Lindsay Kaye Ohlert

EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project

11/30/09
Page 1
“The Hopewell Tradition”

Reflection
For my Native American project, I chose to write a Social Studies unit for a middle

school sheltered English ESL classroom, using content-based instruction principals. In content-

based instruction, the subject-area content and the language practice are integrated, so language

learners both receive the language support necessary to understand the concepts and the direct

language instruction necessary to improve their fluency (Center for Advanced Research on

Language Acquisition, 2009). The irony of combining English language instruction and Native

American history is not lost on me, but when preparing ESL materials, it cannot really be

avoided.

I focused on the Hopewell cultural exchange for several reasons. Firstly, in American

history classes, Native peoples are often discussed primarily in the context of their interactions

with European explorers and settlers (Journell, 2009), overlooking the fact that human history in

North America stretches back millennia before Europeans’ arrival on the continent, an example

of how curricula can be problematically eurocentric (Sadovnik, Cookson & Semel, 2006) even

when ostensibly addressing issues relevant to Native peoples. The artistry of the Hopewell

artifacts and the window they provide into day-to-day life in the region makes Hopewell an

excellent illustration of the complexity and vibrancy of pre-Columbian North American

civilization (Virtual First Ohioans, 2009; Ohio History Central, 2009), which provides a way of

countering this trend. Secondly, the ancestors of many modern Native American tribes

participated in Hopewellian cultural exchanges, so the study of the Hopewell period provides

important context for understanding the development and nature of these groups (Jochim, 2005).

Thirdly, I feel that Hopewell-related topics are particularly accessible for ELLs, as our

knowledge of Hopewellian practice comes primarily from the examination of artifacts and

monuments, not from written or orally transmitted information. Thus, students can approach this
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 2
topic like anthropologists, observing and making inferences based upon their observations,

without being hindered much by language deficits. The presence of Hopewell-era mounds right

here in St. Paul (Woitas, 2009) also offers a concrete, tangible example and helps place the topic

in context, which is extremely helpful for ELLs.

One of the challenges of ESL teaching is providing ELLs with the legally required free,

equal education by presenting intellectually challenging, grade-level appropriate concepts,

material and activities in a way that is comprehensible for students with a limited understanding

of the language (ELLs and the Law, 2009), who also often have literacy deficits and lack

background knowledge of the content. In this unit, I chose to compensate for the students’

language deficits by constantly using visual images as an accompaniment to any text input or

output. I also kept students mostly in pairs or small groups, as non-fluent language students are

generally able to make greater language gains when working together (Ohta, 2000), and used a

good deal of repetition of the same concepts, information and words, as students may not grasp

ideas on the first pass, and multiple repetitions of new vocabulary are required for

internalization.

I see this unit as part of a year-long overarching American history curriculum, one of a

series of units that each provide a snapshot of life in a certain time and place. These units would

be arranged in chronological order, so this Hopewell unit would occur early in the year. Of

course, ESL program models vary greatly from district to district and school to school, as do the

expectations for curriculum and instruction, so it’s hard to say whether I’ll ever have a chance to

use this unit as written. However, the information I’ve gathered about life in the Hopewell

interaction sphere should prove useful in preparing American history lessons, which I will

certainly be required to do at some point, and I believe the activities and instructional methods I

chose to convey the content could be easily applied to related topics simply by changing the
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 3
content goals and materials. Moreover, reading up on the pre-Columbian history of North

America has been extremely enlightening for me – I thought I knew a fair amount about the

topic, but I discovered that I had barely scratched the surface – so even if I never use this specific

unit, preparing this project has been a worthwhile experience for me as an educator.

Curricular Unit

Lesson One: Building Background Knowledge

Content objectives: Students will be able to describe the diet, social structure, housing and
religion of Hopewell-era Native Americans.
Language objectives: Students will write and speak declarative sentences in the simple past
tense to share information with their peers.
Learning strategy objectives: Students will use graphic organizers to enhance comprehension.
Students will set a purpose for reading.

Key concepts/vocabulary: Hopewell, tradition, exchange, mounds, atlatl, tobacco, hunter-

gatherer, seed crops, trade, shaman, Native American, Indian

Activities:
• Teacher uses a map and the classroom timeline to show what time period and region will
be examined. Labels a period from 200 BC to 500 AD with “Hopewell Tradition” on the
classroom timeline. Teacher explains basic concept: the people living in this region
traded products and shared ideas with one another, which helped them co-exist peacefully
and develop interesting art and architecture (Jochim, 2005).
• As a class, students fill in the “K” and “W” of a KWL chart regarding Native American
life of that era.
• In pairs or groups of three, students do a “jigsaw” of various Hopewell-related topics.
Each group does a paired reading of a brief, leveled illustrated text about one aspect of
Hopewell life. Aspects include foods (agriculture and hunting), social structures,
housing, and religion. Using pictures and words, each group puts salient information on
a poster, then shares their information with the class.
• As a class, students update the KWL chart, crossing out “Ks” they now know to be
incorrect, and filling in the “W” column.
• Students display their posters in the relevant section of the classroom timeline.
Assessment: Observing the students’ reading aloud during the jigsaw allows the teacher to
informally assess fluency; the level of accuracy and completeness of the posters allows the
teacher to monitor how much content information was understood.
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 4
Lesson Two: Artifacts and What They Tell Us

Content objectives: Students will be able to make inferences about Hopewell-era life based upon
observation of artifacts.
Language objectives: Students will form simple compound sentences using the conjunction “so”
in order to make inferential statements. Students will use the word “probably” to differentiate
between inferential and factual statements.
Learning strategy objectives: Students will use visualization to understand and remember factual
information.

Key concepts/vocabulary: various animals (hawk, deer, bear, etc.), crafting materials (copper,
silver, stone, etc.), pottery, patterns, pipe, awl, blade, anthropologist, carve, jewelry, statue

Activities:
• Students update their vocabulary journals with new vocabulary from the previous lesson,
and with words that will be needed for today’s.
• In pairs or small groups, students receive a packet of cards with photographs of Hopewell
artifacts (Virtual First Ohioans, 2009; Ohio History Central, 2009) and cards with
written descriptions; they match the photos with the corresponding descriptions.
• Teacher explains that the Native Americans of this time and region did not have writing,
so anthropologists learn about them by studying artifacts. In pairs or small groups,
students make inferences about Hopewell-era life based on the artifacts (e.g.,”Many
statues of young men are bald, so men probably shaved their heads.”) Students share
their inferences with the class.
• Based on these inferences and on the previous day’s readings, students create small
illustrations showing a person dressed in the style of the time, in an appropriate setting,
doing an appropriate activity (e.g. a shaman, dressed in a bear costume, conducting a
funeral service at a mound.) Students label all components of their pictures.
• Students add their drawings and the artifact photos to the classroom timeline.
Assessment: performance on card-matching task and inference statements allows teacher to
informally assess language skills; the level of accuracy and completeness of the illustrations
allows the teacher to gauge comprehension of content information.

Lesson Three: Field Trip to Indian Mounds Park

Content objectives: Students will be able to state the purpose of the St. Paul mounds, and
describe their structure, construction and current state.
Language objectives: Students will answer factual questions using sentences or sentence
fragments.
Learning strategy objectives: Students will work cooperatively to gather information more
quickly and accurately.

Key concepts/vocabulary: everything from lessons one and two, cremation, platform, clay, grave
goods

Activities:
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 5
• In pairs or small groups, students conduct an information scavenger hunt, examining the
mounds and the informational plaques to answer content questions and find content
vocabulary in context.
• While doing this, students take digital photographs of the site.
Assessment: students receive a participation grade based on how actively and assiduously they
conduct themselves during the scavenger hunt, in accordance with pre-discussed behavioral and
academic expectations.

Lesson Four: What Have We Learned?

Content objectives: Students will be able to reiterate key facts from Lessons 1-3, describing the
lifestyle of Hopewell-era Native Americans.
Language objectives: Students will form descriptive sentences in the simple past and simple
present tense in order to convey factual information.
Learning strategy objectives: Students will restate and summarize previously learned
information to confirm comprehension and consolidate memories.

Key concepts/vocabulary: all vocabulary and concepts from previous lessons, draft

Activities:
• As a class, students go over the correct answers to the previous day’s scavenger hunt.
• Students receive printouts of the illustrations from lesson one’s readings, photos of
artifacts, and the pictures they took the previous day at the mounds. They use these
photos to draft “books” about the Hopewell era, arranging the pictures in a logical order,
then writing factual descriptions to go along with each picture. Students may use the
information posted on the timeline, their vocabulary journals, and their scavenger hunt
sheets for reference.
Assessment: examining the book drafts in progress allows the teacher to both informally gauge
writing fluency and grammatical accuracy, and to judge how well the students recall content
information.

Lesson Five: Sharing our Knowledge and Skills

Content objectives: Students will be able to reiterate key facts from Lessons 1-3, describing the
lifestyle of Hopewell-era Native Americans. Students will use resources to check the accuracy
of their statements about Hopewell-era Native Americans.
Language objectives: Students will polish their descriptive sentences by checking for adherence
to standard English conventions.
Learning strategy objectives: Students will use process writing to improve the clarity and
accuracy of their writing.

Key concepts/vocabulary: all vocabulary and concepts from previous lessons, revise, edit,
publish
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 6
Activities:
• In pairs, students work together to revise and edit their books. Partners fact-check for
accuracy, suggest additional content that could be included, and make corrections to
grammar, punctuation, formatting and usage.
• Individually, students write final drafts of their books. If this step is not completed in
class, it may be done as homework.
• Upon completion, students “publish” their books by reading them to the class, then
displaying them in the room.
Assessment: Students receive a participation grade for the peer revision/editing activity. Their
books are graded according to two rubrics, which focus on the accuracy of the content
information and on students’ use of writing conventions that have already been explicitly taught
in class. Students receive two separate grades on the book, one for content, one for language
use.

Text of Content Presentation to EdHD 5005 Class

“The Hopewell Tradition” refers to the cultural practices shared among the Native

Americans living along the Mississippi River and inland of the eastern coast of what is now the

United States. The archeological record shows that during a period from approximately 200 BC

to 500 AD, the various populations of this region used similar shamanistic religious practices,

burial traditions, social structures, and techniques for architecture, hunting, agriculture, and

pottery-making (Virtual First Ohioans, 2009; Ohio History Central, 2009). There is a lack of

evidence of interpersonal violence, but there is evidence of frequent trade and inter-regional

social/ritual gathering, suggesting that shared values and prosperity contributed to what some

scholars call a Pax Hopewelliana (Jochim, 2005).

None of the peoples who participated in the Hopewell interactions possessed writing

systems, but they left behind numerous artifacts that are extremely informative. The most

prominent evidence extant today is the numerous mounds they constructed across the region .

Many appear to be simple small hills, but others are built in the shapes of geometrical forms or

animals. A handful are aligned with lunar or solar activity, and many were used as graves (Ohio
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 7
History Central, 2009). We have some excellent examples of Hopewellian mounds right here in

the Twin Cities, at Indian Mounds Park near downtown St. Paul (Woitas, 2009).

In my opinion, the Hopewell tradition is of particular interest to Minnesota educators for

two reasons: first, several of the modern local Native tribes were influenced by the Hopewell

exchange, including the Dakota and the Ho-Chunk (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2009); and

second, Hopewellian artifacts and mounds offer clear, tangible evidence of the long, vibrant

history of pre-Columbian North America, something that is frequently overlooked, as Native

Americans are often discussed primarily in the context of their interactions with European

immigrants (Journell, 2009).

I hope this brief overview has piqued your interest in this period of North American
history!

Works Cited
Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. (2009). Content-Based Second
Language Instruction. CoBaLTT website, http://www.carla.umn.edu/cobaltt/CBI.html.

ELLs and the Law: Statutes, Precedents. (2009). Education Week Vol. 28, Issue 17 , 8-9.

Jochim, M., Dickens, R. J., Carr, C., & Case, D. T. (2005). Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual,
and Ritual Interaction. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Journell, W. (2009). An Incomplete History: Representation of American Indians in State Social

Studies Standards. Journal of American Indian Education v. 48, no. 2 , 18-32.

Ohta, A. (2000). Rethinking interaction in SLA: Developmentally appropriate assitance in the

zone of proximal development and the acquisition of L2 grammar. In J. Lantolf, Sociocultural
Theory and Second Language Learning (pp. 51-78). New York: Oxford University Press.

The Ohio Historical Society. (2009). The Hopewell Culture. Virtual First Ohioans website,
http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=279.

The Ohio Historical Society. (2009). The Hopewell Culture. Ohio History Central: An Online
Encyclopedia of Ohio History, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?
rec=1283&nm=Hopewell-Culture.
 Lindsay Kaye Ohlert
EdHD 5005 Minnesota Native project
11/30/09
Page 8
Sadovnik, A., Cookson, P., & Semel S. (2006). Exploring Education: An Introduction to the
Foundations of Education. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

U.S. Department of the Interior. (2009). Indian Mounds Park. National Park Service website,
http://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/indimoun.htm.

Woitas, K. (2009). Indian Mounds Park. City of Saint Paul Website,

http://www.ci.stpaul.mn.us/facilities.aspx?
search=1&CID=1&pagenum=3&RID=53&Page=detail.