The Cradleboard Teaching Project turns on the lights in public education about Native American culture – past, present, and most important for the children – the Future. It comes out of Indian country, and reaches far beyond, into the mainstream classroom and into the future of education.
Backed by lesson plans and an excellent curriculum, the Cradleboard Teaching Project is also live and interactive, and totally unique; children learn with and through their long-distance peers using the new technology alongside standard tools, and delivering the truth to little kids with the help of several American Indian colleges. Cradleboard reaches both Indian and non-Indian children with positive realities, while they are young.
This is the way of the future when it comes to offering a cultural study unit to a child, because it’s alive! This is the future when it comes to offering the cultural “real deal” to youngsters half a globe away, in time, we hope, to benefit the lives of Indian children who wonder “Who am I?…and who do others think I am?”
During the five years that Buffy Sainte-Marie spent as a semi-regular on “Sesame Street”, it was always her hope to convey in the Native American episodes one message above all: Indians Exist.
We are alive and real, and we have fun and friends and families and a whole lot to contribute to the rest of the world through our reality.
It’s our hope at Cradleboard that we can joyfully replace the old inaccuracies, with reality, delivered by teams of experts; to the lifelong benefit of Indian children; and that every mainstream child will have access to an enriching Native studies unit provided by Indian people, including children of his or her own age.
Cradleboard(krad-l-bord) a frame, made of natural materials, used by North American Indians to carry a child. The cradleboard style varies from tribe to tribe. It is flexible in use, protective and decorative; a Native American invention much appreciated by other cultures who have adapted the idea to their own uses.
www.cradleboard.org
Ambeson is the Lenape word for Cradleboard.