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Week 5 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 5 — Still Here: Placing Survivance on the Timeline — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — place this week's laws and the occupation of Alcatraz on the timeline, read one family's account beside the record, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, termination and relocation, Red Power and the occupation of Alcatraz, self-determination and repatriation, and survivance. In this assignment you work four short problems on the timeline, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples, and on Week 4's point that tribal citizenship is a political status, not a racial category.

The task

The law-and-case timeline is the course's list of dated laws and events, each year taken from the issuing body's own page. The course's running archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection built for this course; its excerpts are identified by role and decade and are not real people's words. Its E4 excerpt comes from a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s, interviewed in the 2000s. The relocation office promised his father job training and an apartment; the apartment was real, and the job lasted four months; his mother found the Indian center; he learned his nation's language from his grandmother; and he ends, "We are still here."

A younger cousin shows you a school report that says, "Native Americans lived here long ago, before the government moved them to cities." Your job is to answer the way an ethnic studies reader would, starting from a few plain dates on the timeline.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. On the law-and-case timeline, the Indian Citizenship Act came in 1924, and some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957. How many years could pass between citizenship and the vote?
  2. On the law-and-case timeline, relocation offices opened in 1951, and the Indian Relocation Act came in 1956. How many years apart are the offices and the law?
  3. Indians of All Tribes held Alcatraz Island from November 1969 to June 1971: 12 months from November 1969 to November 1970, then 7 more months to June 1971. How many months did the occupation last?
  4. On the law-and-case timeline, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act came in 1975, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act came in 1990. How many years apart are the two laws?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: explain that citizenship came from Congress while the vote was governed by state law, and that tribal citizenship is a political status, so a Native person can be a citizen of the United States and of their own nation at once.
  • Problem 2: place the archive's E4 excerpt (illustrative) after both dates and name one thing E4 shows that the law leaves out, and explain that relocation was a federal program with a federal goal, not only a family's private choice.
  • Problem 3: describe Red Power and Indians of All Tribes in the course's words, and say what the National Park Service states came after the occupation.
  • Problem 4: define self-determination and repatriation in the course's words, and explain that return under the 1990 law runs through consultation with lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin's report speaks of Native Americans only in the past tense. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that Native nations exist today and are spoken of in the present tense, that relocation was a federal program with a federal goal, and that survivance joins survival and resistance, as in E4's "We are still here." Name one limit, such as that E4 is an illustrative account whose dates are checked against the record. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor who says a town's history began in the year printed on its welcome sign. Model message: "The year on the sign is when the town was officially founded, which is a real record worth knowing. But people lived, worked, and traded in that valley long before anyone printed a sign, and their own accounts tell part of the story the sign leaves out. One fair caveat: memories need checking against dated records too."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Your reflection. After you check your draft, write two or three sentences on one of these, your choice: (a) which source, the dated record or the E4 account, changed your thinking more, and why; or (b) which word or phrase in your first draft you replaced, and what the new wording gets right.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four counts, each with the dates or months and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to your cousin, explaining the present tense, relocation's federal goal, and survivance, with one limit;
  • your reflection, on the option you chose; and
  • a one-line restatement of the dates you used, so your counts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe E4 only as the course describes it, name people only by role, speak of Native nations in the present tense, and do not borrow a custom, a quotation, or a detail about any real nation from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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