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Book details how Native Americans of the Pacific Coast sustainably managed resources
LAWRENCE — For at least 10,000 years before contact with European settlers, Native American societies from Alaska to California conserved and interacted with natural resources using a more sustainable and spiritual approach than anything seen in the modern industrial world. A new book co-written by an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Kansas explores key philosophies and practices that guided how these significant civilizations in the Pacific Northwest related to their environment.
Pandemic-forced shift to online education can be boon for future social workers
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic forced education, services, health care and many other aspects of everyday life online. For social work, that transition started as a challenge, but it can be an opportunity for educators, social workers and the people they serve. A University of Kansas professor has published a paper arguing that social work educators can adapt their teaching practices in a way that best prepares their students to interact with those they serve, whether in person or online.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Book details how Native Americans of the Pacific Coast sustainably managed resources
LAWRENCE — For at least 10,000 years before contact with European settlers, Native American societies from Alaska to California conserved and interacted with natural resources using a more sustainable and spiritual approach than anything seen in the modern industrial world.
A new book, “Respect and Responsibility in Pacific Coast Indigenous Nations: The World Raven Makes” (Springer, 2022), co-written by an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Kansas, explores key philosophies and practices that guided how these significant civilizations in the Pacific Northwest related to their environment.
“One of the things that governs their thinking that we think is necessary for the contemporary world is that people have to show respect and responsibility towards one another and the natural world as a way of trying to guarantee our survival to the future,” said Raymond Pierotti, associate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at KU.
The book was co-written with Eugene Anderson, professor emeritus of anthropology and a prominent ethnobiologist at the University of California, Riverside.
“The audience we wrote it for is the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest,” Pierotti said. “Gene Anderson, my co-author, has worked with them for years on their societies, cultures and knowledge systems. He’s an anthropologist by training, but he’s also very understanding of ecology and the way that it functions. Gene brought me in because he thought my experience working on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and relationships with nature would enhance the overall power and impact of the book.”
Examining how Native American cultural groups found balance with nature, the authors in part curated a collection of Native American testimony — including myths, stories and speeches that signify an ecological viewpoint. This is important, Pierotti noted, because the government of Canada now recognizes Indigenous accounts as equivalent to Western traditions of evidence in court cases concerning land claims and decisions about land management.
“In most Native American traditions, what are called religious or ceremonial aspects involve trying to reconcile a way of life that requires the taking of other lives with this idea that you will acknowledge and respect your responsibility to those other lives,” he said.
Chapters cover many facets of Native American life in the Pacific Northwest —including teachings, stories, visual arts, ideology, spirituality, resource management, social and cultural dynamics, and economics — as these societies gathered resources from the land and sea. The authors give added focus to two Indigenous societies noted for their longevity, wealth, and political and economic power: the Nuu-chah-nulth (or, Nootka) of Canada and the Makah, who currently reside on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula.
The book’s opening chapter explores the rules and principles used by Native Americans to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” — the idea that it’s impossible for humans to share mutual resources.
“These people worked very hard to avoid having a tragedy of the commons,” Pierotti said. “There are two tendencies with the perception of Native people. One is to regard them as primitive; the other is to regard them as saintly. These people were neither. In fact, they were serious rivals and had a lot of conflict with one another — but underpinning their combat was the idea that you could not destroy. They never did try to burn out each other’s settlements, for example, because what they wanted to do is reinforce their influence over the areas which they used, including the waters surrounding these lands, because to them the sea was part of their country.”
Another chapter contrasts Native American ecological practices and ideologies with the mindset of European settlers who came to the region beginning in the 1700s, first as trading partners and increasingly as settlers.
“These were very much maritime cultures,” Pierotti said. “These people lived by whaling and fishing most of the time and were supplying American settlements like Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, with whale oil for fuel and fish for food. As major trading partners with the colonial arrivals, they were extremely wealthy until disease, and after the War of 1812, the U.S. paid more attention to the Pacific Coast and moving more military and settlers in — and the British took over after the Spanish departed for California.”
Pierotti said Indigenous Nations of the Pacific Northwest (First Nations in Canada) were successful at resisting British invasion for many years.
“The British got established in Vancouver and Victoria before the Nations realized that they were planning on being there permanently,” he said. “They originally thought of them as trading partners, and they set up their relationships accordingly. When they realized, ‘Oh, these people are planning to stay,’ other issues came into play.”
Eventually, Pierotti said, Indigenous populations lost about 95% of their population between 1700 and 1900 to disease.
With humanity facing the climate crisis, the authors said there are important lessons for living more sustainably to be found in the ideologies and practices of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Coast — who themselves were challenged by changing climate for millennia from their arrival during the Ice Age around 15,000 years ago until the present.
“We’re looking at some very ancient cultures here — the way they set themselves up to live was a way of using the environment to help them survive but not ever destroying it in any meaningful way,” Pierotti said.
Even more important, they knew when to stop exploiting resources, according to the KU researcher.
“As an example, the Makah decided to stop taking gray whales, because they realized the species was in trouble in the early 20th century, whereas it took more than 60 years for the U.S. to declare gray whales an endangered species,” Pierotti said.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Pandemic-forced shift to online education can be boon for future social workers
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic forced education, services, health care and many other aspects of everyday life online. For social work, that transition started as a challenge, but it can be an opportunity for educators, social workers and the people they serve. A University of Kansas professor has published a paper arguing that social work educators can adapt their teaching practices in a way that best prepares their students to interact with those they serve, whether online, in person or both.
Social welfare education, like most disciplines, was transitioning to online coursework in the years prior to the pandemic. The discipline features practice courses in which students learn how to put theories they learn into action. While it can be difficult to teach someone how to establish rapport with a client, assess progress of someone undergoing treatment, intervene with families in crisis or other skills while online, it is necessary.
“Over about the last 10 years, we’ve gone from just teaching social welfare in person to teaching a blend of in-person and self-guided online content to teaching online hybrid courses that leverage teaching over a video conference platform for synchronous components that provide live interaction and using tools like Canvas for asynchronous components that allow for self-guided online activities,” said Nancy Kepple, associate professor of social welfare. “We’ve seen people try to translate exactly what they did in the classroom and say it didn’t work, or people change drastically what they did to make it fit within these virtual spaces. This paper basically says it’s not an either/or.”
While providing a framework for how to teach practice courses across modalities, Kepple and co-author D. Crystal Coles of Morgan State University argue that empowering future social workers to be comfortable working both in-person and online with clients is vital. Social work was already shifting to add more telehealth approaches, but the pandemic forced many services to an online space and revealed many people prefer to receive services online. The study was published in the Journal of Teaching in Social Work.
“In modern social work, we don’t only engage people in person anymore. I have colleagues in practice for whom working with people virtually is their preference, and this is the only way they engage with the people they serve.”
The article is titled “Maintaining the Magic,” as Kepple and Coles argue the strengths of one’s practice instruction can be maintained as it gets translated across modalities. Schools of social welfare/social work have begun returning to more in-person classes, but the main four modalities still exist: Traditional in-person; hybrid of in-person and self-guided online activities; online hybrid of synchronous virtual meetings and self-guided online activities; and fully asynchronous online. The article presents a framework in four parts for drawing on the strengths of each (while navigating their constraints) to ensure they are as effective as possible across modalities by considering structural components of space, time and people as well as a process component of interactivity.
In terms of learning location, educators designing practice courses need to consider space, whether a physical classroom, online space or self-guided course and how students will interact with each other and instructors. The authors give examples of how practice instructors can encourage people to work together based on the opportunities of available physical or virtual spaces, maximizing what is available and unique to each. In regard to time, Kepple and Coles discuss how to ensure educators and students make the most of it. For example, in any online class, some amount of time is spent troubleshooting technology. While that may take time from instruction, educators can strategize ways to find additional time to give back to students and experiential practices. While considering people, educators should consider their own strengths as well as the experiences of those in the class and how those can be brought to the fore, whether in person or in online instruction.
Finally, interactivity is key. Practice courses emphasize that students need interaction with their instructor, the ideas being conveyed and with fellow students to learn skills such as making eye contact, empathizing with others, experiencing human warmth and other essential skills for social workers. The article provides strategies for role-playing and other ways to build interactions specific to each modality.
“Just reading about these ideas doesn’t teach you how to experience or convey these key skills. You have to understand what empathy is as a concept and as an experience to effectively convey it when interacting with someone,” Kepple said. “Social workers have to be prepared to work and help people in any space. Our field isn’t just confined to working with people in a 45- or 50-minute session in one room. We want to be on the leading edge of how we prepare our students for their profession.”
While technology has evolved to deliver education and social work services, the pandemic forced a quick adaptation. And though both life and education have somewhat shifted back to previous norms, the change showed an understanding of both technology and humanity is necessary, according to the authors. Some clients will need to receive services virtually because of distance or preference. Some educators may prefer in-person classes, but the student preferences are also diversifying. In addition, the students who will be the next generation of social workers will need to be prepared for new and evolving technologies. Educators thinking about how they can innovate in their approaches will help ensure new social workers are adaptable, the authors argue.
“It is important to think through how all of these pieces work and how that affects how we teach,” Kepple said. “It’s not brand new; it’s figuring out an intentional way of delivering what we know and what we do well in a new way. I want social workers and educators to believe they know what makes a good instructional space and that they can make practice spaces work across a range of methods.”
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