Teaching Amerindian Autohistory

Teaching the history of Native North America is difficult. Teachers must ask students to read and to write about past peoples whose transmission of knowledge was oral and performative. The available pool of books and articles for assignment often work more as exercises in "othering" than understanding. And everyone in the classroom must find some way to engage essential questions of blood and relative ones of culture. Is there a way to teach such a course without being paralyzed by such basic ontological dilemmas? George Sioui's For an Amerindian Autohistory offers a way out. Sioui, a Wendat philosopher, calls for an approach to the writing of Native history that is rooted in certain cardinal aboriginal values, but his ideas work equally well as pedagogy.¹ To say Sioui's teachings can lead non-Native students to a Native understanding of the past and of the world would be an inappropriately essentialist interpretation of his work, but the book does force students to come to grips with alternative ways of conceiving of personhood, community, and history. Faced with teaching a course on the history of Native North America, I found Sioui's work to be helpful in finding a new kind of conceptual ground on which to base my teaching and the lessons I try to impart to my students.

Sioui's autohistory is predicated on five basic elements: (1) didacticism, (2) morality, (3) confidence, (4) acceptance, and (5) harmony. By moving away from objective observation toward subjective moralization, autohistorians are supposed to create new ways of understanding the past that speak to the needs and beliefs of their communities. To this end, after discussing the method in class, the students and I decided to constitute the seminar as a community and to create and to tell our own autohistories. We had to conduct our autohistories by speaking to members of the community we chose to represent—families, neighbors, and friends—and had to store all of the information we gathered in our heads. Nothing could be written. Web sites, chat rooms, and all things hi-tech were strictly verboten. The point of such strictures was to force students to rely on what is probably the tool that is least tapped by today's curricula—memory. I also made a point of not telling anyone in my department what was going on.

Autohistory must teach, Sioui says. The education comes not from exposing students to pages and pages of historiographical debate but from choosing what they believe is right in reference to themselves and their community, in this case their classmates. A method based on interpreting what is inherently right has no time for positivism or objectivism, nor for anything post- this or that, because arguing what one believes involves righteousness more so than theory. For this reason autohistorians must imprint their audiences' value systems. It is a scholarship of the heart.

Didacticism, at least according to everything I have heard and read about modern teaching in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education, runs counter to the way many of us have been taught to teach. To be didactic is to believe one has a truth worth hearing. In my class the assumption that the speaker had the floor and that others were there to listen granted each speaker a certain pride of place not possible in general seminar discussions where relativity prevails. They held the floor once they spoke and had to maintain their hold with each word that passed from their mouths. As diverse as the class was, certain truths emerged from the students' use of didacticism. Our lives take on a much different shape when placed in the context of grandparents, great-grandparents, and children yet to be born. We might wish away the tragedies of our lives, but to do so would be to deny who we are. Despite our fractured pasts, we are all whole people.

Effective didacticism hinges on morals. When I use the term "morals" I mean neither...