reflection week twelve

I must say that I really liked the chatroom/discussion this week, though I am slightly biased as I generally like chats where you can see the ideas being spoken, then discussed on aim, then brought back into the class discussion. This method allows more ideas to be shared as there is no waiting to be called upon - you can say however much you want, whenever you want to. I tried to bring up ideas aloud as well as participating in the aim chat as I felt it was important to publicize some of the things that we came up with. While I could only see my group's chat, I still noticed certain trends that we brought in and others that people said and we took to discussing. Even with a smaller group - we started off with only 5 and by the end we were down to 4 - I feel like we definitely raised some good points. It was, at times, difficult to pay attention to both the aim chat and the actual discussion, but luckily our chat stayed fairly on topic as we would all pause typing every so often to listen to the conversation, typing furiously after hearing a particularly controversial opinion and providing our own takes on it. I'm anxious to hear/read how ideas actually traveled between groups!

I found the Museum of the American Indian to actually be quite interesting. While I agree with many others in that it was disappointingly (is that a word? it is now...) small and the organization did not optimize the space or artifacts that they had, there was a lot of really cool information present. Yes there were a lot of little kids running around, but it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week; who else do you think is going to be there? Older kids are in school & it is prime field trip taking time for smaller children. Yes they are loud and can be annoying, but think about what you were like at that age. That's just how little kids act. Honestly, I think it's awesome that their schools are making an effort to get them out into the city and exposing them to some of our country's history, even if it is biased. It's true that a lot of the information presented seemed skewed, as Lauren and James talk about in their blog, but that doesn't make it worthless. It may not be an accurate representation, but it is something, which is certainly better than nothing. The museum provided a basis, a starting point at looking into the lives of Native Americans though many included traditions that were obtained after the European invasion.

There was one corner on the fourth floor that I found particularly impressive, though it was definitely shoved in the corner and not at all obvious; had I not been visiting every single section of the museum, I probably would have missed it. It quoted a Native American, though I'm not sure who - I wish that I had taken a picture. It basically said that we should take everything that we are presented with a grain of salt. It said that a lot of Native American history is not completely true anymore. But it encouraged us to continue looking around the museum, to continue learning about the culture that is presented because underneath the skewed perspective is the true lifestyle of the Native Americans. To get some idea of how they lived teaches us about them and allows us a view into their time. It is nearly impossible to get a perfect idea now of how things were, but we should take advantage of what we are given and learn what we can from it.