Who Lives Here? Who Lived Here?

These two questions provide a good framework for homeschooling while traveling, and whenever I feel like our experiences are getting a little too strange and random, I return to them for context. Many current events like climate change and politics can be better understood by getting a taste for the geography and economy of different areas.

The first thing we think about is who lives here right now. What is the population? How close is the library? Where do kids go to school? What languages are spoken? Are the stores national chains or more regional or local? Who are their elected officials? 

Then we look at geography and weather. Where is the water? How does the weather travel? What are the sorts of extreme weather events that people have to deal with?  What kind of pollution is in the area? What wildlife can be observe directly? 

Next, we peel back the layers of history. Yesterday we got to view some petroglyphs made by some people who left the region 1,000 years ago. We also saw some orchards that are were planted by people who came about 150 years ago. It can be a little hard to piece together indigenous history of an area, but I start by checking out the map on https://native-land.ca and then look up the tribe website, if there is one in the area.  We have two myths/legends anthologies that we are working through.

The biggest lesson from this is generally that humans are on the move! Especially in the last thousand years on our continent, people have been moving around quite a bit, sometimes by choice, and sometimes under duress. There are very recent examples of migration, such as what happened on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. All around the west, you can see places where people tried to make a go of it, but the land is too overgrazed and drought-ridden to survive now. In Pennsylvania, the houses get gobbled up by the moisture and the encroaching forest or meadow, but out here, they stick around for decades without collapsing. 

The final thing we do is add our observations to our timeline. Right now, we're just using a free version of Time Toast to do this. 

Today we took a walk around Hanksville, Utah. This is a tourist town that is not really near, but more on the way to several popular national parks. The nearest library is 50 miles away, but they do have an elementary school. Its current enrollment is 24 students in grade PreK-6. People have lived here for many thousands of years, cultivating in the river valleys and flood plains. The petroglyphs were made by Fremont people, which is more a group of similar cultures that lived in this area for a long time, rather than the name of a specific tribe. 

If you come now, be sure to stop at Carl's Creature Garden and pet his goats and donkeys and look at the art.