Inlet Classroom

I’ve been doing a bunch of research for this one.  Potlatching is complicated business!!  I really wanted it to be a critical portion of my game somehow, though.  Before I get started, I’m going to give you two excellent links, so you can verify what I am proposing yourself:

Living Tradition: The Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch of the Northwest Coast

SFU: The Potlatch Ban

The first link is a virtual museum, full of fantastic videos and photos.  It is an absolute gem.  The second provides a clear, detailed explanation of the potlatch in a couple of paragraphs.  I found it very handy.  I looked through a bunch of other websites as well, but they weren’t as appealing.

If you haven’t read my first post on this game yet, you should.  It will give you the necessary background and provide you with essential game pieces.  Basically, my class is split up into three teams and each team is working to accumulate:

1. population
2. claims to land, ocean and river resources

When they claim a resource area, they post a team crest logo up on a map.

However (here is where the potlatch piece comes in), in order for you to have official rights to these claimed areas, you must host a potlatch. The other two teams are invited to your potlatch as witnesses.  You must provide the other teams with gifts in order to assure their support of your claim.

Now, from the research I’ve done (see Purposes of the Potlatch), I’ve determined that potlatches were largely for:

1. publicly recognizing class structure and status
2. passing on a family’s rights, privileges and inheritances (this includes the rights to land, property, fishing holes, etc. AND rights to songs and stories, etc.)
3. celebrating, honouring and supporting individuals (and the community as a whole) at important times

The focus of the potlatch in my game is the recognition of rights to resource-rich areas, not passing rights along.  I figured that the combination of 1. and 2. make my take on the potlatch defendable.   Plus, each team will need to make their potlatch a time of celebration.  We are in the process of creating masks for this purpose.  I am envisioning dancing, drumming, acting out stories and eating snacks.

Teams are ready for a potlatch when they have built up a store of potlatch gifts.  These gifts are acquired by trading 5 health points for a chance to draw out a gift (printed on paper) from the Potlatch bag in each game bin.  There are bunch of different gifts.  I am going to consult with the kids on the relative worth of each gift this week.

potlatch-cards-pdf

**Note that I have included 4 “trespass” cards in with the potlatch cards.  I wanted to intensify the game a bit, so I added these.  If you draw out a trespass card, your team has just trespassed on the territory of another team (crest on the card determines whose territory).  If this team has official rights to a territory, they can demand a gift to settle the score.  This includes potlatch gifts, or even people (to take as slaves).  If you don’t like the confrontational nature of these cards, just don’t include them.

Finally, after one team hosts a potlatch and gives away gifts to each witness, other teams must follow suit.  The second host team must honour the first by making sure that their gifts equal or surpass the gifts of the first (which, in fact, was expected).  In this way, our teams have the chance to show off their status.

I haven’t actually tried this out yet, so bear with me.  As the game progresses and (inevitably) changes, I’ll post updates.

I don’t quite have everything pulled together, but I’m willing to share what I have anyway.

Right now, the kids and I are working on pulling together information to make trivia cards and characters for each child.  We are using three sources:

A Journey into Time Immemorial…You’ll need flash to view this one.  It is completely worth it!  The kids will be immersed in a virtual reality Sto:lo village.

American Museum of Natural History: Hall of the Northwest Coast…another fantastic website with the museum’s huge collection documented and displayed for viewers.

Our social studies textbook: Our Beginnings (Grade 4)

The students are working in teams of 4 to build trivia decks.  Each students is responsible for reading a certain amount of content per day and writing interesting, fair questions (and answers) on his/her own.  Next, they bring their questions to the larger group to check for any overlap and to assess them for fairness and challenge level.  After the group gives the ok, questions are written out on tag.
They are also creating characters.  Each child researched clothing, adornment and tools.  I took photos of each child (head shots) and printed them out (black and white).  The students cut out the heads and created a new body, applying their research.  They love this!

I have broken the class into three large groups.  The students played “rock, paper, scissors” within each group to select a team member who chooses a name/crest for their team (I put names of Northwest Coast mythological characters into a basket and took the kids out to our classroom in the forest for the choosing ceremony).  Now the kids have characters and a team crest (which are posted together on a bulletin board assigned to them).  We need to get playing the game!

How is it played?  Everyday, students are partnered with someone from their team (this rotates to give everyone a chance/break).  Partners face off with partners from other teams.  As I have 28 students in my class, I end up needing games supplies for 7 groups.

Game supplies!  For each team, you will need:

• a bin
• a deck of trivia cards (student created) with roll-the-dice-cards mixed in (printed onto tag matching the trivia cards)
• a set of game instructions (to be printed and placed in each bin) northwest-coast-game-pdf or northwest-coast-game-with-trespass-cards
• a pair of dice (for “Roll the Dice, Learn your Fate” cards)
• a bunch of beads for “health points” (health points are essentially the currency of the game…you get them for correctly answering questions)
• a small bag (for drawing out Potlatch gifts)
• a set of resource-cards-pdf (photocopied onto regular paper and cut out)
• a set of Potlatch gift cards (coming soon)

This looks like a lot, but the supplies are not hard to gather.  Make sure the bins nest and are large enough to accommodate the instructions without folding.

Each team also needs a bin to collect the earnings of each partnership.

The object of the game?  At this stage, groups need to manage and control the wealth of the rivers, ocean and land.  I have posted a map of the Northwest Coast on one bulletin board to keep track of resources that each team manages.  They must also share their wealth at potlatches in order to publicly demonstrate their worthiness to control the resource areas they claim for their house team.

Once each team establishes itself, I will be changing the game by adding encounters with European (and American and, eventually Canadian) fur traders, explorers and fortune-seekers.  Each team will also have to eventually face disease, the Indian Act, and residential schools.  These parts of the game will involve a lot of critical thinking and emotion, too.  It will not be easy for the kids to face these negative historical realities.

I will post soon to give you more supplies and ideas.  I always tweak games as I go.