K-12 Toolkit for Teachers: Open Educational Resources, Open and Free Resources/Tools

Native Knowledge 360° (NK360°) provides educators and students with new perspectives on Native American history and cultures. Most Americans have only been exposed to part of the story, as told from a single perspective through the lenses of popular media and textbooks. NK360° provides educational materials, virtual student programs, and teacher training that incorporate Native narratives, more comprehensive histories, and accurate information to enlighten and inform teaching and learning about Native America.

The AIFG presently contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. The films range from a 1922 silent newsreel to recent footage of pow-wows and political meetings in 2011.

Native American oral texts and examines perspectives and interpretation of Native American oral tradition.

The Digital Library represents a virtual selection from the Heard Museum archives and art collection. The Heard Museum has an extensive collection of art, documentary and photographic works on American Indians with an emphasis on Indigenous people in the Greater Southwest.

The WoLakota project supports students through guiding educators into better implementation of the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings (OSEU) via Culturally Responsive Practices. Implementation of the OSEU increases elements of Oceti Sakowin identity within the school environment and practice, supporting learning for native students and promoting deeper cultural understanding among non-native students and teachers.

The map represents 230 years of movement on the Plains amongst more than 45 different Indian cultures. Territorial, treaty, reservation, and state boundaries flow in an animated timeline.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West offers many K – 12 programs and resources to help teachers and students meet Montana and Wyoming’s Indian Education for All Social Studies Standards.

The Native Writers Digital Text Project brings the works of Native poets and writers of fiction and other prose to readers world wide. Featuring out-of-print literary efforts of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and First Nations people of Canada, the project seeks to broaden the definition of “Native Writing” not only by focusing on writers who are not ordinarily anthologized, but also by publishing works which originally appeared in “ephemeral” sources and the periodical press, especially in those publications edited and produced by Natives.

This site provides an extensive digital collection of original photographs and documents about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures, complemented by essays written by anthropologists, historians, and teachers about both particular tribes and cross-cultural topics. The essays include bibliographies and links to related text and images as well as study questions that K-12 teachers may use as they develop curricula in their schools.

The Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains Collection includes photographs, paintings, ledger drawings, documents, serigraphs, and stereographs from 1874 through the 1940's. In 1998, the images were digitized and drawn from the library collections of three of the Montana State University campuses (Billings, Bozeman and Havre), the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, and Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana.

This portal is a collaboratively curated and reciprocally managed archive of Plateau cultural materials.