Swanton, Vt.-The Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs has announced that an American Abenaki curriculum is now available for Vermont educators. This curriculum has been designed by the four Abenaki communities in Vermont.
Commission Vice Chair Jeff Benay, who also chairs the American Abenaki Curriculum Planning Committee, told reporter Pat Bradley and WAMC Northeast Public Radio that the idea of creating a curriculum focused on the state-recognized tribe has taken years to come to fruition.
"The idea for the curriculum started in 1997 and we worked with a couple of teachers and we developed something," he said. "But it wasn't really as full an experience as we had hoped for and there's always been a sense that the Abenaki wanted their own story to be told. We thought if we could develop something that would really be compelling then school systems would be wanting to get it. And it has taken quite a long amount of time. But this is what we've hoped for."
The curriculum, which is available for any Vermont educator, pulls together information from hundreds of sources, both old and new, including providing links to primary sources. Since the four tribes have developed the curriculum, it's filled with the Abenaki telling their own experience in their own voices.
Dan Coutu told WAMC that developing the American Abenaki curriculum was important because history has not accurately portrayed Abenaki culture.
"When I was a child, the textbooks that I used to learn about Vermont history began by saying that when the settlers moved in Vermont was empty-nobody lived there. The culture of our government and the settler culture has worked very hard for centuries to erase Native people as effectively as possible. And so this curriculum provides a counterpoint to that erasure and a clear body of evidence that yes we are still here."
Benay adds that in the past when Native American history was taught in Vermont schools, it often portrayed tribes of the American west.
"For so long, kids learning in school in Vermont would not learn about the Abenaki experience. So if you looked up in the state of Vermont the Agency of Education or the Department of Education, what you would get when you looked for Native Americans was the experiences of Southwestern Indians. So they're going to get to see what does a native person east of the Mississippi look like, because they don't look the same as their western counterparts."
The lessons and curriculum are available to anyone online at https://www.abenakieducationvt.org/. In the future, the authors plan to create a printed version of the materials and launch a statewide outreach campaign to teachers.
