One day during his first year as a physical education teacher at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in Oak Park, Charles Watson had his class play a game of kickball. The students split into teams, and before the game started, a girl came up to Watson with a question.
“Are there Indian outs in the game?” she asked.
The girl’s language surprised Watson. He had never heard the term before and asked the girl what she meant by it. An “Indian out,” she said, was when you throw the ball directly at a kicker or baserunner to get them out. Other students in the class were also familiar with the term, saying they picked it from relatives or at community institutions like the YMCA.
For Watson, the encounter was yet another example of how deeply prejudice against Native Americans is insinuated into everyday life.
“It jumps up in your face even when you’re not looking for it,” he said.
Other times-with such common phrases like “Indian-giver” or with athletic team mascots-the prejudice is more overt, Watson said during a recent interview.
The encounter, and others like it, inspired Watson to start a class called “Unlearning Indian Stereotypes” for District 97’s staff development program. Watson has taught the 10-week course for four of the five years he has worked at Brooks Middle School. He usually offers both fall and spring sessions. There are 21 staff members from across Dist. 97-including teachers, classroom assistants, even nurses-taking his current class.
Watson, 58, was born and raised in Chicago. He traces his ancestry to the Lakhotan and Muskogee tribes, and has Puerto Rican and African-American forebears as well. He speaks Lakhotan and participates actively in the Native American community in Illinois. Last weekend, Watson and his son performed traditional northern plains dances at the American Indian Center of Chicago’s 54th Annual Pow Wow.
Watson said there is “a lack of accurate information and an overabundance of stereotypes and bias about Indians.” He uses group discussion, lectures and multimedia presentations to address stereotypes staff members may have, and offers resource guides and alternative texts for classroom use.
He said he has had staff members tell him Native Americans live idyllic lives on reservations, in teepees, and ask him “Do you speak Indian?” People assume Native American issues are past history, he said, and very few know anything about treaties or laws important to tribes across the country, like the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects Native American religious practices.
In the classroom, Watson said, Native American perspectives are excluded.
“Books are written from a Eurocentric point of view. The big problem is most of the texts we all grew up on in the U.S. school system were written by white authors,” Watson said. “Indians did not have a voice, and this is one of the reasons why people have stereotypes.”
Another part of the class is rethinking what holidays like Columbus Day or Thanksgiving mean. Watson said he tries to offer teachers alternatives to Thanksgiving re-enactments and plays. Those do get to the real history, he said.
“[Pilgrims] were not tolerant of the indigenous people who came to help them survive,” Watson explained. “They don’t talk about genocide-100 tribes on the Atlantic seaboard alone.”
During the period before Thanksgiving, Watson encourages teachers in his class to think of other ways that students can offer thanks for what they have. Even elementary school children are ready to think about how tribes felt about losing their land. Fourth- and fifth-graders can analyze holiday greeting cards for stereotypical depictions of Native Americans.
Eventually, Watson would like to see a more critical approach to Native American history integrated into the regular curriculum. It is a belief Watson said many teachers who have gone through his course share.
He said there has been some resistance from older teachers (“The materials I give them go right to a drawer,” he said), but younger ones tend to be eager to move away from traditional narratives about Native American issues in their classrooms.
“My wife says I’m a seed-planter,” Watson said. “Hopefully, people take the seeds and spread them elsewhere.”