Aleuts or Unangan original inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands

After reading the book Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse, I decided to showcase a moment in history about the Aleuts of Alaska for Native American Heritage Month. If you are not familiar with the story, the gist of it all is, that the US Government sent the Aleuts of Alaska to internment camps during WWII.


Our Activity for Native American Heritage Month was a "bulletless" Power Point about the Aleuts during WWII. We had a display of Inuit Artwork (I could not find a wall calendar of Aleut Artwork).


We had a Tasting of Smoked Salmon Appetizer, (yes this was an expensive one). We chose Smoked Salmon because the Aleuts were highly skilled at attaining their food from the land and sea, such as sea lions, seals, otter, salmon, birds and such. The cost of this tasting was 50 cents per student. We had 6 whole classes to come in for the tasting, around 130 students over a two day period. Each student was able to have two appetizers each. A lot of our students had never tasted smoked salmon before. Our outdoorsy types seemed to love the smoked salmon.

Things I Learned
*A Smoked Salmon Fillet (1.5 lbs) will make over 200 small appetizer. I over bought.
*You must make the appetizers no more than an hour before serving. Crackers will get soggy.
*Need to bring lemon juice to wash hands. Hands smelled like fish all day long.

Native American Heritage Month

Lucy says..while helping a teacher design a research project for her 11th grade U.S. History class, I ran across these terrific sites I thought I'd share.

Smithsonian American Art Museum's Campfire Stories with George Catlin

This could serve as a springboard for the assignment--have them select an image in this collection--a chief, an image in Ancestral lands, Catlin's quest, the Western landscape, to find more information about--composing not only a 2 or 3 page narrative or reaction paper with more information (from various sources that are cited in the works cited page) about the image, but within the narrative, describing everything they see in the image that gives clues about Native American life at that time (they must choose and image of Native Americans, or Native American life, not images of Catlin and his party). Within the paper, they could also investigate this question--can you find how encroaching movement from East to West affected the life of the person, or the image? Can you find a picture of this area, or a person from this tribe today?

Here are the lesson plans from the Smithsonian site:
http://catlinclassroom.si.edu/lessonplans/contents.html

Also, I love, love, love this activity:

It has them search through primary source documents, and other websites:

Library of Congress

http://www.edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=268

http://edsitement.neh.gov/monthly_feature.asp?id=133

There are many more out there--just thought I'd share these! Feel free to discuss other great sites you've shared with your teachers!