Frontier Faces of Native America: A Place-Based Teaching Expedition to the Black Hills
Cycle through South Dakota’s remarkable landscapes, where Indigenous history, Lakota culture, and outdoor adventure offer new perspectives on the land and our connections to it.
Program
Dates
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Program
Location
South Dakota,
United States
Application
Status
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Cost of
Participation
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What You'll Leave With
This expedition offers educators the opportunity to wrestle with complex questions of history, identity, and belonging in the very places where those stories have unfolded. Through conversations, shared experiences, and time spent immersed in the landscape, participants will gain a richer understanding of Indigenous perspectives and new ways to bring questions of kinship, place, and responsibility into their classrooms.
Greater confidence in expeditionary biking and using outdoor adventure as a tool for experiential learning
A richer understanding of Lakota history, culture, and perspectives on kinship, identity, and belonging
Greater awareness of how Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences can inform classroom teaching
New ways to approach complex questions of land, sovereignty, historical memory, and cultural representation
Practical ideas for connecting literature, history, geography, and environmental studies through place-based learning
Meaningful relationships with fellow educators built through shared exploration, conversation, and reflection
Learning Through the Land and its Stories
The places we teach about have stories that textbooks alone can never fully tell. Frontier Faces of Native America gives educators the opportunity to experience South Dakota’s landscapes by bicycle while exploring the histories, cultures, and perspectives that have shaped them. Through conversations, readings, and shared experiences, participants consider how Indigenous understandings of kinship and place can inform their teaching and help students ask more thoughtful questions about history, identity, and belonging.
Immerse
yourself in Lakota history and perspectives to bring greater depth to your teaching.
Embolden
your approach to outdoor education through expeditionary biking and shared challenges.
Illuminate
connections between history, identity, and place that inspire richer classroom discussions.
Program Description
The notion that the world is rife with connections is embodied in the Lakota Sioux adage, mitakuyé oyás’i, “all are related.” This 10-day interdisciplinary biking expedition along South Dakota’s Mickelson Trail, through the heart of South Dakota’s famed Black Hills, affords teachers the opportunity to explore the rich natural, historical, and cultural contours of this complex western landscape. Here, in the ancestral home of the Lakota Sioux, our teaching community will contemplate so many connections that arise through an encounter with a place and its people, and how these connections can deepen place-based learning in their own classrooms.
Days will move in a rhythm of field experiences, structured pedagogical workshops, guided writing and curricular work, and facilitated discussions. The group will visit Badlands and Wind Cave National Parks, the Crazy Horse Memorial and the Wounded Knee Massacre site at the Pine Ridge Reservation, Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore, and the sacred indigenous site Bear Butte, where Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and other Native leaders performed the Sun Dance. We will complement these experiences with readings and resources and through conversations with various organizations and stakeholders along the way who will deepen our contemplation of this powerful place and its powerful history–from Thunder Valley CDC to the National Park Service.
Alongside this immersion in place, we will explore approaches to place-based education, climate and sustainability education, and interdisciplinary, experiential teaching: not as abstractions, but as something practiced and tested in real time, in a real landscape and context that we will come to know more intimately. At the heart of the week is a simple belief: that experiencing a place deeply enough can change how we think about teaching itself. In the end, teachers will emerge with a more nuanced understanding of indigenous history in the West, of the myriad issues facing the people who call this place home, and of how these stories might offer us new, powerful ways of thinking about our own classrooms, wherever they are.
