Native American students, educators have high hopes for bill mandating their history be taught in Illinois schools
As someone who identifies as Navajo and Choctaw, Nizhoni Ward said her own experiences with what’s taught in Illinois public schools about her ancestry included the classic story of “Columbus sailing the ocean blue” and a first-grade play about the Indians and pilgrims sitting down for a “happy feast after a successful harvest.”
“I was actually asked to play an Indian in that play about Thanksgiving,” Ward said. “I was born on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and I was brought up traditionally, surrounded by my culture. But then growing up here (in Illinois), it was really hard explaining myself to people who didn’t know anything about Native Americans.”
The story of what actually happened at the first Thanksgiving and the relationship between settlers and Native Americans is more complicated than what’s generally taught at the grade school level.
Ward, a freshman at the University of Arizona, said there is a lot to unlearn about Native history, and she’s hopeful a bill sitting on Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk awaiting his approval will help students across Illinois understand the Native American community while righting history’s wrongs.
House Bill 1633, spearheaded by state Rep. Maurice West of Rockford and supported by several others, aims to make it a requirement for Illinois schools to teach a unit of Native American history. Pritzker is expected to sign the bill by mid-August.
In 2019, West introduced legislation that would have required schools to get permission from a Native American tribe within 500 miles to use a native mascot or imagery. Schools would also have to offer a course on Native American contributions to society, but that bill was sidelined in favor of the one proposing a state-mandated Native American curriculum in K-12 schools.
West assembled a working group of federally-recognized tribal members and advocates such as Andrew Johnson to help craft the legislation.
“We’re really pleased with the breadth of this particular bill,” said Johnson, executive director of the Native American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois. “One, it mandates Native American history to be taught. Second, it addresses the self-determination and sovereignty of the tribal nations and brings forth a true understanding of what that means and our relationship with state governments and the federal government and how that evolved.”
Johnson, who is Cherokee and whose tribal nation is in Oklahoma, is one of 280,000 people identifying as Native American in Illinois. In fact, the Chicago area has one of the largest urban populations of Native people. Yet, the state has no federally recognized tribes, and such recognition would provide some protections and benefits, Johnson said.
“We’re an inclusive, vibrant community that contributes at every level here in the state and are just seeking that kind of understanding,” he said.
Ward, who attended middle school and high school in Homewood before being home-schooled for 11th and 12th grade, said she was often tapped as the token Native person to teach students about her culture, which she was happy to do. But sometimes, it felt like the teachers relied on her to get the Native American unit going.
“It was very, very minimal, and they’d basically talk about how Native American people were the first people in America and that was really it,” Ward said, adding that she has high hopes for how the education bill plays out.
Ward said she’s well-connected to the Native community in Chicagoland and tries to spend time in spaces that allow her to educate others about the culture. Last May, she performed a traditional Navajo basket dance at the opening of the Field Museum’s “Native Truth” exhibit. More recently, she put together a presentation on the Midwest’s Native roots for an eighth-grade class at James Hart Middle School in Homewood.
“I think we’re moving in the right direction finally (with this bill),” Ward said. “But I feel like they need to focus not just on the history, but who Native Americans are today — the art, the food, the actual culture, what powwows are, the different types of dances, the jewelry and the beadwork and the regalia and how not all tribes are the same, that we’re all different. And each one has their own culture that they go by. So it’s definitely opening the doors to that conversation.”
Tol Foster, director of the Native American Support Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and citizen of the Creek Nation of Oklahoma, said the bill is just a start in teaching students about Native people beyond what they see in TV shows and movies.
“I have a Native child and my brother and sister have Native children, and whenever schoolteachers implement things about Native Americans, and they start talking about teepees and savagery and Pocahontas … stuff like that, I almost wish they wouldn’t,” he said. “As an educator, as someone who taught Native studies for 20 years, I probably spent the first fifth of my class every year deprogramming what students had mis-learned about Native Americans.”
Foster, who works closely with the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative on efforts related to the Native American community, said the state so far has done a disservice to Chicagoland’s rich Native American history.
“The concern I have is that even when we do teach about Native Americans, we tend to teach about them before the 20th century,” Foster said. “But Chicago’s biggest historical aspect of Native Americans is 20th century — the doctors that emerged out of here, the researchers, the artists, all the native people that came out of the American Indian Center efforts. There was a Native American university here that nobody ever talks about.”
Foster said one of the biggest mistakes the general population makes is mischaracterizing Native Americans as simply a racial group instead of in terms of sovereignty or nationhood.
“Native Americans were multicultural political entities. Native American nations developed things like casino operations for example, which they couldn’t do if they were just merely an ethnic group,” Foster said. “I used to drive around with my Creek Nation tribal tags on my car in Wisconsin, and I would just get the strangest questions from people, and flying with my tribal ID is always an adventure at O’Hare or Midway because I’m white … but I’m also a Native.”
Illinois educators also don’t talk about a bounty that was offered in the state, Foster said. According to the journal “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods” by Benjamin Madley, in 1814, Illinois offered a $50 bounty “for the scalp of any Indian man, woman, or child who entered an American settlement.”
“They don’t talk about the racial violence even then,” Foster said.
Megan Bang, faculty member and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University, and part of the committee that drafted the education bill, said she looked at Illinois legislation that already existed but wasn’t inclusive of Native history.
“We have a whole bill on genocide and Holocaust, but not Native people,” Bang said. “So we looked at bills that should have included us and added some of that language. What’s important about this bill is that it’s not just the teaching mandates but also native representation and inclusion in the equity boards. It’s not just about teaching about Native people. Illinois infrastructure to make sure Native people are included in everything, education or otherwise, is terrible compared to many other states.”
States such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Washington, among others, have Indigenous education advisory boards. Illinois does not.
Aside from teaching students about Native history and culture, Bang said the bill opens up more inclusion for Native American people in governance roles, which is “horrifically lacking.”
It also educates people and prevents schools from making mistakes like one experienced last year by Bang’s son, who was stopped from walking in his Evanston Township High School graduation ceremony because of what he was wearing.
“Leading up to my graduation, my community came together and I received a bunch of coming-of-age gifts, including a Navajo-styled necklace from one of my mentors and uncles,” said Bang’s son, Nimkii Curley, who asked to be referred to by his native name, Miskobinis, which means Redbird. “So I was wearing the necklace. I had a beaded cap with traditional Anishinaabe (or Ojibwe) floral beading from my auntie and grandma. I had on a beaded stole, which was also an Anishinaabe design. And I received an eagle feather for displaying leadership in the community, so I had that on my cap as well.”
Miskobinis said school administrators said he wouldn’t be able to walk across the stage wearing those accouterments and asked him to switch to a plain cap and gown. Because they said he couldn’t walk with the decorated garments, he asked if he could at least wear them while sitting with his graduating class.
“It was saddening, but I accepted because it meant I could keep it on. But when it was time to start, right before I walked out, they pulled me aside and told me that I had to take it off completely and hand it over to the security guard. And I wasn’t going to do that, so they told me I couldn’t go sit down,” Miskobinis said. “So I watched my graduation ceremony from the bleachers on the second floor.”
Miskobinis, who is now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said the day after the graduation ceremony, the school’s dean and dean of students hand-delivered his diploma and apologized for what had happened.
“I made them promise that they would change that rule about not allowing students to display their heritage on their graduation uniforms,” Miskobinis said. “So that my younger siblings, who are in the same high school, could walk across the stage with their eagle feathers.”
Miskobinis said he hopes the bill spurs educators to teach Native American history “the right way,” instead of the “whitewashed” version.
“The word that we use is decolonization; what we’re trying to do is decolonize education,” he said. “It’s not the teachers’ fault because they don’t have proper education. But every single time they try to teach a unit on Native Americans, it just a causes more harm than good sometimes.”
Miskobinis recalled watching the Disney film “Pocahontas” during an AP History lesson, and then another time when students in the class were asked to make art displays about Native American culture.
“A bunch of kids were drawing naked Indians running around teepees with tomahawks — just really racial stereotypes,” he said.
Some educators, such as Miskobinis’ high school history teacher Corey Winchester, admit there is a lot to toss out.
“My own journey has been one where I’ve had to learn and unlearn,” said Winchester, history and social science teacher at Evanston Township High School. “I am a Black educator, and I know that teaching U.S. history, in particular, presents its challenges when you are trying to do justice to the real complex narratives when you yourself haven’t learned about some of those narratives in formal schooling environments.”
Winchester said he struggled to find resources on Native American history to implement into his curriculum, an issue faced by many educators nationwide.
“And I think one of the places where I started, because this was what I had learned, was with the story about Pocahontas,” he said.
Winchester said he used the movie as a gateway into conversations about Native people and about colonialism and the topic of sovereignty.
“But what I didn’t realize then was that the first images and perspectives I presented in the classroom about Native people are caricatures,” Winchester said. “From (Miskobinis’) vantage point, that was not a good place to start. What I’ve come to understand even about my own teachings is that they’re rooted in settler colonial logic, and those are aspects that I need to unlearn. I’m really appreciative that we do have this bill, because it will hopefully avoid some of those situations that I, unfortunately, perpetuated for (Miskobinis) as a Native student.”
Although the state doesn’t create curriculums for school districts, a spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Education said the Regional Offices of Education and Intermediate Services Centers routinely visit school districts to monitor their compliance with numerous state and federal laws, including curriculum mandates.
ISBE said it will also consult with stakeholders to prepare optional resources that districts can use to help them implement Native American history in their coursework and make resources available on its website no later than Jan. 1, 2025.
Johnson said the legislation does more than just mandate certain pieces of American history are taught. The bill requires that the State Education Equity Committee includes an individual who advocates for Native Americans to assist ISBE in identifying diverse subject matter experts to serve on task forces, committees and other commissions.
“Before, the committee included almost every group except Native Americans, and this allows the beginning of more representation within the state and in the understanding of Natives here and how we evolved in Illinois,” Johnson said.
