The other American history

As a boy Virgil Johnson loved Kit Carson. To him Kit Carson was a great cowboy, an outstanding Indian scout and an American legend.

But later as Johnson, a Native American himself, grew up and learned of other accounts of Kit Carson from different perspectives in American Indian history, Kit soon fell off the pedestal.

Kit also moved a lot of American Indians out of their area and, as a government agent, like some other early frontiersmen, he helped make a lot of promises to the tribes that were broken, Johnson said. "Once I found out the truth I didn't think he was that great a person."

Now Johnson is a history teacher at Granger High School in Granite School District. For years he has taken extra time to research Utah and U.S. history to make sure he provides his students with information on historical events from multiple perspectives rather than just a textbook account — something Johnson said is generally written from a European perspective.

But the State Office of Education will be stepping in to help teachers do the same in an effort to infuse the history program with more Native American history lessons, specifically about tribes native to Utah — Ute, Dine (Navajo), Goshute, Shoshone and Paiute.

Using a $114,000 grant from the Daniels Fund, a Denver-based foundation, the state office has been designing, writing and researching instructional material that will provide teachers with resources that present a broader perspective and understanding of the role American Indians played in Utah and U.S. history.

The new instructional material will be used in grades 4, 5, 7, 8 and 11. Dolores Riley, educational consultant and project coordinator, said the intent is to develop lesson plans with assessments tied to the state core curriculum.

Teachers, tribal members, community leaders, tribal teachers, administrators and professors have been working with the state office to put together lesson plans that would be useful to Utah teachers.

"We want to put together lessons that really develop these complex thinkers that we want students to be," Riley said. "Not all teachers have the time to go into the depth of research and development that we're doing, and that's the wonderful aspect of this grant."

Johnson has made such research a priority because, aside from his own cultural back ground, he is fascinated with different perspectives in history.

From the European standpoint Indians were savages, the red men, and the true picture of Native Americans is lacking, Johnson said.