A cooperative agreement for a three-year faculty and curriculum development project on the history of nine midwestern Native American groups for thirty-six community college faculty and academic administrators in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

A cooperative agreement for a three-year faculty and curriculum development project on the history of nine midwestern Native American groups for thirty-six community college faculty and academic administrators in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Noting that the removal of midwestern Indians is not as well known or studied as the southern Trail of Tears, the Ohio Historical Society (OHS), in partnership with Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College, received support for a three-year project on the history of the nine Native American tribes removed from Ohio in the nineteenth century. Faculty and administrators from community colleges in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma - states through which these tribes traveled and in which they resettled - participate in a series of conferences and webinars designed to help them include the history and cultures of these groups in their courses. The project begins with a conference at OHS on Ohio's Native American history. In addition to content sessions with scholars John Bowes (Eastern Kentucky University), Randal Buchman (emeritus, Defiance College), Linda Sue Warner (Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College), Stephen Warren (Augustana College), Melissa Rinehart (Miami University), Dawn Marsh (Purdue University), and Sharon Dean (OHS), participants also visit prehistoric mounds at Hopewell Culture National Historic Park, discuss ways to teach Native American history, and conduct research in the Ohio Historical Society's collections. The second conference takes place in Miami, Oklahoma, and features sessions on the removal of midwestern tribes. Other experts would join the scholars from the first conference: George Ironstack (University of Miami) and tribal representatives, including Glenna Wallace, chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma; Seneca-Cayuga language preservationist Paul Barton; and Wyandot artist Richard Zane Smith. Conferences are supplemented by webinars led by scholars and tribal representatives on a variety of topics, including working with primary sources related to Indian history, tribal governance, Native American arts, and the challenges of language preservation. Finally, participants share the outcomes of their projects at a closing conference. Participants work with a range of primary sources--maps, treaties, letters, diaries, artifacts--and read secondary works by project scholars and other historians, anthropologists, and linguists.