'How We Got Here'

Community, Arches

Participants in a Community Summer class see the history of the Native American experience through the eyes of an Indigenous instructor.

Over the summer, 30 people—some from campus, many from the local community—spent a series of Saturday mornings in Howarth Hall hearing about a weighty subject: the history of Native Americans in the U.S.

Instructor Doris Tinsley, a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, billed the class as a “crash course,” and it lived up to its name, covering more than 500 years’ worth of American Indian history in just a handful of sessions. Tinsley touched on everything from the arrival of the Europeans in the late 15th century to the modern-day crisis known as MMIW, for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

“Crash Course Intro to Native American Studies and Contemporary Issues” was one of 16 classes the university offered in the Community Summer program, in which faculty and staff teach non-credit courses open to the public. This summer’s topics included music production, yoga, ceramics, the history of cancer, and even a bit of quantum mechanics.

Many who signed up for Tinsley’s course cited her heritage as a plus. “The advantage for me was that Doris is an Indigenous person herself. Such resources are very hard to come by,” says Douglas Cannon, a Puget Sound emeritus professor of philosophy who has long been interested in Native American issues. “Her perspective was different from what I had ever been exposed to in a classroom.”

Indigenous children in the Carlisle Indian School in 1892.

Indigenous children at the Carlisle Indian School in 1892, where they were sent to be assimilated into white culture. Photo courtesy of John N. Choate/Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

Tinsley, a former university staff member, grew up in the Shinnecock Nation on New York’s Long Island. She has a degree in American Indian studies from Virginia Tech and is working on a master’s in tribal administration and governance at the University of Minnesota. (She, too, has had primarily white professors along the way.)

One of her goals for the class was to help participants understand “how we got here,” as she put it—that is, “how we went from being the majority to being the minority of the minority.” She started with the Vatican’s 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery, which empowered Europeans to displace and conquer non-Christian people around the world, including those in America. She talked about the Marshall Trilogy, three Supreme Court decisions between 1823–32 that set federal policy toward Native Americans. She covered the government acts of the late 1800s that broke up tribal lands, uprooted Indigenous people, and forced them to relocate—actions that, in Tinsley’s words, “amounted to cultural genocide.”

Attendees also learned about Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School to assimilate Native Americans into the white way of life—an idea embodied in his maxim “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Tinsley touched on the boarding school movement that followed, as well as the so-called Sixties Scoop, in which Indigenous children were removed—often under false pretenses and sometimes forcibly—from their families and adopted into white families.

A remnant of the 1969 Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island.

Tinsley also addressed 1970s Native American activism, including the American Indian Movement, the occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969–71, and the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where, in 1890, federal troops had massacred more than 300 Lakota people.

Tinsley knows a bit of the modern history firsthand: Some of her aunts, uncles, and grandparents were involved in AIM. “I think AIM taught a lot of communities how to rally and lobby, how to go to Senate hearings,” she says. “It was also the first time that these events were covered on the TV news. It opened people’s eyes to what was happening on reservations.” She also told the class about COINTELPRO, a much-criticized FBI operation from 1956–71 aimed at ending activism by Native Americans and others.

“It was a lot of new information I hadn’t seen before,” says Bruce Sadler ’83, who teaches at Mount Tahoma High School in Tacoma and who expects to incorporate some of what he heard from Tinsley in his U.S. history course. “It was fascinating to hear about things that are not going to be in your average history book.” Sadler was one of several attendees who are schoolteachers in Washington state, where legislation called “Since Time Immemorial” mandates that the K-12 curriculum include coverage of tribal history, issues, and contributions.

An activist raises awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Photo courtesy of Native Women's Wilderness.

The Puget Sound summer course was too short to be comprehensive, but Tinsley offered numerous resources for those wanting to do a deeper dive. A sampling, many of which are available on YouTube:

—A Vox.com video, How the U.S. stole thousands of Native American children.

—A 2017 PBS documentary, What Was Ours.

—A short film by Tree Media, Doctrine of Discovery.

—A 2021 CBS Saturday Morning segment, A Look Back at the Takeover of Alcatraz Island.

The class ended in late July, and Tinsley has left the university for a job with Synergy Enterprises, which provides training and curriculum on Indigenous education for the federal government. But the learning continues: Some of the class members have started a book group to keep the conversation going. Next on their list: Vine DeLoria Jr.’s Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

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