Copyright 2014 by the National Art Education Association

Studies in Art Education: Momnal oUiSiies and Research

2014,55(3), 214-226

"Teachers who
recognized what
often is described
as 'American
Indian history' as
actually a 'history
of Indian-White
contact' began
embracing culturebased training
as 'the story of
indigenous people,
told from the
perspective of
the indigenous'"

Culture-Based Arts Education That

Teaches Against the Grain: A Model
for Place-Specific Material Culture
Studies
JAMES W. BEQUETTE
University of Minnesota

When 50 Midwest teachers in two public schools and one

Reservation school worked in respectful, knowledgeable, and
power-sharing ways with local Indigenous elders, artists, and
academics, the outcome was often culture-based arts education
that teaches against the grain. This collaboration and the
culturally responsive pedagogy it inspired led to transformative
thinking about race, power, and injustice. Participating teachers,
who recognized the social relevance and educative potential
of Indigenous material culture as place-based pedagogy,
began using a culture-based model for arts integration across
disciplinary borders. Immersing these mostly White educators in
an Indigenous society's heritage language and ways of knowing,
in turn, heightened many students' engagement with and
appreciation for the place they live and the peoples living there
for millennia.

(Peacock, 1998, p. 17).

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at
bequette@umn.edu

214

Bequette / Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

ulture-based arts integration (CBAI)

(Bequette & Hrenko, 2010; Hrenko,
2010) that teaches against the grain

(Cochran-Snnith, 1991) is one path to making

schoolswhether public, independent, or
government-runmore engaging places
for Indigenous youth and spaces for furthering anti-oppressive education to achieve
social change (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007;
Anderson, Gussak, Hallmark, & Paul, 2010;
Anderson & Milbrandt, 2005; Stuhr, 1994).
CBAi is also about creating place-based
critical pedagogy (Gruenewald, 2003a) that
permits historical and contemporary perspectives of Indigenous material culture to
critically wrestle with dominant discourses
those of Whitemen's schools. Western art, and
American Indian historicization (Bequette &
Petkau, 2011,2013).

Pi's creators envisioned using integrated placespecific Indigenous knowledge (Sobel, 2004) as
a meaningful entry point for culturally responsive student-centered teaching (Gay, 2000;
Villegas, 1991). Interdisciplinary project-based
learning (PBL) (David, 2008; Larmer, 2011 ) ofthis
sort would help learners see connections as well
as contradictions between the way they know
the world and the way others know the world
(Moje, Mcintosh, Kramer, Ellis, Rosario, & Collazo,
2004).

Participating teachers' actual curriculum

development began only after a "design team"
of Indigenous and White stakeholders spent
year 1 of the project conceptualizing Pi's local
model for Ojibwe-focused arts integration.
With assistance from the grant's authors (three
White, university-based researchers) the design
team also devised the cultural competency
training teachers would receive during Pi's following 3 years of curriculum development and
implementation. The university team included
This article makes public outcomes of Project the grant's co-principal investigators: a senior
Intersect (PI), a $1-million, research-based
research associate with far-reaching experience
Arts in Education Model Demonstration and
developing and managing federal grants for
Dissemination (AEMDD) grant.^ Funded from
American Indian tribes and communities, and
2006 to 2010, PI made possible the immersion of
an art education professor with valuable K-12
over 1,000 K-8 students in CBAI. Fifty educators
teaching and research experience in a California
in two public schools with enrollment at 17%
Indian community. The latter was also Pi's curIndigenous and one neighboring tribal school
riculum lead and is the author of this article.
with 100% Indigenous enrollment received culOther key support came from an art education
tural competency training.
PhD student (now a professor in an Eastern university) and two Ojibwe project coordinators.
Authors of the PI grant questioned whether
culture-based education (see, for example, The first now directs a Midwest state's office of
Demmert, 2011 ; Deyhle & Swisher, 1997; Hermes, American Indian education, and the second now
coordinates American Indian education services
2000, 2005) which focused on the language and
in a public school district.
material culture of Ojibwe peoples^ living in the
upper Midwest could improve the academic
Invited Indigenous elders, school teachers,
success of K-8 students, both Indigenous and
and other tribal members on the design team
non-Indigenous, in the arts and on state-manconcluded that culturally responsive education in
dated achievement tests in reading and math. the arts and other subjects must: 1) privilege the

Studies in Art Education I Volume 55, No. 3

215

heritage language of Ojibwe students; 2) provide

access to place-specific Ojibwe material culture
defined here as "any and all human-constructed
objects, forms, or expressions, manifested consciously or unconsciously through culturally
acquired behaviors"(Bolin & Blandy, 2003, p. 249);
and 3) assure student contact with Indigenous
role models (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Grande,
2004; Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Hermes, 2000,
2005; Lipka, Sharp, Adams, & Sharp, 2007; Sobel,
2004; Villegas, 2006).
There was cross-cultural design team agreement that Ojibwe artisans and academics were
the ones best equipped to give Pi's future participants explicit permission^ to infuse culturally
responsive craft, design, art, music, dance, and
associated language experiences into existing
school curriculum. All members agreed that only
artisans could provide the "how-to" knowledge
White teachers would need to leave comfort
zones and use the arts to teach about a culture
other than their own. Similarly, Indigenous
scholarshistorians, linguists, teacher educatorswere recruited to provide professional
development that tactfully addressed why educating for amalgamation (focusing on commonalities across groups) and educating for pluralism
(emphasizing differences), although acceptable
multicultural approaches, do not go far enough
(Castagno, 2009). Instead, these pedagogues
endorsed educating for critical "understanding
of power, privilege, and oppression within and
between groups" (Castagno, 2009, p. 46).
In time, over two dozen Indigenous presenters, ranging in age from 20 to 80, engaged PI
teachers in aesthetic activities and thoughtprovoking sociopolitical dialogue. Inviting the
involvement of these local women and men, and
compensating them equitably for sharing Ojibwe
epistemologies with teachers, enhanced the
project's credibility in neighboring Reservation
communities. On another level, the addition of
numerous non-White voices to Pi's training sessions helped encourage receptive teachers to
learn from history.Thinking critically about structural and cultural oppression of the local tribe

216

since invasion by Europeans laid bare the placespecific grievances of local Indigenous peoples,
including artists. This information, presenters
reasoned, should support teachers'lesson development and pedagogy that asked students to
critically explore why colonization, acculturation, stereotyping, and the dominant White discourse of schools still influence Ojibwe peoples'
response to all aspects of contemporary life,
including "creative work as a form of healing as
well as a livelihood and community gift"(Rendon
&Markusen, 2009, p. 71).
When the design team's planning was done,
PI coordinators addressed three implementation
goals during years 2-4 of the grant: 1) identify
and tap local and regional Indigenous resources
(from elders, artisans, and academics to museum
collections, books, historic venues, and websites); 2) set the stage for continued collaboration
of public school and Reservation school teachers and newly identified Indigenous presenters;
and 3) disseminate information about the CBAI
model: articles, conference sessions, and an
online portal of teacher-developed CBAI curricula (www.intersectingart.umn.edu).
In the sections that follow, this article provides: 1 ) the theoretical framework that grounds
CBAI; 2) an overview of the PI research study,
including its design, data sources, and methods
of analysis; 3) a detailed description of cultural
competency training offered teachers; and 4)
teaching outcomes and broader implications for
art education.

Underpinnings of Culture-Based
Arts Integration
A theoretical framework that recognizes the
conscious synthesis of two sympathetic educational traditions, critical pedagogy and placebased education, anchored Project Intersect's
CBAI model. This "critical pedagogy of place"
(Gruenewald, 2003a) yielded blended discourse that connected place-specific Indigenous
knov^ledge (Barnhardt, 2008) with teaching that
challenged dominant culture assumptions, practices, and outcomes taken for granted in schools

Bequette / Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

(Gruenewald, 2003a). Art education "framed by a

critical pedagogy of place creates opportunities
for students to engage in thinking and artmaking that consider vital questions about nature,
place, culture and ecology" (Graham, 2007, p.
387). Moreover, teaching of this sort has typically challenged the "boundaries and purposes
of art in ways that engage students in reflective
and transformative learning" (p. 388). Pi's grant
writers intentionally proffered a power-sharing
model for place-specific arts education that
valued the cultural capital of local Indigenous
artisans (Bequette, 2009). Cultural content
became a driver of education that articulated
Ojibwestakeholders'aspirationsfor local schools
(McCarty, 2002). That said, research that explicated the potential of culturally responsive pedagogy (Gay, 2000) increasing Indigenous youth's
school engagement (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008;
Demmert, 2001 ; Lipka et al., 2007) strengthened
theargumentforsuccessful culture-based learning also including Indigenous language study
(Demmert, 2011; Hermes, 2000, 2005, 2007).
Privileging the heritage language of Ojibwe
youth and the material culture of their society
furthered conceptualization of an arts integration model that could increase all students'
awareness of ways of knowing other than their
own. Realistically, this could only happen if
teachers understood how to make Indigenous
worlds visible in viable ways (Brayboy, 2003)
which eschew '"caricatures of Indians' relegated
to a distant historical past [that] render invisible the contemporary complexities of Native
American lives" (Bailey, 2010, p. 79).
When the visual and performing arts become
lenses for inquiry-based learning (BallengeeMorris & Stuhr, 2001; McFee, 1995; Stuhr,
1994), they demonstrate the social relevance
of "deconstructing culture[s]" and "reconstructing social spaces" (Gude, 2007) such as schools.
Furthermore, challenging educators to consider
contemporary art as a pedagogical site (Desai,
2010) can present entry points for more student
engagement with material culture studies

(Blandy & Bolln, 2012) and project-based learning (Larmer, 2011).

For example, curriculum that introduces an
Indigenous group's artistically fashioned historical objects of functional design (Vande Zande,
2007) and the creative expression of contemporary visual artists, musicians, poets, and dancers
from the same society invites students to ask
why these artisans explore, comment on, and
critique pertinent social, cultural, and political
issues in their practice. Educative experiences
of this sort are catalysts for new understandings
of the purposes and meanings in Indigenous art
and illustrative of place-specific social justice
arts education (Adams et al., 2007; Anderson et
al., 2010; Anderson & Milbrandt, 2005; Bequette
&Petkau, 2011; Desai, 2010).

Research Design and Methods

Authors ofthe PI grant considered Indigenous
discoursesboth theoretical and epistemologicalthat agreed with "calls for 'decolonizing methodologies' and recentering research
methods on the experiences of marginalized
peoples" (Dance, Gutirrez, & Hermes, 2010,
p. 330). Wide-ranging experience working
with Indigenous communities led us to argue
"cultural intuition and a deep understanding
of reciprocity can be embodied by 'outsider
researchers'" (emphasis added, p. 344). In other
words, cultural intuition came into play when
members of our team attended to concerns
voiced by Ojibwe partners. Reciprocity was
evident in our willingness to connect with, earn
the respect, and "expect an ongoing back-andforth movement"(p. 333) of shared meaning and
power with these stakeholders. And, over time,
cultural intuition and reciprocity undergirded
reframing the PI grant's positivist research protocols in ways that permitted concentrating more
on interpreting the lived experiences of participantsIndigenous students, artists, academics,
and White teachers.
The university contingent concurred with
respected researchers who found "no evidence
that studying the arts, either as separate disci-

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217

plines or infused into the academic curriculum,

raises grades in academic subjects or improves
performance on standardized verbal and mathematics tests" (Winner & Cooper, 2000, as cited
in Hetland et al., 2013, p. 2). However, our grant
proposal did call for a scientific study and posited
a culture-based integrated arts model might
improve students'academic performance. Given
the small size of each of the three school sites in
the study and union protocols prohibiting mandatory teacher participation in research like PI,
classrooms could not be randomly assigned to
one of two treatment conditions as called for in
the grant's original quasi-experimental research
design. Teacher participation, thus, became
voluntary, and over the 3-year implementation
phase of the project, a revised research target of
recruiting participants at every K-8 grade level
was met.
The research team continued collecting
quantitative data for the life of the project
standardized test scores, student attendance
records, teacher surveysbut gauging the academic success of the CBAI model was always
difficult. Overall, qualitative dataclassroom
observations; focus group conversations; students'journals; and teachers'curriculum, lesson
plans, and anecdotal renderings of increased
student engagementyielded more tangible
evidence of the lived experience of PI participants. Viewing artifacts created by teachers and
studentssuch as drums, faceless dolls, carved
and decorated wooden fish decoys, wild rice
knockers, and snowsnakesconfirmed that
material culture was a better descriptor of this
output than fine art or historical crafts.
Data analysis was ongoing. Project staff
observed every PI teacher implement at least
one culture-based lesson In varied learning
environmentsclassrooms, museums, or the
natural world. We scrutinized whether residue
of Pi's culturally responsive professional development was observable in each teacher's practice. Doing so necessitated identifying coding
units and tagging instances and/or utterances
that broached multicultural theories and

218

place-based pedagogies that exposed racism,

oppression, and power relationships as well as
examples of deficit thinking, stereotyping, hegemony, and White racism. Acting as colleagues
and mentors, project staff provided feedback
after these observations to help teachers master
the place-specific integrated arts approaches
their culture-based training advanced.

A Year of Cultural Competency Training

For 50 teachers in three cohorts, face-to-face
cultural competency training began during their
weeklong summer institutes and was followed
by three or four in-service sessions during the
school year. Many PI trainees began thinking critically about the realities of the local Indigenous
society's pre- and post-colonial history on the
day their yearlong training began. For example,
after a Harvard-educated historian and enrolled
member of the local Ojibwe band led teachers
on a bus tour of the regiona place-conscious
(Gruenewald, 2003b) day trip that documented
ethnobotanical change, broken treaties, and
cultural genocide (Peacock, 1998)signs of
intellectual awakening appeared in the survey
feedback of many participants. This was an
account of events few had learned in school
even those White teachers who grew up close to
the Reservation. Visiting a stretch of Great Lakes
shoreline revered by Ojibwe band members
whose ancestors were forced to vacate seasonal camps there (despite treaty protection)
and then seeing an eroding mass grave where
human remains removed from this site early
in the 20th century were unceremoniously
reinterred in a riverside corner of a White cemeteryprovided teachers a new lens for viewing
history and their Indigenous students.
Teachers who recognized what often is
described as "American Indian history" as actually a "history of Indian-White contact" began
embracing culture-based training as "the story
of indigenous people, told from the perspective of the indigenous" (Peacock, 1998, p. 17).
Or, in practice, when teaching became studentcentered and focused on place-specific events

Bequette / Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

in social and historical contexts, opportunities

arose for students to investigate and unpack
different Indigenous perspectivesa range of
"political, economic, and aesthetic histories...
evident in [American Indian] folkways and arts"
(Garcia&Ahler, 1992, p.28).
Presenters argued that understanding
Ojibwe epistemology as a body of knowledge
could help teachers mediate their response to
Indigenous learners in school contexts that have
remained inherently racist (Cleary & Peacock
1998; Grover, 1999; Hermes, 2000). To better
understand Ojibwe ways of knowing and thwart
ethnocentrism and "dysconscious" racism (King,
1994, p. 337), PI teachers were asked to first
deconstruct various accounts of White men's
disregard of Indigenous knowledge. Elders and
academics shared tales o f t h e people," discussing the sources of their wisdom, including the
cadence of woodland life and the seasonal
draw of maple sugaring, stands of wild rice,
and the told stories of long winters (Vizenor,
2000). Leaders spoke too of the human unity of
tribal life and families as political and economic
units that have remained a primary source of
Indigenous identity development.
These conversations broached issues that
ranged from tribal sovereignty, treaty rights,
and Native resilience to boarding school abuses,
historical trauma, and lingering angst over past
deficit-focused research. Activities that encouraged thinking deeply about institutionalized
racism (Adams et al., 2007; Pollock, 2006) were
devised to raise educators' cultural sensitivity
and "appreciation and respect for the Indian
child" (Garcia & Ahler, 1992, p. 14). Other training sessions in authentic settings (Gruenewald,
2003a) included visits to tribal-run businesses
where wild rice and maple syrup were processed
for off-Reservation sale and a hike in the woods
with a lecture on sustainably harvesting birch
bark for crafting a range of utilitarian products.
Wanting PI teachers to see firsthand the dichotomy of Ojibwe children's lives, the program's
Indigenous coordinator organized a second bus
tour. More a reality check than cultural tourism.

this Reservation excursion included stops at

the tribe's expansive government center, a tract
of identical United States Housing and Urban
Development built homes from the 1970s, and
the enterprise that underwrites numerous tribal
programs today: a high-rise casino and resort
with Interstate highway frontage.

Teachers'Curriculum Development
Survey data suggested financial incentives
attracted teachers to PI; however, the lure of
money was no guarantee of their conscientious
adherence to project goals.Teacher participants
received on average $1,500 stipends; release
time to develop curricula and attend summer
and afterschool meetings; and up to $1,200 for
art supplies, transportation to museums and
historical sites, and/or honoraria for the culturists who shared Ojibwe traditions directly with
students. For roughly 25% of the 50 teacher
participants, meeting the stipend requirement
of constructing three lessons that integrated
culture into the arts and other subjects over
the course of a year was perfunctory at best.
Conversely, another 25% ofthe group developed
numerous Ojibwe-focused lessons or comprehensive units (some yearlong) with place-based
critical pedagogical aims that crossed disciplinary borders (Graham, 2007, 2009; Gruenewald,
2003b). The remaining teachers' performances
fell somewhere between these two poles.
Some teachers relied only on "prescriptive
art lessons that simply re-present the work of
an artist" (Desai, 2010, p. 176). For example,
students coloring Ojibwe floral motifs on preprinted bandolier-style polyester bags or making
baskets from birch-bark-patterned wallpaper
was mimetic and involved little critical thinking.
Nevertheless, if the same activities made loose
historical associations and/or tapped suitable
academic standards yet still failed to contextualize colonization's and acculturation's impact on
creative output that evoked the past (Bequette,
2005), lapses of this magnitude were viewed by
Pi's coordinators as missed opportunities, not
teaching failures. Interestingly, while Indigenous

Studies in Art Education /Volume 55, No. 3

219

academics cautioned PI teachers not to develop

and/or use curriculum materials that conflate individual tribal cultures into one "Native
American" society, other Ojibwe band members
taught teachers to make objects that peers elsewhere might describe as mimetic and stereotypically"lndian."This complication went unnoticed
by most teacher participants. But when university researchers did question the authenticity
of such artifacts. Pi's Ojibwe project coordinator
explained deep divides exist in all Indigenous
communities on many cultural matters, including aesthetics and art. Understanding that
Ojibwe material culture has continually built
upon what was established by previous generations, or that each new generation is "creating contemporary art" by "incorporating new
materials and media" was also helpful (Tweed
Museum of Art, 2012). Ultimately, respecting
Ojibwe presenters' dominion demonstrating
cultural production deemed important to the
social identity of the host community confirmed
the aesthetic and ideological appropriateness of
these making activities (Bequette, 2005).
When too many teachers gravitated toward
constructing culturally responsive curriculum
focused only on "neo-traditional" crafting
beadwork, dreamcatchers, or simpler projects
tacked onto existing lessonsthey too were
reminded of Pi's goals of thwarting stereotypes
and debunking monocultural assumptions
about 21st-century Indigenous life by privileging place-specific conceptions of Ojibwe social
identity (Adams et al., 2007). To counter this
tendency and highlight the tension between
traditional and avant-garde Indigenous art, subsequent professional development for teachers
included museum field trips and presentations
advancing the work of respected contemporary
Ojibwe artistsDavid Bradley, Frank Big Bear,
Andrea Carlson, and others. Exposure to a range
of historical and contemporary artists got teachers working with natural materialsquills, birch
bark, and sweetgrassto better contextualize
Ojibwe peoples' culturally acquired behaviors,
such as dependence on local biosystems for aes-

220

thetic expression and production. Conversations

with historical crafters also clarified that
American Indian cultures are not static, reckoning the shift to human-made materials did
not compromise overall craftsmanshipusing
beads instead of quills, for example. PI teachers
had to iearn that in a continuum ranging from
traditional to avant-garde, the historical crafts
with which they are most familiar signify "only a
snapshot of time and represent a small fraction
of the creative arts of Native peoples" (Tweed
Museumof Art, 2012).
Infusion of Ojibwe storytelling, literature,
and poetry into existing school curriculum was
encouraged by Indigenous academics (Grover,
1999). Several presenters tried to steer teachers
away from culturally Inaccurate children's picture
books, young-reader fiction, Hollywood films,
and textbooks that arguably perpetrated stereotypes, hegemony, and White privilege. Nativerun websites or blogs that reviewed children's
literature'' and online curriculum developed to
debunk murky legends about "brave adventurers"such as Christopher Columbus^ were recommended resources for lesson planning.

Contemporary Artists' Practice as

Place-Based Pedagogy
At a winter workshop focused on using
culture-based storytelling and oral history in
teachers' language arts curriculum, a young,
spoken-word artist and an elder storyteller
(both Ojibwe band members) performed for PI
teachers. When surveyed to gauge their reaction to this training, PI teachers overall were
impressed with the male storyteller's presentation; they reported enjoying his "wisdom" and
"wit." Conversely, several of the same respondents were put off by the female poet's prickliness. Co-opting African American slam poetry
and speaking assertively about race and oppression, it seems, violated their essentialist conception of metaphoric storytelling. In an interview
published elsewhere, this Ojibwe poet talked of
White audiences being taken aback by the angst
expressed in her spoken word performances:

Bequette/Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

"They've said, 'I don't understand the anger'and

they seem more baffled by Native rage than that
of other people of color" (Rendon & Markusen,
2009, p. 43). Undaunted by teacher feedback.
Pi's Ojibwe coordinator explained why White
educators must experience firsthand Indigenous
people's frustration with life and being "Indian."
Furthermore, she maintained that introducing
spoken-word activities in elementary classrooms, aside from being highly engaging, would
invite social commentary about provocative
issues in young people's lives.
PI teachers learned "contemporary artists use
a wide range of tools, materials, and sources of
information to critique, explore, and comment
on pertinent issues from the personal to the
global" (Desai, 2010, p. 176). Two presentations
by Ojibwe visual artists confirmed that their
artmaking is often a response to clichd depictions of American Indians and reservation life
in popular visual culture (Defoe, 2008; Gawboy,
2009). One workshop featured a young artist
and Santa Fe Art Institute graduate who asked
PI teachers, "Is this art?" while screening slides
of creative efforts that merely evoked the past
and more edgy pieces by artists who took creative risks. Included in the latter group were the
presenter's whimsical sculptures that appropriated traditional themes, symbols, and materialsspecifically tobacco rituals, ceremonial
pipes, and pipestone, a sacred material quarried
only for pipemakers' use. Even though some
elders viewed this artwork as sacrilege, the artist
told PI teachers his creative efforts refiected his
Ojibwe identity. Making art was a mechanism
for healing the place-specific wounds a colonial past infiicted on his family, tribe, and all
Indigenous peoples of North America (Defoe,
2008).
A second artist, an Ojibwe-Finn elder who
taught art and American Indian studies at local
colleges, participated in Pi's first summer institute for teachers. There, the artist spoke about
painting Ojibwe people "clothed and in modern
dress, to counter the 'naked Native' paintings of
19th-century Anglo-America that carry forward

these stereotypes in American film and TV"

(Rendon & Markusen, 2009, p. 80). In that talk,
he broached notions of a fine line between what
constitutes good Indigenous art and simply cultural production.

Effective Teaching Connects Theory

and Practice
Some months later, three teachers who
enjoyed the aforementioned artist's presentation attended the opening of a retrospective exhibit of his work. One attendee left this
show wondering if the artist's realistic style
might romanticize and essentialize Indigenous
peoples. She remembered, however, that contemporary artists often "engage the social,
economic, and cultural injustices, issues, and
conditions" (Delacruz, 2010, p. 27) that plague
postcolonial communities in subtle and notso-subtle ways. This dichotomy inspired her
construction of a critical unit of instruction that
had elementary children examining this artist's
work. To further her students' understanding of
local Indigenous history, race, power, and injustice, this teacher used the stipend provided by
PI to bus her entire class to see 35 large narrative-style murals the artist painted for a regional
library between 1993-2002. This figurative work
aesthetically embodied over 2 centuries of Great
Lakes history from the Algonquian-Ojibwe story
of earth's creation to first Indigenous-White
contact and the local commerce and industry
that followed. The teacher also provided the
artist honoraria to join the field trip, discuss
the murals, and, she hoped, heighten students'
engagement with and appreciation for the place
they live and the Indigenous peoples living
therefor millennia.
Another exemplar of innovative teaching
inspired by Pi's cultural competency training
was a yearlong unit that had students looking
through political, economic, and aesthetic lenses
at Ojibwe-European fur trade, still a contentious
discussion in Indigenous circles. The capstone
experience for a 70% White, 30% Indigenous
class of 4th graders was an elaborate simulation

Studies in Art Education I Volume 55, No. 3

221

of Ojibwe-French bartering on a historical site

within walking distance of their public school
where fur trade was conducted as late as 1803.
Costumed children, embodying both Indigenous
and White roles, moved about that riverside
knoll, exchanging pelts, birchbark goods, and
quillwork for manufactured itemsglass beads,
textiles, facsimile weaponsall made back in
their classroom under the tutelage of visiting
Ojibwe artisans and their teacher.
Project-based learning and the place-specific
nature of this teacher's simulation had young
re-enactors exploring the social dynamics of cultural contact in visceral ways difficult to foresee
when developing curriculum, policy, and/or theoretical arguments about pedagogy. A debriefing activity that followed the role-play had the
students troubling whether the complex relationship Indigenous peoples had with trading
centers actually encouraged more permanent
White settlements. Thinking critically about the
ethics of early commerce demonstrated the 4th
graders'commandoftopics addressed throughout the school yearcolonization, ensuing
conflict over natural resources, land, self-determinationhostilities that often led to genocide
and vendetta.
This engaging PI curriculum was created after
the teacher heard an Indigenous accounting of
the ramifications of White men establishing
trading posts on "special and sacred place[s] to
the [Ojibwe] people" (Peacock, 1998). Learning
that these trading centers "interposed an economic anomaly between the intuitive rhythm
of woodland life and the equipoise ofthe anishinabe [sic] spirit" (Vizenor, 2000, p. 7) led to formulating lesson plans for the fur trade unit with
the following rationale: the raising of cultural
awareness and appreciation for [Ojibwe] history,
lives, stories, and people will improve the educational experience for all our students and help
break down stereotypes and prejudice.^
An equally ambitious PI project at the
Reservation school had 2nd graders reading the
classic travel saga Paddle-to-the-Sea (Holling,
1941) for an entire school year. Focused on the

222

upper Great Lakes watershed where the children

live, Holling's meticulously illustrated placebased adventure story of a carved wooden
canoe and its miniature Indigenous paddler
became a vehicle for culturally responsive art,
math, reading, science, and social studies teaching as well as Ojibwe vocabulary Introduction
(Gruenewald, 2003b; Sobel, 2004). The teacher's PI training helped her challenge the allIndigenous class to critically explore their past
and present tribal lifeways in home, school, and
community contexts (Gruenewald, 2003b). This
was standards-based interdisciplinary teaching
that complemented the environmental themes,
flora, fauna, and geography the children learned
about weekly in Paddle-to-the-Sea. The text's
narrative also provided entry points for teaching about ongoing injustice (Graham, 2007) in
Indigenous peoples' lives. This teacher, albeit on
an elementary level, tried to "facilitate increased
awareness of and questioning of the status
quo, relations of power, and social structures"
(Costagno, 2009, p. 47).
As Reservation school students chronicled
Paddle's route to the Atlantic Ocean in a series of
art projects, they were encouraged to consider
other travel stories and questions surrounding whether their ancestors' migration was
from the east or west. And because the teacher
knew topics that complicated different versions
of Ojibwe oral history should be broached by
knowledgeable tribal community members
who were comfortable talking with young children, she deftly invited two tribal eldersa local
college professor and the Reservation school's
resident culturistto visit the classroom. Her
PI trainers had identified these Indigenous
resources. Both men talked about the migration
story, answered the children's questions, and
troubled the notion of "truth" in oral traditions.

Outcomes and Implications

To review, observations of teaching episodes and the lesson plans on which they were
basedas well as analysis of each PI teacher's
discourse in professional development set-

Bequette/Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

tingsinformed our argument that well-conceived place-specific pedagogy can effectively

counter underlying assumptions of power,
legitimacy, and ethnocentrism that often creep
into the multicultural lessons of privileged
White educators (Bequette & Petkau, 2011,2013;
Hrenko, 2010). Teachers who truly embodied PI
goals skillfully wove place-specific Indigenous
knowledge into culturally responsive interdisciplinary practice rather than accepting "prepackaged curricula formulas and narrow agendas
often imposed by state and national guidelines"
(Ballengee-Morris, Daniel, & Stuhr, 2010, p. 15).
These educators also heeded the advice of local
cultural gatekeepers who helped them cultivate
the critical consciousness to engage intellectually with "art that is produced today by culturally
diverse civic-minded activist artists" (Delacruz,
2010, p. 27) and situated it within the broader
context of Ojibwe material culture.
Researchers, attending to the concerns of
a cadre of Ojibwe "change agents" who intuitively understood the local scene, were capable

AUTHOR

trainers of teachers and superb role models for

students and demonstrated both mutuality of
purpose and the power-sharing potential of collaborations like PI. Ultimately, these Indigenous
leads' relentless pursuit of full and equal participation of Ojibwe children in Eurocentric local
schools inspired like-minded White teachers to
"find more effective ways to challenge oppressive systems and promote social justice" (Adams
et al., 2007, p. 1 ) in these once-unwelcoming settings. Place-conscious education's goal "to enlist
teachers and students in the firsthand experience of local life and in the political process of
understanding and shaping what happens there"
(Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 620) resonated well with
Pi's goal to use Indigenous knowledge as an
entry point for culture-based arts education that
teaches against the grain.Teachers of Indigenous
youth and students of color elsewhere would
profit from understanding such aims.

NOTE

This research was supported by a grant from the United States Department of Education, Office of Innovation
and Improvement, Washington, DC. The author would like to recognize two colleagues: Jean Ness and Kelly
Hrenko, whose efforts helped propel this project forward.

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ENDNOTES
1

Project intersect (PI) is the working name of the Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination
(AEMDD) program described in this article.The United States Department of Education, Office of Innovation
and Improvement, Washington, DC, funded this research from 2006-2010. Names of all participants and the
three schools in the study have been intentionally omitted.

2 Ojibwe is the preferred name of the Woodland peoples who collaborated with this arts project. "The
Chippewa, Ojibway, and Ojibwe are the same culture as the Anishinabe" (Vizenor, 2000, p. xxiii), a distinct
tribal entity. Indigenous peoples of North Americas are collectively referred to as Indigenous, Native, and/or
American Indian except when otherwise noted in quotations as Indian or Native American in this article.
3

Permission in this context refers to a gesture of trust. Indigenous doyens inviting non-Indigenous teachers to
leave comfort zones and responsibly construct place-specific curriculum that privileged the language and
material culture of the local Ojibwe. In doing so. Indigenous mentors made publica range of appropriate
cultural content and resources suitable for classroom use while offering practical advice on ways to teach
about contemporary Indigenous lifeways without perpetuating deficit caricatures of reservation life,
monocultural stereotypes, and misappropriation of sacred objects (e.g., eagle feathers) and/or oral traditions
(e.g., seasonal storytelling).

See for example, americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com

5 See for example, www.rethinkingschools.org

^

226

Information taken from Rl lesson plans, 2008.

Bequette/Culture-Based Arts Education That Teaches Against the Grain

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