We Shall Remain

The Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) was chosen, with several other PBS member stations from across the country, to create a community coalition to help tell the history of the indigenous people of the United States of America. The Arkansas’s First People Advisory Council includes the Arkansas Archeological Survey, the Sequoyah Research Center, Arkansas State Parks, Arkansas Tech University Museum, the American Indian Center of Arkansas, and the Trail of Tears Association.

In April 2009, American Experience’s We Shall Remain and these special groups of Native peoples, scholars, and civic organizations will bring American Indian perspective to real stories from our nation’s past and present through different types of media, including a library initiative; television and radio broadcasts; various print promotions and community events. This is the first project of its kind and is unmatched in its ambition.

Arkansas’s First People will be the Natural State’s contribution to this unique program. This multi-faceted project will give voice to Native peoples who had and still have an impact on Arkansas. The stories span pre-contact mound cultures to the sovereign nations who now reside in neighboring Oklahoma. Images of cultural legacy, archeological data, and interviews with modern tribal representatives will change stereotypes of these diverse peoples.

Through AETN and the Arkansas Department of Education’s Internet Delivered Education for Arkansas Schools (www.arkansasideas.org), Arkansas teachers will be able to access an online professional development course using the broadcast episodes of Arkansas’s First People, extra video clips, gallery images, virtual tours and a resource list. Links to the individual American Indian tribal Web sites will also be available. All of these components will be unique supplements to classroom instruction for Arkansas students.

AETN will hold special community engagement events for Arkansas’s First People and We Shall Remain. These will include premiere screenings, an atrium exhibit, a Native writer book program and workshops. Each of these events will have components designed to stimulate the viewer’s imagination, connect to the content and provide a new way of seeing Native people. This project is alive in the sense that with the use of these different elements, it will make the viewer want to investigate further.