When researching a subject as vast and diverse as Native American history and culture, it's inevitable that you are going to have to look around and see where points of connection are made. Throughout most of February, a great deal of the research conducted for our project, Indigenous El Paso, has been looking at not only the Native Peoples of El Paso, Texas, but at the Native populations in other cities as well.
"Fill the paper with the breathing of your heart." – William Wordsworth
In our very first blog post written by Dr. Tom Schmid, our team had developed questions with undetermined answers. Two of these questions ranked most important to the research we have been conducting since our return from Grasmere, England, in December:
Sometimes when you're asked to teach others, you wind up learning quite a bit yourself. These past few months have certainly taught me that.
I hate flying. Every time we take off and every time we land, I’m sure I am living my last moments on Earth. In fact, since I was little, I was convinced it was my destiny to die in an airplane, thanks to a pair of fun-loving cousins and their Ouija board. So, when I was given the opportunity to fly to New York last semester to attend the “Community College and the Future of the Humanities” conference being held by the CUNY Humanities Alliance, you would have expected me to hesitate. After all, New York is quite a difference from the desert city in which I make my home. I jumped at the chance, however, and I am glad I did.
When many people think about Native Americans or American Indians, a few standard images come to mind. They typically envision people from the Great Plains, riding bareback on horses with feathered headdresses, or they conjure up images of Apache men holding a rifle. Sometimes they think about cartoonish portrayals of “Pocahontas” or the “Indians” associated with modern Thanksgiving. Inevitably the popular imagination includes an association with nature and “spirituality,” or alternately, some degree of savagery and violence.