Students feast on food and fun
at potlatch celebration
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
Staff Writer
PRESQUE ISLE – While pepperoni pizza, hot dogs, chicken nuggets and potato puffs are typically served in the Presque Isle Middle School cafeteria, sixth-graders in Peggy Kelley’s classes recently got to sample more unique food items including bear, moose, deer and elk as part of a potlatch celebration.
Photos courtesy
of Presque Isle Middle School
DURING A RECENT NATIVE AMERICAN UNIT, sixth-graders in Peggy Kelley’s classes at PIMS made individual totem poles and participated in a potlatch celebration, which featured everything from bear meat to fiddleheads. Shown with their creative totem poles are, from left: Page Kidney, Grant Bridges and Austin Smith.
“I teach the students about the five major Indian groups of Canada, which include the Northwest Coast Indians who were instrumental in celebrating potlatch and designing elaborate totem poles,” said Kelley, a social studies/language arts teacher at the school.
Kelley explained that the Northwest Coast Indians appreciated the gifts that they received from the land and the sea. When a villager, usually a chief or a male of high standing in the community, felt especially grateful for all that he had, he invited other villagers to a potlatch, which was a special feast at which a person who had plenty of food and goods would give it all away.
AMY SEELEY, right, a sixth-grader in Peggy Kelley’s class at PIMS, serves some of the elk meat she brought in for a recent potlatch celebration to classmate Heather Kirk.
“According to a visitor to the Northwest Coast, one chief once gave away 30,000 blankets,” said Kelley. “Another chief, who favored jewelry, gave away thousands of silver and brass bracelets. Within the community, the potlatch was a kind of contest. The person who gave away the most was the winner, and the prize was the respect of the other villagers.”
Kelley and her friends cooked the different dishes in slow cookers the night before the big feast. Much of the food was brought in by her students. In addition to the meats, the potlatch included pickles, ployes, homemade donuts, stuffing, fiddleheads and more.
“I liked the bear meat the most because it’s a little bit like hamburger and it’s something that I’ve never tried before,” said Amy Seeley. “All of the kids got to try some foods they liked, or foods that they’ve never had before. It was really fun.”
“I liked the partridge because it looks and tastes like chicken,” said Madison Walton.
Sarah Morneault agreed.
LACY CONDON displays the many Native American artifacts she brought in to share with sixth-graders in Peggy Kelley’s classes at PIMS including baskets, drums, beads, rattles and a rain stick.
“I liked it because it wasn’t dry and it had lots of flavor,” she said. “I thought the potlatch was great. I had lots of fun and ate almost everything on my plate.”
Colby Ouellette preferred the ployes.
“I loved them so much that I had nine of them,” he said. “My Dad used to make them but then we went into pancakes. I think Mrs. Kelley should host a potlatch for the entire school, and the only way to get in is to bring something to eat.”
Though Nathan Collins enjoyed the food, he said the potlatch also served another purpose.
“It taught us a lot of things like manners and thankfulness,” he said. “It was very fun.”
Equally enjoyable for the students was creating their own totem poles.
“It was fun for me to make my totem pole about my own life,” said Victoria Williamson. “My Papa helped me make it. I learned that the Canadian Indians used animals for their totem poles, but we created ours to present to the class about ourselves. I plan to keep it and put it in my bedroom.”
Sixth-grader Gabby Donovan said this was a project she will “always remember.”
“I enjoyed learning about the Northwest Coast Indians and how they used different symbols to make their totem poles,” she said. “I also really liked making one about my own life.”
Kelley said some of the totems this year included family, friends, hobbies, music, traveling, school, collections and favorite pets, and prized possessions.
“Totem poles can be made out of paper towel rolls, wood, plastic, Styrofoam, coffee cans, PVC pipes, boxes, mailing tubes, Pringles containers … even nut cans,” she said. “The students are very creative and artistic; no two are alike, and when they are ready to do their oral presentations, they do the ‘unveiling’ of their creative designs. Many parents have shared the fact that they feel it’s a great project that they get to do with their child.”
Teacher Casey Johnson also incorporated Native American activities in her math and science classes.
“Students wrote Native American picture stories in small, drawn symbols that stood for words and ideas on ‘buffalo hide,’” she said. “Picture writing was used by the Plains Native Americans to decorate their homes and to record important events in the lives of tribe members.”
Students also did fun with numbers where they were asked to read number sentences, solve them, and then write the number sentence in the language used by the Lakota Sioux.
PROUDLY DISPLAYING the totem poles they made as part of a unit on the Northwest Coast Indians are PIMS sixth-graders, from left: Gabby Donovan, Victoria Williamson and Mari Shaw.
The sixth-graders also learned about and used Mende math that is part of the Mende traditional culture.
“When Mende people count, they use a method of addition where they add one to the previous number to get to the next number – add all hundreds place digits, add all tens place digits, and then add all ones place digits before adding those three sums together to get the total number of the unit,” Johnson said. “They also connect their number to what is being represented by that number (unit). For example, Mende do not say, ‘Five plus three equals eight.’ Mende say, ‘Five oranges plus three oranges equal eight oranges.’ Students practiced solving addition problems using Mende addition and rewrote the solution by stating the properties (commutative, associative) and operations (addition) used.”
Students also solved a word search filled with tribe names and did a symmetrical design using geometric shapes to finish their study of Native Americans in math and science.
Kelley has incorporated the totem pole presentations/potlatch celebration into her curriculum the last few years. Kelley and Johnson agreed that this interdisciplinary unit will be a “wonderful sixth-grade educational memory” and plan to continue it again next year.
