KO'd

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings have established themselves as sleepy-time. I have two fifty-minute lectures back to back. This first one (Environmental Conservation) moves very slowly and puts me in a state of drowsiness. The second one (Ancient and Medieval Art) is reasonably interesting but takes place in a dark room with padded chairs, which thus far has made sleep unavoidable. I do not want to sleep through Art History; I want to learn the material. I'm considering two option to amend the present situation. I can start drinking a glass with Mountain Dew with breakfast, hoping that the caffeine will keep me awake without making me to antsy to focus. I'm not keen on this idea, since caffeine sometimes makes me feel irrationally trapped. The other option that readily presents itself is to start skipping the first class some days, and just reading the lecture outlines off of the website. I'm not thrilled with this plan either, since I don't like to miss lectures, but I have to say that today's class encouraged me to go in this direction.

The instructor's prepared lecture ended when we still had ten minutes remaining. He managed to start up a loose discussion among the students about Native American's effect on the land and whether European travelers were coming to a largely natural or a substantially cultivated landscape. The lecture had covered shifting agriculture, controlled burns, irrigation and other methods employed by the indigenous peoples, and the following discussion revolved around how invasive or how "natural" the techniques were. Opinions varied widely. One male student argued that it's better to compare Native Americans to river-damming beavers that to the Europeans that invaded the continent. One female student said that the excessive hunting of beavers by natives during the fur trading era proves that Native Americans never had any more respect for the land than Europeans. I tend to fall in between these two views, for I feel that both have merit. But I was annoyed when one girl said she wondered what "the Native American perspective on the matter" was. Our instructor (I won't call him a professor because he had yet to earn is PhD) said that she presented an interesting question, and then he asked if anyone in the room was of Native American heritage. I didn't like where this was heading, so I interrupted, "I'd like to point out that the various nations and tribes of North America would likely have widely varying views on this matter. I've been researching the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; there are two groups of people living there, the Gwich'in and the Iñupiat. The the Iñupiat are the poster tribe of Big Oil and firmly support drilling in the area, and the Gwich'in are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the land. I think it's too simple to think of there being a single 'Native American perspective.'" The instructor said that I had an excellent point. He continued on that his own wife was one-eighth Native American, and that she had been surprised to learn that her ancestors had employed substantial landscape-altering techniques, so we shouldn't assume there is a single view. I didn't try to participate after that.