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An excerpt from A Whale Hunt, How a Native-American Village Did What No One Thought It Could by Robert Sullivan. This piece is to accompany "Holding Onto Heritage: Native Whale Hunts & Diversity" lesson.

This lesson challenges students to analyze and to reflect on messages presented in songs — and to express their own views about important issues addressed in some songs.

“The New Deciders” examines the influence of voters from four demographic groups—black millennials, Arab Americans, Latino Evangelicals and Asian Americans. Viewers will meet political hopefuls, community leaders, activists and church members from Orange County, California, Cleveland, Ohio, Greensboro, North Carolina and Orlando, Florida, all of whom have the opportunity to move the political needle, locally and nationally.

This lesson focuses on Chapter 12 of To Kill A Mockingbird, which provides a brief moment where students can see the reaction of one African-American character, Lula. Spending time looking at and understanding Lula’s anger toward Scout and Jem is critical to teaching this novel.

“The New Mad Men” explores how changing demographics in the United States have changed the face of advertising. In particular, the focus is on the purchasing power of the 54 million Latinx people currently living in the United States. The episode visits the headquarters of LatinWorks, an advertising agency in Austin, Texas, with a specialty in multicultural advertising.

In “Pass or Fail in Cambodia Town,” host Maria Hinojosa visits Long Beach, California, where she finds a Southeast Asian community struggling with what one interviewee describes as a “trauma-informed history.” Far from the stereotype of Asians as a “model minority,” less than 65 percent of Cambodian adults in the United States have graduated from high school. Cambodia Town, a neighborhood in Long Beach, is a community plagued by poverty and gang violence.

In “Politics of the New South,” Maria Hinojosa revisits Clarkston, Georgia, featured in a previous episode and notable for its immigrant population. It’s three days before an election in which three former refugees are running for city office for the very first time.

The episode “Our Private Idaho” takes viewers to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Once the epicenter of the Aryan Nations’ white-supremacy movements, Coeur d’Alene has nearly doubled in population in the last two decades. Nearly 90 percent of its new arrivals are white, and although the percentage of nonwhite residents is gradually increasing, it’s still tiny at 5.5 percent.

America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa, a PBS documentary series produced by the Harlem-based Futuro Media Group, reveals how dramatic changes in the composition and demographics of the United States are playing out across the country.

In this lesson, students consider the meaning of the terms “respect” and “equality,” and learn about the kinds of actions they can take to promote respect and strive for equality for all people living in the United States.