Skookum Stories
A heritage inquiry project for BC Social Studies 9 students“Skookum” comes from the Chinook Jargon - a trade language that developed in BC and the West Coast during the 1800s. It means “big” or “strong” and has crossed over to become a word in the English language. This project is about telling a strong story that draws on your own roots and culture, and is based on primary and secondary source evidence.
Handouts |
Family and Culture
You'll see these words thrown around a lot here. Remember, everyone's definition of family will be different. For some, it may simply be an inner circle of people you trust. Same with culture; it isn't always tied to ethnicity -- sometimes it's about values and ideas to which you feel connected. Your heritage is what you make of it -- actions and beliefs that you pick up from society and the people in your life. Heritage is picked up through direct experience and decisions you make, and it is also passed down within families and through culture, whatever those words mean to you.
Inquiry Method
Not necessarily in this order -- be willing to move around through these steps:
- Find out more about your cultural heritage. This often starts by talking to the elders in your family.
- Decide what part of your “story” interests you for further inquiry.
- Gather evidence and conduct research about either your family’s roots or your culture, with special attention to stories that have a connection to history, place, and ideas.
- Design some inquiry questions to help guide your project.
- Organize your evidence and response to questions into a project with spoken and visual elements.
- Get some feedback from friends, family, and your teacher(s) before finalizing your story and presentation.
Notes and Ideas
Every family has some interesting stories about settling in Canada, moving around the country, or building homes, jobs, traditions, and memories... What’s your story? What are some interesting beliefs that have been held in your family or your "inner circle?" Where did they originate? How about cultural activities? Food? Music? Special Skills? Were any members of your family connected to world events or the history of Canada? Wars, railroads, rebellions, settlements? What are some “ordinary” achievements in your family, like clearing land, building a business, raising livestock, or surviving the Depression?
Maybe “family” is not the right approach for everyone, maybe you want to look into the cultural traditions of the general group of people you consider as part of your heritage. Many students feel a strong connection to “adopted” cultures and traditions. Sometimes these things come more from the community than the family. If you have a diverse background, you could pick one aspect of your heritage or many. Students who can’t connect to the culture/heritage angle can look at how culture is developing around them, e.g. local history.
Regardless of where the evidence comes from, to goal is to sift through the possibilities and tell a good story about what you find.
Maybe “family” is not the right approach for everyone, maybe you want to look into the cultural traditions of the general group of people you consider as part of your heritage. Many students feel a strong connection to “adopted” cultures and traditions. Sometimes these things come more from the community than the family. If you have a diverse background, you could pick one aspect of your heritage or many. Students who can’t connect to the culture/heritage angle can look at how culture is developing around them, e.g. local history.
Regardless of where the evidence comes from, to goal is to sift through the possibilities and tell a good story about what you find.
Why you should be excited
Students sometimes begin this project feeling that they have nothing interesting to say about their heritage. After digging around and doing some research, however, they almost always come up with something special. Often it is a simple connection to the past, an understanding of their ancestor's experience, or an awareness about how ordinary people were important in the many versions of the Canadian story that we tell ourselves. Along the way they get better at sorting out different kinds of evidence, and appreciate how history has both patterns and random fun bits (or sad bits) that all make a difference. One of my favourite things as a teacher is to hear back from former students who have kept following the stories they discover whilst doing heritage inquiry in high schools. We've even had some weird coincidences, too. For example, two students found out that their ancestors shared a fur-trade canoe almost 250 years ago -- one was Peter Pond, a partner with the North West Company, and the other was a French-Canadian voyageur. Through these projects we've found about war heroes and criminals, farmers, railway workers, maids to royalty, inventors, trappers, engineers, musicians, and survivors. We learned all kinds of things about immigration, recent and ancient, and about internment camps, residential schools, and lumber camps. We've learned that the relationship between personal histories and accepted public histories are often very different and raise intriguing questions. It has been inspiring to watch students gain confidence as amateur historians and expert storytellers.
Prompts
Try a few of these to generate some ideas and get you started on your project -- think about the prompt and ask "what's the story here?"
- the oldest object in your house (e.g. heirloom)
- three objects from your home that represent your culture or heritage
- how your family (any branch) came to live whee they do (e.g. city, province, country)
- besides Canadian, another nation or culture with which you identify and what this looks like
- a historical event (any level of significance) to which your family is connected
- something in your home with no monetary value but has sentimental value
- an old photo from your home with a story behind it
- one or two values or beliefs that characterize your family
- a family story that, if told to strangers, would hold their attention
- the oldest connection (e.g. to an ancestor) you can make in your family for which you know some detail
- something interesting in your home from the past that you have displayed or put up somewhere
- two object in your room that could be used to explain Canadian (or your) culture to a foreigner
- an experience from the past that seems to be shared again and again in your family (e,g, over multiple generations)
- a tradition that has some roots in your family (e.g. goes way back)
- what you ask if you could interview a deceased member of your family
- an object in your house that was once an everyday object but is no longer used (e.g. tool, implement)
- an object or heirloom that you would pass on to a grandchild (assuming you have one)
- a way of knowing, acting, or doing something that might be unique (or at least important) to your family
- something about your heritage or culture for which you are proud
- something sad or funny that happened in your family’s past that you can share
More Ideas for Heritage Inquiry
Sample interview questions, Where to find sources or evidence, How to build good inquiry questions, and more -- http://www.thielmann.ca/heritage.html.
Here are two students talking about what they got out of doing Heritage Inquiry in school. Video Clip. They started in Social Studies 9 and continued their work in Social studies 10 and 11.
Here are two students talking about what they got out of doing Heritage Inquiry in school. Video Clip. They started in Social Studies 9 and continued their work in Social studies 10 and 11.
Student Examples
These summaries are from students who worked on their Skookum Stories in the Fall of 2016. Their presentations included story-telling, educating the class about historical events they might not know about, and explanation of the posters, slides, documents, pictures, and artifacts they brought in to anchor their talk. As a teacher I especially appreciate how dialed in these students were to what they are talking about, and how they made connections to history and geography, many of them from the content area of their Social Studies 9 course. See if you can pick that up in these summaries and (in brackets) references to the sources they used.
MJ
EB
MJ
- Family left Ireland due to potato famine (journals)
- Scottish Immigration to Canada 1906 (ship passenger list)
- WWI vet - Canadian gunner (attestation papers, photo)
- immigration from Utah to Alberta with a family connection to Alexander Galt, a father of Confederation (journals, photo)
- Impact of the death of a family member in Crimean War in the 1850s (journal)
- Great x 5 Grandparents (Scottish) part of the Great Migration to Canada 1820s: ship to Quebec (37 days), steamboat up St. Lawrence, wagon to Upper Canada (interview, journals)
- family migration to Alberta; worked on CNR, brothers went to WWI (journals, photos, interview)
- Loyalist family, many buried by a New Brunswick church built in 1789 (interview)
- Family contains a WWI vet and many Caribou pioneers, goldminers, and rodeo pros (interviews, photos, 1875 voters’ list)
- New-found connection to Shuswap Aboriginal Nation (interview)
- Ontario Loyalists, later migrated to Prairies (interviews, family documents)
- family departing Saskatchewan for BC upon Tommy Douglas’ election (interview)
- Metis family stories, godfather was Gabriel Dumont, one member became policeman in 1930s but was discharged when a friend used his police vehicle in a bank robbery (interviews)
- Great-grandfather WWII captured at Dieppe raid, survived war but later went missing while goldpanning (interviews)
- Great-grandparents emigrated from Fukushima, Japan to Vancouver, interned in Tashme camp 1941, later left for beet farm in Alberta (map, government identification card issued to Japanese internees, photos, interview)
- Swedish family legacy and immigration in 1870 (family tree)
- descendent of Chief Gw’eh (Kwah) of Ft. St. James, bearer of a pre-contact metal knife (got through trade) and involved in story of early fur-trade, James Douglas, etc. (interview, memorial plaque, photo of knife from museum)
- interwoven stories of multiple Aboriginal relatives from different nations (interviews, family photos)
- father is current hereditary chief of Beaver Clan; ancestors permitted to switch to this clan due to clan imbalance caused by Spanish Flu of 1918 (interviews)
- horrific stories about family members and others at Lejac residential school at Fraser Lake, and uncles and aunts taken in the “Sixties Scoop” (interviews, photos)
- immigration from India to California in 1908 by steamship (interview)
- Great x2 Grandfather a founding member and of building sponsor of a Sikh temple in California, also made bombs in the 1920s for the Indian Freedom Fighters back in India (interview, photos)
- three different WWII vets in family, involvements with shipbuilding, Battle of the Bulge, and liberation of Italy (photos, interview)
- family member who helped construct beach features at local provincial park (photo, interview)
- great-uncle, a jockey, who rode Secretariat and was later thrown from a horse and paralyzed in 1978 (interview, photo)
EB
- two stories of marriages between German and Dutch family members that were rejected by family in 1800s (journals)
- homesteading activities in the early 1900s, including use of home remedies still in use by family today (interview, direct observation)
- attempts to learn more about push factors for Dutch immigration to Canada met multiple dead ends - story was known but family members didn’t want to talk about it 150 years later (interview)
- Great x2 Grandfather who fought and died at the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel; his will was made 7 days prior, his grave was later shelled in 1918 (multiple military records kept both by family and available online)