Defend American Indian Youth — Support California Indian Education Act (AB 1703)
California is at the brink of a watershed moment in a long history of social advocacy in defense of American Indian youth and children by California’s first nations.
Assemblymember Ramos’ California Indian Education Act adds urgency to what has been a decades-long crisis created by the almost two centuries of American colonization of this state. Beginning with a call for genocide by the state’s first American governor after the wholesale usurpation of the sovereign Indigenous territories now known as California by the United States, compulsory government schooling has been a tool for deculturalization, linguicide and disenfranchisement. By 1850, the California legislature enacted the Indian Act authorizing the enslavement of Indigenous men, women and children. Today’s proposed legislation is supported by the sovereign nations that survived the California dream’s nightmare.
AB 1703 calls for the establishment of a California Indian Education Task Force at every school district, county office of education and charter school that operates as a local educational agency. The proposed California Indian Education Task Forces can help educators and parents support American Indian students now and change the way future generations of Californians understand tribal peoples, history, worldviews, and sovereignty.
Californians today may not realize how little they actually know about American Indians, and often how wrong what little they know is — especially educators, administrators and school boards.
Take the popular novel Island of the Blue Dolphins. Students in California are often introduced to this novel between grades 4–9 without ever knowing that the subjects of the novel, the Indigenous Peoples of San Nicholas Island off the coast of San Pedro were actually forcibly removed from the island in 1835 against their will after a protracted battle with Russian otter hunters. This forced relocation was essentially a slave capture expedition and the Nicoleño islanders were brought to a segregated settlement established right outside of the Pueblo de Los Angeles in the Rancheria de los Pipimares (near present day 7th and San Pedro St in downtown Los Angeles). An American named George Nidever, Captain of the Peor es Nada ship, removed the last living islander in 1853. The Nicoleña woman was romantically fictionalized as the Lone Woman in the psyche of the American settlers’ narrative when she was removed to Santa Barbara where she died only a few weeks later. We know today that she was not alone nor was she the “last of her kind” because her people and related tribes still lived in the Los Angeles area.
Never discussed by California teachers or addressed by the state’s curriculum is the historical fact that one of the slave ship’s crew, an American named Isaac Williams, “established relationships with two young Luiseño cousins, María Antonia Apis and María de Jesús Apis (Black 1975:226). The teenage girls bore five of Williams’ children (Black 1975:26–27)”. California’s youth ought to understand that the young child lost to the Islander woman may have been enslaved and forcibly married off as a child to an American settler. A critical minded educator may inquire into how societies protect their children and how do they heal when they cannot?
Educators don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to Indian education and Indian students. For example, a recent LA Times series on the Gabrielino Band of Mission Indians covering Tongva elders provoked a question in my mind as an educator: Who was/were the last fluent, maternal language speaker/s of the indigenous language of Los Angeles?
After interviewing experts cited in the LA Times story on Tongva language, I dug into digital files of American anthropologist JP Harrington. Harrington’s field notes on his research on Gabrielino language date to the 1920’s and 30’s. By July 1932, Harrington had located ninety-year old Jesus Jauro, one of the few remaining Gabrielino speakers willing to speak to him. What struck me the most is that these elders were maternal multilingual knowledge keepers having learned Gabrielino and their own indigenous languages growing up. According to Harrington’s notes they were also cognizant of the multilingual heritage of all surrounding Indigenous Peoples and what a beautiful variety of language wealth there was prior to colonization! One elder even notes that his father tried to teach him Fernandeño and other languages as a child but he never cared to learn! We can only imagine the conversations between father and child as he struggled to defend his language and worldview from extinction.
This was a concern for Indian education of the most profound nature.
I shared this information with our school’s tribal advisors and board members including Nick Rocha, Chair of the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Council of Southern California. Nick’s mother blessed the opening of our school in her territory before she passed on to the long life. Nick and other tribal members noted that many California Indians survived colonization through intermarriage across tribal boundaries.
Today, our school maintains a wide variety of relationships and obligations with the Indigenous Peoples of the Los Angeles basin, much like AB1703 calls for. Through these relationships we deepen our understanding of Indigenous Peoples as part and parcel of our approaches to teaching and learning. As a result we are collaborating on a variety of educational initiatives including an expansion of resources for the revitalization of the Gabrielino language by the tribe.
The California Indian Education Act creates a way forward for California educators. AB1703 is a way to take certain steps towards a world where the many worlds of California Indians, American Indians and Indigenous Peoples also fit. Not only is AB1703 important to the over 30,000 American Indian children and youth enrolled in public schools across the state, but its proposed positive impact should matter to every person of conscience teaching, serving or operating public schools in California.
In Los Angeles, Anahuacalmecac charter school’s educational leadership partnered with local American Indian organizations and local land-based tribal leadership to establish the Indigenous Education Now! Coalition in 2019. The IEN! Coalition was established to advocate for Native students and to educate the LAUSD on its existing legal obligation to formally consult with local tribes, Indian organizations and Indigenous communities. As a result of our advocacy and community organizing efforts, the LAUSD authorized the allocation of $10,000,000 to establish the Indigenous Student Achievement Initiative in 2021. However, due to the lack of formal consultation with and oversight by local tribes, Indian organizations and Indigenous communities, the District’s planned distribution of funding to school sites and proposed use of vendors identified through a Request For Information process limiting funding available to each school to a maximum of $62,000 per school. Leaving the distribution of these funds to a school by school request for funding is a disservice to American Indian and Indigenous students and communities. First, because American Indian students are not regionally concentrated anywhere in the District and over 60% of identified American Indian students are enrolled in charter schools and therefore not eligible to benefit from this funding. Second, because LAUSD does not currently have any way to identify Indigenous students and proposes again to leave this burden in the hands of each school to come up with.
Legislation like AB1703 would establish protocols and processes for consultation on these types of issues.
Moreover, a California Indian Education Task Force at LAUSD for example could begin to identify persistent systemic deficits in educational services to American Indian students and issue a report to the District’s board and the California legislature annually. This report could include findings of issues as defined and prioritized by Indian tribes and organizations as well offer proposed solutions.
Anahuacalmecac recently conducted a similar report focused on the importance of identifying American Indian and Indigenous students across the county and critically analyzing the types of data currently collected and available to the LAUSD and other school districts in Los Angeles County. Our key findings uplifted the importance of Indigenous language rights and Indigenous language education in k-12 schooling. Currently, Anahuacalmecac is the only public school in the county that teaches any Indigenous language formally.
The California Indian Education Act would go a long way to building institutional processes to identify and address systemic deficits and opportunities for transformation as defined by Indian tribes, organizations and experts.
Although nothing could conceivably make up for the atrocities of the past treatment of California Indian children and families beginning with the Indian Act of 1850, passage of the California Indian Education Act of 2022 would go a long way towards the healing of California Indian and other Indigenous students today.