Resource Review - Kids Discover Online: Native American Heritage Month - Northwest Coast Peoples

 I recently stumbled upon an advertisement on social media for Kids Discover Online and their Native American Heritage Month resources. I took a quick glance and noticed multiple problems immediately and decided to do a full review. 

There are six sections on the main Native American Heritage Month page: Eastern Woodland Indians, Native America, Plains Indians, Southwest Peoples, and Northwest Coast Peoples. I am starting with Northwest Coast Peoples and will be working my way through each section. 

Northwest Coast Peoples - Kids Discover Online: Native American Heritage Month

The introduction is written in past tense language, which implies they no longer exist. Unless referring to a specific moment in history, language on these topics should be present tense as Native people still exist in all of these places. For example, it says “…kids will spend some time learning about the Northwest Coast Peoples, who lived on the shores of the northern Pacific Coast, and how they differed significantly….” Both bolded words should be present tense as these are both still true today. The next part of the same sentence says “Native American groups.” “Groups” is never the correct term to use in this context. This is like calling the United States or Germany a “group.” Native nations are sovereign nations, not “groups.” This should say “Native American nations.” The next sentence, referencing not being influenced by the Maya or Aztec people is very odd and completely out of place. I don’t understand why this is relevant? Many Native nations north of Mexico, especially the further north you get, were not influenced by them. Sure, there was trade that spread foods and other goods and ideas from them around North America, but that impacted the NW coast as well. 

The entire introduction uses past tense language where present tense should be used. When talking about life in the past, it can state “Traditionally, these nations did not farm” and then describe historic foodways. But the parts about Potlatches, art, etc. need to be present tense as those are all still practiced. Toward the end of the introduction a sentence says “…in which the survivors of this era have banded together to preserve their culture…” This wording is odd. Why not say “in which these nations continue to preserve their cultures…” Notice how the word “culture” is plural instead of singular like in the Kid’s Discover sentence. Just because nations in this region share a lot in common, does not mean they all have the same culture. The word culture should always be plural when referring to multiple Native nations or a region.

The first section is titled “Major Groups of Northwest Coast Peoples.” Again, the word “Groups” is always incorrect in this context. This should be titled “Major Nations of the Northwest Coast.” 

The beginning of this section identifies the region as ending in southern Oregon. However, it actually stretches into northern California. It also says this region “…ran from…” – again past tense language. This region is still a cultural region and runs from Alaska to northern California. Again, this section uses past tense language only, even when referring to cultural practices that are still very much alive. This is problematic and leads children to incorrect assumptions and beliefs. When talking about historic or traditional life ways, they can say “Historically, these nations….” And then use past tense language, but simply maintaining the past tense language throughout is incorrect. 

It also continues the use of the word “groups” instead of nations. It makes the claim that this is the only “culture” (should be cultures, plural) not influenced by the Aztec (should be Mexica) and Maya, but this is incorrect. Many nations throughout the Americas were not influenced by them. Many cultures around the Americas are much older than both of those civilizations. And while trade goods and foods spread throughout the Americas, that is not the same thing as having a cultural influence. Are they really going to say that the nations in the Arctic and Subarctic were influenced by the Maya and Aztec?? The statement about the NW region being the only ones not influenced by Mesoamerican civilizations is absolutely false. Of the “three major differences” between nations in this region and other regions, the last one “Third, food was easy to find” is a false comparison. While that is correct for the NW coastal region, it is also true in most other regions as well. In other regions, food was either easy enough to find or they were agricultural societies so that wasn’t an issue. Claiming this as a major “difference” is the problem as that is incorrect.

There is a large image of a historic Native town ("village"). There are clickable dots in the image with information. The one about canoes should explain that “canoe” just means boat in Taino and can be any size of boat. The word, without explanation, implies a small boat in most peoples’ minds. Many of the boats used by NW Coast nations are very large. The word “villages” should be “towns,” or at the very least “towns and villages.” Eurocentrism is apparent here. Using words like “villages” for everything from small actual villages to major urban areas is problematic and Eurocentric. This was a historically very densely populated area with major towns. And while the information is about a time in the past, it can at least say that these canoe/boat traditions continue today. The dot to click for totem poles uses past tense language where it should use present tense. Totem poles are still used and still an important part of the cultures in this region. 

The map of “major” nations in the region has an explanation that again uses “groups” instead of nations. It also uses past tense language when these nations are still there. This section is focused almost entirely on material culture. This is all anyone ever learns about Natives…food, clothing, tools, etc. This is a problem. Non-material culture should be given just as much time, if not more, than material culture. This is yet another example of Eurocentrism.

The next section is called "Village Life." Like I said previously, this should at the very least be “towns and villages.” But “towns” is more accurate, as even in the past this was a very populated and urban area. The word “village” is used throughout instead of “towns.” This is Eurocentrism. It also uses the word “dwellings” instead of “houses.” This is another example of Eurocentrism. What if I referred to the houses in Europe or the US as “dwellings” instead of “houses?” That would sound ridiculous. This wording is used to make Natives seem primitive. It is an inherently harmful implication. While most of the section is focused on the past, there are some statements in here that are still true today and should use present tense language or clarify that these are still cultural practices today. This is true throughout the whole section. 

It claims that plank houses are sometimes referred to as “big houses” but that is incorrect. A Big House is a specific building in the town for government, communal, and ceremonial purposes. It’s not a home. Plank houses are people’s homes. There’s a difference and they are not the same thing. Toward the end it says “Some groups were more warlike than others.” Aside from the constant issue of the word “groups,” the term “warlike” is another example of harmful Eurocentric language. I don’t see anyone referring to European countries saying, “Some European groups were more warlike than others.” This language is completely unnecessary. It can simply still have the information about warriors included, it doesn’t need that opening sentence. The end part about clothing doesn’t mention seal skin, which was and is used among some of the nations in the PNW.  This section is focused almost entirely on material culture. This is all anyone ever learns about Natives…food, clothing, tools, etc. This is a problem. Non-material culture should be given just as much time, if not more, than material culture. This is yet another example of Eurocentrism.

Family Life – This section starts out with a general monolithic statement that these nations “often lived in villages divided into two groups called moieties.” One issue is that this is a monolithic statement instead of recognizing cultural differences among PNW nations. Another issue is that it seems to imply that these nations call their social divisions “moieties” or that that is a word from one of those languages (and therefore implies they all call their social divisions that word instead of having distinct languages). "Moiety" is an anthropological term in English, not a Native term or word. This should be explained, or they should not say that their social divisions are called “moieties.” The article then does the same thing with another word: phraties. This is another European term, but it seems to imply this is a term these nations use for their clan divisions. 

There is a large image included. There are a lot of clickable dots in the image with information. All of them are monolithic and lump all PNW nations into one culture, which is incorrect. But one of them is about babies and cradleboards. Cradleboards are still used, so that shouldn’t be past tense only, however there is a monolithic statement that says “A flat head was considered beautiful and a mark of social standing, so noble and commoner babies had their heads flattened.” While this was a practice among some nations in the Americas, not only in the PNW, this statement implies that all of the PNW nations did this. When talking, writing, or teaching about Native peoples and nations - nation specific language should be used instead of monolithic statements like this. This should indicate which nations practiced this in the past, or it should be left off.

The next section is "Art" - Again, this whole thing is in past tense language. “The people of the Northwest Coast used materials that were all around them to create art. Women were great at weaving baskets and textiles. The men were skilled at carving wood.” Emphasis mine. Not only is this incredibly simplistic to the point of being problematic, but none of these statements are exclusively past tense and should all be written in the present tense. This problem continues throughout the article. The article also continues to call Native nations “groups” which is always incorrect. The information is generally okay, but it’s almost entirely generalized instead of nation specific. It should specify which nations they are talking about instead of this general language that implies all the nations are the same.

Spiritual Life – The same issues as before continue here including past tense only language, words like “groups” instead of nations, and generalizations/lack of nation specific information is prevalent throughout the entire page. These beliefs still exist among these nations, so none of it should be written in past tense. Beliefs also vary between nations so all of this should include nation specific information but doesn’t. Instead, it continues to turn these nations into a monolith of the region. Typically, the spiritual beliefs of Native nations, when told by outsiders, are bastardized and described in Eurocentric and inaccurate ways. A page like this about traditional spiritual beliefs should not be written by non-Natives and it shouldn’t be on educational websites like Kids Discover. Information about spiritual beliefs should always come directly from the nations themselves, not other sources. Some nations don’t openly share certain beliefs with outsiders. Sometimes information about these beliefs get out there anyway and that is not acceptable. Sometimes these beliefs are taken by outsiders and warped, changed, added to, taken from, etc into something different but passed off as being “Native” beliefs. This is incredibly harmful. There is no reason for this page to exist on Kids Discover at all.

I cannot check the accuracy of the things taught on this page, as I am not a citizen of one of those nations and am not well versed in their spiritual beliefs (nor should I be), but I can speak to HOW these beliefs are written about. The way they write about these beliefs is very othering and exotifying. This is harmful. Christian beliefs are never described in this manner. Imagine if someone described European beliefs like this “Religion infused every part of Europeans’ lives. Europeans believed in one supreme deity, a father figure, who they believed was made of three parts, and they particularly worshiped the deity’s son. They claimed that their god had given humans domination over the earth. They built elaborate temples to him and performed ceremonies in which they ate crackers and drank wine and believed it was the body and blood of their god, who would provide them with entrance into a wondrous afterlife called heaven when they died. Many wars were fought over disagreements about the details of this religion, each group believing their interpretation was the right one that should be spread across the land.” (from: What if people told European history like they told Native American history? | An Indigenous History of North America (wordpress.com) ) This is what the page about PNW beliefs sounds like. 

They’re also being shared from Eurocentric perspectives rather than Indigenous perspectives or that of citizens of those nations. Eurocentric perspectives do not belong in descriptions of other cultures spiritual beliefs. It uses the word “shaman” in one section, but this word is not correct for Native nations in the Americas. It is often used to describe these beliefs, but it is still incorrect. At the bottom of the article, it says “the people did not have written languages…” While oral traditions are extremely important in most Native cultures, “written language” can take different forms and don’t have to be similar to Eurasian forms. Totem poles, woven textiles, and art in these nations can all transmit information including traditional stories, family histories, and cultural information. These are all methods of recording information like written language. Talking about the information transmitted in totem poles in the previous lesson, for example, and then claiming here that there was no written language is a bit of a contradiction. People need to expand their understanding of what “written language” means.

Trade with Outsiders – The introduction to this section starts out with saying the Spanish “found” the Haida in the 1740s. No, they did not “find” them, they "encountered” them in their homelands, or they “came to Haida homelands,” or they “met” the Haida, but they did not “find” them. No one writes about Native people “finding” Europeans when we travel. No one says “Adam Nordwall found Italy in 1973” or that Native Americans “found English people” when they were kidnapped and sold into slavery in Europe. The Spanish did not find the Haida. It then says the British sent James Cook to “stake claim in the area” without questioning that narrative. How can people “stake claim” in someone else’s land? If the British tried to come to the U.S. right now and “stake a claim” in Chicago, for example, that would be ridiculous. This narrative of “steaking a claim” needs to be questioned and dissected, not simply stated as fact.

The next paragraph is incredibly patronizing and horribly written. No one writes about Europeans in this way; it’s ridiculous to do so about Natives. "The people of the Northwest Coast were smart traders. They were happy to exchange furs for guns, iron, sugar, blankets, flour, and sails for their canoes.” This is incredibly Eurocentric and harmful in the way it is written. Imagine a page saying “White people were smart traders. They were happy to exchange…” Of course, the PNW nations were “smart traders,” they were trading up and down the coast and inland for thousands of years before this! There was a trade language based on the Chinook language that was used from Alaska to California. Talking about Native nations like they’re children is not okay. Also the way it is written makes it sound like they’re primitive and don’t have basic necessities. Blankets? Yes, they traded for European blankets, but they were skilled weavers and made woven cloth, as the art page talked about, so it’s something they already were familiar with. Plus their fur blankets were probably better. But this makes it sound like they didn’t have anything like that before.

The part about diseases says that the nations in the PNW lost about 90% of their populations between 1800 and 1900, which is true, but it implies that this was solely due to disease. It's also passive and makes it sound like it just randomly happened. Passive language doesn't belong here. Diseases certainly played a part in this population reduction, but so did genocide, enslavement, boarding/residential schools, disruption of trade networks, disruption of subsistence lifeways, reservations, etc. Here is an important quote from the book An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States: “Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so, they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.” (Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz). This should be made apparent rather than making it passively sound like they just "lost" their population and it was all because of disease.

The “Before Long” part here makes it sound like Natives were responsible for the decrease in game animals and the need to buy supplies from traders. It has no explanation about how the dependence was forced. It also doesn’t explain the motivations behind why some traders wouldn’t sell to Natives, which was racism. These explanations are way too simplistic to the point of being inaccurate. This also claims that fur traders had “no interested in taking land,” which is false. They sometimes did. 

The explanation of reservations is so far from reality it’s ridiculous. Reservations were prison camps as methods of genocide and forced assimilation. This just makes it seem like a land issue. It also uses the word “roamed” which is incorrect. Native nations did not historically “roam” our homelands, we lived in them (and still do). The part at the bottom about assimilation just says that the governments “tried to convince the people to live as European-Americans did.” NO…they FORCED it. It was not just “tried to convince.” Assimilation was not a choice, it was forced. It also says that the Canadian government made potlatching illegal but makes no mention of the United States making cultural and religious practices illegal as well. It wasn’t just Canada, but this section makes it sound like all of these things happened only in Canada.

Northwest Coast People Today –

This is the only section that uses present tense language even though every section has sentences and paragraphs that should be in the present tense. Most of the language in all of these should be present tense. Their opening definition of a nation makes no sense in the rest of the context of the paragraph. It’s an incredibly weak and confusing explanation. The rest of the paragraph would be hard for a younger child to understand without more context of what a Native nation is. 

The first picture is a black and white historic photograph even though this is supposed to be about these nations today. And the paragraph written with it is factually incorrect. It claims that Natives in the US got the right to vote in 1924. We did not. We did not get the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We were made citizens of the US in 1924, the last people to become citizens, but it did not come with civil rights. We had to fight for our civil rights as well. Some states granted Native men voting rights earlier than 1965, but we did not have the federally protected right to vote across the whole US until 1965. The explanation for the purpose of the National Congress of American Indians is also incorrect. While the NCAI certainly supports cultural ways of life, its purpose is political.

The paragraph about fishing rights says the nations have treaties with the US to fish where they always have, but it makes it sound like the US has actually upheld those treaties. It has not. These treaties have had to be fought for in court to force the US to actually uphold their end of the treaties. The paragraph makes it sound like it’s only commercial fishermen and animal rights activists that have caused issues for these fishing rights, but most of the issues are government related. Their explanations of arts, cultural preservation, and powwows are extremely lacking and need to be rewritten.

This entire Northwest Coast Peoples part of the Native American Heritage Month page is very poorly done. The rest of the 6 parts are just as bad and I will be posting reviews of those in the coming months. 

I absolutely do not recommend any "Native American" resources from Kids Discover, these are horrible.