Blog Post Four: The Yellow Woman and The Night Chant


There are certain things within a culture that are emphasized. This is done because these things are important to the history and/or collective beliefs of that culture. The Night Chant and The Yellow Woman are good examples of this. They involve nature which is extremely important to the Native American culture.

The Night Chant is a great story to emphasize the theme of nature and community. The teacher could ask the students to point out all the times that the writer talks about nature doing something or being personified. The teacher would then ask them why they the think the author does that. They would also ask them to find and share out any other themes that they see within the work and connect it to either The Yellow Woman or another work that they have read previously. This link also provides possible helpful material for a lesson plan based on The Night Chant. https://www.learner.org/series/amerpass/unit01/context_activ-2.html
For The Yellow Woman, the teacher would connect the themes of nature to The Night Chant and have the students do a compare and contrast between The Night Chant and The Yellow Woman. The teacher would ask the students to pick out five similarities and five differences. The Yellow Woman also gives room for character analysis. The students could analyze the interactions and the character development of The Yellow Woman. How does she change throughout the story, from beginning to end? Attached are some other questions that could be used to generate discussion:
teacherweb.com/FL/.../Yellow-Woman-Discussion-Questions-Student-Generated.doc
 

The elements of popular culture that could be used to engage the students would be to have them connect different parts of the story to anything now and days. Such as what they know about modern day Native American society, and if that has impacted them in any way.
This is an important topic to discuss because it is such a big part of the Native American culture and if we, as teachers, hope to educate and expand our students’ minds, we need to show them as many different aspects of every culture that we can.       


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