Kentsiis Curriculum
The CVTC Cultural Resources Program endeavors to in provide Ahtna Cultural Education Curriculum to teach the community about our culture as the Indigenous people of Nay’dini’aa Na’, Chickaloon Village. We hope to provide a better understanding of our history and culture as we move forward in living, preserving, and restoring our traditions. In Chickaloon, we learn by doing. This idea that you learn by just trying and allowing oneself to fail, problem solve, and eventually succeed. This kind of reverse engineering is reminiscent of many indigenous learning systems which focus on holistic knowledge. To teach about the values in indigenous learning methods and teach about respect for environment and indigenous materials.
This lesson is called Kentsiis or Moccasin. In this lesson, participants are taught how to identify the several different types of Ahtna Athabascan moccasins and their purposes. The goal is to make traditional Ahtna Athabascan moccasin slippers and to educate several Ahtna Athabascan words involved with the activity. This method of instruction follows the same Traditional Physical Response approach used by Chickaloon traditonal school, Ya Ne Dah Ah.
