Last updated: January 13, 2024
Lesson Plan
Native American Reservations
- Grade Level:
- Middle School: Sixth Grade through Eighth Grade
- Subject:
- Social Studies
- Lesson Duration:
- 90 Minutes
- Common Core Standards:
- 6-8.RH.2
- State Standards:
- State: Nebraska
Subject: History
Grade Level: 6th -8th
State Standards: SS 8.3.1a, 8.3.1b, 8.3.4a - Thinking Skills:
- Understanding: Understand the main idea of material heard, viewed, or read. Interpret or summarize the ideas in own words. Applying: Apply an abstract idea in a concrete situation to solve a problem or relate it to a prior experience. Analyzing: Break down a concept or idea into parts and show the relationships among the parts. Creating: Bring together parts (elements, compounds) of knowledge to form a whole and build relationships for NEW situations.
Essential Question
What were reservations and why were they used? What was their purpose? How did they impact Native American culture?
Objective
In this lesson, students will develop an understanding of Native American reservations and why they were created. They will do this by reading about Native American reservations, discovering why Native American reservations were created, and discussing living conditions on Native American reservations.
Background
The Homesteaders, Immigrants, and Native Americans unit is broken up into six lesson plans, taking 45-120 minutes to complete, targeting sixth through eighth grade students. A class does not have to complete every lesson in the unit - each lesson comes with its own set of objectives and resources. This is lesson 4 of the unit.
This lesson focuses on the creation of Native American reservations. The first people living on the prairie were the ancestors of the various Native American Tribes. Through archeology, we can surmise that the plains have been inhabited for centuries by groups of people who lived in semi-permanent villages and depended on planting crops and hunting animals. Many of the ideas we associate with Native Americans such as the travois, various ceremonies, tipis, earth lodges, and controlled bison hunts, come from these first prairie people.
Horses were brought to Mexico by the Spanish in the 1600s. The migration of the horse from Mexico in the 1700s changed the culture of the Great Plains Tribes to one that was more mobile. Before the horse, the Tribes hunted and traveled in relatively small, restricted areas. The introduction of the horse into Native American society allowed people to cover greater distances. The horse became a status symbol to Native Americans and individuals amassed vast herds of these animals.
The first known historic Tribe in the plains area was the Pawnee who lived in earth lodges part of the year and in tipis during the summer and fall hunts. The earth lodge Tribes such as the Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, Omaha, Oto, Ponca, Pawnee, Wichita, and Winnebago, among others, planted crops such as corn, squash, and beans and stored their food in underground storage caches. Their semi-subterranean lodges held from 10 to 40 people. Several lodges were grouped together to form fortified villages. Smaller groups ventured out with tipis for the bison hunts, returning to the earth lodge for winter.
Other Tribes associated with the Great Plains were the Lakota-Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapahos, Comanche, Kiowa, and Crow, among others. They lived mainly in tipis, traveling through the Plains region. These groups were the great hunters of the Plains following the bison or "buffalo" and foraging for berries, roots, and other plants. They lived in extended family relationship groups, traveling to familiar places and encampments. Often, they traded and warred with the earth lodge dwellers.
Preparation
This lesson requires enough computers for students to work in pairs or small groups.
Lesson Hook/Preview
1. Ask students to answer the following questions out loud or on a piece of scratch paper: Who owns your desk?
2. While some students will say they own the desk, they are actually just using and taking care of the desk while they sit at the desk. This is called being a steward.
3. Ask the students:
- Who owns a farm —the farmer? the community? the country?
- Who owns land?
4. Explain to students that most Native American groups did not believe people owned land and thus you could not buy or sell it; it was just yours to use. They were merely stewards of the land, much like students and their desks. They do not own the desks, but they are theirs to use. However, the settlers and US government had a very different perspective.
Procedure
1. Explain to students that today they will be answering the question: What are reservations and why were they created?
2. Put students in pairs or small groups.
3. Give students 20 minutes to investigate the following link: https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/americanindians.htm
4. Ask the students to discuss as a class what reservations are and why they were created.
5. In the same pairs or small groups, assign each group one of the primary documents about life on reservations found at: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/wkmiles.htm.
6. Give students twenty minutes to analyze the primary source using the “Life on the Reservation: Primary Source Investigation”.
7. Each group of students should share out their findings with the rest of the class. As the other groups share, the students should take notes.
Vocabulary
Steward – A person who manages or looks after another’s property.
Reservation – An area set aside by the US Government for Native Americans to live on.
Native Americans – Persons who are native to the land that is currently the United States.
Settler – Person who moves to a new location to live.
Assessment Materials
To show their new knowledge of reservations, each student should assume the
role of a Native American living on a reservation in 1890. The student will
write a diary entry about what their life would be like. Suggest to students
that they choose to write from the point of view of one of the Tribes they followed on the maps.
Enrichment Activities
Students could generate a letter from President Ulysses S. Grant, who set up the first reservation, explaining his reasons for its creation.
Related Lessons or Education Materials
This lesson plan is the fourth lesson in a larger curriculum unit on Homesteaders, Immigrants, and Native Americans for grades sixth through eighth.