Knowing Our Neighbors: Acknowledging and Honoring Indigenous North Carolinian Histories

Students will research the Indigenous peoples that once occupied the land on which they now live, work, or go to school, ultimately determining which of the eight state-recognized tribes lived in their region using the Ancient North Carolinians website. Focusing specifically on an area / county of North Carolina, students will investigate artifacts from archaeological digs and interpret the ancient lifestyles of the peoples that used the material culture exhibited on the website. Students will be given the opportunity to learn about the present-day cultures of Indigenous North Carolinians through a field trip to a powwow.  Finally, with the knowledge and experiences they have spent the semester building, students will utilize the “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement” from the Native Governance Center website as a source for information to make connections between the sites they researched and/or visited, the Indigenous peoples that once occupied that land, and the present-day lives and locations of contemporary American Indians in North Carolina. In a final paper, students will grapple with the question of whether or not current occupants of the land should pay a voluntary land or honor tax to the Indigenous people whose land was taken from them, or whether there should be some other form of reparations made, and what that might look like.