Think Like an Early Ohioan!

by: Natalie Mitchell (nam83@zips.uakron.edu)

This activity will ask your students to think about how early Ohioans would have used Ohio’s natural resources. They’ll have to be creative, make observations and inferences, and work hands-on to put their natural resources together into a miniature of something that would be useful to someone living in the early Ohio landscape. This activity would work well at the end of a unit on Native Americans, particularly in Ohio, because it is likely that the students have been imagining themselves in the place of these Native People and will have some great ideas brewing about what they would make if they were living hundreds of years ago in Ohio’s landscape.

This activity gives the students a way to think about history in a science class or science in a history class, and should help them make connections between the two.

When discussing Native Americans, it is important to acknowledge that the land we are learning about is stolen land, or land that belonged to people before we occupied it. While this is a pretty heavy topic for elementary school students, there are ways to approach it without making them feel like they are the "bad guys" and get them excited to learn about people who lived in Ohio before them! A good way of doing this is by showing them the below website:

Below is a map of some of the bigger Ohio tribes. Particularly of note are the Wyandots, Iroquois, Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee.

If the students have not engaged with the different types of shelter and tools used by Native Americans in Ohio, here are some examples that should prompt them with ideas for the activity:

Above is a longhouse, commonly used by the Iroquois. It is constructed mainly using timber. Usually, multiple families would live together in the same longhouse.

Above is a wigwam. This type of dwelling was constructed using mostly timber and woven mats.

Above is a picture of Wyandot people wearing clothes made primarily of animal hide and fur, adorned with various stones and shells. Prior to European contact, this is much of what would have been worn, but after trade with the Europeans began, the Native people of Ohio began to incorporate different traded goods into their wardrobe such as various types of fabric.

Above is a picture of various Clovis points. Clovis points were these long purposefully chipped (or knapped) pieces of flint that could be used for many different kinds of tools, particularly spears. These were very common among the Paleo-Indians of Ohio, so they were common over 11,000 years ago!

Above is an example of an Adena (a group who lived in Ohio 3,000-2,000 years ago) clay pot. These would be used for cooking and storing food.

Background on Natural Resources

Timber The most common trees in Ohio are Oak, Ash, Buckeye, and Maple. Hardwood deciduous trees (the kind that lose their leaves in the fall) are very common in Ohio, and also happen to be very useful natural resources. Trees can be used for all sorts of projects (ask kids to name things that are made of trees) and hundreds and thousands of years ago, the people living in Ohio used them to make shelters, transportation, tools, and much more.

31% of Ohio is forested! Almost all the trees in Ohio are hardwood, deciduous trees. There are over 100 different types of hardwood trees growing in Ohio. (all facts here from https://forestry.ohiodnr.gov/portals/forestry/pdfs/ohioforestryfacts.pdf This pdf could even be printed as a handout if desired)

Clay Clay is very common in Ohio. In fact if you go in your backyard and dig down a bit, you will likely find a vein of reddish or grey clay yourself! Ohio’s clay was deposited over 500 million years ago, beneath coal beds or in lakes carved by glaciers. Native Americans in Ohio made quite a lot of pottery, for utility and artistic reasons, and during the 1800s and early 1900s Ohio was a center of the clay industry, with factories producing bricks, sewer tile, and ceramic pottery. The short video below explains how to find clay naturally. It might give the students a nice visual for what clay looks like in the “wild”. They may even realize that they had seen it in the ground in Ohio before)

Fur When Europeans first made contact with the New World, one of the natural resources they were most interested in was fur from North American mammals. Native Americans had been using fur and animal skin for clothing and shelter, among other uses, for hundreds of years prior to this contact, but with the goods offered through trade with Europeans, many Native Americans switched from gathering furs for subsistence and started gathering as many as they could for trade. This meant that many more animals were being hunted than ever before and their populations started going way down. This affected the ecosystems across Ohio (and beyond!) for many centuries after the trade slowed down. Many of the animal populations that were hunted during this time have never recovered and still have very low numbers. Some of the animals most commonly hunted for fur in Ohio were beaver, muskrats, raccoons, fox, and deer.

Flint When you think about flint, I bet you picture someone hitting two rocks together over a pile of tinder trying to make sparks to start a fire. This has been one of the most common uses for flint, and it is still used this way now. Did you know that flint is the State of Ohio’s official gemstone?

Flint has a high silica content (silica is known for being very hard) and is a type of quartz. Because of the type of rock that it is, it’s very hard and brittle. This allows it to break easily in a process that Native Ohioans would have done, called “knapping”.

Grasses Before Europeans started settling Ohio, the state’s area contained many tall grass prairies. Native Americans learned that the animals they wanted to hunt liked to live in tall grass prairies, so they would protect these prairies and maintain them in order to keep them healthy so the animals they hunted would have a habitat to live in. To maintain these prairies, they would burn them down sometimes, this would keep bigger plants like trees from growing there, and the ashes from the burned plants would make the soil very fertile and healthy! The tall grasses that grew in these prairies would be used to weave baskets and mats, though this was not as common in Ohio as it was with Native American groups in the middle of North America where there was even more grassland.

A lot of these prairies were eventually turned into farmland by European settlers. Prairies in Ohio were mostly made up of grasses such as Indian grass, big bluestem, switchgrass, and prairie cordgrass.

The image below is from https://www.metroparks.net/big-bluestem-indian-grass-johnnixon/ . This picture shows both big bluestem and Indian grass. This is a great example of what Ohio prairies looked like.

This activity, depending on how in-depth you went on the background information, could be appropriate for grades 2-4. I hope that it is modifiable enough that it could be useful above or below that as well.

Science is a Human Endeavor

Hopefully the students will see that natural science impacts humans out in the “real world” and not just in laboratories. With some of the background on how Native Americans interacted with their natural resources and made observations, the students will see that Native Americans acted in a scientific way and were not “primitive”.

Science is a Way of Knowing

Students will see that science helps us understand the world around us. For example, by making qualitative observations about timber, students will be able to infer the ways in which it is useful as a natural resource.

Ohio's Learning Standards for Social Studies: Grade Themes

2nd Grade: People Working Together This activity could help the students think about how prehistoric people and early Ohioans would have worked together to form a community and solve problems.

3rd Grade: Communities Past and Present, Near and Far This activity involves the students thinking about how communities of the past would have solved problems and used the world around them.

4th Grade: Ohio in the United States This activity would go along well with the students thinking about prehistoric Ohio cultures.

This activity starts with brainstorming ideas on the included worksheet. This worksheet will help the students think of creative ways to use natural resources. The goal is for them to make observations about these resources, followed by inferences about how their features could be helpful to humans. Once they have completed the worksheet, ask them to pick one of the three ideas they had at the bottom of their sheet that used multiple materials together. Whichever one they select they will then make a miniature model of to help visualize the practicality of the object and experience the tactility of the materials. It might help them understand the project better if you make an example object or two so they have a good idea of the scale that they are dealing with. They can then gather their materials from a station that you set up somewhere in the classroom and begin crafting!

Link to Worksheet

Once your students have crafted their models, they can even set their models up somewhere in the classroom to create a little early-Ohio village of their own! With the materials provided, it is likely that many of the students will be making shelters, vehicles, and simple tools, so all together their models will create their own unique version of an early-Ohioan settlement. You can use their village as a jumping-off point for discussing what the villages of early-Ohioans would have actually looked like (look in background section for reference photos) and ask them to be creative and think about how they worked together to create a miniature community. This will help them imagine their models in context, and help them think deeper about how humans interact with the natural world around them.

Below are some examples of the sorts of miniatures your students could make! These are obviously made with more time than the students will have, but you can see the sort of projects that would work with this assignment.

When going over the natural resources as a class prior to handing out the worksheet and completing the model-making activity, make sure to ask them plenty of questions such as: what is a natural resource? What natural resources have you seen in Ohio? How do we use [insert natural resource here] today? How did early Ohioans use their resources? These questions will prompt some thought about natural resources and how they have been used historically as well as in the present. I include more example questions in the background section.

This kit comes with a worksheet that will give the students a space to start brainstorming uses for various natural resources that are common in Ohio. This will help them warm up their creative brains for the next, more hands-on part of the kit that will require them to think a little more creatively about how these resources could work together to solve basic problems.

Final Assessment: ask the students to share their miniature! They should be able to explain what materials they used, why they selected these materials, and what purpose their object would serve in the life of an early Ohioan.

1 worksheet for each student

Representational craft supplies:

Popsicle sticks or twigs to represent Timber

Playdough or modeling clay to represent Clay

Felt or other soft, thick fabric to represent Fur

Thick grey/black foam to be chipped away at to represent Flint

Thick twine to represent Grasses

Other helpful craft supplies:

Scissors

Glue

Any other basic craft supplies could be useful

Resources for Instructors:

A great resource for you teaching Ohio history would be Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State by Kevin Kern and Gregory Wilson. This is certainly above your student’s reading level, but gives a great history of Ohio going back to the formation of the ground beneath our feet thousands of years ago.

For more background on Native American use and manipulation of the landscape, check out Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson or Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Ohio Indian Trails: Third Edition by William McGill, Frank Wilcox, and Richard S. Grimes will provide some great background on the early people living in Ohio.

Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children by Michael J Caduto and Joseph Bruchac

http://ohiohistorycentral.org has helpful info on Native groups in Ohio, which should help if some students want to know more about how certain groups. Also very useful information on the natural resources in Ohio! It had a page on most of the resources I focus on (except grasses).

https://www.rrcs.org/Downloads/Ohios%20historic%20Indians%2038%20pages.pdf This PDF has some good information about Ohio Tribes after European contact. It is also where many of my images came from.

https://forestry.ohiodnr.gov/portals/forestry/pdfs/ohioforestryfacts.pdf Great resource for tree facts!

Resources for Students:

Rachel and Sammy Visit the Prairie by Jannifer Powelson will give the students background on midwest prairie ecosystems

If you have any students particularly interested in flint knapping here is a great resource on that process: The Space Age Kid's Guide to the Stone Age Skill of Flint Knapping: Making Arrowheads out of Rock by F. Scott Crawford

The Tree Book for Kids and their Grown-ups by Gina Ingoglia if a student is interested in most aspects of trees from how they grow to how to identify them.

Birchbark Brigade: A Fur Trade History by Cris Peterson will give students more background on the Fur trade in North America

When Clay Sings by Byrd Baylor Though this book is centered in the southwest region of the US, it helps students think creatively about the history that can be felt in objects, such as clay pots