(Editor’s note: “Talking Circle” features faculty and administrators discussing their lessons learned and best practices for teaching Native students and operating tribal colleges. We invite submissions.)

Spokane Tribal College is restructuring to prepare for applying as a candidate for independent accreditation. To prepare for this step, the college asked me 4 years ago to design and teach Introduction to the Humanities.

Isolated among the Selkirk Mountains foothills in northeastern Washington, the small Spokane Indian Reservation is home to approximately half of the 2,350 tribal members. The Spokane are historically, linguistically, and culturally related to Interior Salish tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, the Coeur d’Alenes in Idaho, and the Kalispel and Colville tribes in Washington.

The college began in 1995 when Salish Kootenai College (Pablo, MT) in cooperation with the Spokane tribal administration, opened a branch campus here in Wellpinit, WA. Enrollment has varied per quarter, from as high as 40 to as low as 12. The average student-instructor ratio is 6 to 1.

I responded enthusiastically to the offer and began the search for introductory humanities resources. A regional university library listed a video titled “Introduction to the Humanities.” Previewing this film was a wake-up call.

The video had 30 seconds showing a variety of historic human creativity: glimpses of ancient Syrian sculpture, Celtic rock carvings in Ireland, Egyptian tomb paintings, etc.; nothing from the Western Hemisphere. The remaining 29.5 minutes discussed “our” culture’s arts, from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance and Michelangelo, to Great Literature, Mozart, and the Boston Pops orchestra.

Hmmm – not very relevant for first quarter Spokane Tribal College students. The “our culture” aspect would be unrecognizable and oppressively exclusionary.

The standard Intro to Humanities curriculum thus revealed itself as a celebration of Western European culture, a way of passing on that civilization’s valued achievements to its younger generation – fine for members of that culture.

Certainly our students get curious about some of those “higher” and very “white” practices like Greek sculpture or classical music. But their education experiences have been, on the whole, boring, irrelevant, and authoritarian, with the European-focused content implying “white is right.” A tribal focus would be unfamiliar and (hopefully!) provoke curiosity.

The course naturally had to fulfill mainstream standards in order to provide legitimate credits. Also, it needed to engage the students. A discipline named after humans should be universally applicable.

The course must be relevant while communicating the essence of the humanities. But what is that essence? Another journey to the university library resulted in an armful of academic tomes on teaching humanities, most of which were like the abandoned video.

However, The Permanent Agenda of Man: The Humanities by Paul Brandwein turned up a simple viewpoint: The five basic concepts of the humanities are expressed by humans through seven fields of expression/study. At last — the essence!

I used two handouts resulting from Brandwein’s view:

1. Concepts in the Humanities: Truth, Beauty, Love, Faith, and Justice.
2. Fields of Expression in the Humanities: Art, Music, Dance, Drama, History, Language, and Philosophy/Spirituality.

For the first assignment, students listed their personal relationship to each Field of Expression, noting and then discussing whether they were recipients (look at art, listen to music, etc.), active participants (draw, play music, etc.), or “N/A” if the field did not seem to be part of their lives at all. Language, of course appeared as both recipient and active.

Without exception, they perceived “drama” as negative emotional outbreaks in family or other social relationships. (This misconception tended to persist throughout the 10-week quarter despite discussions regarding drama-award categories for movies and television programs.)

Students recognized the Fields pan-culturally; in discussion they could readily tie Fields to their personal experience and their community’s creativity. The less tangible Concepts became clearer as the quarter progressed.

Initially, most students had difficulty separating “Justice” from their experiences with police and modern courts, though they easily placed Love, Truth, Beauty, and Faith. The curriculum was not designed around the handouts. Rather, they constantly provided discussion reference points and structure for making course content logical as we watched films or experienced other varieties of human creativity.

Short, lecture-style contexting preceded and/or followed when class participants watched films: a short piece with indigenous Hawaiian dance groups, an African-American modern dance company, and a classical ballet troupe. They watched the documentary Latcho Drom (modern gypsy music and dance from India through eastern Europe and Spain), and viewed a cleansing ritual in Senegal.

They saw the 17,000-year-old cave paintings near Lascaux, France, with the television set on mute (thus minus the too British commentary and the so-called “names” of the caverns). The pause button was available to all, for questions, insights, clarification, exclamations, cultural comparison, contradictions, laughter.

The short novel Dead Voices by Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) caused laughter. They read it aloud in class to catch the rhythms in his language use. Later they saw an Italian-made documentary interview of Vizenor.

The course contained just enough from the standard humanities curriculum to ensure that Western culture was included among various examples of humans’ creativity. We watched scenes in Branaugh’s Henry V with text in hand: Where the king leads his men “once more into the breach” and where the French princess learns English.

Students videoed their outing to the Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane (city) where displays represent both Native (largely regional) and non-Native cultures, then showed and discussed their video in class. They attended the Spokane Symphony’s visit to the local high school. Periodically, they were told about “outside world” humanities curriculum and how we were changing it.

The final project assignment was either a paper or presentation within a Field of Expression in the Humanities, bringing in at least one of the Concepts. This allowed students to experiment with their own human expression. Great variety resulted, from creative writing to collage making, from an academic paper on Vizenor’s trickster English to a Native music presentation.

I regret that we did not have a Native writer or artist come give a guest presentation. Nor did we have the funds to attend an opera, ballet, or dramatic production in Spokane (city) so students could experience the mainstream atmosphere.

Overall, however, I found that putting the Native American, the world-wide cultures, and the Western European cultural examples on a par with one another provided the right mix. Students developed a better understanding of universal human creativity and of their own rightful place within such endeavors.

For six years, Lynne Crow (Kainai First Nation, Blackfoot Confederacy) served as adjunct faculty at the Spokane Tribal College in Wellpinit, WA, instructing Native American Studies (academic and experiential), Social Sciences, English, World History, Art History, and Humanities. Her M.A. in Linguistic Anthropology with a specialty in intercultural communication (University of Calgary 1987) and M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Eastern Washington University 2003) complement each other in her work.