New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Students get Indigenous People’s Day message straight from source
NEW HAVEN — A few dozen New Haven Public Schools students now know — from personal experience — that indigenous people aren’t just folks from the past whom you read about in history books or watch in Netflix movies.
They also know, just in time for Indigenous People’s Day, that not all indigenous folks look the same; that, in fact, they can hail from all over the world, and that you may not even know you’re talking to one unless they tell you.
Most importantly, they know what indigenous people are: the first people who lived in a place.
The kids, from at least six city schools, got a first-hand learning experience when they met Friday via Zoom with a couple of members of the Association of Native Americans at Yale.
“Native tribes today are able to combine the past and the present,” said Yale sophomore Lexy Beard, 20, who grew up in Warren, N.J., far from her Lumbee Tribe’s lands in southeastern North Carolina.
As she spoke, the students, who ranged from pre-K to eighth grade, were looking at a photograph on Zoom of a thousands-of-years-old native beading tradition adapted to create an image of Baby Yoda from the “The Mandalorian.”
“The amazing thing about indigenous people is that we’re all tied together because we’re the first peoples of the world,” Beard said. “But our cultures are all really different.”
Even within the Association of Native Americans at Yale, there’s been a lot of discussion of late about changing some things to reflect that the organization doesn’t just represent Native Americans but also indigenous people from other parts of the world, she said in an earlier interview.
Indigenous People’s Day is celebrated on the second Monday in October — the same day as Columbus Day — as a reminder that when Columbus “discovered” America, a whole bunch of indigenous people already had lived here for thousands of years.
The students learning about it this time around came from East Rock Community & Cultural Studies Magnet School, ESUMS — Engineering and Science University Magnet School, John C. Daniels ID Magnet School, King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School, Beecher Museum Magnet School and Riverside Academy.
In the first of two hourlong Zoom sessions with city students and their teachers, Beard and fellow Yale student Evan Roberts — a member of the native Alaskan Tlingit tribe who grew up in Longmont, Colo. — explained what indigenous people are, all the different places they can come from and that “if something or someone is different, it does not mean that it’s bad or wrong.”
In addition to Native American tribes — beginning with the Quinnipiac and Algonquian tribes that once inhabited local lands here in Connecticut — they talked about native Canadian people, native Hawaiians, the Maori of New Zealand, Australian aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders and native Samoans, both living and in movies, such as Disney’s “Moana.”
They told the kids about some famous indigenous people, including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who is Samoan, and Jason Momoa — Aquaman — who is native Hawaiian.
“It was very cool,” said Anthony, a student in Nicole Wischert Raccio’s fifthgrade class at East Rock School.
“I just want to say, the kids enjoyed it and they were really engaged,” Raccio told Beard at the tail end of the Zoom presentation.
Tricia Simon, magnet resource teacher at East Rock School, said the school had third- and fifth-graders participating.
Because East Rock focuses on cultural studies, “it really ties well into conversations our students already are having,” Simon said. “It gives the student the opportunity to hear first-person stories, firstperson voices.”