Teacher’s Guide

Lesson plans and resources for K-12 instructors

Valerie Rangel, City of Santa Fe Historian, IV

01 / 19

A StoryMap of Maps

Question prompts: What language are the maps written in and who is represented? Why is representation important? Who had access to the maps when they were created? Who has access to them now? Are maps political documents? How are maps used today? What makes a community functional, healthy, and beautiful? How does the shape that we give to our city, in turn, shape us?

Click anywhere on the StoryMap to interact.

For a full list of sources to search historical information, click on the following link:  Resources.pdf (santafelibrary.org) 

A StoryMap of Historical Places

Question prompts: What does the title of the StoryMap “No Me Olvides” mean? What historical events, people, places and things are important to preserve and remember?

Click anywhere on the StoryMap to interact.

Doctrine of Discovery

Question prompts: What was the Camino Real? Who created the Santa Fe Trail and how long was it in use? What was the plan of European colonists when they arrived in New Mexico?

Lesson Plan: Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery | Teaching Native American Histories(umass.edu)

Teaching Climate Justice and Local Activism Through Documentary Film

Representatives from 350 New Mexico created a 4-day middle school lesson plan, "Climate Hope: From Knowledge to Action,” to address the need to support local teachers in climate education, and recognizing the importance of youth voices on this issue, they are developing a climate change curriculum to help educate and engage middle school students in climate action. A separate curricular unit, developed by the University of New Mexico's Latin American & Iberian Institute, focuses on a broader collective resistance of Indigenous peoples in Latin America and their leadership in the fight for climate justice. The resources publicly available include an entire unit on the documentary "La Vocera" and additional lesson plans, encourages students to create their own documentary on climate justice and resiliency in their own communities. These resources are targeted at middle school students but can be applied to all classrooms with adaptation:  Teaching Climate Change (350newmexico.org) 

Local history documenting climate change:

PhotoVoice Project

The PhotoVoice concept was developed by Professor Caroline Wang at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Mary Ann Burris from the Ford Foundation.

PhotoVoice is a process that has been used for research, education, social change, and the development of more healthful public policy. It empowers people who may be marginalized in society and have little access to policy makers by giving them cameras and asking them to capture in pictures and words phenomena that matter to them. People, whose voices frequently go unheard and whose perspectives often are overlooked. Goals of PhotoVoice: 1. To enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns. 2. To promote critical dialogue and knowledge about personal and community issues through large and small group discussions of photographs. 3. To reach policy makers. To these ends, the PhotoVoice process lays out multiple stages for defining the goals of a project, anticipating an audience, taking pictures and telling stories about them, evaluation, and presentation. While PhotoVoice can be done on a more individual basis, one of the most powerful aspects of the technique is the group reflection on and discussion of the photographs.

Human Rights

Question prompts: What are Human Rights? Who created the list or definitions of human rights? How is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples different? Who is responsible for ensuring that all people have the right to food and shelter? What happens if a country is in violation of providing human rights? Does everyone in the United States have human rights? Are access to water and safe drinking water, sanitation (indoor plumbing), and electricity basic human rights? What groups of people in New Mexico do not have these things and where do they live? (colonias near El Paso/TX, Pajarito mesa/ABQ, San Juan and McKinley County Navajo communities) What has been the impact of not having water for Navajo communities during the pandemic? Should internet connectivity be a basic human right?  Universal Declaration of Human Rights | Facing History and Ourselves 

2015 Navajo Water Lady (CBS news):  The Navajo Water Lady -YouTube 

Purpose of this guide

The purpose of the Bounty guide is to engage teachers in critically examining historical events that have remained largely hidden and ignored for hundreds of years by non-Native people in the United States; unlearning a distorted portrayal of the past that is deep in the dominant worldview; acknowledging what they don’t know and exploring how that makes them feel; using the dual lens of the View from the Shore and the View from the Boat; exploring how erasure happens and the collective responsibility of settlers to change the status quo.

The events examined in this guide, which include the issuance of monetized scalp-bounty proclamations that targeted Indigenous peoples for extermination, are glaring reminders of an ideology of killing that is deeply woven into the American fabric, so deeply that the threads are hardly visible, unless you are an Indigenous person who feels their impact, or you are a non-Native person who has studied everyone’s history and not just that of the Europeans.

We aim to rectify the erasure and invisibility of the scalp-bounties so that future generations of students of U.S. history can learn the truth about the catalog of official policies that incentivized the hunting and scalping of Native children, women, and men in exchange for significant payment. The hunting of Native people constituted domestic terrorism and unleashed an avalanche of hatred and suspicion of Native peoples that continues today.

Explore a Storymap of Santa Fe's darker history:  Sombras de Oscuridad (arcgis.com) 

Indigenous Slavery

Question prompts: What types of slavery existed in New Mexico? Who were the enslaved? How long was the practice of slavery in existence? After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War ended, did slavery persist in New Mexico? What does "Genízaro" mean? How does this impact Hispanic/Indigenous identity today?

The Navajo Long Walk

Question prompts: When speaking about the Navajo Long Walk, what time period are we referring to? Which groups of people in New Mexico were considered enemies of the state and therefore persecuted? Why were the Navajo and Apache singled out from other tribes for removal to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo? How many people died and what killed them? How is this history remembered today?

Video (Long Walk Tears of the Navajo):  https://youtu.be/IehXUWJEEdA 

The Power of Words

Question prompts: What is the purpose of memorials and monuments? What does the name “savage” on the Civil War Soldier’s monument mean? Who is that name referring to and why? Do the students know why the monument is there? What values does it represent?

On the Kit Carson obelisk, the words “He Led the Way” are inscribed on the stone monument. What do these words mean? Do the students know why the monument is there? Are there monuments that students are concerned about?

Map of Languages, Ethnicities and National Origin

Language is part of who we are and a carrier of our heritage and culture. Language is also one way of identifying what we mean by ‘communities’. Translation and interpreting services must be provided to ensure that recent arrivals who do not yet have a firm command of English have equal access to services such as health care, food access, legal services and emergency support.

Activities that cultivate diversity of languages help strengthen community cohesion, trust and compassion. In the classroom, music from different countries can be played to go along with activities, or just for fun at the end of the day. Each week, a teacher could showcase music from a specific country or culture and have students guess where it comes from.

The Indigenous Language Institute located in Santa Fe, serves American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, First Nations of Canada, and the international indigenous community. The institute provides tools and training to help Native language teachers and learners help themselves in their efforts to bring language back into everyday lives of the People.

The network of people and organizations formed through seminars and workshops promotes ongoing relationships that cultivate sharing of lived experiences and knowledge, and also builds partnerships that support the passing of traditional wisdom and values to future generations through original languages.

 "International Mother Language Day  is celebrated each year on February 21st, and is an opportunity to highlight the instrumental role of the languages we inherited in early childhood, whether we call them mother tongues or mother languages, first languages or main languages. They are, for each of us, the bedrock of all our learning and knowledge. This is why education in mother languages is so important: we cannot absorb what we cannot understand. Yet it is estimated that 40 percent of the world's people still have no access to education in a language that they speak or understand, a condition that has negative multiplier effects on the attainment of many of the Sustainable Development Goals." —  Linguistic Diversity: An Imperative for the United Nations | United Nations 

Map source: Languages, Ethnicities, and National Origin, NM Small Areas, 2008-101 (pending update).

Ethnobotany of New Mexico

Ethnobotany is the study of how people use plants. Many of the medicines that we are prescribed by doctors are derived from plants.

Question prompts: How long have people in the Southwest used plants for medicinal purposes? What other practices were plants used for? How are local plants used today?

Plan a Field Trip to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden:  Ojosy Manos: Eyes and Hands Garden – Santa Fe Botanical Garden 

Human Impact on the Environment

Question prompts: What is light pollution and how does it impact the environment? What are the types of land use in and around the city of Santa Fe and how does it impact the environment? How big is your Eco-footprint? Does the health of the river impact human health? How is the Santa Fe River connected to the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the Rio Grande? What communities do these water bodies impact and how is human activity affecting the environment? What was the Santa Fe River flash mob event and why was it historically significant? Since the 2010 Flash Flood event, what has changed? Do the students have concerns about the river and the health of the environment? What are ways each student can be environmental stewards?

Santa Fe Watershed (river stewardship community clean-up days):  Community Cleanup Days – The Santa Fe Watershed Association 

Exploring Our Growing Need for Water

About This Lesson Day 1 - students will explore groundwater and how the depletion of groundwater can cause land subsidence in regions like California’s Central Valley. Students will also learn about how agricultural water use for different crops compares to the amount of water required for raising animals on farms and ranches.

Day 2 - students will read some of the Blue Planet Network’s Stories of Water to learn about how different people around the world struggle to have access to clean water and some of the ways they have addressed this issue. They will also explore their own water use habits and ways they can reduce water waste in their home using a water calculator from the Alliance for Water Efficiency and a leaky faucet calculator from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Science School.

Essential Questions:

  1. What are some water sustainability issues we are facing around the world?
  2. What controls whether or not people have access to clean freshwater?
  3. What is water waste? When or how is water wasted?
  4. What can happen when we pump too much water out of the ground?

Native American Cultural Genocide

Learn more information on the three Indian Schools located within the city of Santa Fe:  Indian-Schools_essay.pdf (santafelibrary.org) 

Students can examine the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and research modern cultural reclamation projects using the following lesson plan link:

Teaching Tolerance: Resources to Introduce Students to Different Faith Traditions

Teachers across all subjects and grade levels occasionally find themselves having difficult conversations with students. A student asks a question about racism that is difficult to answer in an age-appropriate way. Another student is bullied because of their culture or heritage or faith traditions. 

While educators want to teach tolerance in the classroom, it isn’t always easy. They need to be informed about various cultures and all about different religions. If you’ve been tripped up by a question about religion, you aren’t alone. Many teachers have a hard time openly talking about religion in an informative manner. 

Use this guide to introduce religious concepts to your students and have healthy — even challenging — discussions. It is possible to have a religious debate in the public school classroom, and your students may be better off because of it.   

What is Environmental Justice?

In order to better meet the Agency’s responsibilities related to the protection of public health and the environment, EPA has developed a new environmental justice (EJ) mapping and screening tool called EJScreen. It is based on nationally consistent data and an approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports.

Click on the map or enter a location in the search field and explore!

What's in Your Watershed? The EPA Environmapper online tool provides access to several EPA databases to provide you with information about environmental activities that may affect air, water, and land anywhere in the United States.

Tell Your Story

StoryCorps gives people of all backgrounds, typically two at a time, the opportunity to record meaningful conversations and archive the recordings at the Library of Congress. 

Recording a StoryCorps interview couldn’t be easier: You invite a loved one, or anyone else you choose, to one of the StoryCorps recording sites to share a 40-minute conversation.

Neighborhood Historians is a pilot story-based neighborhood project in Santa Fe, working in collaboration with the Santa Fe Public Library to train community members in the tools of multimedia storytelling and archiving as means to build a digital repository of stories about Santa Fe and the diverse people who live here. Participants in the Neighborhood Historians program will be trained in storytelling, interviewing, audio and video technologies to gather, edit and archive the stories of other community members, and the archive will be housed on the Santa Fe Public Libraries website.

Create Your Own StoryMap

ArcGIS StoryMaps are a type of digital story-telling platform that combines images, text, and video to enhance learning and illustrate spatial relationships with a visual appeal. StoryMaps inspire and inform, as well as build a stronger sense of place through a deeper understanding of history which can effect change, influence opinion, and create awareness. They can be a learning tool for use in the classroom and a great way for students to share their projects, as well as a new way for organizations and businesses to inform others about the history of their work and mission.

ESRI ArcGIS is offering a free public account to anyone who wants to create Storymaps. The account is designed for personal, non-commercial use.

With a public account you can:

  • Create, store, and manage maps, scenes, layers, apps, and other geospatial content.
  • Share content with others.
  • Access content shared by ESRI and GIS users around the world.

Click this link to start a free public account:  Create ArcGIS Account