University Place

The Story of Act 31

– I would like to welcome you to The Wade House Historic Sites and it is my pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker Dr. J. P. Leary. Dr. Leary is an associate professor of Humanities, First Nation Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He’s also a member of the graduate faculty in Education, Faculty Affiliate with the Professional Program and Education Center for First Nations Studies. He served as the American Indian Studies Consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction from 1996 to 2011. Leary earned a Masters in American History from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in Educational Policy Studies from UW-Madison. Please welcome Dr. J P Leary. (applause)

– Thank you very much. I’m glad to see so many of you come out here this evening. (laughter) I’m glad to spend some time with you talking about a book that I published this last spring through the Wisconsin Historical Society Press called The Story of Act 31, How Wisconsin History Came to Wisconsin Classrooms. And as you can tell, I’m starting to dress like the book cover the more I do these book talks. I’d like to spend maybe a half hour or so talking a bit about the book. I’ll read a few sections from it. And I want to thank University Place for recording and Wade House for the invitation. I’m very glad to be here with you this evening. Thank you once again for coming out. I want to say just a little bit about the Wisconsin education policy context around Act 31. When I was at DPI, we would go to these multi-state meetings. And one of the things that they would say is, well, we’re a local control state, too. And our state school board says, “Well, no, you’re not a local control state.” What local control really speaks to is that most of the decisions that are made in a local school district are made by a locally-elected school board. We don’t have a state school board. We have an elected State Superintendent, currently, Dr. Tony Evers, 424 school districts, 12 Cooperative Educational Service Agencies, and 39 Teacher Education Programs.

So, this is sort of the landscape for education policy in the State of Wisconsin. Wisconsin has 11 Federally- recognized tribes out of 573 federally- recognized nations with a government-to-government relationship with the federal government of the United States. There is a 12th nation in here that is also a self-governing people, but without that government-to-government relationship with the United States. That’s the Brothertown Indian Nation, headquartered down near Fond du Lac. So, what is Act 31? Act 31 is a Wisconsin state budget bill. And so, like any budget bill, it’s got everything under the sun in it. All kind of different provisions. This one, this particular budget bill, included provisions related to American Indian studies and created an American Indian studies program at DPI. And as you heard in that kind introduction, I served at DPI from 1996 until 2011. And after that, I came up to UW-Green Bay. And so, just to let you know that– So, in the education policy program at UW-Madison– And my bio, by the way, does not acknowledge that I’m a proud UW-Eau Claire Blugold alum, as well. So, I’m not sure why the press cut that from my bio, but I want to acknowledge UW-Eau Claire, as well. When I was in the ed policy program at UW-Madison, one to the things that they really instilled into us is that education policy is a solution put forth to a problem that gets defined in a particular way. And so, we can see that there are five separate statutes that came into what we kind of loosely call “Act 31.”

In the same way that education circles these days, “Act 10” means something very specific. So, this does five different things related to American Indian Studies. So, we can see there are five different facets of the problem that was defined. So, the first one deals very specifically with treaty rights curriculum. And this was addressed through the publication by the department of public instruction of a guide called Classroom Activities on Chippewa Treaty Rights. And the lead author on that was my mentor, Dr. Ron Satz up at UW-Eau Claire. He wrote that along with Rick St. Germaine and Tony Gulig, who taught recently UW-Whitewater. The next piece speaks broadly to human relations. Not just a native issue. And so, we see that it speaks to an understanding of cultures different, perhaps, than the cultures that may be present in your home community. We cannot expect our teachers to teach that which they have not had the opportunity to learn themselves. And so, there’s a piece around teacher certification that really addresses both pre-service teacher education as well as professional development particularly geared toward those who did their initial teacher education outside of Wisconsin. So, this became a requirement to become a fully-licensed teacher in the state of Wisconsin. Now, we can also think about those instructional materials that are in use in our classrooms and in our school libraries. And so, one of the things that the framers of this particular policy were thinking about is “how do we equip our students with the knowledge and skills to live in an increasingly globally connected world?”

And so, you may be living in Glenbeulah, you may be living in Greenbush, but today, you may be telecommuting to a job in Korea. You may be dealing with people from halfway around the world. And so, having that knowledge and skill set this way was sort of what they had in mind. Now, this is the piece that often is thought of as sort of the heart and soul of Act 31. And it’s the requirement that every school district provide instruction in history, culture and tribal sovereignty at least twice in the elementary grades and at least once in the high schools. And elementary, for statutory purposes, is K-8. And so, it simply says “include instruction.” But, it doesn’t say, “This is what you have to do.” It doesn’t say, “You must include this specific person, this specific event, this specific era.” It just says “history, culture, and tribal sovereignty of the federally recognized American Indian tribes and bands located in the state.” And at the time it was passed, this was the most specific directive from the state to locally-elected school boards. This, that we might recognize right now in 2018 as almost impossibly vague, was seen by some as an intrusion upon local control around the words “include instruction” and providing those broad parameters.

So, when we’re talking about Act 31, this is what that means. It means these particular provisions in state law. And so, what I was trying to do with the book is try and explain, “So, why do we have that?” “Where did it come from?” So there are a lot of folks who say, “Well, how did you come to this book and how long did it take you to write it?” There are sections of the first two chapters that go back to my freshman comp paper at UW-Eau Claire… a couple years ago. And I was fortunate to have known many of the people that are in the book. As I mentioned, Ron Satz from UW-Eau Claire, Rick St. Germaine from UW-Eau Claire. Dorothy Davids, Ruth Gudinas, Gordon Thunder, who’s in the book, is my father-in-law. So there are a number of folks. Many of these stories I had heard while I was at DPI and heard the stories of some of the things that had happened on the route to passage. As I mentioned, I worked at DPI for about 15 years, and I wrote my dissertation, calling it “The Tangled Roots of Act 31.” And, in conversation with the first editor I worked with, she said, “Well, why are you not going with that title?” I said, “Because I did a lot of research and untangled them. Now I got a story to tell.” And so, what I’m really trying to get at is the historical roots of this.

Where did this come from? Why do we have it? And part of the sort of “popular story,” to the extent that there is one, is that this was related to treaty rights controversy of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the state of Wisconsin. And of course it is, right? Of course it is. But it’s broader than that. It’s really broader than that. One of the ways that some see it is as another example of social policy. So, thinking about the extent to which our society tends to use the public schools as instruments of reaching out into the public more broadly. But if we look at this and then we ask ourselves, “Where did that treaty rights controversy itself come from?” “What opportunities did previous generations of Wisconsin students have to learn?” Then, we can see that this really is about curriculum policy. It’s not about matters that are external to public schools. And so, part of the guiding questions is, “why did the public have such little understanding in the wake of 1983’s Voigt decision.” “And what opportunities to learn did past generations have?”

There’s always this interplay between. Even those decisions that are made by a locally-elected school board, those are shaped by forces external to that school district, shaped by things like decisions made by textbook publishers, things made by curriculum committees working at the state level, working at major professional associations in the national level in social studies, and thinking about how their work informs what happens in classrooms, even in Wisconsin. So, thinking about what became known as “official knowledge.” So, that’s the content and the perspectives that become officially validated by our schools. And then looking at, so how did those people who made this change, how did they make that happen? How did something as vague as “include instruction” in the history, culture and tribal sovereignty of federally-recognized tribes and bands become transformative of curriculum policy in this state, such that it was the most specific curriculum policy directive to date? And so there are five sections, really looking at treaties and treaty rights and travel sovereignty broadly. Looking at the backlash, looking at the protests at the boat landings, looking at the way that those protests spilled over into public discourse more broadly. Part 3 and 4 really ask, “So where did that backlash come from?” Part 3 really looks at the big picture, from the national level. How did all of these national curriculum policy trends effect what was happening in social studies classrooms here in our state, here in our communities.

And really look at how did those those trends either create opportunities to learn or constrain opportunities to learn about history, culture and tribal sovereignty. Part 4, “Official Knowledge in. the State of Wisconsin.” This is where I was looking at materials from the Wisconsin Historical Society and from some of the leading textbooks of the era. Part 5, and as my students would say, “When is he going to get to the point?” That really is the narrow story of– This is the real legislative and community activist work of creating these curriculum policy changes. So, I want to read you a brief passage. And this is from a man named Elmer Davids, Sr., and he’s Stockbridge-Munsee. This speech was delivered at the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961. So here’s the opening passage from the book. In June 1961, a Stockbridge-Munsee travel member named Elmer L. Davids, Sr. spoke at the American Indian Chicago Conference where he addressed the “white public’s” general lack of awareness of American Indian issues. Davids, who was a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee, shared his observations as, “a reservation Indian and a citizen living on taxable land.” In a passage that foreshadowed educational reform efforts, David argued that the public needed to be “educated to look upon a reservation in the true meaning of the word, something the Indian tribes have reserved for themselves out of the vast territory of this country which was once their domain, and for which in some cases, they so valiantly resisted the invaders.”

He goes on to ask whether his peers and neighbors knew “that the early explorers were shown the valleys and watercourses that became our highways, or that the stories of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Lewis and Clark could never have been written were it not for friendly Indians.” Davids challenged his audience with this pivotal question, “Is it fair to the Indian to use the textbooks in our public schools that tend to justify the acts of early settlers, and make the poor Indian, resisting in proud self-defense, a culprit and a savage?” So what he was calling for, what Mr. Davids was calling for in 1961, is the policy logic that we see of Act 31. I also open the book with a passage from him because it begins to challenge that more narrow reading of the origins of Act 31. If we see it as tied to the 1983 Voigt decision which upheld Ojibwe treaty rights, touching off the protests in the ’80s and ’90s, then we would expect it start with an Ojibwe speaker. We would expect not to start almost 30 years prior to that. So, from the beginning, I’m trying to suggest that there’s more here to the story. So Part 1 really tries to lay out because Act 31 speaks to history, culture and tribal sovereignty, I wanted my readers to have an understanding of tribal sovereignty, an understanding of entering into negotiations with the federal government of the United States as a sovereign. Government-to-government negotiations.

An understanding that treaty-making, treaties are essentially large-scale real estate transactions. And that in many cases, then, there were payments due, there were things held back, there were lands held back, there were rights retained. And so, what we’re talking about in the battle for treaty rights is the reserved rights to hunt, fish and gather within the ceded territory that the six Ojibwe bands in Wisconsin kept for themselves and did not include as part of a broader real estate transaction. This section also looks at efforts going on to reassert those treaty rights that predate 1983’s Voigt decision. Looks back to efforts in Michigan. Efforts up in the northern part of the state, and efforts Lac Courtre with Fred and Mike Tribble and their 1974 act of civil disobedience that eventually led to 1983’s Voigt decision. What you see here is the ceded territory. And so, it’s roughly the northern third of Wisconsin. I tell my students, “You know where Highway 29 is?” Highway 29 and Points North. And so, these are all Ojibwe land cessions. And, at the time of the first cession, we were still part of Michigan territory. So, this is the land that we’re talking about. The right to hunt, fish and gather was reserved in these lands. And so, looking at the backlash, there are three separate sections. Looking at the violence of the boat landings, looking at the way that that affected our communities more broadly, and then thinking about the way that people started to come together to think about, “How can we address this in a positive way?”

Here are some pictures from some of the protests. And you may remember some of these scenes. We see the Boston Lake, 1989. And it’s really no accident that Act 31 was passed in 1989, because that was the year that the protests were the most violent. It was in that spring that there was a legitimate concern that someone would be killed at a Wisconsin boat landing. In the upper left, you see the logo for an organization called Protect Americans’ Rights and Resources, one of the leading anti-treaty organizations. In the upper right, we see a can of Treaty Beer. And you can maybe make out the text. “Land claims, fishing rights, hunting rights, water rights, equal rights.” This was from an organization called Stop Treaty Abuse-Wisconsin. And they were more into direct action. They were more overly racist in their actions. And they were actually shut down eventually based on a civil rights lawsuit. I want to point out over in the lower, my right, your left, that cartoon. If you’ve seen footage of the scenes at the boat landings, you may recognize that that’s not much of a caricature. It is a cartoon but it’s not caricaturing what was going on. “Spear an Injun,” “Save a walleye,” “Custer had the right idea,” “Harvest Indians, not fish,” and yet, the official word is this is purely an economic issue, where they often said it’s about the natural resources. It’s about protecting the natural resources. When I started at DPI in 1996, “Spear This” was still alive and well across the state. And I could go– When I was doing my Act 31 workshops, it seemed like no matter where I would go, I would ask people, “How many of you have seen this in real life, besides this slide?” And I’d ask for a show of hands. And there was anywhere I went, at least one person, and I’d say, “Where?” Right?

Because again, the popular understanding is, “Oh, it’s those folks up north,” right? “It’s them, up there.” And it didn’t matter if I was in Madison, Milwaukee, Eagle River, Fennimore, it didn’t matter where I was. These kinds of things were all across the state. And so, passing the buck to “them, up there” is simply not accurate. So again, thinking about, what did these folks have the opportunity to learn in their classroom? So I was looking at, so what was going on with social studies? And again, thinking about if these are broader societal concerns, so how are students in social studies learning about the world that they were experiencing? There wasn’t anything going on. There wasn’t anything developed about World War II until 1943, ’44. There was almost nothing about the Great Depression during the Depression. There was almost nothing about Civil Rights until about 1968. It really was not part of the professional discourse. And that’s true of major societal movements not limited to what was going on in the field relative to native people. But those developments in the field left native people generally invisible and occasionally badly misrepresented. Looking at what was going on in Wisconsin, now, I mention that we’re a local control state. But what that means is that the state of Wisconsin, through the Department of Public Instruction produces guidance documents that are to help local schools and school districts think about, “What does good history education look like?” “What does good civics education look like?” “What does good economics, geography, behavioral sciences, what does good look like in those fields?”

So, I was looking at Wisconsin curriculum policy. What was the official word, then, from when the state would convene these sort of local folks, and then, they would issue these guidance documents? That’s official knowledge. Looking at the State Historical Society and some of the things that they were publishing, it doesn’t get any more official about Wisconsin history than publications from the Wisconsin Historical Society. After I did the dissertation, I began to read a journal called Badger History. Badger History was something that came out first in 1948. And about 1965, it shifted from a monthly thing to something that came out four times a year. Badger History was for students. And one of the things that I was really concerned about is when you are looking at these guidance documents, then what you are getting is policy statements about what we think students should learn. When you’re looking at textbooks, you’re looking at what they had the opportunity to learn. But what Badger History does, because it includes student work product, it shows, “What did students actually learn?” And Exploring Wisconsin was the leading Wisconsin history textbook from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s. And it went through many, many editions. And so, you can see an early edition of Exploring Wisconsin and a particular issue of the “Fur Trade.” And I should warn you, not everything made it into the book. So I’ve still got stacks of stuff that I need to do something with. I want to read you a piece from 1948 from the second volume of Badger History.

And this is a good example of student work product. A high school student from Appleton writing from the perspective of the Fox River, offered a piece titled “I Saw the Last of the Fox.” The river, which is the narrator in this account, “loved to carry those gay and gallant Frenchmen” who sang beautiful songs as they traveled, whereas the fox, “never sang on the water, nor did they change one trifle in all the years I carried them.” The river notes that it “had no objection to toting them around” until the fox began to “stop my favorite French traders to exact tribute from them” as they passed through fox territory. The piece describes several military actions taken by the French and their Menominee, Huron and Ottawa allies against the “tricky fox.” And how the hill at Butte des Morts once ran red with human blood as a result. The river softened its views of the Fox, allowing some to escape, but those who it did not were to serve as a ‘warning to all other treacherous tribes.’ The piece concludes by noting that ‘the last of a famous Indian tribe, the Foxes, died in that spot.’ In addition to being historically incorrect, this student-authored essay excusing genocide was published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust were still fresh. The irony is further heightened by its inclusion in the same issue as an article about the governors’ task force on human rights, a policy statement that begins by stating that “the world tragedy from which we have just emerged was rooted in race prejudice, excessive nationalism, religious persecution and inhumanity to man.”

What’s interesting about this as student work product is that this is something that was written by a student to demonstrate presumably what they had learned in the classroom, demonstrating acquisition of new knowledge and understanding, was evaluated by the instructor as “exemplary” and submitted to Badger History where the historians in charge of this journal had at that time the State Historical Society of Wisconsin also agreed that it was an exemplar of student work in Wisconsin history and printed it, right next to things about the governor’s task force on human rights. This next piece, what I was trying to do in this next section, “Talking Back to the Curriculum.” What I was trying to do is show that the efforts of native people and non-native allies toward transforming curriculum policy in the state didn’t just happen in the 1980s. And, it’s actually a much older thing. I took that back to the early 20th century with an organization called Society of American Indians and many of the Society of American Indians’ leaders were folks that had come out of Carlyle Indian Industrial School, come out of Haskell, and were able to take that education that they had received in what were by and large horrific places of forced deculturalization, and used that education, used those knowledge and skills that they had gained to fight for their people, to create opportunities for themselves.

So, Society of American Indians was raising some of the same kinds of things that Elmer Davids was raising in the ’60s, toward the turn of the century. 1914, they were meeting down at UW-Madison and issuing these kinds of statements. There was an organization called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians in 1926, and they stepped into a textbook controversy in Chicago. And the mayor of Chicago at that time, one of the things that he was trying to do was rid the schools of undue British influence. That was the concern. And he was also trying to co-opt the growing white ethnic population in the city of Chicago. So, thinking about, “How can we then bring in Polish American history?” “How can we bring in Ukrainian American history?” “How can we bring that in?” That’s a way to remove this pro-British bias. He’s reaching out to all of these communities. And one of the organizations, that showed up at these hearings, was the Grand Council Fire of American Indians. And again, they’re saying some of the things that Elmer Davids is saying in 1961. There are other examples throughout the book of native people talking back and trying to reshape curriculum policy. So what we saw happen in 1989 is not anything new. It’s part of an ongoing conversation about what teachers should be teaching, about what students should be learning, and the greater hope for building an understanding by the general public from there. Here are some of the folks that were instrumental in passage. The gentleman on my right, your left, that’s Representative Frank Boyle. And Frank Boyle served in the Wisconsin assembly out of Superior, and Frank Boyle, he did a lot of work.

He did a lot of work to transform curriculum policy to make Act 31 come to fruition. But the one who really should be up here, Representative Sharon Metz. And Representative Metz was from Green Bay. She’s living near Omro these days. And Sharon Metz was a complete force to be reckoned with on this issue in the Wisconsin Legislature. And she was looking at what kind of examples do we have in curriculum policy, what sort of policy infrastructure can be used as precedent, what kind of mechanisms are out there that we can promote change in a good way? And then, when she left the legislature, she founded an organization called, “Honor Our Neighbors’ Origins and Rights,” and was a treaty rights support group. And one of the things that Representative Metz did so effectively is rally together faith communities and civic organizations as places of teaching and learning in community outside of schools. The woman in the middle is Dorothy W. Davids. As many of us know her and knew her, Aunt Dot. Aunt Dot passed away in 2014. She was the first native woman and first woman of color to graduate from UW-Stevens Point. She got her teaching degree. She taught up in Ashland for a time. Taught over near Ellsworth, she taught in West Allis. And she worked for many, many years for UW system, UW-Extension. And she is a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans. She’s also, by the way, Elmer Davids’ daughter. And so, what’s often seen as an Ojibwe story can also be seen in some ways as an intergenerational story of Mohican activism around this, as well. And the gentleman closest to me, in many ways closest to me, Uncle Al. Alan Caldwell.

And Alan Caldwell is known as the godfather of Act 31. He was at Lac Courtre teaching and serving as principal at the school when Fred and Mike Tribble were arrested in 1974. He knew them. He came down to DPI. He was working as the bilingual education and national origin desegregation consultant in the early 1980s. Alan Caldwell served on the American Indian Study Committee in the state legislature. He served on the American Indian Language and Culture Education board. He served on the board of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association. Alan Caldwell and Dorothy Davids held leadership roles in a lot of the key organizations that led to passage of Act 31. And Uncle Al has since passed, as well. He was the godfather of Act 31. And he was always quick to credit others for it, as well. He said, “Well, I was the guy at DPI,” but there were many, many people that had a hand in this. I want to read another short passage. Now, the story of Act 31, as I had mentioned, is a story of great victory. They had transformed curriculum policy in unprecedented ways. Include instruction, as vague as we might see it now, was incredibly specific. The most specific directive from the state to local school districts. And in the years past, the vision of those people at that time has not fully borne out. And so, that’s to set this passage up. Despite what is rightfully viewed as a victory for American Indian educators and their allies, however, implementation has been an ongoing challenge. The new policy was unprecedented in the specificity of its directives to local school districts, raising important questions about local control, even among Act 31’s advocates.

The law may have provided those eager to offer this instruction with the necessary political power to do so, but there was no viable mechanism to compel instruction where interest was not already present. Concerns about the adequacy of resources allocated to the department of public instruction to support the requirements arose early and remain a perennial concern to this day. Reductions in staffing and budgets meant that services supporting instruction were eliminated, scaled back, or had to be provided in a different way, which has affected teacher education and licensing. The need for and nature of instructional materials to be used remains an ongoing politically sensitive question, one that has not been fully addressed, though there is buy-in from several state and public agencies to create new and engaging resources. In addition, policy changes from 1989 to the present, including the model academic standards, and No Child Left Behind, have impacted priorities for our curriculum planning. Because of these continuing challenges, implementation of American Indian Studies-related provisions has proceeded unevenly. That victory story, that story of such hope in 1989, as I mentioned, has not borne out. I’m grateful to you for being here this evening. I’m grateful to those who worked me in putting the book together. I did my best to tell this story, and I’m grateful for the interest and support of the audiences that I’ve had and the readers that I’ve been fortunate to interact with. I would be glad to take your questions and your comments at this time. (applause) Thank you.