Originally posted: October 2013
Diana Mackiewicz, participant in the 2012 STUDY CANADA Summer Institute for K-12 Educators, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities award to participate in the “Native Americans of New England, A Historical Overview” program. As a web design teacher and head of the Computer Department at Eagle Hill School in Hardwick, MA, Diana opted to create a website about Native Americans that includes the First Nations and Inuit in Canada.
In a letter to the NRC, Diana wrote, “This summer I worked on a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Grant about Native Americans at the University of Massachusetts and completed an eight page website as my final assignment. I included many resources from Canada and also focused one page on the Inuit at http://researchdtmack.com/inuit.html. While completing this project I thought much about what I had learned during the 2012 STUDY CANADA Summer Institute in Ottawa and Montréal.
During the process of making the project at the NEH workshop, we were asked to compose an essential question to guide students in their research. It concerns ethics involved in understanding and attaining information from Native Americans.
Finally, because of all the STUDY CANADA training and the research that I have conducted since then, I will be offering a class called, “Indigenous Peoples of North America” at my high school. It is a hopeful attempt to bring attention to teaching about indigenous peoples at the high school level. This too was an idea inspired from my time at STUDY CANADA.
The website I created is http://researchdtmack.com and there are links to other websites I have completed in the past several years. The Native American site has a turtle image since my site created for the NEH is called Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.
Thank you for the all of the presentations and inspiration at the Institute.”
The National Resource Center on Canada appreciates the feedback from past program participants and the recognition given by NEH to their professional endeavors that follow.
The Canadian Studies Center forms the Pacific Northwest National Resource Center (NRC) on Canada with the Center for Canadian-American Studies, Western Washington University (WWU).Tina Storer, at WWU, serves as Education and Curriculum Specialist for the NRC. STUDY CANADA is the NRC’s annual professional development workshop, offered by the Center for Canadian-American Studies at Western Washington University for the last 34 years serving educators from almost every state in the nation. The Institute is funded, in part, by a Title VI grant from International and Foreign Language Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education.