White Oak Learning Centre Residential Program

Each learning activity should reinforce certain essential themes critical to achieving the objectives of the curriculum and the Centre. These themes are:

• Basic elements of Ojibwe and European worldviews.
• Learning by doing—"this task is to be done and you need to do it."
• A blend of learning to act on your own while accepting the responsibility for those actions and the realization that to survive, let alone succeed, we must cooperate with others.
• The fate of humanity and the natural world are intertwined and our continued existence depends upon conserving natural resources and sustaining the ecological viability of the world around us.
• Having fun!!

A Assuming historic roles of the fur trade is White Oak's principle means of interpreting and presenting history. Students join in the process by being given a fur trade role (voyageur, clerk, Ojibwe hunter, trading partner, camp cook, etc.), taught the basics of the role, and then encouraged to "live" the character during their stay. On the last night, students will review their roles, discuss the roles they would have liked to play, and examine the roles they play in modern life.

The Student will:

• Learn the basic social structure of the fur trade era.
• Learn how to conduct living history and how this differs from acting.
• Examine social class in general and, in particular, their own role in society.

• Fur Trade Overview, This is a summary presentation of the trade, main players, significant dates, and geographic setting.
• Role Playing and Review concept of role playing. Have each student introduce themselves as their character. Distribute clothing or items that appropriately identify each student's character.
  Review of clothing, personal gear and the such associated with the various roles. Discuss how "the clothes make the person"; use modern examples to allow students to examine this perception in their own lives. Discuss how in historic times one's role in life was essentially determined at birth. Relate this to the American concept of mobility within classes.
• Form Brigades, Students are to be divided into smaller groups of about 10-15 called brigades. Depending on the number of brigades to be created, have the students count off 1-2, 1-2, etc. making sure that each brigade has a representative sampling of character roles. Ones will be the Red Brigade and twos the Gold Brigade. Add Blue and Green if needed.
• Meeting of Two Worlds, This helps set the stage for subsequent discussions by briefly presenting Ojibwe and European worldviews as relevant to the fur trade era.
• Post Tour, Students are to dress for the outdoors. While walking to the post, describe the era, where the post was actually located, the terrain of the area and how it has been modified.
• Historic Game: Cat and Mouse, If the weather is acceptable, set up the Cat and Mouse stumps in the post and get the students playing.
• Making a Journal, Once the students have stored their outdoor clothing, have them make their personal journals.
• Journal Writing, Students are to spend 15 minutes or so writing or drawing in their new journals. Emphasize that this is for their own consumption only. None of what they write or draw will be shared with others except as they may volunteer to do so.
• Review WOLC rules and expectations.

After providing a quick historical perspective of the fur trade, this session focuses on the multicultural dynamics of the trade. It examines how distinctively different cultures met and conducted a mutually satisfactory economic exchange. The session also introduces the concept of how the trade changed the two cultures, especially that of the Indians.

The Student will:

• Learn about the fur trade and its historical context.
• Recognize the various multi-cultural dimensions of the fur trade.
• Learn a challenging game.

• The Game of Sticks, This deceptively easy historic game is a snap to play but difficult to master. Presented as a game of chance, once a person knows the trick of it, the game is hard to lose.
• Fur Trade Economics, Students adopt their persona to play out the actual trading of goods, establishing credit at the company store, and examining the value of goods to different cultures. credit, beaver as medium of exchange, setting values of goods (Indian and European perspectives), some trade math exercises.
• Crafts and Historic Games, Students can choose to work on a historic craft (e.g., making a shirt, wool mittens, leather pouches, etc.), research on an approved historical topic, or play one of the historic games.
• A Wonderful Option: Lantern Light Walk, Students use lanterns to light their way along the Gil Quaal Nature Trail stopping to listen to and identify night sounds, gaze at the stars, and experience the night away from city lights.
• Journal Writing
• End of Day ceremony or activity.

Roughly 80% of the Europeans involved in the fur trade were voyageurs, the common laborers of the era. This section is organized around the life and work of the voyageur, examining everyday life skills, social class and status, and knowledge critical to living in the wilderness. Students will be challenged to examine their own knowledge of the natural world and the options and choices facing them in the modern era. The Student will:

• Learn the role of voyageur in the company and society and then relate this situation to modern living options and situations.
• Learn several basic skills of voyageur life.
• Create a map that forces them to consider how and why people settled where they did, the need to know the landscape, and how the knowledge critical to everyday life changes over time.

• The Voyageur, Use this time to present basic information on being a voyageur, life options and choices.
• Le Pays d'en Haut ("the up country" pronounced "ler pay-ee dahng oo"), One or more outdoor activities will be done at each of the allocated times. Topics include animal tracks, bird identification, forestry, life and death in nature, and watersheds.
• Fire Starting, This is presented as a basic life skill of the era. It demonstrates one way of how European trade goods influenced everyday life for Indians. Use it to show how it is necessary to observe the environment around you to be aware of fuels and tinder.
• Tea and Beverages, Indians usually drank beverages made from leaves, bark or roots. Europeans drank huge quantities of Chinese tea (green or black) with coffee being an expensive and less desired choice. Chinese tea was expensive in North America with the finest grades consumed by the upper class. Working class laborers like voyageurs seldom drank Chinese tea; plain water was the most common drink along with Indian-style herbal beverages.
• Historic Game: Checkers.
• Le Pays d'en Haut [see earlier description]
• Sense of Place Challenge, Indians were fully in tune with and knowledgeable of their surrounding environment. As a group, they knew all the plants and their likely uses, animals and their habits, and the nature of the physical terrain. They closely monitored weather patterns and the changes in seasons to determine when they should hunt, fish, and gather wild rice, berries, herbs and other needed plants. While generally less knowledgeable than the Indians, fur traders came to know the land exceptionally well. This exercise is not a "test", it's a challenge.
• Map Making, Mapping the north west was a major goal of the fur companies and eventually the nations of Canada and the United States. Maps presented a vast storehouse of knowledge gained through years of difficult exploration. David Thompson's map of 1815 was the most accurate and comprehensive map of the region. This exercise gets students to view their home areas in a different light. It urges them to consider how a person's perspective of an area depends upon how and when he/she lives in the area.
• Journal Writing [see earlier description]

This section focuses on the Ojibwe and basic life skills of the era. It is intended to encourage students to learn respect when interacting with other cultures.

Outcomes: The Students will:

• Learn about Ojibwe culture and history.
• Learn how to make simple foods of the era.
• Perceive how the natural world has been critical to where and how we live and how this has changed over time.

• Ojibwe Culture, A brief overview of Ojibwe culture and history.
• Ojibwe Village Map, Students are asked to place themselves in the moccasins of Ojibwe people coming to a new lake. Where should their village(s) be located? The students map out their locations and give reasons for their selections.
• Ojibwe Pictograph Writing, The group uses traditional Ojibwe pictograph concepts to communicate messages.
• Fry Bread and Bannock, Although these two breads are more European in that they use wheat flour, they allow time to talk about foods of the era. Discussion can extend to where modern food comes from and how it gets to our table.
• Le Pays d'en Haut [see earlier description]
• Historic Game: Snake Game, Particularly during the winter, Ojibwe had considerable amounts of time spent in their wigwams. Games and storytelling filled much of this time.
• Le Pays d'en Haut [see earlier description]

The fur trade was more than an exchange of goods. It also was an exchange of ideas. Exposure to Indian culture, values, and traditions greatly influenced political thought in Europe and America. But it was the Indians who underwent the most change, some positive and some negative, as they shifted from stone age technology to manufactured goods. Understanding the nature of such change 200 years ago is useful in understanding the forces influencing people in modern times.

Outcomes: The Students will:

• Learn about the nature of cultural forces and change at play during the fur trade era.
• Learn how to view events from the perspective of another culture (this will be especially true for non- Indian students).
• Consider how to apply the lessons of cultural change 200 years ago to their lives today.

• Introduce subject of cultural change as it occurred during the fur trade. Since the students will have been on-site for a full day by this time, they will be familiar with the two cultures involved and issues related to interactions between them. Indicate that the upcoming movie portrays the initiation of the fur trade in a portion of Canada in which no trade had yet occurred. Also, this movie is from the perspective of the Indians.
• Movie: Ikwe.
• If time and students' inclination permit, pose a series of questions based upon the movie. The general intent of the questions is to get the students thinking about inter-cultural interactions.

This is the follow up to the first session at the beginning of the stay at WOLC.

Activities:

• Begin with an identification "quiz" of various period tools, implements, and clothing items. Many of these items the students would have seen during previous sessions and others are new. Determine who would likely have owned and used these items and relate this to the roles people played during the era.
• General discussion on historic and modern roles. Students are asked to review the roles they've played—what they liked and didn't like about their character; what characters they would have liked to play and why. Perhaps let one or two change characters to indicate how they might have played them. Shift discussion to modern times. Students are to identify roles within their school or community. How do people assume these roles vs the "given" positions of 200 years ago? How do you change your role? When all done, students are to return historic gear and clothing.
• The groups are given time to present their "local environment" maps and their Anishinabe settlement maps for review and comment by the entire class.
• Crafts and Historic Games, Students can choose to work on a historic craft (e.g., making a shirt, wool mittens, leather pouches, etc.), research on an approved historical topic, or play one of the historic games.
• Option: Lantern Light Walk
• Journal Writing [see earlier description]
• End of Day ceremony or activity.

The Students close out their WOLC stay with a fun way to recapitulate lessons they've learned over the past couple days. The students will play several of the historic games they've learned and have time to critique their visit.

Outcomes: The Students will:

• Be given opportunity to test themselves on what they have learned while at White Oak.
• Have fun.

• Students and their teachers can ask questions and offer critiques of their stay.
• Historic Game Challenge, The students will first decide if they want these games to be a competition between the brigades or a challenge for the entire group.
  a. Fire starting
  b. Ojibwe/French language challenge
  c. Cat and Mouse
  d. The Game of Sticks
• Thank yous, last minute questions and answers, etc.

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