Educator Resources

Local Native American History Lesson Plans

Introduction

Between 1910 and his death, John Henry Hauberg gave hundreds of public lectures about Native American history in and around the Quad Cities. Of particular interest to him was educating young people about the history of Native American nations who lived in the area, especially the Sauk and Meskwaki. He was a frequent visitor to the Meskwaki Settlement at Tama, Iowa, and brought the United Sunday School Band boys to meet members of the community. While Hauberg hoped these boys would learn to appreciate the Native American past, the Meskwaki people themselves likely saw Hauberg’s interest in their culture as a way to promote and sustain their distinct way of life, their language and their traditions. The lessons below should help students today develop understanding of Native American regional history as well as of Sauk and Meskwaki cultures today.

1. Cause and effect: Understand and explain how interactions between white settlers and Native Americans shaped the community, region, and environment.

2. Perspective: Investigate how individuals and groups differed in their perspectives during the same historical period, how perspectives change over time, and how identity influences perspective.

3. Sources: Use primary source documents as sources of information about the past; evaluate how factors such as date, author, and purpose affect the information in the document.

4. Extension Activities: Gather and evaluate information, construct arguments, understand the purpose and consequences of purposes and policies of both the federal government and Native American nations.

LESSON PLAN 1 – approx. grades 1-4

View Wacoshashe’s Talking Paper, which was probably made by the Meskwaki chief  Wacoshashe in about 1820. Images can be printed from Jack and Mary Musgrove’s article Wacochache’s Talking Paper; teachers should read this article for context.

1. In this drawing, Wacoshashe was probably telling a story. What do you think the story was about?

2. What animals can you identify in these images? Make a list. How do you know what they are? Which ones are you not sure about?

3. Where do these animals live?

4. Why do you think these animals were important to the Sauk and Meskwaki people? What do you think they used them for?

   a. Does the drawing give us any clues?

   b. Think about what the human figures are doing.

   c. What do you think the lines mean?

   d. Listen to the Meskwaki language names for different animals.

5. After 1830, the number and kinds of animals in this area began to decrease. What might have contributed to the animals’ disappearance? How do you think this might have affected the Sauk and Meskwaki people?

6. Today, Meskwaki people live at Tama, Iowa, where they still take care to consider their relationship to the environment. They have a project called Red Earth Gardens. What vegetables do they grow? What would you like to grow?

7. Extension activities:

a. Research one of these animals. How did the Sauk and Meskwaki (or other native American nations) use it? How did white settlers use it? Is this animal still present in the area today? Why or why not?

b. Visit the Hauberg Civic Center grounds and/or Black Hawk State Historic Site. What plants and animals do you see? Make a drawing that shows what you saw and what you did.  How is your drawing like or not like Wacoshashe’s?

c. Meskwaki people today participate in a project called “phenology” – recording when certain events in nature happen (first ice forms, first robin) to help them manage their environment. Look at their phenology chart (p. 4). What does it tell you about what natural events are important to Meskwaki people today? Make your own phenology chart for each season. (You can do this at home, or by visiting the same place over time – for example, the Hauberg Center grounds or Black Hawk State Historic Site). What does your chart tell you about your relationship to nature and what is important to you?

LESSON PLAN 2 – approx. grades 4-6

In 1918, ethnologist Truman Michelson recorded the story of an elder Fox (Meskwaki) woman, which describes what her girlhood growing up in Iowa in the 1840s was like. This activity could be paired with a visit to the Hauberg Indian Museum at Black Hawk State Historic Site, which provides information about the home life of Sauk and Meskwaki people.

1. Read pp. 298-301 of the “Autobiography of a Fox Woman.” What sorts of activities did she do as a girl? How did she feel about these activities? What activities do you do each day, and how do they compare?

2. In the 1840s, Meskwaki children didn’t go to a formal school, but learned what they needed to learn at home. What was the Meskwaki girl learning? What does her learning tell you about the Meskwaki way of life in 1840? About the work and responsibilities of women?

3. What do you learn at school? What do you do for fun? How do these activities compare to what this girl learns and does for fun?

4. In 1840, many white settlers believed that Native American people didn’t work hard and were not prepared for the future. What does this girl’s life tell us about how Meskwaki people thought about work and the future?

5. This story was originally written in the Meskwaki language. See what it looks like by looking at a text that Meskwaki children today might use to learn their language. Does the story seem different? Why might it be important for Meskwaki children to learn this language today?

6. Extension Activities:

a. For many Native American groups today, language preservation is an important way to connect to their cultures. What can you learn about Native American languages and how these nations are working to teach the language to children?

b. Watch this video about the Sauk language. What does it help you understand about how language is related to culture and values? Have you ever learned a new language? What was it like? How would you feel if you could not speak your language?

c. Zitkala-Sa was a Dakota Sioux woman who was sent away to a school run by white people in the 1870s. Read chapters II and III of “School Days of an Indian Girl.” How does her education compare to the Fox girl’s?  

LESSON PLAN 3 – MIDDLE SCHOOL

1. What do you know and not know about the people who occupied this land before the current states and national governments were created? Where did you learn about them?

2. Read the historical documents describing the Sauk and Meskwaki people and their activities. Then consider the following questions:

   a. What activities did the Sauk and Meskwaki people do in the upper Mississippi Valley? What work did men do? Women? What did white settlers do?

   b. What sorts of relationships did they seem to have with white settlers?

   c. How did white settlers view the Sauk and Meskwaki? How did the Sauk and Meskwaki view them?

   d. Consider what year each of these documents was written, and by whom. Are there any changes over time in how whites perceive Native American work and land use? How do you explain these changes?

   e. What information in these documents was new and/or surprising to you?

3. In 1829, the Sauk and Meskwaki people came back to their village in what is now Rock Island to find white settlers living in their houses and putting fences around their cornfields. A group, mostly Sauks, led by the Sauk leader Black Hawk resisted, and in 1832, there was a war between the white settlers and Black Hawk’s band, in which many members of this band were killed. All the people had to leave their villages and cornfields in Illinois and go to Iowa.

   a.    How does Quaife (document 1) explain why the Sauk and Meskwaki people left the area? Based on the other documents, what does he leave out?

   b. Watch the video “Invasion of America.” What does this video suggest about the larger goals of the government at the time of the Black Hawk War? You can also explore this map to learn more. Search for “Sac and Fox” to see what lands they ceded to the U.S. government and when.

4. Visit the websites of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma and of the Meskwaki Nation at Tama, Iowa. What can you learn about how and where the Sauk and Meskwaki people live now? How do they describe their values, culture? What economic activities do they participate in today?

5. Extension activities:

   a. Kealon Hamilton is a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma and a high school student. Watch his video about the case of the Oklahoma Tax Commission vs. the Sac and Fox Nation. After watching it, what is your understanding of the idea of “sovereignty” as it applies to Native American nations? What does it help you understand about how the Sac and Fox people merge tribal identity with modern concerns?

   b. Investigate how the Meskwaki people came to live at their settlement in Tama, Iowa. How does their history counteract the idea that Native Americans “disappeared”? How does this settlement differ from reservations?

   c. Some people are familiar with the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII, but the Meskwaki people also worked as code talkers. Investigate the roles and experiences of Meskwaki Code Talkers.

Document 1: Milo Quaife, Historical Introduction, Early Day of Rock Island and Davenport, 1942

Quaife was a Euro-American historian at the University of Wisconsin Historical Society. The excerpt below comes from the published narratives of two white men who settled in the Quad Cities in the 1830s and ‘40s.

Although the settler came to subdue a wilderness, it was not a vacant land. For unrecorded ages the Red Man had occupied it, developing a Stone-age culture which made but slight use of the natural resources of the country and which knew nothing of material progress or change. The culture of the white man was utterly antipathetic to this, and when the two races came together the swift conquest and displacement of the red man by the white was inevitable.

Document 2: Morrill Marston, ‘Report on Indians of the Upper Mississippi Valley,” 1820

Marston was a Euro-American army major who served at Fort Armstrong between 1816 and 1820. The excerpt below is from a report written to the federal government, which wanted to learn more about the condition of Native Americans on the western border of the U.S. Here, he describes the Sauk and Meskwaki people.

They leave their villages as soon as their corn and beans are ripe and taken care of, and their traders arrive and give out their credits and go to their wintering grounds; it being previously determined on in council what particular ground each party shall hunt on. The old men, women and children embark in canoes, the young men go by land with their horses; on their arrival they immediately commence their winters hunt, which last about three months. Their traders follow them and establish themselves at convenient places in order to collect their dues and supply them with such goods as they need….They return to their villages in the month of April and after putting their lodges in order, commence preparing the ground to receive the seed. The number of acres cultivated by that part of the two nations who reside at their villages in this vicinity is supposed to be upwards of three hundred. They usually raise from seven to eight thousand bushels of corn, besides beans, pumpkins, and melons. About one thousand bushels of the corn they annually sell to traders and others; The remainder (except about five bushels for each family which is taken along with them) they put into bags and bury in holes dug in the ground for their use in the Spring and Summer.

The labor of agriculture is confined principally to the women and this is done altogether with the hoe….The women usually make about Three hundred floor mats every Summer; these mats are as handsome and as durable as those made abroad. The twine which connects the rushes together is made either of basswood barks after being boiled and hammered, or the bark of nettle; the women twist or spin it by rolling it on the log with the hand.”

Document 3: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Narrative journal of travels through the northwestern regions of the United States, 1820

Schoolcraft was a geographer and ethnologist who studied Native American people. He made these observations during a trip to explore the people and resources of the Great Lakes Region. Here, he describes the lead mines near current-day Dubuque, Iowa.

The principal mines are situated upon a tract of one square league, commencing immediately at the Fox village of the Kettle chief, and ex- tending westward. This is the seat of the mining operations formerly carried on by Dubuque, and of what are called the Indian diggings…. The lead ore at these mines is now exclusively dug by the Fox Indians, and, as is usual among savage tribes, the chief labour devolves upon the women…. They employ the hoe, shovel, pick-axe, and crow-bar, in taking up the ore…. They always dig down at such an angle that they can walk in and out of the pits, and I descended into one of these, which had probably been carried down forty feet. All this, is the work of the Indian women and old men, who discover a degree of perseverance and industry, which is deserving of the highest commendation. When a quantity of ore has been got out, it is carried in baskets, by the women, to the banks of the Mississippi, and there ferried over in canoes to the island, where it is purchased by the traders at the rate of two dollars for a hundred and twenty pounds, payable in goods at Indian prices. At the profits at which these goods are usually sold, it may be presumed to cost the traders from seventy-five cents to a dollar, cash value, per hundred weight.”

Document 4: Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, 1834

Black Hawk was a leader of the Sauk people who was born and lived at the village of Saukenuk in present-day Rock Island in about 1767. He was loyal to the British in the war of 1812, and resisted white American settlers who took over Sauk lands. After the 1832 Black Hawk war, he was taken captive by the U.S. government. He told his story to French-Potawatomi interpreter Antoine LeClaire, and his autobiography was published and read by many white Americans.

We can only judge of what is proper and right by our standard of right and wrong, which differs widely from the whites, if I have been correctly informed. The whites may do bad all their lives, and then, if they are sorry for it when about to die, all is well! But with us it is different: we must continue throughout our lives to do what we conceive to be good. If we have corn and meat, and know of a family that have none, we divide with them. If we have more blankets than sufficient, and others have not enough, we must give to them that want….

We were friendly treated by the white chiefs, and started back to our village on Rock River. Here we found that troops had arrived to build a fort at Rock Island…. We did not, however, object to their building the fort on the island, but we were very sorry, as this was the best island on the Mississippi, and had long been the resort of our young people during the summer. It was our garden (like the white people have near to their big villages) which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds; and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river. In my early life, I spent many happy days on this island. A good spirit had care of it, who lived in a cave in the rocks immediately under the place where the fort now stands, and has often been seen by our people. He was white, with large wings like a swan’s, but ten times larger. We were particular not to make much noise in that part of the island which he inhabited, for fear of disturbing him. But the noise of the fort has since driven him away, and no doubt a bad spirit has taken his place!

….At this time we had very little intercourse with the whites, except our traders. Our village was healthy, and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor no hunting grounds better than those we had in possession. If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place, none of our people would have believed him! What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends?