Like Civil Rights Movement in Context, this assessment gauges students’ ability to contextualize two historical documents and place them in the correct chronological order. Document A is a photograph taken in a classroom at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Document B is a photograph taken on the grounds of the Washington Monument in 1978. In it, a sign reads: "AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT." This assessment draws on students' knowledge about Native American rights in a way that goes beyond the simple recall of facts and dates. In this assessment, students must show that they have a broad understanding of how Native American rights changed over time and demonstrate the ability to use knowledge about the past to place the two documents in context.
In this assessment, students who correctly contextualize the documents will identify that the American Indian Movement, which organized the protest in Photograph B, was founded many decades after the period when most Native American boarding schools were established (mid-19th to early-20th centuries). Photograph A, by contrast, was taken just twenty-five years after the founding of the school it depicts.
