Stealing Little Moon : the Legacy of American Indian Residential Schools

by Dan SaSuWeh Jones

In this nonfiction family history, Dan SaSuWeh Jones traces the experiences of Little Moon and later generations of his family within the American Indian boarding-school system, including Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. Combining family stories with historical research, he examines forced separation and assimilation while honoring Indigenous resistance, cultural continuity, and survival.

Big Idea

Government policies can harm families across generations, but they cannot erase Indigenous identity, agency, or cultural continuity. Reading family history alongside historical evidence helps students understand both institutional injustice and the people whose lives extend beyond it.

Discussion Questions

1.What does the title Stealing Little Moon suggest was taken from children and families? How does the book deepen your understanding of that word, stealing?
2.How do Little Moon’s experiences and those of later family members help us understand the boarding-school system differently than a list of historical facts would?
3.Where do you notice family members maintaining identity, caring for one another, or resisting the schools’ demands? Why is it important to notice these actions alongside the harm?
4.How does Jones connect his family’s memories with the larger historical record? What can each kind of source help readers understand?
5.What responsibilities do readers have when learning and sharing a painful history that continues to affect living families and communities?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 55–60 minutes📦 Copies of the book or selected excerpts with page numbers, paper, pencils, colored pencils or markers, sticky notes, and an optional map showing locations discussed in the excerpts.

Learning Goals

Explain how the boarding-school system attempted to separate Indigenous children from their families, languages, and cultures.
Use accurate details and page references to connect an individual family experience with a broader historical policy.
Distinguish between a compressed historical summary and a slower passage that emphasizes a significant detail.
Describe examples of Indigenous agency, family connection, and cultural continuity without minimizing institutional harm.
Revise informational writing for purposeful pacing and respectful, precise language.

Activity Steps

1.Prepare and contextualize: Explain that this is nonfiction, despite the supplied fiction label. Locate the communities and school discussed in the selected passages, establish respectful discussion agreements, and preview references to forced separation or mistreatment; offer an alternative passage focused on family continuity.
2.Read and gather evidence: Share two age-appropriate passages, one about Little Moon and one about a later generation. Students record who is involved, what happened, the relevant policy or school practice, and page references.
3.Notice pacing: Compare a passage that moves across years with one that concentrates on a particular moment or detail. Mark language that signals elapsed time and details that ask readers to slow down.
4.Build the display: Students fold paper into two panels. For each generation, they write a two-sentence factual overview and a three- or four-sentence close look at one documented detail, using quotation marks and a page reference for any quoted words.
5.Connect and revise: Add a connecting caption explaining one change or continuity across generations. Partners check accuracy, distinguish evidence from interpretation, and suggest one pacing revision; do not invent dialogue, thoughts, or sensory details.
6.Share and reflect: Invite voluntary sharing, then collect an exit response explaining how a pacing choice changes what readers notice and why the family’s history matters today.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RI.4.3, RI.5.3, RI.6.3, RI.7.3 — Explain or analyze relationships among people, events, ideas, and historical developments.
ELA: CCSS W.4.2–W.7.2 — Write informative or explanatory texts using relevant facts, details, and organized ideas.
ELA: CCSS W.4.9–W.7.9 — Draw evidence from texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
ELA: CCSS SL.4.1–SL.7.1 — Participate effectively in collaborative discussions and build on others’ ideas.
Social Studies: C3 Framework D2.His.3.3-5 and D2.His.3.6-8 — Generate questions about individuals and groups who shaped historical change.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Stealing Little Moon is nonfiction, not a fictional boarding-school story. Jones’s family history gives students an opportunity to study how a writer makes a large historical system understandable through particular lives. Following Little Moon and later generations, readers consider both the scale of forced assimilation and the significance of individual experiences. For grades 4–7, use carefully selected excerpts and provide historical context before concentrating on craft. The central pacing question is: When should a writer move quickly across time, and when should the writer ask readers to linger? Compare passages that summarize policies or years of family history with passages that focus on a documented event, remembered experience, or meaningful detail. Students can mark time signals, sentence boundaries, paragraph breaks, and transitions, then explain how these choices shape attention rather than simply labeling writing fast or slow. Throughout the workshop, accuracy and care come before dramatic effect. Students should not invent traumatic scenes, impersonate children who attended the schools, or turn forced removal into a game. Instead, they can practice evidence-based summaries, thoughtful pauses, and clear transitions while noticing how Jones presents Indigenous people as family members and individuals with agency—not only as people harmed by institutions.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage spanning years of family history with one focused on a particular experience. Ask what readers gain when Jones changes the amount of space devoted to an event.
2. Plot	Treat the book’s progression as a nonfiction narrative rather than an invented plot. Trace how policies, school practices, and family decisions connect events across generations without suggesting that history has a neatly resolved ending.
3. Prosody	Read a short, non-graphic passage aloud, honoring punctuation and phrasing. Discuss how a measured pace can support understanding without dramatizing suffering.
4. Word	Examine words such as assimilation and the language used to describe the schools’ purposes. Compare institutional terminology with the effects on children and families that Jones documents.
5. Concept	Use the idea of legacy to connect Little Moon’s experiences with later generations. Ask how the book develops this concept through both consequences of harm and continuing family and cultural connections.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice how Jones’s position as a family member shapes the history he tells. Discuss why an Indigenous family perspective matters when examining institutions that sought to suppress Indigenous identities.
7. Point of View	Distinguish Jones’s narration from family testimony and historical sources where they appear. Ask whose knowledge each passage offers and what that source can—and cannot—establish.
8. Setting & Place	Locate Chilocco and the family’s home communities using the text and a map. Discuss why distance from home was not merely background but part of the boarding-school system’s power.
9. Original Characters	Reframe this fiction-oriented term as real people portrayed in nonfiction. Track what the text establishes about Little Moon and other family members without adding invented traits or treating them as character types.
10. Dialogue	Where the selected passage includes quoted speech or testimony, identify its source and attribution. If there is no dialogue, discuss how narration communicates experience without manufacturing a conversation.
11. Details	Select a concrete detail about school practices, separation, or family connection from the text. Explain how that detail makes a larger historical policy more understandable.
12. Descriptions	Compare description of an institution or its routines with description of family life where the text provides both. Ask how the selected details influence readers’ understanding without inventing additional sensory information.
13. Firsts	Find the first introduction of Little Moon or Chilocco in your edition. Discuss what information readers need at that first encounter and what Jones leaves for later development.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Identify a passage that makes an individual experience feel especially close or understandable. Name the factual detail, quotation, or narrative focus responsible rather than assuming the writer must have invented a scene.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Label passages that concentrate on an event and passages that summarize a longer period. Examine how the multigenerational structure links personal experiences to the history of the school system.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Discuss tensions between institutional demands and family identity, language, or connection. Do not frame children’s suffering as entertainment or ask students to manufacture suspense around abuse.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Track any movement between historical events and later family perspectives in the selected reading. If no flash-forward or cliffhanger is present, discuss that absence rather than assigning a technique the passage does not use.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine an actual chapter ending and the next opening. Ask whether the break marks elapsed time, a new generation, a change of focus, or an opportunity to reflect.
19. Pace & Creativity	Have students rewrite the same verified information as a brief overview and a longer explanation. Emphasize that nonfiction creativity involves selection, arrangement, and emphasis—not invented evidence.
20. Play	Use low-stakes craft play by rearranging students’ own factual sentences and comparing the results. Do not simulate forced removal, school punishment, or the suppression of language.
21. Performance	Invite an optional reading of a student’s factual explanation with purposeful pauses. Avoid reenactments, imitated Indigenous accents, or performances of traumatic testimony.
22. Personality	Find details that reveal a family member’s individuality beyond their relationship to the schools. Discuss why readers need to encounter people as more than examples of a historical policy.
23. Humor	If students encounter humor or warmth in a family account, consider how it reveals relationships and individuality. Do not assume humor is present or introduce jokes about the harms described.
24. Pause	Stop after a significant detail about Little Moon or a later family member and allow quiet annotation. Ask how a pause helps readers absorb meaning before returning to historical explanation.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Examine the title Stealing Little Moon for its emotional and conceptual force. In excerpts, identify imagery or figurative language only where it actually appears, distinguishing it from literal historical description.
26. Repetition	Track recurring ideas such as family separation, language, identity, or continuity across generations. Distinguish repeated themes from repeated wording and explain how either can connect distant parts of a narrative.
27. Rhythm	Compare sentence lengths and patterns in a historical overview and a family-focused passage. Read a few sentences aloud to test how their rhythm affects emphasis and comprehension.
28. Punctuation	Examine how sentence endings, commas, and quotation marks organize one selected paragraph. Students can revise punctuation in their own summaries while keeping the facts and source quotations unchanged.
29. Questions	Generate questions the family history raises, such as how a policy affected relationships across generations. Separate questions the text answers from those requiring additional research or community expertise.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare two generations using details Jones provides about school experiences and family connections. Avoid assuming all family members—or all Indigenous nations—had identical experiences.
31. Objects	Choose an object actually mentioned or pictured in the selected pages. Explain what its documented context reveals about institutional control, personal identity, or family memory without inventing a symbolic backstory.
32. Threes	Look for a three-part grouping only if one occurs in the passage. As a writing exercise, students can organize three verified details into a clear sentence and assess whether the pattern improves readability.
33. Lists	Collect text-supported examples of school rules or practices and consider what a list reveals about systematic control. Then discuss why individual family accounts are necessary alongside such a list.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect paragraph spacing, margins, and section breaks in the edition being used. Discuss how visual pauses affect reading, while recognizing that a blank space alone does not prove an author’s intention.
35. Art & Graphics	Study a photograph, caption, or other documentary visual included in the book. Distinguish what students can observe from what the accompanying text establishes, and consider how stopping to study an image changes the reading pace.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Use an evidence-sorting task in which students match their own notes to family history, institutional policy, or cultural continuity. This is a classroom tool, not a claim that the book contains games; avoid points or competition tied to suffering.
37. Placement	Ask why readers encounter a particular historical explanation before or after a family account. Students can test how moving their own context sentence changes the clarity and impact of a paragraph.
38. Form	Identify the work as nonfiction family history that connects individual lives with a broader institutional history. Discuss how this form differs from a textbook overview and from historical fiction.
39. Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough page-layout model, then create a four-page mock-up of an evidence-based response to the book. Plan where a heading, factual paragraph, source note, and reflection should fall; this is a student design exercise, not a claim about Jones’s drafting process.
40. Passion	Discuss how sustained attention to family history communicates the importance of remembering and truth-telling. Ask students to identify textual evidence of the book’s commitments rather than speculate about feelings Jones has not stated.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task: One History, Two Reading Speeds. Minutes 0–3: Read a short, teacher-selected passage about Little Moon’s separation from family or experience within the boarding-school system; preview difficult content and offer a family-continuity passage as an alternative. Minutes 3–6: Students record three verified facts and the page number, separating facts from their interpretations. Minutes 6–10: Write a two-sentence overview that compresses the information without minimizing the harm. Minutes 10–15: Write a four- or five-sentence version that slows down around one documented detail, adding explanation supported by the passage—not imagined thoughts, dialogue, or sensory description. Minutes 15–18: Partners underline time signals, circle the emphasized detail, and check both versions against the source. Minutes 18–20: Students share or submit a reflection: 'My slower version helps readers notice ___; I kept it accurate by ___.' Close by connecting the individual experience to the book’s larger account of family legacy and Indigenous continuity.

Classroom Activities

Family History, Two Speeds

Students create a two-panel, evidence-based history display about Little Moon and a later generation in Jones’s family. Each panel pairs a short factual summary with a slower, closely observed passage about a documented detail, helping students explore how pacing connects individual lives to a multigenerational history. Students write as historians, not as imagined boarding-school students.

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