06 Erik Holland Layering Perspectives

When I work with a staff member or myself build a program one of the things that’s in the block of the planning is who’s the audience and how is it built and so where are they intellectually and so you say students of that age I assume we’re talking early elementary or something like that where those kinds of things aren’t there well the standards are what’s my community where am I in my family if I’m a littler kid you know I mean and so a teacher can help to think about community as the places where people make their living so Lewis and Clark come out to a place where there haven’t been any of their ilk except a few fur traders and there’s books called before Lewis and Clark and there’s you know so but so there’s one perspective of well they’re not the first but there are very few and so they are coming into something that is unused by their family and so that’s newness I mean and they do happen to then be the conquerors and take the journal back to Jefferson and Jefferson really wanted to know about the native peoples the reason they spent time at Fort Mandan was because these people were traitors and had been for 600 years and if you’re a good traitor you’re able to let the other into your village and get along with them to carry on a trade that’s why Lewis and Clark were able to spend the winter with a man dance because the Mandans were entrepreneurial traders that it was a business for them and the fur trade grew out of it for Clark and Madhu to honk oh Sh a village built by James Kipp who learned the language in the 1830s and then the steamboats can imagine a guy standing on the edge of a hill seeing the first steamboat and what did he think about that did he think Wow look at all the kettles that are coming for my wife you know here’s a bunch of really cool stuff and that’s the same perspective that people in Western North Dakota have when they see an oil tanker coming out to North Dakota is like that trucks coming out here to rape the Badlands or it’s coming out here to invest in our economy build our infrastructure make it better make America great whatever you want to say so there’s a perspective there that was happening when Lewis and Clark touched here and the story starts with them so a teacher can use that as an access point to talk about who was here and what was that whole 600 years of trade what the hell were they trading sorry one of the things that they were trading was Rock knife river Flint biggest export in North Dakota for 2,000 years find it in Ohio find it in Wyoming find it all over the only place it comes from is Central Western North Dakota it’s the only resource for it and the native population knew that it was powerful they knew it as soon as the glaciers receded because they were in the glacier glacial ice that’s where that’s stuff came and was deposited it’s in the Glacial till if you want to go into the geology and their quarries are in that tail and they’re picking up these cobbles of rock that when you break it you can predict how it’ll break makes it valuable because you know what you can make out of it already because you can predict it so there’s a perspective for why is it valuable what’s this export it’s going all the way across there’s trade involved Lewis and Clark got here we just connected the whole story to oil by layering some perspectives into it and there I think that’s the answer I mean you said how can this help this is how they don’t have to go and do Lewis and Clark story as the only story it’s a piece of our life it’s a continuum and native population doesn’t disagree with that I mean they just are a little upset that you know some of the outcomes many of them were not pleasant