TPS Native American social studies lessons left “in limbo” after three years

(TULSA, Okla.) Controversial revisions to Oklahoma’s statewide curriculum standards have garnered significant attention, overshadowing simultaneous changes to standards for Native American history. But whether and how any of these standards are taught in classrooms is a complicated process that depends on the resources available to and selected by individual school districts.

The Oklahoma State Department of Education develops academic standards for kindergarten through 12th-grade education in all public schools in Oklahoma. However, individual school districts select curricula to implement the standards, including materials like textbooks and lesson plans. Because the OSDE mandates all students take one semester of Oklahoma history as a graduation requirement, all high schools must offer the class regardless of the available teaching resources. There are not many comprehensive textbooks or other resources focusing on the state’s history, and the few available often gloss over important aspects of Oklahoma’s past.

At Tulsa Public Schools, significant updates to lesson plans on Indigenous history for the Oklahoma history course have stalled since May 2022. Teachers and TPS community partners, who collaborated to write the curriculum, completed lesson plans for just one of the course’s five units.

Amanda Soliván, then the social studies content manager for TPS, proposed updates to the Oklahoma history curriculum in 2021 after noticing the district’s chosen textbook lacked lesson plans for teachers. Soliván wanted to provide a more “culturally responsive curriculum,” enabling TPS’s diverse student body to see their cultural history reflected in social studies lessons.

“Oklahoma history is not the American Revolution, which has so many pre-prepared lesson plans; you can’t just wing it,” Soliván said. Updating the TPS Native history curricula was an immense task. “We would write lesson plans and assessments and resources and provide them for teachers, and then, similarly to when we created curriculum on the Tulsa Race Massacre, we would also be doing a series of videos.”

Soliván suggested the project’s stasis could be due to the district’s limited ability to allocate resources to social studies curriculum development. While the OK history lesson plans were in development, TPS was experiencing a severe shortage of substitute teachers. 

“At the time, the district prioritized providing students with a teacher in every classroom over drafting Oklahoma history curriculum,” Soliván said, who became a long-term substitute teacher during the 2021-2022 academic year on top of her full-time role as social studies content manager. “It’s more important that you have a teacher in the classroom to teach kids.”

Teacher shortages are an ongoing issue for TPS. 

Over eight months, Soliván was one of two writers on the curriculum project, the other contributor being a teacher. Writing those lesson plans was only one aspect of Soliván’s job, which she recalls as “hours and hours of work.” While other core subjects like math, science and English had two employees each to manage the curricula, TPS employed just one social studies content manager.

Before Soliván’s departure in Spring 2022, she provided incoming social studies content manager Emily Harris with detailed notes on the curriculum project, potential contacts for review and future steps. 

Indian Education resource advisor Erin Parker said Harris met once with Indian Education when she became content manager, and since then there has been no movement on the curriculum development.

“Once [Soliván] left, there was no one really there to stick up for us or make things happen,” Parker said.

Parker said many Native students are frustrated that their teachers focus on well-known events, such as the Trail of Tears and other 1800s-era events, when teaching Native American history. Those students want social studies lessons on modern Indigenous figures, including Mvskoke citizen and former United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. 

Unlike previous state standards, the new OSDE curriculum standards include Harjo, other Indigenous figures from Oklahoma and several important but lesser-known events relevant to Indigenous history. But a lack of teaching resources like those Soliván and other TPS educators were developing will likely prevent comprehensive and consistent discussion of these newly-included topics in the classroom.

“Students that are Native and are active in their culture don’t feel seen,” said Parker, who meets

regularly with Indigenous students in the Tulsa school district. “They feel like it’s just all talked

about like we’re in the past.”

Over the past semester, Indian Education employees and students from the Tulsa Native Youth Board have raised their concerns about limited teaching of Indigenous history in the district with TPS Superintendent Dr. Ebony Johnson. Parker is hopeful Harris will move the project forward soon.

We could not reach Emily Harris for comment.

“Indian Education was a really key partner in helping provide dialogue when looking at some harder issues to address,” Soliván said. The content she wrote was passed on to Indian Education representatives for review, as well as members of the Tulsa Indian Education Parent Committee, which comprises parents of Native TPS students.

Without including Native American educators, parents, scholars and administrators in the review process, well-meaning curricula writers may oversimplify or misrepresent complex aspects of Oklahoma’s history. Parker recalled a moment when she called out a writer who “glorified” the Buffalo Soldiers, the first group of Black people allowed to serve in the US military.

“The way I was taught about Buffalo Soldiers was that they hunted and they killed us,” said Parker, who is descended from the Cherokee and Kiowa tribes. “I had to let [the writer] know that we have songs about how they murdered us… because Buffalo Soldiers were created to protect only the ‘civilized tribes.’”

Without guidance on teaching these traumatic moments in history, many TPS and Oklahoma educators don’t teach them at all.

“As a teacher, you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing,’” Soliván said. “So when the district is providing you with materials, it helps teachers in a lot of ways feel safe.”

Step-by-step lesson plans approved by the district were intended to both create a more well-rounded history course and provide teachers with a safety net. Some teachers have concerns about losing their jobs and teaching licenses for saying the wrong things, as Oklahoma’s Congress passed House Bill 1775 in July 2021.

House Bill 1775 deterred classroom discussions on systems of oppression within the United States through a series of vague legal clauses prohibiting district employees from making students or other individuals feel guilt, discomfort or anguish on account of their race or sex. In 2024, a Norman teacher’s license was revoked for posting a QR code in her classroom linking to a selection of banned books.

But before the bill even became law, Parker described having to rely on individual teachers’ interest in Native American history for it to be taught.

“Then once they get to that point, now they’re scared to do it,” Parker said. “Teachers need to be empowered to feel comfortable with actually teaching Native history.”

In the 2024 legislative session, State Representative Amanda Swope introduced a bill to protect teaching Native American history from legal scrutiny. House Bill 4129 would have required the teaching of Native American history and culture in public schools beginning in the 2025-2026 academic year. 

The bill’s language opened avenues for teachers to “develop dialogue with students” on concepts like discrimination and stereotyping and help students understand “the experiences” of America’s Indigenous peoples. It also required the OSDE to consult federally recognized tribes and experts in Native American history and culture while developing curricula. 

House Bill 4129 was never voted on by the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

“We often teach the sooner myth in our Oklahoma history class… people yell ‘boomer sooner’ without remembering what those things meant,” said State Representative John Waldron, who co-authored House Bill 4129. “So there’s still this kind of colonial ethos, that Oklahoma is a state for white people who came in after 1889.”

When new statewide social studies curriculum standards like emphasizing the role of the Bible and identifying “discrepancies in 2020 election results,” other topics updating Native American history standards were underreported.

Oklahoma history saw significant revisions to its curriculum standards, including topics on tribal jurisdiction, legislation and judicial actions relating to tribal sovereignty. Side-by-side comparisons of the old and new standards can be accessed from this Google Drive folder, organized by an anonymous Oklahoma educator under the American Historical Association.

Parker is skeptical that the new curriculum standards will translate to better Native American history in public schools. Since the standards’ implementation isn’t enforced and the Oklahoma history curriculum project remains incomplete, she believes whether lessons fulfill the new standards will depend on the initiative of individual educators or school leadership.

“I'm sure there are teachers out there doing their own research and finding things, which is great, but it would be nice to have that already done,” Parker said.

Indigenous history in the unit approved by TPS centered on land acknowledgement, cultural origin stories and geographic landmarks from Indigenous peoples, including lessons on the Native American Graves Protection Act and Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma.

Unit two, while in its preliminary stages, delved into federal policies like the Indian Removal Act and the ensuing allotment acts that divided Indigenous nations’ reservation land. According to Soliván, the curriculum “had just kind of scratched the surface.”