For 8th graders from Washington Middle School, their history and social studies classes moved off the textbook page and became a full sensory experience of ancient and modern culture in a daylong program at Aurora University and the Schingoethe Center for the Native American Cultures on the university campus.
Dr. Dona Bachman, center director, told the students, “I’m hoping the students understand that when you talk about Native Americans you are talking about a tremendous span of time that goes all the way to the first inhabitants in the New World to contemporary living artists shown in our museum here.”
Students rotated through five programs designed by Bachman and Tom Pierski, the middle school’s social studies teacher.
In one program, the students placed their hands in the handprint left by the creator of a fragmented cooking jar from 3,500 B.C., in another they learned of the Indians who hunted wooley mammoths, and could dig in a sandbox littered with real excavated teeth and tools.
Sitting in the dark of the portable Starlab planetarium, students saw the surrounding stars come alive as Native American stories were told of wolves and coyotes and shooting arrows. They traveled in an exhibit that illustrated the nature’s four seasons with items of past tribes from different parts of the world.
Those quiet activities were jammed into the 20th Century with the explosive poetry presentation and story slam by Eddie Two Rivers, a 52-year-old Anishanobae from the Ojibwa tribe of northwestern Ontario, Canada. A one-time criminal, Two Rivers is now a poet, playwright and member of the Red Path Theater Company in Chicago.
Hair gathered back in a small ponytail and dressed in loose jeans and a brown shirt, Two Rivers traveled back and forth across the university’s stage, his voice booming as he read his poetry. He moved from the anguish of a child running through a summer fog after being called a bastard to the soft, pastel imagery of fishermen casting their nets in the early morning.
His poetry was sprinkled sometimes with earthier words than teachers may have chosen.
But when children giggled at his words, he chided them back.
“The artistic expression of emotion is sometimes best said in the way that I am saying it, but I don’t say it to make you giggle,” he said. “I say it to share the emotion with you.”
That sharing would please Pierski.
“Ultimately I want the students to have the exposure to the Native American cultures and all the good that they have contributed and to come to some form of appreciation of that culture,” said Pierski
