Response to Coates Course

The Coates course was a very essential part of the study abroad program. Most of us came into this course with little prior knowledge of the Cherokee Nation. I did have some previous instruction on Cherokee history coming into the course but the information Julia Coates provided us with was more in-depth than any history I had learned before. I know the long days were hard on all of us, still the amount and quality of the information we were presented with definitely outweighs that difficulty.

Councilwomen Coates took a great approach to most of her information; her presentation of the information on the Trail of Tears was amazing. I had never questioned information such as the number of deaths or U.S. military involvement, so it was great to have this information presented to us intellectually without the terribleness of this event being down-played. I also thought the video dissection exercise we did near the very beginning of the course was very beneficial. Watching that video and then having all the false information in it identified directly after caused me to seriously think about all the false information that is presented to the general public about Native Americans, and how easily all that information is swallowed. I think it served as a good reminder that we all need to take everything with a grain of salt when it comes to learning about history. I know I definitely kept that lesson in mind, especially when it came to the later parts of the course where we discussed the UKB and the Freedmen. Although, there was a bit of bias in some of the information presented in the course, overall it was a great precursor to the rest of the study abroad trip. Other than that I don’t know that I could say anything on the Coates course that Walker, Andrei, and others have not already said better.