CHARACTER EDUCATION WORD

August 2010 - Respect

Showing high regard for authority, other people, the environment, self and country. Treating others as you would want to be treated. Understanding that all people have value as human beings.

          Please look at the artwork that has been selected from the Booth Western Art Museum’s collection. We believe art can inspire, inform and influence what we think of people and events - past and present. We think this artwork provides a good example of respect. As you read the text, think about the ideas presented and how you can put them to work in your life.

 ***************************************************************

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to organize an expedition to explore and map the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. They were in search of a water route across North America. The Corps of Discovery, as they were known, would be traveling into lands that few white men had ever seen. To assure the success of their journey, Lewis and Clark hired Sacagawea, a Shoshone Indian girl and her husband Toussaint Charbonneau to guide them from the Great Northern Plain to the Pacific Ocean.  In his sculpture, Indian Mother and Child, artist Harry Jackson depicts Sacagawea holding her son Jean Baptiste, who made the entire trip with his mother. From the very beginning Lewis and Clark treated Sacagawea with respect and as an equal to the other members recruited for the expedition. They relied heavily on her to aid with navigation, language translation with the Native American tribes they encountered and finding edible food along the trail to supplement their food supplies.
 

Indian Mother with Child by Harry Jackson

The community in which you live and the school you attend are composed of many people, whose culture may be different from your own, but each is a person of value, each has something to contribute and each should be treated with respect. Do you treat others, as you would want them to treat you? It’s a small world, and you would do well to remember that we are all inhabitants of the same earth, and far more unites us than divides us.