Native Avatars, Online Hubs, and Urban Indian Literature

Teaching American Indian literature with online resources can help diverse urban Indian and multicultural students connect with American Indian cultures, histories, and Nations.¹ This onlineenriched pedagogy adopts Susan Lobo’s sense of the city as an “urban hub,” or activist community center, an urban area linked to reservations in which Native American peoples adapt their cultures in ways that resist mere cultural assimilation into US metropolitan society. Building upon Lobo’s ideas of the urban hub, Jennifer Ladino finds that urban Indian literature can reinforce “a fluidly defined community” that “can emerge to combat alienation and provide emotional and material support” (45). Ladino argues that urban hubs are especially important given that the two-thirds of the total US Native American population reside in cities (36). What this essay adds to Lobo’s and Ladino’s sentiment is a sense of how teaching American Indian literature in a face-to-face classroom blended with online technologies can add to Native urban hubs. Hausman and Purdy note past limitations in blended classes, observing that “for writers and readers of American Indian literatures, the digital revolution has often been engaged as a means of storing information.” However, they also explore Native-language acquisition, tribal Internet pages, author e-mails, and online publications, among other examples of a more dynamic Internet interfaces that can aide teaching American Indian literature (27). This essay builds upon multiple insights and suggestions regarding blended pedagogies that can enhance the appreciation of American Indian literature.

NativeWeb is an example of an online Native cultural hub with literary links. Given Leslie Marmon Silko’s Laguna Pueblo recounting of Spider Woman, “Tse’itsi’nako, Thought Woman . . . the spider,” who names “things into creation” and helps protagonists to fulfill their quests across time, borders, and urban areas in the web of her design (125), I see no accident that NativeWeb is named as such. It is like an electronic extension of Spider Woman’s knowledge on the World Wide Web where all perception is interrelated and rapidly evolving beyond our comprehension. Silko reminds readers that “human identity, imagination and storytelling were inextricably linked to the land, to Mother Earth, just as strands of the spider’s web radiate from the center of a spider’s web” (21). In referencing American Indian websites as enhancing tools in teaching American Indian literatures, I am conscious that I am utilizing what I call Spider Woman’s World Wide Web, which links back to American Indian oral traditions, lands, and contemporary Nations.

Silko’s Pueblo understandings of creative thought as a web intersects with Barr’s and Tagg’s learning-centered paradigm, which holistically facilitates teaching “knowledge web construction.” For Barr and Tagg, the student’s previous knowledge, embodied experiences, goals and culture remain central as she or he creates relationships with new knowledge (Revolution in Higher Education). Wittrock also suggests a web-like educational process that replicates the generative formation of interconnected neurological networks in the brain and allows for a more integrated and long-term learning process. He finds that students learn better when they are able to connect their old and new experiences and concepts because of the neurological manner in which memory and learning occurs as a building of new networks upon old ones (531). Because students are ever more enmeshed in a culture of video games, cell phones, web communications, and technologies in classrooms, it makes sense for a course to build upon the technologies they already know and incorporate them into new teaching practices. In analogous ways, “the web” is an interrelated creative process grounded in a physical reality within ancient American Indian oral traditions and within contemporary neurologically inflected educational theory. As physi cal land is the locus of human consciousness for Silko, so the physical brain is the locus of human knowledge, creativity, and learning for Wittrock.

My experience regarding how the World Wide Web supports American Indian literary pedagogies has continued to evolve in the new millennium. In 2000, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, I asked my American Indian pupils to compose web pages and narratives...