Preserve the Old with the New

Michael Running Wolf Jr. is a Montana Native American software engineer for Buffalo Tongue Inc, a non-profit. He has an interest in indigenous cultural revitalization and has recently produced a VR project aimed at preserving the Madison Buffalo Jump. His project started when his wife applied for and received a seed grant from Potlatch Fund. With this grant Friends of Madison Buffalo Jump and Buffalo Tongue Inc collaborated to create a project that would highlight the importance of this area to the indigenous people of Montana. One would have to be very tech savvy to be familiar with all of the platforms and applications used throughout this project, but anyone could understand how important it is to preserve this tribal heritage and history. The projects deadline was in March of 2016 in which they were hoping to create a tangible demo for Tribal Cultural Committee meetings for Montana Tribes. A key component of the project was to encourage the tribes of Montana to voice their support for preserving the Buffalo Jump by contributing cultural knowledge and content for our application. Overall I thought that this was a beautiful example of how technology can be used to preserve and document cultural heritage.

Interesting and thought provoking questions that my students could ask include:

Grand Challenges that this article could tie into:

Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet

cultures and biological diversity over time in order

to better sustain both.

Understanding the American Experience

United States, particularly African American, Latino,

Asian Pacific American, and Native American, as

well as the cultural interrelationships among these

communities.

Valuing World Cultures

the loss of cultural diversity — tangible and

intangible heritage.

heritage, with emphasis on the heritage, arts,

indigenous knowledge and expressive systems, and

contemporary art and design.

Montana Social Studies Content Standard 3: Students apply geographic knowledge and skills (e.g., location, place, human/environment interactions, movement, and regions).

End of Grade 8:

3. analyze diverse land use and explain the historical and contemporary effects of this use on the environment, with an emphasis on Montana.

7. describe major changes in a local area that have been caused by human beings (e.g., a new highway, a fire, construction of a new dam, logging, mining) and analyze the probable effects on the community and environment.

Upon Graduation — End of Grade 12:

4. analyze how human settlement patterns create cooperation and conflict which influence the division and control of the Earth (e.g., treaties, economics, exploration, borders, religion, exploitation, water rights).

7. describe and compare how people create places that reflect culture, human needs, government policy, and current values and ideas as they design and build (e.g., buildings, neighborhoods, parks, industrial and agricultural centers, farms/ranches).

I think an important activity to incorporate into this lesson would be a vocabulary self-awareness activity. When reading through this article myself I found that I hadn’t heard of much of the technology that was used for the project. So, in order to move forward with the lesson that I would like to implement, my students and I should all have a better understanding of the technologies and vocabulary mentioned. For this activity I would use the vocabulary self-awareness mentioned in 50 routines, but I would alter it just slightly. I would ask my students to highlight words that they do not know while they are reading through the article. After everyone is done reading, I would have everyone come up and write the words that they did not know on the board — repeated words should be sorted into groups, so we can see how many people have questions on the same word. After that we will go through as a class and find the definitions/ look up what the app/technology used is. I will then type up a handout of these words and their definitions that I will post to the google classroom so students may reference back to it.

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