Schooling Experiences of Central California Indian People Across Generations

SCHOOLING EXPERIENCES OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA INDIAN PEOPLE ACROSS GENERATIONS

by Tara Williams B.A. (Fresno Pacific University) 2004 M.A. (Fresno Pacific University) 2009

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctorate in Education

Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at Fresno State Kremen School of Education and Human Development

California State University, Fresno 2012 ii Tara Williams May 2012 Educational Leadership

SCHOOLING EXPERIENCES OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA INDIAN PEOPLE ACROSS GENERATIONS

Abstract

This exploratory study took a post-colonialist lens to record, examine, and document schooling experiences of California Indian people across several generations representing three Central Valley tribes: the Mono, the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria, and the Tule River Tribe. Past and present perceptions of Indian schooling were elicited through personal interviews and framed by archival data from educators and students through multiple generations. Mission school, boarding school, and public school experiences were documented and compared. Interviewees agreed on the importance of education for tribal youth as a collaborative effort between tribes and public schools. Boarding school experiences were reported as having been positive or negative depending on historical and socio-political context. Interviewees indicated a strong interest in including traditional culture and language as part of the schooling experience for California Indian youth. Gaming as a source of revenue was perceived by interviewees as having both positive and negative ramifications for the education of tribal youth.

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California State University, Fresno Kremen School of Education and Human Development Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership

This dissertation was presented by

Tara Williams

It was defended on May 7, 2012 and approved by:

Susan Tracz, Chair Educational Research and Administration

Elaine Garan Literacy and Early Education

Sharon Brown Welty Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people were exceedingly generous with their time and their assistance, and it would not have been possible to complete this dissertation without their support. Frankie Williams, my husband, assisted in too many ways to name, facilitating contact with family and friends who became interviewees, contributing time and knowledge of his traditions and culture, not to mention inexhaustible patience and goodwill. I would also like to express my profound appreciation to my ever-supportive dissertation chair, Dr. Susan Tracz, for her listening ear and valuable advice, and more thanks to my dedicated committee members Dr. Sharon Brown-Welty and Dr. Elaine Garan for their patience, rapid reading, and forward-looking, sensitive feedback and advice. Dr. Gelya Frank was exceptionally gracious and generous in sharing her previous research. This study would not have been possible without the foundation provided by her previous scholarly work. Dr. Jared Dahl Aldern contributed time, advice, and several key background texts. Thanks also to Dr. Laura Alamillo and my DPELFS cohort-mates Alicia Lozano and Lorena Maldonado for encouraging me to pursue a deeply meaningful study. Special thanks are also due to the Tule River Tribal Council, the Tule River Elders Council, John Focke and the Towanits Indian Education Center for their support, as well as Kaya and Jeannette Atwell, Ron Alec, Suzanne Moineau, the Hon. Ron Goode, Barbara Ezell and the Sierra Mono Museum, and each and every one of those who consented to be interviewed. Thank you for adding your voices to the conversation, and I hope we will all have the opportunity to talk again soon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

LIST OF TABLES ...... x

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Post-Colonialism and the Effects of Colonization ...... 2

American Indians Today ...... 3

Historical Background: California Tribes ...... 4

Indian Education ...... 8

Mission Schools ...... 9

Residential and Boarding Schools ...... 9

Educational Reform ...... 13

Research Questions ...... 16

Limitations ...... 17

Definition of Terms...... 17

CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ...... 19

Introduction ...... 19

History of American Indian Education ...... 19

Indigenous and Colonial Periods: 1492-1776 ...... 20

Christianization ...... 23

Treaty Period: 1776-1871 ...... 26

Indian Removal: 1824-1850 ...... 30

Extermination: 1850-1890 ...... 33

Assimilation: 1870-1920s ...... 35

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Self-Determination: 1934-1953 ...... 47

Termination: 1953-1958 ...... 48

Reform: 1960s and Beyond ...... 49

Framing and Reframing American Indian Identity ...... 51

Designation as American Indian ...... 53

Official Recognition of American Indian Identity ...... 54

Language, Literacy, and Cultural Identity ...... 57

Psychological Theory of Human Development ...... 60

Education for Hegemony ...... 63

American Indian Boarding Schools as Total Institutions ...... 64

Self-mortification Processes in Indian Boarding Schools ...... 65

Resiliency ...... 67

American Indian Education Today ...... 68

Tribal Gaming and American Indian Education ...... 69

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ...... 71

Rationale for Qualitative Research ...... 71

Political Implications of the Qualitative Approach ...... 72

Research Questions ...... 73

Data Collection ...... 74

The Semi-structured Interview ...... 74 Addressing Researcher Subjectivity: The ―Separating Out‖ Analytic

Technique ...... 76

Archival Data: Recovering Voices of the Past ...... 77

Data Analysis ...... 77

Ethical Considerations ...... 78

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CHAPTER 4: RESULTS/OUTCOMES ...... 79

Introduction ...... 79

Research Questions ...... 80

Research Design ...... 80

Limitations ...... 82

Schooling Experiences: Tule River Tribe of Yokuts Indians ...... 86

Interviews with Tule River Tribe Members ...... 92

Tule River Tribe: Reservation School ...... 95

Porterville Unified: Vandalia Elementary School ...... 104

Porterville Unified Middle Schools: Pioneer and Bartlett ...... 108

Porterville High Schools ...... 109

Sherman Institute/Sherman Indian High School ...... 112

Stewart Indian School ...... 120 Schooling Experiences of Mono Indian People: Interviews with

Mono Tribe Members ...... 128

North Fork Rancheria ...... 129

North Fork Presbyterian Mission School ...... 130

Wallace Barcus: ―A Controlled Study of Indian and White Children…‖ 135

North Fork Elementary School ...... 139

Sierra Elementary ...... 140

Sierra High School ...... 141

Schooling Experiences of the Tachi Yokuts: Santa Rosa Rancheria ...... 143

Summary of Findings ...... 148

Interviewees‘ Perceptions of the Value and Importance of Education ..... 150

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION/SUMMARY/CONCLUSION ...... 153

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Introduction ...... 153

Summary ...... 156 Theme 1: Boarding school experiences varied for Central

California Indian people...... 157 Theme 2: Experiences with educators (teachers, coaches, administrators) influenced identity formation, academic persistence, and resiliency

among Central California Indian students...... 160 Theme 3: Grounding in traditional language and culture enhances

resiliency...... 166 Theme 4: The increasing level of education among Central California Indian people is resulting in a desire and need for more jobs that

can be filled by tribal members...... 170 Theme 5: Central California Indian people are interested in establishing their own schools in which traditional content, including California Indian languages and history, and mainstream content can both be

taught...... 172 Theme 6: California Indian people have mixed feelings about the

impact of gaming on tribal youth...... 176

Implications and Further Research ...... 182

Conclusion ...... 184

REFERENCES ...... 187

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1 Estimate of Probable Indian Populations of California, 1800-1900 ...... 7

Table 2 Erikson’s Developmental Stages of Life...... 62

Table 3 Tule River Tribe Interviewees ...... 93

Table 4 Archived (Frank, 1973-2004) Tule River Tribe Interviewees ...... 94

Table 5 Mono Tribe Interviewees ...... 138

Table 6 Archived and Other Materials Relating to Mono Tribe ...... 138

Table 7 Tachi Yokut Interviewee ...... 144

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. California tribal territories prior to Euro-American contact...... 5 Figure 2. Chiracahua Apache children on arrival at Carlisle Indian School, 1886...... 10 Figure 3. Chiracahua Apache children after 4 months at Carlisle Indian School...... 11 Figure 4. Tom Torlino, Navajo Indian, upon arrival at Carlisle Indian School in 1882 and 3 years later in 1885...... 11

Figure 5. Woxie Haury, a Cheyenne woman, in studio portraits, early 1900s...... 12

Figure 6. Federally recognized Indian tribes of California...... 14

Figure 7. Indian country, 1492 - Present ...... 21

Figure 8. Tule River reservation school, 1940...... 97

Figure 9. Fort Bidwell schoolhouse in 1964...... 99

Figure 10. Sherman Indian High School. Undated postcard...... 114

Figure 11. Sherman Indian High School, circa 1908...... 116

Figure 12. Sherman Indian School today...... 121 Figure 13. Indian students awaiting baptism in the Stewart swimming pool, ca. 1900...... 122

Figure 14. Stewart baseball team, ca. 1905...... 122

Figure 15. Girls‘ sewing class at Stewart, ca. 1900...... 123

Figure 16. Stewart Indian School parade float, ca.1946...... 123 Figure 17. Benjamin Perryman, Creek chief, and his grandson Joseph Moses Perryman, founder of the North Fork Presbyterian church and mission...... 130

Figure 18. Renata P. as a child...... 133

Figure 19. North Fork Mission students...... 134 xi

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Figure 20. Wallace Barcus with his 3rd grade class in 1954...... 136

Figure 21. Sierra High School football team, 1966...... 143

Figure 22. Josie Atwell, grandmother of Clarence (Kaya) Atwell...... 146

Figure 23. Clarence (Kaya) Atwell as a child...... 148

Figure 24. Mono Dreamers logo...... 186

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

―A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct… the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.‖ Thus spake California‘s first governor, Peter H. Burnett, on January 7, 1851, in an address to the California legislature. At the time, California had been a state for less than 6 months; less than 3 years earlier, it had still been part of Mexico. California Indian tribes of the Central Valley had managed to evade much of the contact with Franciscan missions attempting to Christianize the tribes of the coastal areas, and they had been more or less left to their own devices by the Mexican government. However, the arrival of gold- seekers and Euro-American settlers in the mid-19th century represented a massive assault on multiple fronts: Central Valley tribes now had to contend directly with conflicts over land and resources as well as unaccustomed diseases brought by the influx of outsiders. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, California Indian populations were decimated: Of an estimated population of 18,000 Indian souls at the turn of the 19th century, by 1880, a mere 600 survived (Cook, 1976). Yet despite Governor Burnett‘s racist declaration and the violent repercussions it gave warrant to, a century and a half later, California‘s American Indian population has not only survived, many tribes are currently experiencing a period of thriving growth. Displaying remarkable endurance and resilience, California‘s surviving tribes, like other Indian tribes across the United States, are showing gains in population and evidence of socioeconomic recovery. This study seeks to document and explore perceptions of schooling and the role of education in the survival and recovery of the Central Valley‘s Indian tribes.

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Post-Colonialism and the Effects of Colonization Taking a critical post-colonialist lens, this study also endeavors to take into account the effects of historic cultural and linguistic subjugation, which may linger and resonate among California Indian youth today. Post-colonialism, a postmodern intellectual and scholarly discourse initiated in the 1960s (Young, 2001), seeks to understand the legacy of Euro-American traditions of domination of other cultures. In the Americas, the colonialist era is regarded as having its symbolic beginning in 1492 and continuing into the 20th century. An important feature of post-colonial thought is the recognition of language as a form of power. The perceived right to superimpose one‘s language and culture upon others, and the belief that this superimposition provides a ―civilizing‖ influence, is a prominent feature of the colonial mindset. Fanon (2008) described the resulting ―inferiority complex of the soul‖ engendered in colonized peoples that works to sustain their domination (p. 18). Horsman (1981) connected the concepts of racial superiority and the American conviction of Manifest Destiny, granting to White or Anglo-Saxon people the right to exert dominion over non- Caucasian races. For the Euro-American colonizer, the language of civilization is English. As the colonizer exercises the ―civilizing claims of imperialism‖ (Young, 2001), the colonized individual is expected to become ―proportionately whiter— that is, he will become a real human being, in direct proportion to his mastery‖ (p. 1) of the dominant language. Post-colonialist scholars question the assumed right, and rightness, of such linguistic and cultural superimposition. Colonization is more than a historical or political reality; it carries with it psychological, emotional, social and spiritual ramifications for both the colonizer and the colonized. A disturbing blind spot in American history is revealed by the reality that shortly after fighting a Revolutionary War for the purpose of throwing

3 3 off the yoke of British colonization, the new nation picked up that very same yoke and placed it on the backs of indigenous peoples who were perceived to be racial, linguistic, or cultural ―others.‖ The field of psychohistory (DeMause, 1998) metaphorically equates colonization with abusive human childrearing practices, contending that ―all social violence—whether by war, revolution or economic exploitation—is ultimately a consequence of child abuse‖ (para. 50). According to DeMause, the resulting dysfunction may be reflected not only in the behavior of individuals, but of entire nations and cultural groups. Applying this metaphor to American Indian experience, in addition to direct acts of violence enacted to promote genocide, education and schooling may be viewed as additional forces used to traumatize American Indian children through the government-sanctioned practice of sending them to residential schools to learn English and to eradicate their cultural and linguistic identities. As famously articulated by Captain Richard Henry Pratt (1892), founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the purpose of the residential schooling process was to ―Kill the Indian… and save the man.‖

American Indians Today According to the 2010 United States Census, American Indian and Alaskan natives comprise .9% of the U.S. population, a number that represents approximately 5 million people. Because the American Indian population is growing at a faster rate than the American population as a whole, census figures predict that it will increase to 2% by the year 2050. To put this population increase into historical perspective, it is important to recall that prior to colonization, in the area currently designated as the United States, American Indians comprised 100% of the population.

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Today, half of the surviving American Indian population lives west of the Mississippi River. California is home to the largest population of survivors, with 1.0% of the state‘s overall population currently identifying as American Indian or Alaskan natives. This number represents some 740,000 people. Central California counties, particularly those of the San Joaquin Valley, report American Indian populations higher than the state as a whole: 1.6% in Tulare County and 1.7% in Fresno and Kings counties, respectively. Overall, the American Indian population tends to be younger than the American population as a whole, with a median age of just under 30 compared to just under 37. One-third of the U.S. American Indian population is younger than 18. These children continue to be much more likely than other ethnicities to live in poverty, particularly if they live on an Indian reservation, and they are also more likely to be raised by grandparents than the population as a whole (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). While historically American Indian students have been less likely to complete a high school education or earn a college degree, in recent years this situation has been rapidly changing. As of the 1990 census, only 54% of American Indians living on reservations had graduated from high school. However, the 2010 census reported that 80% of American Indians over the age of 25 now have a high school diploma, which comes close to approximating the 85% rate reported for the U.S. population as a whole (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).

Historical Background: California Tribes In the 18th and 19th centuries, as American settlers moved from the Atlantic seaboard westward across the continent in search of land and resources, the indigenous peoples of Central California were among the last to be confronted in their ancestral lands, mostly due to geography. The California interior was difficult to access, and so the indigenous population there lived relatively

5 5 undisturbed as, for a century, the native inhabitants of the rest of the continent underwent the turmoil of displacement and conquest. The map in Figure 1 shows the areas traditionally frequented by Central California Indian tribes prior to contact with Europeans or Euro-Americans.

Figure 1. California tribal territories prior to Euro-American contact. Source: Wild Rivers Teaching American History Project (2001)

Spain planted its first Catholic missions on the coast of California in 1769, at which time it is estimated that the area that would later become the state of

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California was home to more than 100 separate nations or tribes. The first known visit to the interior was an expedition led by Captain Pedro Fages in 1772. However, unlike their coastal neighbors, the indigenous peoples of the Central Valley of California more or less successfully resisted recruitment efforts by the Spanish missions that had subjugated—and decimated—other California tribes. Cook (1976) estimated an aboriginal population of approximately 310,000 when California was ―discovered‖ by Cabrillo in 1542. Cook further estimated that there were nearly 84,000 indigenous people living in California‘s Central Valley when the Spanish first arrived, the population density reflecting the abundance of food available in the area. The Yokuts, the collective name given to indigenous peoples who lived in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of what is now the state of California, were comprised of 40 to 50 tribes living in villages, each with an average population of 200 to 300 people, governed by a process of consensus utilizing a decentralized leadership of ―tiyas,‖ local authorities who resolved problems based on custom or precedent. These tribes lived in an area of abundant resources with few documented incidents of internecine conflict (Frank & Goldberg, 2010). Reality changed irrevocably for the Yokuts people with the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Cook (1976) estimated that in the 32 years between 1848 and 1880, the Yokuts population of the San Joaquin Valley was nearly eradicated, from approximately 14,000 at the start of the Gold Rush to a surviving remnant of only 600 souls (p. 351). This cold fact represents a lived reality in which tightly bonded communities, in the space of a single generation, witnessed the demise of 96% of their friends and family members, while simultaneously being divested of control over their lands, resources, and way of life. Table 1 documents the steep decline in numbers of California Indian people over the

7 7 course of a single century, showing a population loss of 52% in a single year, 1849, the onset of the California Gold Rush.

Table 1

Estimate of Probable Indian Populations of California, 1800-1900 Loss as % of Total Year Population Loss in Number Remaining Pop. 1800 260,000 - - 1834 210,000 50,000 -19% 1849 100,000 110,000 -52% 1852 85,000 15,000 -15% 1856 50,000 35,000 -41% 1860 35,000 15,000 -30% 1870 30,000 5,000 -14% 1880 20,500 9,500 -32% 1890 18,000 1,500 -7% 1900 15, 500 2,500 -14% Source: Merriam (1905)

Yet the few survivors proved remarkably durable, and a century and a half later, their descendants continue to occupy what remains of their ancestral lands, despite all efforts to discourage, relocate, or eradicate them. Again, geography played an important role in this outcome. Unlike other indigenous peoples who were forcibly moved westward to accommodate Americans‘ appetite for land and resources, California tribes already occupied a westernmost portion of the continental United States. Attempts at simple genocide proved unsuccessful, and despite state and federal governments that looked the other way or simply failed to act in a timely or appropriate manner to protect them, California Indian people

8 8 somehow managed to survive to this day, many on the same lands, or lands adjacent to those of their ancestors.

Indian Education One of the most amazing things concerning the Yokuts is their extensive knowledge concerning their environment…[a little eight year old girl] was able to identify more than 300 plants, birds and animals common within a few miles of the cabin where she was born and then was living. Her mother knew more than 500 items… Both the mother and daughter knew not only the names of the plants but also where they grew, when they ripened, and whether the plant had any medicinal or food value… what it was good for, how and when to harvest it, how to prepare and administer it…This knowledge extended to the birds, animals, shrubs and trees, and even to the surrounding soils and rocks… the data furnished by the daughter checked exactly with that furnished by the mother, a record never attained by school teachers in formal education. Remember that this was in addition to the dozens of extended stories constituting the folklore of their world and relating to its creation, the creation of the Indians, a universal deluge, the hereafter, the sun, moon, and principal constellations and their interrelated movement and to every distinguishable feature of the landscape. What educated present-day resident of that same area has an equal store of information about his immediate surroundings? (Latta, 1949/1999, pp. 618- 619) In this commentary, renowned Yokuts researcher Frank Latta confronted the dilemma of defining education in a way that can encompass its meaning across two very different cultures. Defining education is an ontological problem that may serve to illustrate the culture clash between Euro-Americans and American Indians. Fueled by the colonialist assumption on the part of the American government and its predominantly Christian citizenry that the English language and Christian-American culture were inherently superior and civilized, the dominant Euro-American culture viewed American Indian people as primitive, savage, and in need of redemption. Since the founding of the United States in the late 18th century, government policies have reflected changing attitudes toward American Indians that have run

9 9 the spectrum from acceptance of mutual sovereignty to calls for extermination. By the late 19th century, efforts to exterminate Indians through violence and neglect were replaced with imposition of a process of forced assimilation. Education was assimilation‘s weapon of choice; the cultural battle then shifted decisively to the schoolhouse.

Mission Schools Christian missionaries began efforts to convert American Indians as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, efforts that were continued by mission schools of various denominations into the 19th century. The system of mission schools was established and run by religious agencies supported by federal funds (Adams, 1974). While early missionary efforts often involved missionaries and teachers learning tribal languages as a basis for instruction, later schools followed an English-only policy, particularly from the 1880s into the 1930s. In the early years of the 20th century, government focus began to shift from residential and mission schools to reservation-based public schools that provided literacy, industrial, and agricultural education for Indian youth (Fear-Segal, 2007).

Residential and Boarding Schools The most aggressive efforts toward assimilation occurred in federally funded off-reservation residential or boarding schools, where many Indian children were forced to attend and stay for three years or more without vacations or visits home. Captain Pratt established the first Indian residential school in St. Augustine, Florida, in a fortress built by the Spanish to defend the Florida coast; the colonialist reverberations are apparent to the post-modern reader. Pratt‘s first students were Indian prisoners of war, members of the Chiracahua Apache, a

10 10 southwestern band of mountain Indians, a small number of whom who had fought in resistance to U.S. government forces by Geronimo. Pratt was convinced that Indians, like Whites, were born as tabulas rasas upon which the civilizing influence of the English language and Euro-American culture and work ethic could readily be inscribed, and that the entire procedure of Indian assimilation could be accomplished in a single generation. Pratt‘s Fort Marion school became the model for his Carlisle Indian Industrial school in Pennsylvania and all other off-reservation Indian boarding schools of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Welsh, 1887; Fear-Segal, 2007). Figures 2-5 represent before and after pictures of Pratt‘s students, intended to advertise the success of his efforts to transform American Indian people to fit the Euro-American image.

Figure 2. Chiracahua Apache children on arrival at Carlisle Indian School, 1886. Source: California Indian Education (CALIE)

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Figure 3. Chiracahua Apache children after 4 months at Carlisle Indian School. Source: California Indian Education (CALIE)

Figure 4. Tom Torlino, Navajo Indian, upon arrival at Carlisle Indian School in 1882 and 3 years later in 1885. Source: California Indian Education (CALIE)

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Figure 5. Woxie Haury, a Cheyenne woman, in studio portraits, early 1900s. Source: California Indian Education (CALIE), from the collection of Estelle Reel, Superintendent of Indian Schools, 1898–1910

At the government level, teaching English to Indians was considered to be in the state‘s own best interest. Superintendent of Indian Schools from 1886-1888, John B. Riley, condemned the reality that ―more than twenty thousand [Indian] children …are growing up without knowledge of our language… learning the vices rather than the virtues of our civilization‖ (Spack, 2002, p. 31), a situation that was viewed as potentially destabilizing to society itself. Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan condoned the use of solitary confinement, beatings, and other punishments for Indian students caught speaking their native languages, disciplinary practices for which Indian boarding schools eventually became notorious. Morgan justified the use of institutionalized violence by stating that ―the Indians must conform to the white man‘s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must‖ (Spack, 2002, p. 35).

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Educational Reform The Indian Citizenship Act, passed in 1924, extended, through the Fourteenth Amendment, the right to education for American Indian youth, among other entitlements (Wright, Hirlinger, & England, 1998). Although litigation was frequently necessary to guarantee fair participation in educational opportunities for American Indian students, change was on the horizon. The Meriam Report of 1928 documented horrific conditions and practices in federally funded Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools, generating a shift in attitude toward American Indian education at the government level (Szasz, 1999). In 1934, Congress passed the Johnson-O‘Malley Act, which provided assistance to public schools for each American Indian student enrolled. Indian boarding schools began to temper their coercive tactics; in some cases, management of these schools was taken over by Indians themselves. During the Great Depression, sending children away to boarding school became a survival tactic for some Indian families, as described in the experience of Fortunate Eagle (2010) at the Pipestone School in Minnesota. Ironically, the bringing together of children of disparate tribes at Indian boarding schools resulted, for many, not in cultural or identity eradication, but, according to Adams (1995), in the forging of ―a pan-Indian consciousness.‖ Intertribal bonds also resulted in the formation of regional pan-Indian political organizations such as the Mission Indian Federation (Shipek, 1989), which existed from 1919 to 1965 for the purpose of asserting sovereignty rights of Southern California Indians (see Figure 6 for locations of federally recognized tribes). The American Indian Movement (AIM) embraced a broader pan-Indian political agenda and entered national consciousness with the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 and Wounded Knee in 1973.

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Figure 6. Federally recognized Indian tribes of California. Source: Paula Giese, http://www.hanksville.net/maps/ca/california.html

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The 1972 Indian Education Act was the first piece of legislation geared toward equal educational opportunity focused specifically on American Indian youth. In the 1970s, the percentage of American Indian students attending public schools rose dramatically to 70%; at present, that figure hovers closer to 90% (Pavel, Curtin, & Whitener, 1995). Fear-Segal (2007) described an Indian powwow that was held on May 28, 2000, on the grounds of the military barracks that once housed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. A 15-foot tipi, its entrance facing east toward the cemetery where more than 200 Indian students from tribes all over the nation were buried, provided a changing area for powwow dancers. A traditional Lakota spirit- releasing ceremony was enacted to assist spirits of Indian children who had died at the school to pass over peacefully to the other side. Several thousand people, many of them descendants of past Carlisle attendees, participated in the powwow and danced to the sound of traditional drums on the earth of the place where their ancestors had been sent to be divested of their Indian culture. Strands of American Indian past, present and future are entwined in the following image observed at the Carlisle powwow by a Pawnee woman: She watched ―the northern drummer hold his cell phone to his drum, so that a friend could hear the beat, hundreds of miles away back home (Fear-Segal, 2007, p. 312). In the effort to understand American Indian education and schooling, the strands of past, present and future, of policy and practice, of cultural and personal identity are braided together and must be unplaited to enable understanding and to prevent the mistakes of the past from limiting the possibilities of the future. How have California Indians experienced schooling and education? What does education mean to Indian people today? What is the place and significance of schooling for members of a culture within a culture? In California‘s Central

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Valley, the voices that are missing from the American Indian education conversation are the voices of Central California Indians themselves. Speaking in a general sense about the aftermath of colonialism, Young (2001) stated that it consists of histories of slavery, of untold, unnumbered deaths… of the enforced migration and diaspora of millions of peoples… of the appropriation of territories and of land, of the institutionalization of racism, of the destruction of cultures and the superimposition of other cultures… postcolonial theory always intermingles the past with the present…it is directed toward the active transformations of the present out of the clutches of the past. (p. 4) It is precisely this sense of present-day transformation ―out of the clutches of the past‖ that serves as the guiding metaphor upon which this study was built.

Research Questions The post-colonialist point of view requires the granting of equal consideration to historical circumstances and the perception of those events as experienced by those who were subjugated or colonized. This study sought to record and interpret the meaning of schooling and education to American Indians of California‘s Central Valley by documenting and comparing the experiences of several generations of family members within three different tribes, situated against the backdrop of changing governmental policies, attitudes, and practices. How have California Indians of the Central Valley experienced and perceived schooling across the generations? What does education mean to California Indians today compared to what it meant a generation, two generations or more ago? How do schooling experiences and perceptions differ by tribe, by school, by location? I explored these questions, and documented the responses, as I conducted personal interviews with multi-generational members of extended families from

17 17 three Central Valley tribes: The Tule River Tribe, of which my husband is an enrolled member; the Mono; and the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria. In an effort to include voices of those speaking from further back in time, I also explored archived data, including the personal papers of the minister of the North Fork Indian Mission School and personal interviews of Tule River elders recorded by Gelya Frank in the 1970s-2004. It is my hope that recording and comparing the experiences of Central Valley Indian people across time will not only serve to give voice to their perceptions and experiences but will also enrich and inform the ongoing conversation about the purpose and practice of schooling, and what education means and can accomplish for Indian students of California‘s Central Valley.

Limitations As a researcher I recognize that in this study the tables of perception are turned: as a White Euro-American woman whose education and attitudes have been shaped by my own experiences of Catholic and public schooling within the dominant Euro-American culture, I endeavored, as a self-identified cultural ―other,‖ to understand and interpret the experiences of people whose frame of reference is very different than my own. Areas of distortion, misperception and misinterpretation are not only possible but likely to have occurred.

Definition of Terms Definitions of terms are derived from research literature and participant observation. American Indian, for purposes of describing participants in the study, will refer to enrolled tribal members and direct descendants of various tribes, including

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Central California Indian tribes such as the Tule River Band of Yokuts, Mono, and Tachi Yokuts Indian. Education will refer to the transmission and imparting of both knowledge and cultural norms and practices to members of a group or society. Hegemony (Macedo, Dendrinos & Gounari, 2003) refers to the social, cultural, ideological and economic influence exerted by a dominant group. Identity (Stets & Burke, 2000) will refer to both personal and social aspects of identity, including self-categorization, an individual‘s perception of self as a member or nonmember of categories and roles, and social comparison, how that perception interfaces with acceptance by a particular group with whom the individual identifies. Post-colonialism (Young, 2001) is a lens that seeks to understand the effects of Euro-American domination of other cultures. Schooling will refer to the formal process of state-sponsored education designed to shape knowledge, thinking and behavior. Total institution (Goffman, 1961) will refer to a setting in which a large number of people live and work, and in which all aspects of their daily life are regulated and controlled. Transculturation (Huffman, 2010) a term borrowed from anthropology, is here recast to refer to the process by which an individual gains proficiency in concepts and behaviors of another culture without sacrificing or hybridizing elements of his or her original culture.

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CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Introduction American Indian education: These three words encompass vast political, social, cultural, historical, linguistic and psychological considerations, each and all of which defy simple definition or categorization. Definitions matter insofar as they contribute to the creation of frames or categories of thought that determine human perception and behavior (Gitlin, 1980; Goffman, 1974; Lakoff, 1987). Historically, American Indian education policy and practice have reflected the changing nature of these frames and definitions. In an arguably post-colonial present-day United States, defining who is or is not an American Indian raises questions of social and cultural identity. Defining where one ―belongs‖ is not merely a personal choice, but one which may be largely determined by others outside the self (Rummens, 1993, 2003). Education, whatever form it takes within a culture or group of people, concerns itself, directly or indirectly, with the shaping of individual and cultural identity through the imparting of shared norms and bodies of knowledge (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Fanon, 2008). Public education in the United States is shaped at the government level by policy, and that policy is in turn determined by dominant and accepted concepts and frames of reality. Therefore, American Indian education exists at the nexus of American history, culture and identity. Relevant research pertaining to each of these topics is reviewed in this chapter.

History of American Indian Education The history of American Indian education mirrors changing attitudes toward American Indians overall, initially in relationship with early European

20 20 explorers and colonists, and later with the increasingly dominant Euro-American culture. As interpreted by Grande (2004): Indian education was never simply about the desire to ―civilize‖ or even deculturalize a people, but rather, from its very inception, it was a project designed to colonize Indian minds as a means of gaining access to Indian labor, land, and resources. Therefore, unless educational reform happens concurrently with analyses of the forces of colonialism, it can only serve as a deeply insufficient (if not negligible) Band-Aid over the incessant wounds of imperialism. (p. 19) In an attempt to follow the interwoven strands of public perceptions, government policies, and their impact on American Indians and their education, this history is divided into seven frequently overlapping periods: the Indigenous and Colonial Periods from 1492 to 1776; the Treaty Period from 1776 to 1871; the Extermination Era from 1850 to 1890; the Assimilation Era from the 1870s to the 1920s; the Era of Self-Determination, from 1934 to 1953; Termination, from 1953 to 1958; and, finally, the Era of Reform, beginning in the 1960s and extending to the present.

Indigenous and Colonial Periods: 1492-1776 In 1492, scholarly estimates of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere range from 75 to 145 million people, with 8 to 18 million living in the area north of Mexico (Stannard, 1993; Thornton, 1987). Prior to 1492, indigenous peoples educated their own children in their native languages in accordance with their cultures and traditions. However, with the arrival of European explorers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the concept and implementation of Indian education began to change, as European explorers and subsequent settlers took upon themselves the mission of imposing their own religious and cultural beliefs and practices on the inhabitants of what they named the New World (see Figure 7). Following a papal bull issued in 1492 that granted to Spain any land west of

21 21 the Azores that was not under Christian rule as of Christmas Day of that year, Columbus made his first fateful trip across the Atlantic. Upon encountering and befriending the natives of Hispaniola (now Haiti), Columbus stated, ―I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appears that they have no religion,‖ and that he believed that the Indians would be ―more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force‖ (Bourne, 1906, pp. 108-110). His subsequent expedition the following year included five priests.

Figure 7. Indian country, 1492 - Present Source: Cherokeehealing.com

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Over the coming century, Spanish explorers would extend their reach into and across the South American continent, establishing outposts that mirrored the close church-state relationship of Spain (Ahlstrom & Hall, 2004). Spanish Jesuits attempted as early as 1570 to establish a mission in the Chesapeake Bay area in North America, but their efforts failed. The Franciscans were more successful, extending their reach northward into what is now Texas and New Mexico, recording that in 1634 they were ministering to some 30,000 Indian converts using catechisms they translated into native vernacular as well as providing some ―elementary education‖ (Ahlstrom & Hall, 2004, p. 41). The Spanish Franciscans began to establish missions in the area of what is now New Mexico as early as 1610, later continuing their efforts in California, where they established 21 missions along the coast for the purpose of converting California Indians to both the Catholic religion and a civil, agricultural lifestyle. Work and worship were core values of the missions, where Indian converts spent long hours in both labor and prayer and suffered beatings if they refused to comply with the friars‘ imposed schedules (Lightfoot, 2005). Under Spanish colonization, Indian people were subdued and employed as a hard labor force in Spanish mills, mines, and fields. Where the friars did not learn the local Indian languages, mission efforts were less successful and the numbers of converts began to dissipate (Ahlstrom & Hall, 2004). Though California was largely ignored by the Spanish until the 18th century, the Spanish tendency to dominate native populations was perpetuated here as well, as noted by Dana (1840) upon sailing into Monterey Bay: ―There is no working class (the Indians being practically serfs) … The Indians… do all the hard work, two or three being attached to the better houses, and even the poorest persons are able to keep one at least‖ (pp. 77-83). This colonialist attitude of domination and

23 23 relegation of native inhabitants to servile positions in the labor force would persist among Euro-American colonists and deeply inform American Indian educational efforts for centuries to come.

Christianization Other early efforts to educate and Christianize the indigenous peoples were initiated by the French Jesuits (Ahlstrom & Hall, 2004), who landed in what is now Nova Scotia in 1611 and gradually moved westward along the great waterways toward the interior of the North American continent. As the Reformation in Europe had given rise to opposing currents of religiosity springing out of the Roman Catholic and emerging Protestant traditions, the New World provided a setting for the playing out of missionary and evangelical zeal. Efforts to Christianize and Anglicize native peoples were set against the backdrop of conflicting political interests and alliances in the process of colonization, as France, Spain, and England vied for control and possession of the Americas. Missionaries sought first to save the souls of the Indian peoples through conversion, in the interest of which many learned native languages, established systems of grammar for previously oral languages, and also translated the Bible into native vernacular. Wyss (2000) illuminated the role of the Bible and Christianity among Protestant colonists attempting to educate American Indian tribes during the early colonial era. The Virginia Company started its own mission schools but ran them only briefly, from 1619 to 1622. Centuries before the articulation of Manifest Destiny, Massachusetts Bay colonists such as Increase and Cotton Mather (1676) declared indigenous people to be heathens ―whose land the Lord God of our fathers hath given to us for a rightful possession… the English Israel‖ (p. 46, emphasis in the original). The Bible, considered by Christians to be the

24 24 embodiment of God‘s truth, was the primary educational tool utilized by early missionaries. Christianity and literacy thus became linked, as Protestant missionaries believed that only through literacy could genuine Christian conversion take place: ―all godly people should be literate‖ (p. 7). From the earliest European settlements in New England, literacy became associated with virtue, civility, and Christianity, while illiteracy was viewed as the hallmark of heathenism, vice, and superstition. During colonial times, the only American Indians to receive an education were those who, like the children of the Wampanoag, were sent to work as indentured servants to European families in exchange for gaining literacy skills (Wyss, 2000) or those who converted to Christianity and received some schooling through missions or missionaries. In some cases, the missionaries extended themselves to learn or understand American Indian language and culture. For example, John Eliot, a Protestant minister with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, learned the language of the local Massachusetts tribe in order to preach to them more effectively, and later set up the first of the ―praying Indian‖ towns in 1651 among Algonquians. Eliot insisted the converted Indians live in English-style houses, be subject to law rather than consensus, wear English-style clothes, and structure their families as English patriarchies. Fines were imposed for infractions such as ―pawwowing‖ (using traditional healers), having long hair, having more than one wife, isolating menstruating women, biting lice, or using bear grease. Beaver (1966) recounted that by 1674, 14 such towns had been established in New England. American Indians in praying towns were taught English using the Bible and devotional texts, as well as agricultural and domestic skills. However, in the face of the escalating violence of Indian resistance to the encroachment of European settlers in the decades-long King Philip‘s War (1620-1675), praying

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Indians soon found themselves caught between cultures, rejected by traditional tribal members and distrusted by White settlers who suspected them of retaining tribal loyalties. The praying towns and their inhabitants disappeared when the Massachusetts, Connecticut and other regional tribes were forcibly displaced west of the Connecticut River. Even before the American Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States, two very different approaches to Indian education become apparent: One utilizes the native language spoken by the tribe as a bridge to the establishment of bilingualism (native language plus) and biculturalism (tribal culture plus), while the other approach promotes imposition of the colonizer‘s language (e.g., ―English only‖) accompanied by cultural divestiture (subtractive approach). A proponent of the language and culture plus model, and perhaps the most influential of the colonial New England Indian educators, was Eleazar Wheelock (Beaver, 1966). After graduating from Yale in 1733 and being ordained as a Calvinist minister shortly thereafter, Wheelock envisioned what educators today would recognize as a dual immersion program: His idea was to start a school in which American Indian and White youth would be educated together and learn each other‘s languages and culture, in the interest of training them to work together as pairs to go forth and establish new churches and missions. Plagued continuously by financial difficulties, Wheelock‘s Moor-Indian Charity School existed for a brief period in the mid-18th century. In 1755, Wheelock‘s school was attended by 21 Indian boys, 10 Indian girls, and 7 White boys. As support for his program dwindled, Wheelock was called away to establish Dartmouth College in 1769 with a charter from King George II. Wheelock appended his Indian school to the new university. Likewise, William and Mary College had a special house for Indian students as early as 1723.

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Initially, Indian tribal leaders seemed to accept Christian missionaries as praying men having spiritual beliefs that were not necessarily in conflict with their own native traditions (Eastman, 1907/1970). However, this acceptance did not necessarily extend to all forms of European education. When Virginia commissioners offered a William and Mary education to sons of the chiefs of the Six Nations in 1774, the tribes reacted initially to this turn of events with amusement. In a demonstration of what Thomas Jefferson (1787) would later describe admiringly as Indian eloquence, the tone of the chiefs‘ communication reveals bemused tolerance and acceptance of cultural differences: We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges…. We are convinced that you mean to do us good by your proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things, and you will, therefore, not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. (Deever, Abraham, Gill, Sundwall, & Gianopulos, 1974, p. 204) Going on to observe that after a college education, several Indian young men had come back to their tribal homes ―totally good for nothing,‖ the chiefs then turned the tables by offering to take a dozen of Virginia‘s sons to ―instruct them in all we know, and make men of them‖ (Deever et al., 1974, p. 204). However, this gentle ribbing and mutual acceptance of cultural difference became increasingly strained as the number of European settlers grew and linguistic, religious, and cultural differences between Indians and Europeans became more likely to generate conflict than humor.

Treaty Period: 1776-1871 In 1775, on the cusp of the founding of the United States, the first policy defining U.S. responsibility for American Indian education was formulated with the allocation of $500 to educate Indian students. Following the Revolutionary

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War, the Continental Congress appropriated for itself the ―sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the trade and managing all affairs of the Indians‖ (Prucha, 1997, p. 38). Because many Indian tribes had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, new American statesmen such as Washington viewed the defeat of the British and cession of their land holdings to include the territory of Indian peoples. The tribes, however, disagreed. While referring diplomatically to the new Americans as ―brothers,‖ the Western Indian Confederation of 15 tribes and tribal groups insisted that ―We never made any agreement with the King, nor with any other Nation that we would give to either the exclusive right of purchasing our lands‖ (Albach, 1851, p. 422). Washington, wishing to avoid the expense of continuing war, offered to buy Indian lands. ―Money, to us, is of no value,‖ the tribes countered, noting that they had ―only been defending our just Rights against your invasion‖ (p. 422). Yet the changing frame of the U.S./American Indian relationship becomes evident with the tribes‘ rather plaintive closing remark that their ―only demand is the peaceable possession of a small part of our once great Country‖ (p. 422). U.S. founding father Thomas Jefferson (1787) expressed favorable opinions regarding the intelligence and educability of the American Indian: His vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours in the same situation... The principles of their society forbidding all compulsion, they are to be led to duty and to enterprize by personal influence and persuasion. Hence eloquence in council, bravery and address in war, become the foundations of all consequence with them. To these acquirements all their faculties are directed … (p. 103) The new nation started with apparent good intentions with regard to its indigenous inhabitants, as articulated in Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (Johansen & Pritzker, 2008):

28 28 schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. (p. 900) Euro-American colonists, legitimated by the outcome of the Revolutionary War with the British, now viewed themselves as victors and Indian sovereignty as conditional. It would soon become apparent that the yoke of colonial subjugation thrown off by the Revolution had merely been displaced. The Christian beliefs of early Americans made outright extermination of American Indian people morally problematic (Adams, 1974), and so assimilation efforts were begun in earnest. Education in the ways of Euro-American culture was considered integral to the implementation of assimilation policies and supported by fiscal outlays enacted by Congress. By 1802, Congress had approved appropriation of an annual sum not to exceed $15,000 to be dedicated to Indian education efforts. This amount was reduced to $3,000 in 1803, then raised to $10,000 annually in 1819. These funds were traditionally disbursed to missionaries and mission schools through the 1870s for the purpose of ―introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization…teaching their children reading, writing, and arithmetic‖ (Prucha, 2000, p. 33). Mission schools had been founded on the core belief that civilization was organized as a hierarchical ladder raised toward heaven that could be climbed to reach the uppermost rungs occupied by good White Christians (Devens, 1992). Schools focused on the ―rising generation‖ of children and employed many forms of persuasion to induce the children to attend, including music, singing, and promises of food that were attractive to the frequently displaced and hungry Indian

29 29 families. Girls were taught the skills of Victorian domesticity. For example, at Shawnee Quaker School, as described by Devens: thirty-six girls… in 1827 alone produced 400 pieces of student clothing, 50 sets of sheets and towels, and 80 pairs of socks. They also spun and wove 100 pounds of wool and 40 yards of rag carpet, churned 800 pounds of butter, made 600 pounds of cheese, 21⁄2 barrels of soap, and 100 pounds of candles. In addition, they did daily housekeeping, laundry, cooking, and cleaning. The girls worked in groups, rotating jobs every two weeks in order to learn all aspects of housekeeping. (p. 229) ―The girls,‖ declared Isaac Baird of the Odanah Presbyterian Mission School in Wisconsin, ―will wield a greater influence in the future. If we get the girls, we get the race‖ (p. 225). Some girls, like Gertrude Bonnin, also known by her Indian name, Zitkala Sa (1900), later realized that when they embraced White education in government boarding schools, they inadvertently lost their connection with their mothers and grandmothers. The ceremonies, rites and teachings that traditionally established their spiritual lives and connections with the stories of their people were disrupted, and what had not been learned or experienced could not be passed on when these women had daughters of their own. Many tribes were reluctant to send their children to White schools. ―We did not want our children to learn the White man‘s ways,‖ recalled Edward Read Hand, Cheyenne Keeper of the Sacred Arrows (Fear-Segal, 2007, p. 49). ―We had our own ways and we liked them better. It was still our country and we did not want anyone to tell us what to do‖ (p. 49). Echoing a similar sentiment, Kiowa chief Satanta told white negotiators through an interpreter: ―I want the children raised as I was‖ (p. 49). Bill (1990) observed that traditional tribal education was oral and ―consisted of training youth by prayer, storytelling, memory skills, and listening‖ (p. 1). It was also experiential, as in the Ojibway custom of sending children as young as four or five out into the forest to establish relationships with

30 30 spiritual guardians. As children grew older, spiritual experiences expanded to include vision fasts that might last for several days, dream interpretation, and coming-of-age ceremonies that for girls in many tribes also involved menstrual seclusion (Devens, 1992), none of which practices were permitted in the mission schools. As Euro-American settlers appropriated more land and spread west, the traditional education systems of the indigenous tribes were disrupted and gradually broken.

Indian Removal: 1824-1850 In 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was created within the US War Department (Fixico, 2012), which had been charged with handling American Indian relations. Meanwhile, the ―Civilized Tribes‖ – an eastern group consisting of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles with a long history of contact with Euro-American culture – had adopted European-style dress and lifestyle and had also created sophisticated educational and governmental systems for their own people. The Cherokee leader Sequoyah believed that much of the power of the Euro- Americans derived from their written language, and so he established a written syllabary for his native Cherokee language – the only written language known to have been created by a single human being (Johansen & Pritzker, 2008). Sequoyah‘s written Cherokee was easily acquired by tribal members and by the 1820s, a popular bilingual Cherokee/English newspaper was being published and read throughout Cherokee territory. Some viewed the Cherokee preference for their own language as a disincentive to attending the White mission schools, while others believed that Cherokee written language would provide a bridge to English literature (McLoughlin, 1992). Initially, the Cherokees believed the willingness of mission

31 31 schools to provide free education to be evidence of the missionaries‘ ―great love‖ (p. 358). Cherokee children were quick learners, and it soon appeared to their missionary teachers that Cherokee children could learn as much and as well as any White person (p. 360). However, learning English was a process that took four to five years for most, and while Cherokee parents wanted their children to learn ―White man skills‖ of reading, writing, and arithmetic, they were not always pleased by the amount of Christian doctrine that academic skills came laced with in mission schools, as well as the perceptions promulgated by the missionaries that full-blooded and culturally traditional Cherokees were ―backward‖ (p. 360). Despite the tribe‘s success in adapting to American culture, increasing pressure from White settlers and the discovery of gold in the Indian territory of northern Georgia more or less sealed the fate of the eastern Cherokee. In 1838, the US government sent 7000 troops to enforce the relocation of the Cherokee from Georgia to the new Indian Territory that had been established in what is now Oklahoma. As a result of this move, a thousand-mile journey begun on foot in the fall and completed during a harsh winter with few supplies and careless military supervision, the Cherokee educational system was destroyed and half the Cherokee population perished (Johansen & Pritzker, 2008). In Cherokee this tragic event became known as Nunna daul Tsuny, ―the trail where they cried,‖ or, in English, ―The Trail of Tears‖ (Marsella, 2008, p. 92). Shortly thereafter, just as the discovery of gold in Georgia had disastrous consequences for the Cherokee, the California Gold Rush of 1849 was disastrous to California Indians, particularly those of the interior and the great Central Valley (Frank & Goldberg, 2010), tribes that had, up to that point, managed to live relatively undisturbed by the activities of Spanish missions established to convert the tribes of the coastal areas. Nearly a century before, the Spanish King Charles

32 32 had expelled the Jesuits, who had started missions in Baja California, and appointed Fray Junipero Serra and the Franciscan order to oversee and continue the colonization of California on behalf of Spain. Serra and the Franciscans founded more than 20 missions along the California coast between 1769 and 1823. After 1833, when the Mexican government ordered the missions to be secularized, efforts to continue spreading the Catholic religion were carried on by schools, such as St. Boniface Indian School in Banning, which perpetuated the old mission model. Rathbun (2007) recounted how an heiress nun spent more than $1 million of her own money to found St. Boniface, an investment that was later supplemented by contributions from the Catholic Church and the federal government. Nuns and priests, inspired by the work of Serra and the Franciscans, continued the mission-style attempt to save the souls of Indians, whom they viewed as lustful pagan savages. The teaching staff, including nuns from a multiracial order started by the St. Boniface founder, felt themselves to be on a mission from God to Christianize, educate, and civilize the local Indians, known to Whites by the derogatory title ―Diggers.‖ On a typical morning at St. Boniface, Indian students said a short prayer facing the cross, then faced and saluted the flag, which was raised with a military- style bugle call (Rathbun, 2007). At St. Boniface, as at most Catholic schools, allegiance to God came first and allegiance to the U.S. government came second. Students attended Mass every morning, 7 days a week, with boys and girls sitting on separate sides of church. Frequent prayers throughout the day infused Catholic values into every activity and Catholic doctrine was built into daily lessons. Indian students were expected to work diligently and be compliant; if not, they could expect to be whipped for infractions such as impudence.

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Continuing the practice that had begun hundreds of years earlier with the Wampanoag in the Massachusetts Colony, and which became common practice in many Indian boarding schools, the girls were farmed out to local families as servants, sometimes for years. At St. Boniface, this was considered essential exposure to what a good Catholic home life was and should be like. Afterward, the Indian girls were returned to their reservations (Rathbun, 2007). While at St. Boniface, boys learned farm labor or masonry, while girls learned to be laundresses and maids. Students worked in the school‘s laundry, kitchen, orchards, and gardens; they mixed mortar, hauled rocks, laid bricks, constructed and painted buildings, cleaned rooms, stoked furnaces—all activities considered to be preparation for their future as manual laborers. A Serrano elder, Martha Manuel Chacon, described her girlhood experience at St. Boniface as ―tantamount to slavery,‖ a criticism similar to those that had been previously leveled against Franciscan missions on the coast: One of the nuns made her clean underwear all of the time… Martha rebelled in some small way, washing jeans instead of underwear. When the nun discovered what Martha was doing, they told her to stop. When Martha continued to clean the jeans, the nun slapped her. In response, Martha slapped the nun in the face. The nun protested, telling Martha she had sinned by striking God‘s agent. Martha responded that if it was a sin for her to slap a nun, it was a sin for a nun to slap an Indian. The nun ran off to protest to a priest, who whipped Martha. When Martha went home for a holiday, she refused to return. (Rathbun, 2007, p. 167) Mother Katherine Drexel, the founder of St. Boniface, contributed to more than 60 schools for Indians and African Americans in her lifetime. She was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2000 (Rathbun, 2007).

Extermination: 1850-1890 While extermination of the Indian population appears to have been a de facto occurrence to this point in American history, the results of the Indian

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Removal Act (1830) paved the way for genocide to manifest as overt and de jure (Cross, 1999). Changing attitudes toward American Indians resulted in support for removal and paved the way for extermination. Cass (1830) articulated the growing tendency to view American Indians as an inferior subspecies: Many of [the Indians] were carefully taught at our seminaries of education, in the hope that principles of morality and habits of industry would be acquired… The cause of [our] total failure cannot be attributed to the nature of the experiment, nor to the character, qualifications, or conduct, of those who have directed it… But there seems to be some insurmountable obstacle in the habits or temperament of the Indians, which has heretofore prevented, and yet prevents, the success of these labors…That it is not to be attributed to the indifference or neglect of the whites, we have already shown. There must then be an inherent difficulty, arising from the institutions, character, and condition of the Indians themselves. (p. 2) Cass framed his opinion with reference to the sacralized doctrine of Manifest Destiny: There can be no doubt… that the Creator intended the earth should be reclaimed from a state of nature and cultivated… If such people will usurp more territory than they can subdue and cultivate, they have no right to complain, if a nation of cultivators puts in a claim for a part… We believe, if the Indians do not emigrate, and fly the causes which are fixed in themselves, and which have proved so destructive in the past, they must perish. (p. 7) Perhaps the most rabid of the proponents of extermination as a ―final solution‖ to the Indian problem was General William Tecumseh Sherman, who transferred his genocidal hatred of Southerners to American Indian tribes after the conclusion of the American Civil War (Fellman, 1997). Sherman, openly racist toward Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and Indians, was assigned by then-President Grant to the plains wars to dislodge the Sioux nations and clear the path for Manifest Destiny, carried westward on the rails of the Pacific Railroad. In 1888, the Board of Indian Commissioners, having been transferred from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior, observed that education

35 35 policy would need to take into account the predicted disappearance of the Indian way of life in coming decades: ―If anything in the world is certain, it is that the red man‘s civilization will disappear before the white man‘s civilization, because of the two, it is inferior‖ (U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d., p. 788). This attitude undergirded a new approach to American Indian education. Where in the past, many of the mission schools experienced success in using the culture and language plus model of building on the Indians‘ existing culture and language, a subtractive process was now fully embraced which held as its goal complete cultural and linguistic divestiture, to be carried out by a system of residential schools funded by the federal government. The 1890 massacre of several hundred Sioux Indians, mostly women and children, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota is viewed by many historians as signaling the end of American Indian resistance to Euro-American domination (Brown, 1970). However, the story of American Indian education had by no means come to an end. On the contrary, a new chapter was about to begin.

Assimilation: 1870-1920s The bloodshed on the western plains inspired intense lobbying by liberal politicians and reformers, which led then-president Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 to formulate an Indian ―Peace Policy‖ (Fritz, 1960). In his second inaugural address in 1874, Grant referenced the obligation of conscience of the American people toward the indigenous inhabitants of the United States. It also posed a rhetorical question: Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society by proper teaching and treatment? If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and in our own consciences for having made it. (Reyhner & Eder, 2006, p. 71)

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Education, meaning ―education in eurowestern beliefs‖ (Tinker, 2004) now occupied a central position in the U.S. government‘s policy shift toward assimilation. As the U.S. expanded westward across the North American continent, policymakers assumed that ―the Indian of the West would grow up with the country‖ (Hoxie, 2001, p. 53). In 1871, a rider added to the Appropriations Act put an end to treaty-making altogether, permanently shifting the frame of U.S. government and tribal relations, which were no longer to be considered purely nation-to-nation, but a hybridized form of sovereignty conditional upon the laws and policy of the United States. This change in perspective was underscored by the 1885 Major Crimes Act, which gave the U.S. government legal jurisdiction on Indian territories. At the same time, the government perspective on Indian education was also undergoing a radical shift. Extravagant promises had been made about Indian education, such as the 1868 Peace Commission promise of a full-time teacher to every 30 Indian children (Hoxie, 2001), but such promises were not always kept. The previous traditional approach of leaving education to missionaries and religious organizations was gradually being replaced by a federalized, systematized, and professionalized approach to Indian education in the form of on- and off-reservation schools funded by the federal government. Congress recommended that off-reservation boarding schools be established to speed up the process of tribal deculturation by removing familial and community influences (Churchill, 2004). In 1870, Congress appropriated $100,000 to finance the operation of federal industrial schools. In 1873, appropriations to the $10,000 per year Civilization Fund that had previously financed mission schools were curtailed (Reyhner & Eder, 2006) as Congress appropriated a much larger amount to

37 37 finance Indian education through government channels. Schools, in particular federal Indian boarding schools, were expensive to run, and there were more than 40,000 Indian children in need of education. Between 1879 and the mid-1890s, funding for Indian education increased from $75,000 to $2 million (Hoxie, 2001). By the end of the 1880s, boarding schools had proliferated nationwide and there was a federal school operating on every reservation in the country. Two conflicting schools of thought emerged at this time regarding the educability of American Indian students, which influenced the development of schools and curriculum. While both followed the subtractive schooling model, one, espoused by Colonel R. H. Pratt, founder of the seminal Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, was informed by Locke‘s philosophical view of the human mind at birth as a ―tabula rasa,‖ a clean slate carrying no innate or pre- existing thoughts or ideas. The other approach, espoused by Estelle Reel, Superintendent of Indian schools from the late 19th through early 20th centuries, was based on racist beliefs about the inherent inferiority of American Indians that were popular and widely held at the time, and which influenced Reel‘s development and imposition of a uniform English-only curriculum for the education of American Indians that left its mark on government-sponsored Indian schools throughout the 20th century (Lomawaima, 1996). Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, espoused good intentions and the belief that ―compulsory attendance at school would… ensure, in a single generation, the obliteration of savagery‖ (Fear-Segal, 2007, p. 41). Pratt‘s address to the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, delivered at Denver, Colorado, in 1892, is worth quoting at some length to explain his influential perspective on American Indian education. Pratt began his address

38 38 by agreeing with the controversial statement attributed to, and denied by, General Phil Sheridan: ―The only good Indian is a dead Indian‖ (Hutton, 2003, p. 180): In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man… The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people [as a result of segregation on isolated reservations], and because of our savage example and treatment of them… We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization. America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success. Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why… compel them to remain a people unto themselves? It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage- born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. (para. 1-5) Pratt‘s argument rang with apparent logic and common sense, at least from a Euro- centric point of view, and was backed by his prior successful experiences educating Apache prisoners of war in a colonial fortress in St. Augustine, Florida (Churchill, 2004). Pratt brought his oratory to a rousing conclusion: When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when

39 39 we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact – then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian. (para. 9) Sadly, elevated suicide rates among American Indians (Centers for Disease Control, 2009) illuminate the chilling possibility that for many, particularly American Indian youth, Pratt‘s advice may still be followed today, even though history demonstrates that the Indian and the man may well be inseparable. In contrast to Pratt‘s egalitarian if misguided vision of Indian potential, the indefatigable Estelle Reel maintained an unapologetic racism that was reflected in the Uniform Course of Study (UCS) she developed and imposed upon federal Indian schools during her administration. According to Lomawaima (1996), under Reel‘s tenure as Superintendent of Indian Schools, ―the Indian Office's education division was professionalized, and national Indian policy turned from conquest and relocation to bureaucratic control‖ (para. 4). While progressive in some areas, such as her support for women‘s suffrage and equal pay for equal work by male and female teachers, Reel‘s perspective on American Indians was informed by an assumption of their racial inferiority. Although Reel worked hard to professionalize teaching in the Indian schools, the detailed and standardized curricula she developed reinforced racial, class, and gender biases, focusing on manual labor, agricultural, and industrial skills for boys, and domestic skills for girls, since she perceived the Indians to be too dull and lazy to be inclined toward more elevated intellectual pursuits. In effect, federal boarding schools continued to perpetuate the training for subservience that characterized much of American Indian education from the earliest colonial times forward. Pratt‘s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first off-reservation Indian boarding school, was established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in an abandoned Army

40 40 barracks and operated from 1879 to 1918. As noted by Fear-Segal (2007), ―Carlisle marked the transfer from mission to federal control of Indian schooling‖ (p. xxi). Carlisle students lived according to a highly regimented militaristic schedule in which half the day was devoted to academic studies and the other half to industrial, agricultural, or domestic skill building. Students were expected to embrace the Christian religion, but had their choice of denomination. Congress provided in 1882 that all abandoned military posts should be converted into Indian schools. By the late 1880s, there were more than 100 Indian boarding schools operating on Pratt‘s cultural divestiture model, along with federally funded day schools run by both government and religious organizations (Rehyner & Eder, 2006). Upon the advice of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who ran the Hampton Institute founded to re-acculturate African Americans in the post-Civil- War era, Pratt took before and after pictures of his Indian charges as part of the marketing campaign for his style of education, showing students upon arrival in their ―wild barbarous things‖ and then later in their ―civilized‖ state, shorn, scrubbed, and uniformed (Hoxie, 2001, p. 56). As noted by Fear-Segal (2007), many Indian students failed to make the full cultural transition due to sickness or death. The first student mortality occurred within the first two weeks the school was opened, and provision for a cemetery had to be made on school grounds since Indians were excluded from burial in the cemetery in town. The Carlisle Indian cemetery still holds the remains of hundreds of Indian children, while many others were sent home to die. Deaths of children sent out on work placements went undocumented. Federal Indian schools adopted Reel‘s strict, standardized curriculum system-wide, and emphasized her vocational/industrial approach, which included detailed instructions, such as these written out for a course in sewing (Reel, 1901):

41 41 In the first year: Never permit sewing without a thimble. Do not let children make knots in thread. See to it that all sit in an erect position, never resting any part of the arm on the desk. Biting threads must never be tolerated. Drill in use of the thimble, length of the thread, threading needle, motion of arm in taking stitches, fastening thread; drill in the use of emery and holding scissors. (p. 452) Tribal languages and culture were prohibited. In 1880, the Indian Bureau decreed that all instruction in government-funded schools would be delivered in English, and all student and staff interactions would be enacted in English as well. This abolished the previously successful practice of many mission schools that had used local Indian vernacular as a bridge to English language acquisition (Reyhner & Eder, 2006). While some Indian students successfully acquired at least minimal ―White man‘s skills‖ in the government boarding schools, the lived reality for many Indian children was abuse, neglect, sexual molestation, and disease, terminating for as many as half of them in death (Churchill, 2004; Fear-Segal, 2007). Those who had homes to return to often found that the skills they had acquired in boarding school did not match any available employment. Some shook off the veneer of Americanization and simply resumed whatever remained of their traditional tribal way of life. Being forbidden to speak their native languages proved not only difficult but painfully isolating and a source of bitter memories for many Indian students at the time. Children from many different tribes and languages were gathered together, some taken involuntarily or as prisoners of war, some going for years without contact with any other person who could speak their language or understand them. Lone Wolf, a Blackfoot and a former Indian boarding school student recollected (Horse Capture, 1978): If we thought that the days were bad, the nights were much worse. This was the time when real loneliness set in… We were told never to talk Indian and if we were caught, we got a strapping with a leather belt. I remember one

42 42 evening when we were all lined up in a room and one of the boys said something in Indian to another boy. The man in charge of us pounced on the boy, caught him by the shirt, and threw him across the room. Later we found out that his collar-bone was broken. The boy‘s father, an old warrior, came to the school. He told the instructor that among his people, children were never punished by striking them. That was no way to teach children; kind words and good examples were much better. Then he added, ―Had I been there when that fellow hit my son, I would have killed him.‖ Before the instructor could stop the old warrior, he took his boy and left. (pp. 89- 90) American Indian children had a wide variety of responses to experiences at the boarding schools during this era. Some, like Luther Standing Bear, who later became a school teacher, came with fanciful ideas, such as believing that simply sleeping in the ―White man‘s house‖ would magically confer the ability to speak English (Coleman, 2007). Others were taught to decode English and could ―read‖ and recite impeccably for visitors, but without understanding a single word of what they read. Some students enjoyed aspects of the boarding schools, such as the domestic cottages where girls were sent for a short time to ―play house,‖ role- playing and grouping into family units to practice household management (Lomawaima, 1996). Some, who had a home to return to, attended boarding schools for a period of 3 to5 years and then returned to their tribes, while others, whose tribes or ancestral lands had been wiped out, stayed on in the schools, sometimes for decades, or were adopted into White homes to which they were indentured as servants (Fear-Segal, 2007). Fear-Segal (2007) provided contrasting examples of schooling experiences at Carlisle: the experiences of a captive Lipan Apache girl and her brother, both designated as prisoners of war and sent to Carlisle in 1896, and that of Susan Marmon, a Laguna girl from a southwestern Pueblo who attended Carlisle 15 years later. The Apache girl, named Kesetta by her captors, was designated a prisoner of war after being captured with her brother at the age of 10 following the

43 43 massacre of their tribal band by the Fourth U.S. Cavalry. Kesetta bore scars on her head and shoulders from where her panic-stricken mother had tried to kill her with a rock to prevent White soldiers from taking her prisoner. Kesetta and her younger brother, who was given the name Jack, witnessed their mother‘s death at the hands of the soldiers and were taken prisoner, then adopted by a member of the Cavalry who played in the band. After several years of traveling with the soldiers who had killed their mother and most of their people, the children were sent to Carlisle. Meanwhile, their father, Ramon Castro, leader of the Apache band who had been out on a hunting expedition when the massacre occurred, searched for his children while he continued to war against U.S. forces in the area of Texas (Fear- Segal, 2007). He never found them and was eventually killed. For more than a century, remaining family members told the story of the massacre and the lost children, until a chance Internet search connected the researcher with surviving members of Kesetta and Jack‘s family. Kesett and Jack lived short and unhappy lives. Jack died of tuberculosis after 7 years at Carlisle. Cut off from her people with no home to return to, Kesetta was sent out to work as a domestic servant and gave birth to an illegitimate son at age 30, then died shortly thereafter from tuberculosis, as had her brother. One-hundred and twenty-five years after her tragic death, the story of the lost Apache children having been kept alive at family gatherings for generations, surviving members of Kesetta‘s family held a ceremony to recognize that the long lost children had at last been found. Seeing a photo of Kesetta taken during her days at Carlisle, one of her surviving present- day relatives observed that as a child, Kesetta looked just like his own daughter. Fear-Segal (2007) contrasted the tragic outcome of Kesetta‘s story to the later experience of Susan Marmon, the first Laguna woman in her pueblo to earn a college degree. Marmon attended Carlisle a decade and a half after Kesetta‘s

44 44 death. Encouraged by her mother to seek an education, Marmon spent several years learning English at a local Presbyterian school before attending Carlisle, then went on to college and became a teacher, returning to her people to found a pueblo school. While, according to Fear-Segal, ―Carlisle represented exile‖ for Kesetta, (p. 282), for Marmon, the same Indian school represented opportunity, hope, and a future. The General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act (Dawes, 1887), was intended to work in tandem with the boarding schools to facilitate the assimilation process by imposing individual ownership of land allotments on American Indian tribal members, subverting tribal traditions of communally held lands. By disposing of ―excess land‖ left over after individual allotments were made, the U.S. government managed to obtain another two-thirds of the remaining Indian land that had been previously deeded to tribes through treaties. Meanwhile, federal educational services were limited to children of one- quarter or more blood quantum in 1918. By 1920, the number of Indian students in public schools outnumbered those in federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools for the first time. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, also known as the Snyder Act, conferred American citizenship on all American Indians who had not yet been granted this status, without requiring them to give up their tribal citizenship. Conferring American citizenship on Indian people helped to ensure that states would assume greater responsibility for educating Indian children in public schools (McCoy, 2000). In Oklahoma, the survivors of the Cherokee nation had successfully rebuilt their government and tribal schools in the Indian Territory to which they had been forcibly relocated, only to have their education system destroyed once again by a change in federal policy. In 1901, the Cherokee were

45 45 declared citizens of the United States, and in 1906, with Oklahoma on the threshold of statehood, Congress abolished the Cherokee school system. To all appearances, educationally speaking, American Indians had been assimilated into the general population. However, the Meriam Report (1928) told a different story. Describing the results of a two-year study commissioned by the federal government, the report condemned the care of Indian children in the boarding schools as ―grossly inadequate‖ (p. 11). For example, Indian children in boarding schools were allotted 11 cents a day for food when the recommended allowance was more than triple that amount, leading Meriam to observe that ―cheapness in education is expensive… the Indian service is almost literally a ‗starved‘ service‖ (p. 348). Not only were Indian children malnourished, but Meriam found that children as young as 10 years of age were being forced to do heavy labor for up to four hours a day, a situation he felt would violate child labor laws in most states. He likewise condemned the antiquated classrooms and teaching methods: ―The nailed-down desks, in rows; the old-type ‗recitation‘; the unnatural formality between teacher and pupil, the use of mechanistic words and devices, as ‗class rise!,‘ ‗class pass!‘; the lack of enriching materials, such as reading books‖ (p. 379). Indian boarding school facilities were deemed inadequate, and their staff undereducated, poorly trained and underpaid, leading to high turnover rates: ―In one school visited in March, 1927, there had been twenty-six teachers since September for the eight school rooms… One room up to that time had had ten different teachers‖ (p. 360). Meriam condemned the Indian boarding school concept in general for its ―annihilation of initiative, its lack of beauty, its almost complete negation of normal family life, all of which have disastrous effects upon mental health and the development of wholesome personality‖ (p. 393). The 872-

46 46 page study declared allotment and assimilation policies a failure in that they had destroyed many aspects of tribal life while failing to provide a meaningful substitute for Indian culture (McCoy, 2000). According to the Harvard- and Brookings-educated Meriam: The most fundamental need in Indian education is a change in point of view. Whatever may have been the official governmental attitude, education for the Indian in the past has proceeded largely on the theory that it is necessary to remove the Indian child as far as possible from his home environment; whereas the modern point of view in education and social work lays stress on upbringing in the natural setting of home and family life. The Indian educational enterprise is peculiarly in need of the kind of approach that recognizes this principle; that is, less concerned with a conventional school system and more with the understanding of human beings. (p. 346) Arguing against the standardized curriculum that Superintendent Reel had worked so tirelessly to establish, Meriam insisted that ―Indian tribes and individual Indians within the tribes vary so much that a standard content and method of education, no matter how carefully they might be prepared, would be worse than futile‖ (p. 347). Meriam went on to attack boarding school routines using wording that seems eerily applicable to the increasingly standardized and routinized public education system of today: The whole machinery of routinized boarding school and agency life works against the kind of initiative and independence, the development of which should be the chief concern of Indian education in and out of school. What all wish for is Indians who can take their place as independent citizens. The routinization characteristic of the boarding schools, with everything scheduled, no time left to be used at one's own initiative, every movement determined by a signal or an order, leads just the other way. It symbolizes a manner of treating Indians which will have to be abandoned if Indians, children and adults alike, are ever to become self-reliant members of the American community. (p. 351) Meriam‘s suggestions for improvement, written nearly a century ago, seem startlingly contemporary when he remonstrates that ―It is the task of education to

47 47 help the Indian, not by assuming that he is fundamentally different, but that he is a human being very much like the rest of us, with a cultural background quite worthwhile for its own sake‖ (p. 354). Meriam urged a fundamental change in the approach to American Indian education that represented a radical move away from Reel‘s Uniform Course of Study: The real goals of education are not "reading, writing, and arithmetic‖ —not even teaching Indians to speak English, though that is important—but sound health, both mental and physical, good citizenship in the sense of an understanding participation in community life, ability to earn one's own living honestly and efficiently in a socially worthwhile vocation, comfortable and desirable home and family life, and good character. These are the real aims of education; reading, writing, numbers, geography, history, and other "subjects" or skills are only useful to the extent that they contribute directly or indirectly to these fundamental objectives. (p. 373) The Meriam Report contributed to the cessation of the allotment process initiated by the Dawes Act and paved the way for the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, halting the loss of tribal lands through privatization, and restoring local self- government to tribes.

Self-Determination: 1934-1953 To support states in their efforts to educate American Indian children in public schools, Congress authorized the Johnson O‘Malley Act (JOM) in 1934. This legislation was part of the Indian New Deal, intended to reduce the role of the federal government in Indian affairs. While the wording of the act supported the development of Indian-run schools for Indian students, in practice, most of the funding went to state public schools. Increasingly, White-educated Indians such as Thomas Alford, Charles Eastman, and Gertrude Simmons, publishing under her Indian name, Zitkala Sa, gave voice to the American Indian experience of moving between languages and cultures (Coleman, 2007). Where Alford and Eastman, not without misgivings,

48 48 strongly promoted White education as a path toward progress and development, Zitkala Sa (1900) came to a different conclusion. The daughter of a Sioux mother and a White father, she was working as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School when grappling with emerging issues of her own personal identity led her to suffer a breakdown and to question and later vehemently attack the assimilationist education agenda (Fear-Segal, 2007). Successfully employing the literacy tools she had acquired in the process of her own cultural divestiture, her writings exposed the shortcomings and degrading aspects of the Indian schooling process.

Termination: 1953-1958 With the exit of John Collier, the progressive Commissioner of Indian Affairs who served in that position from 1933-1945, anti-Indian interests in the 1950s opposed and reversed many of the more controversial aspects of the IRA and JOM that supported Indian sovereignty and self-determination. Tribal rolls were closed and per capita payouts issued to liquidate tribal assets. More than 100 tribes were terminated, meaning their relationship with the federal government was abolished and more than three million acres of tribal lands were relinquished nationwide (Prucha, 1984). Many federal Indian schools were shut down, except in places where there were no public schools, such as on the Navajo reservation. As articulated by Peroff (1990), Indian affairs had become dominated by the ―pervasive metaphor… that the relationship of an Indian to the federal government is that of a ward to a guardian‖ (p. 389). Termination sought to eliminate that metaphorical relationship, as well as any lingering belief in Indian sovereignty, through one-sided implementation of policy designed to get rid of reservations and force Indians to assimilate. Indians from rural reservations were relocated to urban centers, where some found prosperity while others experienced cultural dislocation and poverty as a result of unemployment. President Nixon formally renounced

49 49 termination as a failed policy in 1970, which was followed by efforts on behalf of many terminated tribes to regain their prior status.

Reform: 1960s and Beyond The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 marked a resurgence of interest in Indian education as part of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations‘ vision of the Great Society. Targeted funding for Indian education became available through Title I and Title III. In 1969, the Kennedy Report, so named in honor of the leadership of Robert and Edward Kennedy on the Special Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education, once again sounded the alarm over the deplorable condition of Indian education nationwide. Repeating many of the same recommendations that had been made by the Meriam Report nearly 40 years before, the Kennedy Report advocated greater Indian participation and control over educational programs (McCoy, 2000). Congress responded to the report‘s recommendations with the 1972 Indian Education Act (IEA), which authorized funding for services to Indian students including special needs, adult education and literacy grants. Regulations were tightened on expenditures of JOM funds and Indian parental control over JOM programs was increased (McCoy, 2000). In the wake of highly publicized incidents of American Indian activism such as the 1969 visit to Washington by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the occupation of historically significant sites such as Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, the Indian Self Determination and Assistance Act of 1975 vested sovereignty once again in tribal governments (McCoy, 2000). The Indian Education Act of 1972

50 50 provides federal assistance in education over and above the limited funds appropriated annually for Indian education programs in the Office of Education, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, to help close the gap which now exists between Indian education and the general educational level of the United States. (1975, para. 2) A National Advisory Council on Indian Education, comprised of 15 American Indian or Alaskan native presidential appointees, was also established, and $17 million in funding was appropriated in the first year to address IEA objectives. In 1978, the act was broadened to include funding for not only special education needs for Indian students, but also culturally-related academic needs. The IEA was indicative of another frame shift in perception of American Indian people as the vision for the content and purpose of their education now extended beyond assimilation to include the possibility of cultural reinvigoration. In 1979, the US Department of Education was established and absorbed the Indian Office of Education. More recently, the IEA was again updated in 1994 as Title IX. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB) amended Indian education programs as Title VII, Part A of the renewed ESEA (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2011). In a decisive move away from the linguistic divestiture models for policy promulgated in the earlier part of the century, the Native American Languages Act (NALA) was passed in 1990 to assist in the preservation of American Indian languages and to fund cultural programs (McCoy, 2000). NCLB also provided for direct grant funds as well as encouraging collaboration between American Indian programs and public schools for language development purposes. The Indian Nations at Risk Report of 1991 demonstrated an ongoing achievement gap between American Indian students and other groups, with lower achievement and higher dropout rates documented for American Indians in both public and BIA

51 51 schools. Many of the recommendations for improving educational plans and strengthening relationships between Indian schools and educators as well as tribal governments, school districts, and state and federal organizations suggested by NALA have yet to be implemented (McCoy, 2000).

Framing and Reframing American Indian Identity Embedded in a question as apparently simple as ―Who is (or is not) an American Indian?‖ are centuries of history accompanied by shifts in cognition and categorization that have driven and continue to drive public opinion, human behavior, and government policy. According to Lakoff (1987), it is not only the names things are given that matter, but also the categories in which they are placed. Framing is one way of describing the process by which this categorization occurs. According to Gitlin (1980), ―Frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters‖ (p. 6). Entman (1993) expanded Gitlin‘s definition, noting that ―to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them… promote a particular problem, definition, or moral evaluation‖ (p. 52). The uneasy relationship between American government and American Indian tribes and the resulting swinging pendulum of American Indian education policy can be viewed through this lens as powered by a shifting frame and categorization of American Indian identity, which has ultimately determined everything from tribal sovereignty to the appropriate scope and content of the education of American Indian youth. Seeking to combine identity theory and social identity theory in a way that might lead toward a more comprehensive ―general theory of the self‖ (p. 224), Stets and Burke (2000) conceptualized category/group and role as the foundations

52 52 of identity. They distinguished between group and personal or role-based identities, noting that ―the basis of social identity is in the uniformity of perception and action among the group members‖ (p. 226). This explains why group members tend toward cognitive behaviors such as stereotyping of in- and out- group members and exaggerated concurrence or group-think. Personal identity, in their estimation, is ―categorization of the self as a unique entity, distinct from other individuals‖ (p. 228). The difficulty in separating social and personal identity is illuminated when they state that ―the personal identity is the set of meanings that are tied to and sustain the self as an individual; these self- meanings operate across roles and situations that… pervade all the membership groups to which one belongs‖ (p. 229). While some roles or aspects of identity are more malleable than others, the authors note that ―the more persons one is tied to by holding an identity…the more likely it is that the identity will be activated‖ (p. 230) or played out in a given situation. A central aspect of American Indian traditional culture involves what psychologists would label depersonalization, in the process of which the self is perceived not as an individual, but as a prototype of the group with which one identifies. Depersonalization is important to maintenance of group identity, in that it is the basic mechanism that underlies collective action, group cohesion, cooperation, altruism and ethnocentrism. Ellison (1993) observed that an increase in perception of self-worth can accompany identification with a group, which may result from the group‘s acceptance of the individual. Therefore, it is likely that individual and group identities, while equally important and certainly interrelated, may affect people in different ways: ―People… feel good about themselves when they associate with particular groups, typically feel confident about themselves

53 53 when enacting particular roles, and generally feel that they are ‗real‘ or authentic when their person identities are verified‖ (Stets & Burke, p. 234).

Designation as American Indian As recently as the 19th century, the term ―American‖ referred primarily to the indigenous inhabitants of the American continents (Forbes, 1995). According to Spack (2002), colonization resulted in what she describes as a ―rhetorical inversion‖ (p. 1) as the original Americans, people indigenous to the land, were, over time, designated non-natives in comparison to early settlers. Only in the last century has the term American taken on a broader, non-ethnic connotation, although ethnic hyphenation (e.g., Mexican-American, African-American) has become commonplace. The term American Indian is currently used to differentiate indigenous from later-arriving inhabitants, and may include designations ranging from kin, clan, traditional, tribal, regional or national affiliations (Nagel, 1997). In addition to its ethnic or historical meaning, designation as American Indian has legal and economic ramifications with federal, state, and local governments. According to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), while Indian Affairs does not and cannot confer tribal membership on any individual, the government will issue a Certificate of Degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood (CDIB) provided that the applicant can show ―relationship to an Indian listed on an Indian census roll, tribal base roll, Indian judgment fund distribution that includes Indian blood degrees, or other document prepared and approved by the Secretary of the Interior… or his/her authorized representative‖ (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2011, para. 1). While no individual is required to obtain the CDIB, it is a prerequisite for receiving federal services. The BIA maintains a list of 564 federally recognized tribes and is also the approving agency for groups wishing to receive federal recognition in order to be

54 54 able to receive federal services. However, tribal membership is determined by each individual tribe based on its own established criteria; there is no uniform requirement or definition of what it means to be an American Indian which extends across tribes.

Official Recognition of American Indian Identity Garroutte (2003) articulated the dilemma of establishing an officially recognized American Indian identity by noting that some tribes have made citizenship criteria more stringent and some have made them less so. Some have closed their rolls altogether so that no new tribal citizens are accepted. Some have even disenrolled or revoked the membership of significant numbers of former tribal citizens, charging that they do not meet the necessary criteria… it is one thing to claim identity as an Indian person, and it is quite another for that claim to be received by others as legitimate. (p. 6) Illustrated here is a central problem of identity: Its designation represents an intersection between a personal choice of self-definition and recognition and acceptance of that choice by others. Therefore, Hall (1990) conceptualized cultural identities as not fixed, but as ―points of identification… which are made within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning‖ (p. 226). Forbes (1995) problematized the use of blood quantum as a means of establishing American Indian identity, noting that the blood quantum concept originated in Virginia in 1705 as a manifestation of racist and colonialist attitudes through which rights and privileges were reserved for White residents while being denied to non-Whites such as Indians and Negroes. Blood quantum designations were founded upon a deficit model measuring distance from pure whiteness. The underlying assumption is similar to that of Goffman (1963) in his theorizing on stigmatization as determined largely by distance from an assumed normal represented by ―a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant

55 55 father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports‖ (p. 28). All who do not fit that criteria may be considered to be stigmatized, or socially disadvantaged, to a greater or lesser degree. For those designated as other than White, the measureable percentage of nonwhite blood is minimized over time through intermarriage with members of the dominant culture. Blood quantum charts, while still in use by the BIA as well as some American Indian tribes, are viewed by other tribes and individuals as a path to genocide. Blood quantum must be established from a tribe recognized by the US government and is usually set at one-quarter, the equivalent of having one full-blooded Indian grandparent. Descendants who marry outside their tribes of origin, even if they intermarry with Indians of other tribes, thereby rapidly dilute their blood quantum, which can conceivably cause their descendants to disappear from tribal rolls within just a few generations (Churchill, 2004). Waters (2004) conceived of cultural identity differently, as arising from political or world views: Cultures that locate identity in a politics of ideas, e.g., those belonging to Greek thought, tend to colonize other cultures and link individual identity with linear time (of discrete human events and institutions) rather than with a geographic place. Conversely, indigenous cultures nurture individual identity formation with a communal interdependence and sustainability in a specific geographic location. (p. 154) Viewing American Indian identity and history as ―a history of place consciousness, preserved through oral history‖ (p. 155), Waters observed that identity is comprised of not only what a person physically looks like on the outside, but consists also of language, values, world view, ways of thinking and being, nonverbal communication, and other intangible, socially communicated characteristics. She named the place-consciousness she perceived to be integral to

56 56

American Indian identity mindspace (p. 160). For California tribes in particular, remnants of whom still live on or near their ancestral lands, existence of such a mindspace may account, at least in part, for their persistence and resiliency in the face of all efforts to exterminate them. Yet another view of American Indian identity was articulated by Huffman (2008), who identified four ―cultural masks‖ assumed by American Indian college students: A cultural mask is the process by which a person comes to construct a personal ethnic identity. Moreover, a cultural mask also includes the manner in which an individual uses and ultimately projects that ethnic identity. Specifically, the cultural masks included that of assimilated students, marginal students, estranged students, and transculturated students. (pp. 7-8) According to Huffman, assimilated American Indian students identified fully with the mainstream population and experienced few difficulties in adjusting to college life; marginal students maintained identification with American Indian culture and thus experienced cultural dissonance; estranged students strongly identified with their American Indian culture and experienced mainstream culture as a threat, which caused problems for them in their college experience; transculturated students strongly identified with their American Indian heritage and considered it a stabilizing foundation which was not affected by their being situated within the mainstream college culture. Transculturated students, therefore, tended to have better and more positive college experiences. By this measure, among the previously mentioned American Indians writing about their experiences moving between cultures, Zitkala Sa (1900) might be characterized as estranged, while Charles Eastman (1907/1970) might be considered transculturated. Transculturation might also be a useful term to describe the appropriation or creation of community-based or boarding schools run by Indian staff to further

57 57 the education of their own people, such as the Rough Rock Demonstration School and Navajo Community College established by the Navajo in the 1960s and 1970s (Szasz, 1999). As the 1971 student body president of Navajo Community College stated, a school founded by and for American Indian students ―is what we have always needed. It… teaches our young people to be leaders among our own people. It teaches what we, the American Indian, want to learn‖ (p. 180).

Language, Literacy, and Cultural Identity According to Spack (2002), imposition of the English language on American Indians and the act of designating them as ―non-native‖ speakers of English had ―the rhetorical effect of making the first inhabitants of this land invisible, for they, of course, were native speakers not of English but of a multitude of indigenous languages… Europeans were, in effect, depriving Native people of their linguistic birthright‖ (p. 1-2), a process Macedo et al. (2005) have described as ―linguoracism.‖ Language is power, and designating who bears the burden of translation marks inferior status in a power relationship such as that between American Indians and the dominant Euro-American culture. Sioux writer Zitkala Sa (1900) poignantly described the personal cost in culture and identity, which she felt she incurred in the process of her own Euro- American education, a cost she felt was particularly high for American Indian women: For the White Man‘s papers, I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers, I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother‘s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. (Spack, 2002, p. 158) During the early colonial years of the 17th century, Indian languages coexisted with English and other languages spoken by increasing numbers of European settlers arriving in North America. However, as efforts to Christianize indigenous

58 58 peoples progressed, native languages were denigrated as deficient and unable to communicate the finer, more abstract concepts of Christianity and European traditions (Spack, 2002). While political domination required only imposition of the dominant language with or without understanding, religious conversion required missionaries to learn native languages to communicate spiritual concepts in order to effect meaningful spiritual change. Many early mission schools therefore endeavored to teach biblical concepts to American Indians in their indigenous languages, but after the Civil War, as increasing numbers of Euro- Americans moved westward and violent confrontations with indigenous tribes escalated, English-only education became the norm. Despite demonstrated success in educating American Indian children using both their native languages and English, reservation schools, controlled and funded by the Federal Indian Bureau, were forced to adopt a strict English-only policy in the late 19th century, and a succession of Commissioners of Indian Affairs upheld the English-only approach (Spack, 2002). In the words of one such Commissioner, the ―instruction of the Indians in the vernacular is not only of no use to them, but is detrimental to the course of their education and civilization, and no school will be permitted on the reservation in which the English language is not exclusively taught‖ (p. 36). The English-only decree was met by many educators with open criticism, such as the then-president of Dartmouth College, who insisted that ―the idea of reaching and permanently elevating the great mass of any people whatever, by first teaching them all a foreign language, is too absurd ever to have been entertained by sane men‖ (Bartlett, 1887, p. 1254). Likewise, Paiute educator Sarah Winnemuca, who spoke five languages by the age of 14, worked tirelessly in the interest of establishing bilingual education. She founded her own successful

59 59 school, the Peabody Institute, utilizing principles founded on her own experience of learning English and other languages as well as the Friedrich Froebel model. Froebel, a German immigrant credited with inventing kindergarten, described his approach to education (Marenholtz-Bulow, Mann & Shirreff, 1877), an approach that could be characterized as progressive even—or especially—by today‘s standards: My educational method offers to its pupils from the beginning the opportunity to collect their own experiences from things themselves, to look with their own eyes and learn to know by their own experiments, things and the relations of things to each other, and also the real life of the world of humanity… in such manner, a great inward and outward independence will be gained, which teaches one how to stand on one‘s own feet… too much and too early knowledge with which youth is crammed… prevents men from reaching a true and real independence, which is only fruit of the vigorous efforts of one‘s own powers, especially by acting and doing. (p. 226) Winnemucca‘s educational philosophy, as described by her benefactor Elizabeth Peabody, sister-in-law to the forefather of American public education, Horace Mann: instead of being, as usual, a passive reception of civilizing influences as proffered by white men who look down upon the Indian as a spiritual, moral, and intellectual inferior, it is a spontaneous movement, made by the Indian himself, from himself, in full consciousness of free agency, for the education that is to civilize him. (Zanjani, 2004, pp. 265-266) At Winnemucca‘s Peabody Institute, children learned first by speaking Paiute and then learned English translations, progressing later to reading and writing. Yet in spite of impressive and well-documented successes with her students, Winnemucca fell under attack by political enemies in the Indian Affairs Office and eventually was forced to close down Peabody for lack of funding (Zanjani, 2004).

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As lamented by Winnemucca‘s contemporary, the Sioux Standing Bear, a great opportunity for mutual enrichment was lost with the advent of the federal government‘s English-only mandates. According to Standing Bear (Spack, 2002), Our annals, all happenings of human import, were stored in our song and dance rituals, our history differing in that it was not stored in books, but in the living memory. So while the white people had much to teach us, we had much to teach them, and what a school could have been established on that idea. (p. 107) Instead of sharing their collective wisdom and enhancing the dominant culture within which they had become involuntarily situated, American Indians, as ―colonized, cultural beings‖ were ―sentenced to a silenced culture‖ (Macedo et al, 2003), the deleterious effects of which are still felt and observed among American Indian people today.

Psychological Theory of Human Development Among therapists, the process of identity formation is conceptualized as a complex socio-cultural process occurring throughout successive, universally experienced stages of human development (Erikson, 1963). A German immigrant who came to the U.S. to escape the Nazi regime, Erikson was fascinated by his new home culture and conducted several studies of American Indians that contributed to the formation of his psychoanalytic theories. According to Erikson, each developmental stage presents a crisis or conflict to the emerging personality which may be resolved with success or failure. Outcomes of facing these challenges in the process of maturation are understood to influence or determine adult behavior and choices. Erikson (1963) elaborated on Freud‘s developmental stage theory, expanding the developmental sequence to include eight stages encompassing the human lifespan from birth to old age.

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Erikson‘s (1963) first stage encompassed the first year of life, and was concerned with development of trust versus mistrust, depending on the infant‘s experience of being cared for and having its needs met. If an infant‘s needs are met appropriately, the child develops a sense of trust in adults around him or her, but if a child‘s needs are not met in a dependable fashion at the stage, the legacy for the child can be a lack of trust in other human beings that can extend throughout life (see Table 2). Erikson‘s second stage, autonomy versus shame, occurred around the ages of 2 and 3. The third, ages 4 and 5, was concerned with development of initiative versus guilt. The fourth stage, involving the development of industry versus feelings of inferiority, encompassed the schooling years, from about age 6 to 12. The onset of puberty and young adulthood occurred during stage 5, from the ages of about 13 to 19. Stage 6, involving issues of intimacy versus isolation, took place in early adulthood, ages 20-35. Middle adulthood, from ages 40 to 60, was the seventh stage, involving generativity versus stagnation. The final stage, integrity versus despair, occupied the later years, from the mid-50s into old age. Modern and postmodern psychoanalytic theory, although developed and situated outside the American Indian worldview, may nevertheless provide some insights into the ongoing effects on the psyche of cultural divestiture, deprivation and psychosocial or emotional disruptions. Understanding how disruptions occurring within crucial developmental windows may have affected American Indians‘ individual development as well as social and family relationships may lend insight into increased incidences of problem behaviors such as substance abuse, suicide, and family instability among American Indian youth and adults (Centers for Disease Control, 2009; U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).

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Table 2

Erikson’s Developmental Stages of Life

Stage Basic Conflict Important Events Outcome Children develop a sense of trust when caregivers provide Infancy (Birth to 2 years) Trust vs. Mistrust Feeding reliability, care, and affection. A lack of this will lead to mistrust. Children need to develop a sense of personal control over Early Childhood (2 to 3 years) Autonomy vs. Shame and Toilet Training physical skills and a sense of Doubt independence. Success leads to feelings of autonomy, failure results in feelings of shame and doubt. Children need to begin asserting control and power Preschool (3 to 5 years) Initiative vs. Guilt Exploration over the environment. Success in this stage leads to a sense of purpose. Children who try to exert too much power experience disapproval, resulting in a sense of guilt. Children need to cope with new social and academic School Age (6 to 11 years) Industry vs. Inferiority School demands. Success leads to a sense of competence, while failure results in feelings of inferiority. Teens need to develop a sense of self and personal identity. Adolescence (12 to 18 years) Identity vs. Role Confusion Social Relationships Success leads to an ability to stay true to yourself, while failure leads to role confusion and a weak sense of self. Young adults need to form intimate, loving relationships Young Adulthood (19 to 40 Intimacy vs. Isolation Relationships with other people. Success years) leads to strong relationships, while failure results in loneliness and isolation. Adults need to create or nurture things that will outlast them, often by raising children or creating a positive change Middle Adulthood (40 to 65 Generativity vs. Stagnation Feeding that benefits other people. years) Success leads to feelings of usefulness and accomplishment, while failure results in shallow involvement in the world. Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of Maturity(65 to death) Ego Integrity vs. Despair Toilet Training fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.

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Education for Hegemony What constitutes education raises fundamental questions about the nature of culture and cultural hegemony. For the American Indian, the U.S. government‘s superficial or legal acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty must be parsed with the reality that what shards remain of ancestral Indian land holdings are situated within a dominant Euro-American culture, and that survival within this context demands interaction. Education provided to American Indians by the dominant culture may be viewed as a process of cultural shaping to facilitate interaction. Thus language development becomes central to the educational process. Whose language, whose values, whose stories are taught in the process of education, and under what conditions, determine cultural survival or extermination of marginalized, nondominant groups (Fanon, 2008). The stakes are high. As described by Churchill (2004), American Indian people who had been deculturated by the boarding schools were unable to participate fully in their cultures of origin and were ―congenitally barred by the race codes‖ (p. 71) of the dominant culture began to suffer from a condition he describes as Residential School Syndrome (RSS): Seeking some sort of normalcy in marriage and the forming of families, they typically discover that a combination of the psychoemotional damage they‘ve suffered in the schools, their all but total lack of experience in actual familial settings, and often their inability to secure … steady work … generates catastrophic results. As a rule, they end up visiting upon their offspring some variation of the misery they themselves endured as youngsters… For the children of residential school survivors, childhood is often an experience worse than it was for one or both their parents. (p. 71) To place RSS within Erikson‘s (1963) developmental stages, American Indians who were forced to attend Indian boarding schools in which they were traumatized and divested of language, culture, and personal identity could be viewed as having

64 64 been prevented from successfully negotiating the stage of autonomy, resulting instead in a sense of inferiority and weak sense of self, which could later translate into poor parenting skills or abandonment of their children, thus perpetuating the damage inflicted upon them through multiple generations.

American Indian Boarding Schools as Total Institutions Goffman, Lemert, and Branaman (1997) defined total institutions as ―forcing houses for changing persons‖ where they are ―stripped of the supports of their home worlds‖ (p. 12). Total institutions assume control of every aspect of a human being‘s life, and the result is ―self-mortification‖ through a series of processes including role and name dispossession, programming and identity- trimming. The individual is thus transformed into ―an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment‖ (p. 16). Degrading postures, stances, and deference patterns reinforce the authority of those in control. The human being who has been completely and successfully self-mortified through these processes ―has access to none of the resources, freedoms, and territories necessary for sustaining a viable self‖ (p. 18). Churchill (2004), quoting penal psychologist Richard Korn, equated the education process in Indian boarding schools to what occurs in U.S. ―supermax‖ prison facilities, noting that the purpose of such total institutions is to reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next step is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient, self- directing antagonists. This failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves. (p. 70) Churchill went on to describe the seeking of self-negation and oblivion through drugs or alcohol, culminating in seeking ―the final ‗closure‘ of suicide‖ which

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American Indians engage in ―at a rate more than five times the national average‖ (p. 71).

Self-mortification Processes in Indian Boarding Schools Indian children were frequently taken from their home environments suddenly or unexpectedly by government representatives who did not speak their language. According to Tinker (2004), Taken often by force from their homes at ages as young as four, transported to facilities remote from their families and communities, confined there for a decade or more, relentlessly stripped of their cultural identities while being just as methodically indoctrinated to see their own traditions—and thus themselves—through the eyes of their colonizers, chronically malnourished and overworked, drilled to regimental order and subjected to the harshest forms of corporal punishment, this was the lot of one in every two native youngsters in North America for five successive generations. (p. xviii) Churchill (2004) described processes of self-mortification among American Indian children arriving at federal boarding schools, noting that upon arrival, children were divested of their traditional clothing and possessions and then scrubbed and ―disinfected‖ with alcohol or kerosene while staff sometimes commented about ―dirty Indians‖ (p. 19). Boys then had their long hair cut military-style and uniforms were provided. Indian names were exchanged for Anglicized names, thus completing the loss of the ―identity kit‖ (Goff, 1997). Not only was English mandatory for purposes of instruction, as of 1890, the BIA required that ―pupils be compelled to converse with each other in English‖ and be ―punished for violation of this rule‖ (Adams, 1974, p. 140). Punishments for speaking one‘s native language included being beaten or hit with a leather strap or being made to kneel in a corner. Staff surveillance was virtually continuous (Churchill, 2004).

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Tinker (2004) stated that half of the children sent to the boarding schools did not survive them, while the outcome for many who did was ―catastrophic dysfunction,‖ noting that ―Indian country is today a genuinely Fanonesque panorama marked not only by… endemic alcoholism and suicide, but by the most grinding set of destitution and ubiquitous forms of violence (which were by all credible accounts completely absent from their own traditions)‖ (p. xxiii). As Hall (1990) discussed, one of the most insidious effects of colonization was that the colonizers ―had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‗Other‘‖ (p. 225). Indian boarding schools succeeded in the process of internal reframing or ―inner expropriation of cultural identity‖ (p. 226) accompanied by shame for many American Indian people. Evidence of this indoctrination into shame appears as early as the 17th century in American Indian accounts of conversion experiences, as in this sorrowful self-condemnation by the Algonquin Indian Ponampam (Eliot, 1653): I found that all my doings were sins against God… and when I saw these sins against God, I was weary of my self and angry with my self in my heart… I feared because every day sin was in my heart… sometimes my heart was ashamed, and sometimes my heart was wrong. (p. 20-21) Hall (1990) also noted an unintended consequence of coercive assimilation and marginalization practices by the dominant culture. Just as African slaves, uprooted from their various tribes and traditions, forged a new culture that extended across prior divisions and disparities, so American Indian survivors, under pressure to assimilate, formed a Pan-American Indian identity that has solidified rather than dispersed their cultural awareness within the dominant Euro- American culture surrounding them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the trend of American Indian people taking over the old government boarding schools and refashioning them for educational purposes of their own design.

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Resiliency If there is an opposite to self-mortification, resiliency, defined by Rutter (1999) as ―resistance to psycho-social risk experiences‖ may well be it. Rutter noted that children‘s susceptibility to risk factors depends on a variety of factors including genetics, family and peer group interactions, and environment. Pinto- Gouveia and Matos (2011) explored how a child‘s age can affect whether or not a shame memory becomes a central component of personal identity. Shame memories were found to be associated with traumatic stress reactions, as well as contributing to adult experiences of depression, anxiety and stress. Examining the exceptional resiliency demonstrated by American Indian elders, Grandbois and Sanders (2009) broke new theoretical ground by approaching conceptualization of elder resilience. After interviewing eight elders, the researchers concluded that ―Resilience exists among these Native American elders, but it is uniquely enmeshed into the seamless fabric of their culture, worldview, and connectedness expressed as Oneness with all creation‖ (p. 569). They quote the words of one interviewee, who stated, ―When you realize that Native Americans have survived not only a historic but a contemporary direct confrontation with the largest super power on earth, it goes without saying that resilience abounds in this group of people‖ (p. 578). Another insisted, ―I am not a victim, and neither are my people. We are survivors.‖ The elders interviewed felt strongly that American Indian history should be taught in school, and that doing so would combat negative stereotypes of American Indian people. Implications for the value of traditional cultural education as a protective factor for school age youth have been explored by several researchers. Engel (2007) looked at combining traditional cultural medicine with Cognitive Behavioral Treatment (CBT) to enhance the resiliency of a young American

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Indian boy, while Montgomery, Miville, Winterowd, Jeffries, and Baysden (2000) found that traditional culture improved resiliency among American Indian college students.

American Indian Education Today As in centuries past, different cultures continue to define education in different ways, as illustrated by these lines from a contemporary poem written by a North Fork Mono Indian elder: An American Indian is highly educated within the Universe, It is their university. When an Indian is in the big cities, They are blind to the modern environment. But when city people come up to the mountains, All they can see is beautiful scenery. They do not understand What lies in the heart of the mountains. (Bethel, 2010) Stannard (1993) suggested that the decimation of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere may well be the largest scale genocide ever perpetrated in human history. Yet American Indian people, against all odds, continue to exist and even, in some places, to thrive due to the current climate of acceptance and support for renewal of indigenous traditions, language and culture. According to Cross (1999), Doing something about the dismal state of Indian education requires that we confront deeply embedded historic, cultural, and legal biases. These biases have long frustrated attempts to reform Indian education. (p. 947) American Indian people themselves recognize that American Indian education is today at a critical juncture. Following a series of 11 hearings conducted nationwide among American Indian people discussing the impact and consequences of NCLB on American Indian Education, the National Indian

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Education Association, in conjunction with Arizona State University, made the following observation: There is an overall sense from the testimony that profound changes are underfoot in Native education and that the Native education community has only just begun to sense the impacts and dangers incumbent in both the intended and unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind statute upon the future of Native education. It is clear from the testimony that these changes to date have not included the Native voice. (Beaulieu, Sparks, & Alonzo, 2005, p. 3) American Indian people recognize that effective educational reform will need to address endemic issues of residual and continuing traumatization. As described by one participant, So, when we're talking about No Child Left Behind in tribal schools from Indian Country, I would venture to say over 80 percent of our children are traumatized at an early age; and so, therefore, their ability to learn and comprehend is affected very severely … This whole No Child Left Behind or other education endeavors deals with academics and learning; but, as long as we don't address the other issue of hurt children and hurt children cannot learn -- we all know that, don't we? Hurt children cannot comprehend. We know that. And, most importantly, children in unhealthy homes, it affects their attendance and it does contribute to their dropout. Early childhood trauma is also the precursor to longterm alcohol and substance abuse. The research is connecting all that up. (p.23)

Tribal Gaming and American Indian Education Gaming operations on a large scale began among Indian tribes in the 1980s (Mirkovich & Cowgill, 1997). At present, nearly 100 tribes in 19 states maintain gambling operations. Following a landmark court case between the state of California and the Cabazon tribe, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 put tribal gaming enterprises under the regulation of Congress. This law, while affirming tribal sovereignty, also requires Indian tribes to maintain compacts with their state governments that specify the types of gaming operations in which tribes may engage on their lands. California, home to 66 such compacts, currently hosts

70 70 more tribal gaming enterprises than any other state. Viewed as a form of economic opportunity for reservations with few other money-making options, gaming has provided a financial windfall for many tribes. As Ojibway leader Marge Anderson observed: ―It‘s the only economic development that has ever worked in Indian country. Period. And without gaming, we were losing our culture, we were losing our language. We wouldn‘t survive‖ (p. 12). Not all American Indians agree with Anderson‘s judgment, however. Bitter and even violent conflicts have arisen among and between tribal members over gaming-related issues and distribution of casino profits; others applaud the enhanced economic prosperity that has allowed tribes to fund schools and other programs for the education and social welfare of their people (Moore, 1993; Rose, I.N., 1992; Thompson & Dever, 1994). Both present and future improvements to American Indian education need to take into consideration that education takes place at the juncture of powerful forces of history and culture. Education, as a complex process involving mind, body, spirit, and culture, is, for the American Indian student, also situated at the site of psychic wounds, some caused by schooling itself, that are not instantaneously healed by the application of money, as studies of the correlation between tribal gaming and educational outcomes have demonstrated (Diaz, 2009; Evans & Kim, 2008; Lawton, 1993; Martin & Adams, 2006). This study seeks to add to existing knowledge through understanding how Central California Indian students, past and present, perceive and make meaning of their schooling experiences. By giving voice to their perceptions, the researcher hopes to improve not only understanding, but also to improve efforts to provide meaningful education and schooling experiences for American Indian students in days to come.

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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

Rationale for Qualitative Research Research may be defined in general as the disciplined collection of data for purposes of creating knowledge (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). Research approaches may be further differentiated into three general categories: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (Creswell, 2003). This study will employ a qualitative approach, as defined by five criteria (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003): Participants will be observed and interviewed in naturalistic settings; the descriptive data will be collected in the form of words and observations rather than numbers; there will be an emphasis on process rather than products; the data will be analyzed inductively; and meaning, in particular participant perspective is of essential concern (pp. 6-7). According to Shank (2006), three tenets govern the qualitative inquiry: First, the researcher actively, and with self-awareness, participates in the research process; second, the inquiry into meaning is in service of understanding, and may extend beyond understanding to critical efforts, particularly in service of marginalized or disempowered people; and finally, the qualitative inquiry embraces new ways of looking at and interpreting reality. Shank further explained: When we believe that our current levels of meaning are not rich enough, this position leads us inevitably to study things on their own terms, at their own levels, as wholes. We resist the urge to factor, to decompose, to compartmentalize, in order to explain. (p. 9) But what exactly is understanding, then, for the qualitative researcher? Wax (1986) defined understanding not in the intuitive or empathic sense, but as ―a social phenomenon—a phenomenon of shared meanings‖ (p. 11). She went on to state that such understanding does not in and of itself generate knowledge, but is a precondition of research in any social situation (p. 13). According to Wax, this

72 72 shared understanding may potentially yield a form of data ―that is as absolute as any in science‖ (p. 14).

Political Implications of the Qualitative Approach Questions relating to research, how it is conducted, where, and with whom, challenges or calls into question what Becker (1970) has called the hierarchy of credibility, meaning ―the idea that the opinions and views of those in power are worth more than those of people who are not (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003, p. 17). According to Bogdan and Biklen, the increasing popularity of qualitative methods in education from the 1960s onward has transformed, and continues to transform, the field of education, just as 19th century ―muckraking‖ inquiries exposed social problems which transformed Bogdan and Biklen (2003) further note the ideological influences of feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory on research practices. The latter two influences are of particular interest in the present study. The postmodern postcolonialist lens has been discussed in chapter 1. Critical theory, according to Giroux (1983), ―refers to both a ‗school of thought‘ and a process of critique‖ (p. 8). In addition, critical theorists, particularly those of the Frankfurt School (Giroux, 1983), view research as a political act involving the ―commitment to penetrate the world of objective appearances and to expose the underlying social relationships they often conceal‖ (p. 8). These social relationships may be characterized by conditions of domination and subordination, hence critical theorists may conduct their research to benefit a specific group of people. Recognizing that society is presently organized in a way that generates injustice and inequity for some, the critical theorist conducts research expecting to benefit those who have been marginalized with an intention to ―empower the powerless and transform existing social inequalities and injustices‖ (McLaren, 1994, p. 168),

73 73 or, as Giroux (1983) has put it, ―thought and action should be grounded in compassion and in our sense of the sufferings of others‖ (p. 9). Thus critical research potentially contributes to a sense of political engagement and hope, as Giroux (2006) defines the word: Hope is the refusal to stand still in the face of human suffering, and it is learned by example, inflamed by the passion for a better life, and undertaken as an act of civic courage. (p. 233) As relates to this study, the researcher‘s hope is to contribute to knowledge in support of what Rorty (1998) has described as ―achieving our country‖ by moving towards a progressive vision in which the reality of the past, particularly past injustice, is confronted, its effect on the present confirmed, and an America develops in which governments and institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced. Such a country cannot contain castes or classes, because the kind of self-respect which is needed for free participation in democratic deliberation is incompatible with such divisions. (p. 30) Ultimately, Rorty contended that achieving this vision of the United States would ―produce less unnecessary suffering… and a greater diversity of individuals— larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals‖ (p. 30). It is this researcher‘s hope that the present study will contribute to attaining such a vision.

Research Questions The purpose of this study was to record and document the perceptions about education and schooling as experienced by California Indian people from the Central Valley and to explore the significance and effects of various forms schooling and education across multiple generations for members of three different tribes. As discussed in previous chapters, American Indian education,

74 74 and schooling in particular, cannot be considered apart from the realities of colonization and cultural subjugation as experienced by Indian people in the centuries-long process of forced assimilation. Research questions that guided the inquiry were: How have California Indians of the Central Valley experienced and perceived schooling across the generations? What does education mean to California Indians today compared to what it meant a generation, two generations or more ago? How do schooling experiences and perceptions differ by tribe, by school, by location?

Data Collection As articulated in chapter 1, the voices missing from the conversation about American Indian education in California are notably the voices of California Indian people themselves. Geertz (1973) defined culture as ―webs of meaning‖ within which people live, encoded in symbols and subject to interpretation. Thus, even the formulation of a definition of education and/or schooling that can encompass shared meaning across two very different cultures is problematic, especially when only one voice, the voice of the dominant culture, is heard. The researcher attempted to address this ontological dilemma through the use of two qualitative research tools: the semi-structured interview (Bailey, 2007) and Krieger‘s (1985) ―Separating Out‖ analytic technique.

The Semi-structured Interview Data collection included conducting and recording semi-structured interviews of California Indian people who represent several generations of extended families affiliated with three different tribes: The Tule River Tribe, the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria, and the North Fork Mono Indians. As noted by Bailey (2007), the semi-structured interview permits the researcher some

75 75 flexibility by allowing the flow of the interview to determine when and how preformulated questions are asked. Such interviews are scheduled in advance and might also include unplanned dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee. This approach allowed the interviewer to ask comparable questions of different interviewees while still allowing room for unexpected responses and differing perspectives. Consent forms were provided for interviewees. Questions for semi- structured interviews included:  What was life like for you during your childhood?  Do you remember your first day of school? What happened?  What do you remember learning in school? Was this learning valuable to you? Why/why not?  Do you remember any of your teachers? Who? Why?  Can you describe a typical school day?  What was your favorite part of your educational experience?  How did your schooling experience compare with those of your parents, grandparents, or other relatives?  When and why did you stop attending school?  How do your schooling experiences compare with those who came after you, such as children or grandchildren?  What is your opinion of what is taught in schools today?  What, in your opinion, is worth teaching or learning? What does it mean to be well-educated?  Is there anything else you would like to say? These questions were asked of interviewees and recorded. I then transcribed their responses. Interviewees included California Indian people from three different areas: my husband and his family members from the Tule River

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Reservation near Porterville; the Mono; and the Tachi Yokuts from Santa Rosa Rancheria near Lemoore.

Addressing Researcher Subjectivity: The “Separating Out” Analytic Technique Bias, as a form of error, presents a threat to the validity of research findings, and for the qualitative researcher, subjectivity must be addressed in research design and data collection. According to Peshkin (1988), a researcher‘s ―subjectivity is like a garment that cannot be removed‖ (p.17). Therefore, he suggested that the researcher not wait until after data has been gathered to seek out possible effects of subjectivity, but to engage in a process of constant reflection throughout the research process in order to avoid the possibility of reporting what one‘s own biased perceptions have ―sought out and served up as data‖ (p. 20). Peshkin recommended keeping a written account of each time the researcher‘s personal sentiments are aroused, analyzing each situation and its potential influence on research focus and data interpretation. Krieger (1985) evolved an even more specific technique for addressing the researcher‘s ―idiosyncratic patterns of recognition‖ (p. 309) which she described as ―Separating out‖ ( p. 312), an analytic technique consisting of three sets of brief but reflective notes that accompany interview data. First, ―Pre-interview Self- Assessment‖ notes document the researcher‘s previous acquaintance with the interviewee, report any perceived biases resulting from previous conversations or stated opinions of others as well as interviewer expectations, prejudices, personal feelings or reactions. The ―Interview Self Assessment‖ identifies feelings or personal prejudices evoked or experienced subjectively during the interview, how these might be explained, and what they might mean; and finally, a post-hoc analysis of notes taken during the interview itself. According to Krieger, ―We need

77 77 to link our statements about those we study with statements about ourselves, for in reality neither stands alone‖ (p. 321).

Archival Data: Recovering Voices of the Past In order to include perspectives involving educators, tribal and family members who lived further back in time, the researcher also viewed personal papers of a minister who ran the Presbyterian Mission and school established at North Fork in 1910. These papers are housed in Special Collections at the Henry Madden Library at Fresno State University. In addition, transcripts of interviews of elders from the Tule River Tribe conducted by researcher Gelya Frank in the 1970s, as part of her masters thesis, and subsequently in the early 2000s as part of the Tule River Tribal History Project were generously provided by Dr. Frank.

Data Analysis Data were analyzed by the researcher inductively and reflexively in the process of data collection. Interviews were also transcribed, analyzed and coded depending on content; coding categories were established as data were collected. Field notes were taken to make a record of the researcher‘s impressions that were not apparent or included in the interview recordings. Shank (2006) delineated three characteristics of thematic analysis of coded data: the inductive process in which the researcher‘s thinking moves from specific instances to general patterns; incident and theoretical comparisons to confirm thematic patterns; and saturation, the point at which patterns can clearly be seen, indicating that sufficient data has been collected, and deeper analysis and write-up can begin. Miles and Hubberman (1999) suggested ongoing coding of data throughout the collection process. Triangulation of researcher observations, live interviews, and historical interviews and data were used to establish internal validity. While qualitative

78 78 researchers do not share the same expectations or definition of reliability as quantitative researchers do (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003), reliability in qualitative research may be defined as the ―fit between what they record as data and what actually occurs in the setting under study‖ (p. 36).

Ethical Considerations Some interviewees, particularly those who have had negative or traumatic schooling experiences, such as those who attended government boarding schools, were expected to experience unpleasant emotions or have memories surface during the interview process. One precaution the researcher took in anticipation of this was to interview elders in a group setting when possible, as well as having a counselor available during and after interviews.

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CHAPTER 4: RESULTS/OUTCOMES

Introduction The purpose of this study was to record and document schooling experiences of Central Valley California Indian people across multiple generations. These voices have been largely missing from conversations, past and present, about education and its effects on diverse populations of students in this state. Those interviewed about their schooling experiences were members of three Central California tribal groups: The Tule River Band of Yokut Indians from the Porterville area, the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria near Lemoore, and Mono from the North Fork and Cold Springs Rancherias. Relevant voices of several additional American Indian people of other tribes who shared schooling experiences with those interviewed are also included. Archival materials were used to provide additional information, including schooling experiences of Central California Indian people who are now deceased. Special Collections relating to Central California Indian people, including the papers of Vernon Brooks and oral histories collected in the 1960s and housed at the Henry Madden Library at Fresno State University, were consulted. Gelya Frank of the University of Southern California (USC) generously permitted access to transcripts and DVDs of her graduate work conducted with elders of the Tule River tribe during the 1970s as well as data she and her team collected for the Tule River Tribal History Project in 2004. Additional materials and resources were provided by Mono Tribal Chairman Ron Goode and the Sierra Mono Museum. Frankie Williams of the Tule River Tribe was an invaluable ally in helping the researcher to schedule interviews and also made himself available to serve as a

80 80 counselor for any who might need counseling after recalling difficult or traumatic schooling experiences.

Research Questions History, as Winston Churchill once observed, is written by the victors. The post-colonialist perspective attempts to redress distortions resulting from this historical tendency by placing equal importance on the perspective of subjugated peoples. The research questions for this study reflected the post-colonialist lens adopted by the researcher for purposes of this study: How have California Indians of the Central Valley experienced and perceived schooling across the generations? What does education mean to California Indians today compared to what it meant a generation, two generations or more ago? How do schooling experiences and perceptions differ by tribe, by school, by location?

Research Design The study utilized a qualitative research approach, relying on a semi- structured interview format as well as study of archived materials. Information was gathered from nine members of one extended Tule River tribal family, representing five generations, with members of four living generations actively participating in the interview process. Interviews were recorded digitally then transcribed into word processing software. The interview transcriptions, along with other notes and data, were loaded into NVivo9 software. Coding categories were deduced from ongoing scrutiny of the transcripts and comparison of interviewee responses and archival data. Additional data that were not input into NVivo9 for coding was examined and coded by hand. Several interviews were

81 81 obtained too late to create full transcriptions, so only portions were used. Videos, DVDs, and websites consulted were not coded in NVivo9. The 1956 master‘s thesis by Sierra High School principal Wallace Barcus, and the Petition for Federal Acknowledgment from the North Fork Mono Tribe provided by Tribal Chairman Ron Goode, were likewise used as sources but not coded in NVivo9. The researcher also interviewed several American Indian people who were not members of the three targeted tribes, but who shared relevant schooling experiences with one of the populations. For example, an American Indian high school principal was interviewed who is not a member of the Tule River Tribe, but he grew up near the reservation and shared the same schooling experiences as his Tule River friends. Informants were interviewed in their homes or places of work. Archival data was located and explored during trips to the Henry Madden Library at Fresno State University, the Tule River Reservation, the Sierra Mono Museum, and Santa Monica, California, where the researcher consulted with Gelya Frank at her home. The researcher contacted members of the Tachi Yokuts Tribe, but only one agreed to be interviewed, a meeting which took place outside the sweat lodge next to his home. The interviewee‘s wife, a member of the Mono tribe from the Big Sandy Rancheria, also participated in the interview. Two elders of the North Fork Mono were interviewed at the Sierra Mono Museum, along with an elder member from another tribe. Two additional Mono elders were interviewed in their respective homes. Additional interview data was obtained through archives and online sources to provide perspective of schooling experiences across multiple generations.

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Limitations Access and scheduling proved to be significant obstacles in obtaining interviews within the time frame allotted for data collection for the dissertation. Central California Indian people contacted for purposes of the study, even those directly acquainted with the researcher‘s husband, who is a member of the Tule River Tribe, displayed no particular urgency in returning phone calls or scheduling meeting times. In accordance with materials describing cultural differences between Euro-American and American Indian perceptions of time provided to the researcher by Ron Goode, an interviewee and former professor of American Indian studies, this is not unusual for the studied population. Scheduling problems ranged from cancellations due to unexpected deaths of elder tribal members requiring lengthy ceremonial participation (8 days of ―crying‖ ceremonies for traditional elders) to the participation of entire family groups in spring cattle drives. The researcher attempted to avert scheduling problems by initiating early contact with Tule River Education Director John Focke of the Tribal Education Program. The researcher also formally requested permission and participation the Tule River Tribal Council and Elders‘ Council. These efforts were augmented by the assistance of the researcher‘s husband, Frankie Williams, who is employed on the Tule River reservation as Director of the Tule River Alcohol Program (TRAP). The predictable result of these efforts is that there are more interviewees represented from the Tule River Tribe than from the other two Central Valley tribes selected for the study. Obtaining interviews on schooling experiences of extended family members representing four generations was possible only due to Mr. Williams‘ ongoing efforts.

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While the Tachi Yokuts elder interviewee provided valuable information, efforts to include more members of the Tachi Yokuts tribe across generations were not successful within the time constraints of the dissertation process. Twice the researcher scheduled appointments to meet with the Tachi Yokuts Tribal Education Director, and on both occasions, the director was out of the office when the researcher arrived at the appointed time. No explanation was offered on either occasion. Due to the length of the drive from Visalia to the Santa Rosa Rancheria, the researcher elected, both times, to stay and speak with the staff present at the time. Staff members were eager to share their opinions regarding Indian education and schooling, but none were members of the Tachi Yokuts tribe, although one was married to a tribal member. Another staff member had grown up on the Rancheria and participated in the tribe‘s education program as a child, but she was not a Tachi Yokuts tribal member; she was Wintun, from the Sacramento area. The majority of Indian people interviewed were tribal elders. The number of interviewees who recall traditional learning experiences within their family or tribe, as well as the number of those interviewed who have dedicated their lives to their tribal communities in positions of leadership, certainly limit the generalizability of the findings. The focus of this study was on tribally affiliated interviewees, most of whom continue to live on reservations or Rancherias. A study of off-reservation Indian people, or of those who have actively chosen to sever ties to their tribes and/or traditional ways of life, might yield very different perceptions and insights. Archived interviews shared by researcher Gelya Frank provided valuable information about schooling experiences of elders no longer with us. However, those interviews were general in nature and not conducted specifically for the purpose of learning about schooling experiences. Some of the information

84 84 provided on the schooling experiences of these interviewees is therefore partial or incomplete. Notably missing are recorded accounts of schooling experiences from the generation of Central California Indian people who would have been most likely to have attended the repressive government boarding schools. The researcher did not access or record any detailed accounts of such experiences among tribal members. Several references were made in the archived interviews concerning older relatives who warned younger generations away from boarding school attendance, but there were no specific incidents described. Additional data that could fill in the missing pieces may be available in tribal records or the work of other researchers, but time and distance constraints prevented this researcher from exploring this line of research further at the present time. Timing and scheduling were also problematic when seeking interviews with some representatives of the North Fork Mono tribe. Tribal Vice-Chairwoman Elaine Fink was initially enthusiastic about being interviewed, along with her mother and daughters. However, serving the tribe in recent months has required her to make repeated trips to Washington, D.C. as the Mono seek approval for a new gaming enterprise the Rancheria hopes to locate on Highway 99 near Madera. The researcher made numerous attempts by phone and by email to schedule the promised interviews, but the opportunity did not manifest within the dissertation time frame. Finally, being a White female educator interviewing Indian people, many of whom have had negative or even traumatic experiences in school, and some of whom specifically mentioned White female teachers as a source of cruelty or discriminatory school-related behavior, was certainly a limitation. In addition, the legacy of historical trauma among the survivors of Central California Indian

85 85 people who lost more than 90% of their relatives and friends in a single generation due to the depredations of White people cannot be underestimated or ignored. This researcher was forced to confront what it feels like to be viewed as a representative of one‘s race, which in this case required dealing with residual racial guilt for events in which I personally played no individual part, as well as a general consciousness of being culturally or racially ―other‖ than the subjects of my interviews. Confronting the reality of being culturally and ethnically ―other‖ meant, to me, the need to accept that there might be concepts and experiences that I simply would not grasp or be made privy to. This represents a cause of discomfort to a researcher whose identity is wrapped up in her capacity not only to grasp whatever is within reach intellectually, but also to care for and attempt to understand the people in proximity to her. It has been difficult to acknowledge and accept that there are things my interview subjects might choose not to share with me or that I might not fully grasp due to our racial, ethnic, or cultural differences. Some of these issues did not emerge in the interview process, but became apparent later, as I continued examination of the data collected. Participants with more formal education were sometimes better able to articulate to the researcher the differences in mindset between the two cultures, while some of those with less formal education appeared to display some degree of anxiety, insecurity, or need to compensate for what they perceived to be a comparatively lesser educational status. I attempted to put interviewees at ease by noting the wide range of schooling and educational outcomes in my own family and by affirming the value of less formal or societally mandated learning experiences. Nonetheless, areas of distortion or misunderstanding in the

86 86 interpretation of interviewees‘ comments or experiences are not only possible but likely to have occurred. The lives of those interviewed have played out within the broader socio- political context of American Indian education policy-making at the state and federal levels. Larger American social trends and historical events such as the Great Depression and a succession of wars also affected the lives and schooling experiences of those interviewed. The voices of interviewees are allowed in the following pages to speak for themselves, in an effort to create an unfolding panorama of educational experiences spanning approximately a century. Brief descriptions to help create context are included.

Schooling Experiences: Tule River Tribe of Yokuts Indians In concert with most California tribes, various bands of the Yokuts Indians, a linguistically-related grouping of some 50 tribes through the Central Valley of California, negotiated treaties with the U.S. government in the early 1850s. None of these treaties was ever ratified, resulting in a great deal of political confusion for future generations. In fact, this confusion may have been deliberately induced to mask the reality of the free-for-all land grab that resulted, at the expense of California Indian people, to which the federal and state governments turned a blind eye (Frank & Goldberg, 2010). When the three men tasked with negotiations brought treaties with California tribes back to Washington, D.C., these treaties were shelved in secrecy for a period of 50 years. Meanwhile, gold-seekers and land-hungry Euro-American settlers from further east were allowed, with impunity, to drive Indian people from their ancestral lands. Those native people who were not murdered outright died of starvation or exposure to disease. This is a reality that must be taken into account

87 87 when embarking on any study of the survivors of that de facto genocide. Explaining the decimation of 90% or more of the Central California Indian population in the single generation following the start of the Gold Rush, Cook (1976) stated: The first [factor] was the food supply... The second factor was disease. ... A third factor, which strongly intensified the effect of the other two, was the social and physical disruption visited upon the Indian. He was driven from his home by the thousands, starved, beaten, raped, and murdered with impunity. He was not only given no assistance in the struggle against foreign diseases, but was prevented from adopting even the most elementary measures to secure his food, clothing, and shelter. The utter devastation caused by the white man was literally incredible, and not until the population figures are examined does the extent of the havoc become evident. (p. 200) It was within the context of this historical reality that the Tule River Reservation was created. In 1854, an Indian reservation with a working farm was established at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley near the U.S. Army fort at Tejon. Built on the mission model, the Tejon Reservation required quotas of labor from its Indian residents, who were mostly Yokuts from the Yowlumni tribe and Kitanemuk, a local tribe related to the Shoshone (Frank, 2002). Shortly thereafter, the first Tule River Reservation was established on 1,280 acres in an area then known as Madden Farm near what is now Alta Vista Elementary School in the City of Porterville. The Tule River reservation was located in the traditional homeland of the Koyeti and Yowlumni tribes and served as a refuge and agricultural training ground for surviving remnants of various California tribes, including the Koyeti, Yowlumni, Yaudanchi, Chunuts, Yokodo, Kaweah, Wukchumni, Pankalachi, and Kumachisi. Just as in earlier times, Mission Indians escaped into the Central Valley, some of the Tule River residents were runaways from the forced labor

88 88 conditions of reservations such as Tejon. As Tule River elder Alotha Santos put it, ―One come from the Kernville, Pankalachi, Tejon, Table Mountain… Where there is little bit leftover Indian, pick it up, put them in here‖ (Frank, 1973, in Frank, 2002, p. 15). This tradition continued in the wake of the Owens Valley War between encroaching miners and the Western Mono, also known as the Mona or Monache. The Mono were defeated, and 350 survivors were relocated to the Tule River Reservation in 1860. It is important to note that the Tule River Tribe is not comprised of a single ancestral band of California Indians, but the survivors of many tribes with two broad linguistic origins: The Yokuts of the Central Valley, who often shared words in common; and the Mono, who came from the mountain areas and are more closely linguistically related to the Paiute. In 1864, the population of the Tule River Reservation was reported as 800 (Frank, 2002). By 1873, pressure from encroaching settlers who coveted the rich farmland being developed by the Tule River Indians pushed the reservation up into the foothills and the mountains, expanding the total acreage but reducing the amount of arable land (Frank & Goldberg, 2010). Reservation Indians were forced once again to turn their land and all improvements they had made over to White settlers, and to adapt to a new life in the mountains. Koyeti survivor Jose Vera, whose great-grandmother had been baptized at a Spanish mission, was one of the Yokuts who, when forced to move from the Madden Farm reservation, thrived in making the transition. Mr. Vera became a rancher on the new Tule River Reservation (Stiner, 1949). Other families who successfully adapted to new conditions include those of several interviewees, who continue the ranching tradition generations later on the reservation today. As the Tule River tribes adapted to their new, more remote mountain setting, educators of 19th century America were scaling their own metaphorical

89 89 mountain as they attempted to implement Horace Mann‘s (1848) vision of an inclusive common school model for public education. This model did not, at the time, include American Indian people, due in part to the political fact that they were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924. The prevailing 19th century American attitude toward Indian education was reflected in comments made by George Hoffman, BIA Special Agent supervising the Tule River Farm in 1866: ―No schools have been attempted here, nor any religious instruction, nor could I recommend the expenditure of any money on such hopeless subjects‖ (cited in Larsen, 2002, p. 10). Deemed irredeemable and uneducable, most reservation residents were left to their own devices and many continued to speak their ancestral languages and practice their traditional ways. In retrospect, this may have been the best thing that could have happened for many of them, given the educational outcomes for American Indian children who were forced into military- model boarding schools that began to proliferate in the 1890s. In the early 20th century, public and government attitudes began to shift. As noted by Frank (2002), ―The most dismal and oppressive period of American government policy toward the Indians of this country occurred from 1885 to 1934‖ (p. 7). Assimilation was the new goal, forcibly imposed upon Indian people through practices such as compulsory attendance at military-model boarding schools with standardized curriculum and corporal discipline practices in place to assure linguistic and cultural divestiture. The researcher was told that there was a government boarding school located on the Tule River Reservation during this era, but that ―someone burned it down‖ (Vernon Vera, personal communication, January 26, 2012). The year 1934 marked passage of FDR‘s Indian Reorganization Act, which provided for tribal self-rule through democratically elected councils. Indian lands

90 90 continued to be held in trust by the federal government. Several Tule River interviewees recollected this change, remembering both the Indian agents who once lived on the reservation and their departure. Several interviewees had served in the past on the reservation‘s tribal council. One noted with some humor that quite a few more candidates run for election now than did when serving on the council was not a paid position. The Johnson O‘Malley Act (JOM), initially intended to provide federal funds to offset the cost of public schooling for Indian students who lived on tax exempt lands, was also passed in 1934. Some interviewees recalled a school at this time that was located near Soda Spring. Others recall the LaMotte school, which has since been relocated to Mooney Grove Historical Park in Visalia. During this era, many Tule River Indian children attended a one-room reservation school in which a single teacher served 1st to 8th grade students. This reservation school burned down in the 1960s. Other Tule River Indian students were sent to the North Fork Presbyterian Mission and boarding school. Those who graduated 8th grade at the reservation school had the option to attend high school at government-run boarding schools such as Sherman Institute in Riverside or Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada. Stewart was also a destination for some elementary school-age reservation children as well. The Tule River Tribe voted to keep its reservation intact in the 1950s, when Congress began to pass termination legislation on a tribe-by-tribe basis in an effort to dissolve government obligations to American Indian people and hasten the assimilation process. In California, termination policy took the form of the 1958 California Rancheria Termination Act. Nationwide, 109 tribes – 41 of them in California – lost their sovereignty and millions of acres of trust lands were removed from protected status during this time. Much of this land was sold by the

91 91 government to private, non-native citizens. Once Indian land holdings were broken up and federal support was withdrawn, the isolation and poverty of most reservation Indians left them without health or education services for their people, much less the resources necessary to challenge federal policy through the judicial system. Nonetheless, many California Indian people worked collaboratively as the Inter-tribal Council of California (ITCC) to resist the termination policy. Poverty was a common condition for most reservation residents. As noted by Frank (2002), a lease with the Whitney Lumber Company, enacted in 1957, provided more than two-thirds of the income earned by reservation families at that time, including several interviewees and their family members. Seasonal work picking fruit and working in packinghouses also provided income for many Indian families, and it was common practice for all family members, including children, to participate in this labor. Many interviewees recalled camping with their families and ―picking prunes‖ or other crops to finance the purchase of school clothes or to support their families in general. Many interviewees from all three tribes remembered growing up without utilities such as indoor bathrooms, running water or electricity in their homes, well into the 1970s. Poverty, however, did not prevent Central California Indian people from engaging in political activism. In 1972, Native American Training Associates (NATA), a coalition of American Indian activists including a Tule River tribal member, contributed to the passage of the California Indian Education Act (1972) and California Indian Health Care Act (1974). These acts provided funding for much-needed Indian health and education support services and programs. Meanwhile, other tribal members reflected the growing political awareness and activism among American Indian people when they travelled to Alcatraz Island to

92 92 lend support for the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of the island in 1969-1971. In 1980, the Tule River Tribe won its legal battle to regain lost reservation acreage, a northeastern section of 1,280 acres that includes a rare stand of Sequoia trees. In 1996, a tribal casino was established and now provides gaming revenues that fund recovery of lands adjacent to the reservation and working capital to fund tribal business enterprises. Gaming revenues also fund community services to support health, housing, and education for tribal members. Today, there are approximately 900 enrolled Tule River tribal members living on the reservation, with an additional 1,400 enrolled members living off the reservation.

Interviews with Tule River Tribe Members Personal interviews were conducted with nine enrolled members of the Tule River Tribe and one direct descendant who is not enrolled. Interviewees ranged in age from 14 to 87 years old (see Table 3). One person not a member of the tribe, a Ho-Chunk man who grew up near the Tule River Reservation and shared similar schooling experiences, was also interviewed. As one of only a handful of educators in this area who are of American Indian ancestry, his perspective was valuable to this study. The researcher was also fortunate to gain access to additional interviews originally conducted by Gelya Frank of University of Southern California during her graduate work in the 1970s and subsequently in the early 2000s in the context to the Tule River Tribal History project, which she led. Many of the people who participated in these interviews are now deceased, and these materials permit an extension of the interpretation of schooling experiences for California Indian people as far back as the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pseudonyms are used for interviewees to protect their privacy (see Table 4).

93 93 Table 3

Tule River Tribe Interviewees Name Tribal Affiliation Age Schools Attended Highest Grade Completed Lorraine W. Tule River Tribe 87 Tule River Reservation School, 10th grade (Pankalachi, Fort Bidwell, Stewart, Koyeti) Sherman Charles S. Tule River Tribe 80 Tule River Reservation School, North Fork 7th grade (Yowlumni) Mission Boarding School Carrie W. Tule River Tribe 60 North Fork Elementary, (Yowlumn) Sierra HS HS graduate Elizabeth W. Tule River Tribe 78 Vandalia Elementary, Bartlett/Pioneer Middle Some college (Wukchumni) School, Porterville HS, Porterville City College Fred W. Tule River Tribe 60 Vandalia, Central (Lemoore), Bartlett BA (Wukchumni, MS, Porterville HS, Yowlumni) Oxnard College, PCC, College of the Sequoias, Fresno State University Lydia P. Tule River Tribe 55 Vandalia, Bartlett, Porterville HS,PCC, BA University of Laverne Patty B. Tule River Tribe 48 Vandalia, (Wukchumni, Bartlett(Pioneer?), Some HS Yowlumni) Porterville HS Susie M. Tule River Tribe 45 Vandalia, Bartlett, Pioneer, Porterville HS, AA (Wukchumni, Sherman, PCC, San Yowlumni) Joaquin Valley College Catherine M. Tule River Tribe 37 Vandalia, Pioneer, Porterville HS, UC Law degree Santa Cruz, University of NM Albuquerque Kyle W. Tule River Tribe 17 Crestwood, Royal Direct Descendant Oaks, Linwood, La 11th grade (Wukchumni, Joya MS, El Diamante Yowlumni) HS Roy M. Tule River Tribe 14 Vandalia, Pioneer (Wukchumni, 8th grade Yowlumni) Malcolm W. Ho-Chunk 52 Vandalia, Pioneer, Porterville HS, MA Ed. Monache HS, Administration Bakersfield College, Fresno Pacific University

94 94 Table 4

Archived (Frank, 1973-2004) Tule River Tribe Interviewees Highest Level Name and Year Completed of Interview Tribal Affiliation Age Schools Attended (if known) *Jose Vera Tule River Tribe b. 1869 - No known formal schooling None 1949 (Koyeti) Anna S. Tule River Tribe b. 1891 No known formal schooling None 1972, 1973 (Pankalachi) Delia S. 2004 Tule River Tribe b. ca. Sherman Institute Unknown (through son) 1920 Ronnie F. Tule River Tribe b. 1945 Unknown Unknown 2004 Eddie C. 2004 Tule River Tribe b. ca. Tule River Reservation Unknown 1930 School, Stewart Indian School Ron C. Tule River Tribe b. ca. late Sherman Institute Unknown 2004 (Yowlumni) 1920s Lawrence G. Tule River Tribe b. ca. Tulare (rural elementary), 10th grade 2004 (Paiute/Yokuts) 1920 Tule River Reservation School, Porterville HS Joan G. 2004 Tule River Tribe b. 1917 Tule River Reservation GED School, Stewart Indian School Mary V. Tule River Tribe b. 1926 Tule River Reservation Unknown 2004 School, Porterville HS Isaac G. Tule River Tribe b. 1927 Tule River Reservation GED 2004 School, Porterville HS, 1944- 45 Ginny H. Tule River Tribe b. 1931 Tule River Reservation Unknown 2004 School, Vine Street School, Sherman Institute Earlene F. Tule River Tribe b. 1922 Harvey School (near 8th grade 2004 Porterville or Livermore mines) Rhonda B. Tule River Tribe b. 1933 Tule River Reservation GED 2004 (Yowlumni) School, Sherman Institute Lucy G. Tule River Tribe Unknown Private school Gradeschool 1973 5th or 8th grade Annie M. Tule River Tribe b. ca. Tule River Reservation Unknown 1973 1930 School, Flora H. Tule River Tribe b. 1913 Sherman Institute 10th grade 1973

* The interview with Jose Vera was conducted by Ina Stiner in 1949 for the Tulare County Historical Society Bulletin and reprinted in a special supplement to the Visalia Times Delta on September 7, 2002. All other interviews listed in this table were conducted by Gelya Frank in 1972, 1973, 2002

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Tule River Tribe: Reservation School Schooling experiences for Central California Indian people of the Tule River Reservation differed significantly from one generation to the next, reflecting overall changes in Indian education policy at the state and federal levels, as well as societal attitudes toward Indian people and the attitudes of Indian people toward education in general. Archival material for those who were born prior to the 1920s made little mention of formal education for that generation. Many of the people of that time still spoke their native languages and followed traditional ways. Mention was made of a government boarding school having existed on the reservation at one time that had been burned down. Lucy G. (Frank, 1973) remembered another school that ―used to be right down by the river where that barn is,‖ Lucy recalled, ―up there, at Soda Spring. The E**s used to live right there, where the church is. And afterward they traded them that place up there. That was when they put the school house down here. Built a new school. From that old building where the school house used to be, they moved it.‖ The LaMott School mentioned by Lawrence G. (Frank, 2004) was built in 1894 and was apparently located on Success Drive. It was later moved to Mooney Grove Park in Visalia and is part of an historic exhibit there today. Interviewee Fred W. remembered being barefoot, riding his horse to the reservation school, until it burned down and the children were sent by bus to attend Vandalia Elementary School in Porterville. Lucy G. (Frank, 1973) remembered the culprits: ―These young boys, they burned [the buildings] up. Burned [the school house] building, too.‖ After the reservation schoolhouse burned down in the 1960s, Tule River reservation students were bussed down to Vandalia Elementary in Porterville. Earlene F. (Frank, 2004) remembered attending a school on Success Drive.

96 96 They had a bell. A real big bell on the school. With a real big thick rope. It had a knot on the bottom. And the teacher used to help us… make us have turns… ding dong, ding dong! And I used to climb on top of that, and it used to take me up and down, up and down. I remember that.‖ When Earlene started school, she did not speak any English, but she learned from the teacher there. ―She was a real nice teacher… she really knew how to teach us. She would take us outside and then she would say, ‗Look up there in the tree… There‘s a bird up there.‘ She kept repeating the word bird. Bird. And we had to repeat the word, bird, bird. That‘s how I learned to speak English Then we had to draw that picture of a bird on top of the tree. My mother had that picture for a long time. Many of the elder interviewees remembered attending the one-room reservation school, near where the Tribal Education Building stands today. In the old schoolhouse, a single teacher served first through eighth grade students (see Figure 8). Lorraine W. remembered starting first grade at the reservation school: It was a real good school. It was a one teacher deal with… the first to the eighth grade. I tried to look that up one time to see who was going to school that year and this, and the agency at the time just counted the kids and never wrote down the names. It might have had seven kids on one day, maybe two or three the next day. Depends on who would show up to school. Lorraine described the layout of the school and outbuildings as they existed back then: The whole fence line behind [the education center] was called the agency. We had a school there, right in the back, with the teacher‘s quarters. There was a long room on the end, where they fed the kids. Then we had another big building there, where the elders‘ building is today, where the [agent] lived, that took care of everything on the reservation. That was before we had tribal council. Right in the area where the education [center] is, out where the kids go out and play, we had a huge building there that was our dance hall. It was all combined in there… We had a big building there that was kinda like a commissary, and there was a guy that worked there that was a blacksmith…. And right in that little corner, below the school, we had a small building there that ended up to be our tribal program. It was also the forest service, and the only phone that was on the reservation was there…One of those wind up deals. The teacher had her own little house there, a kitchen and a bedroom and a bathroom and everything in there. It

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Figure 8. Tule River reservation school, 1940. Source: Photo courtesy of Clifford Silvas

98 98 was pretty lucky we had a bathroom there. Up the hill… there was a long big building there with boys and girls bathrooms. And then, right in the back, there was another section joined to it, had a downstairs with showers in it. That‘s where I was born. My dad worked for the Forest Service and at that time, they called ‗em rangers. Me and my younger brother were both born there. Charles S. remembered crossing the bridge to walk to school: We‘d walk across the river. They had a wooden bridge across there, or a tree, a fallen tree, you could walk across it. We couldn‘t afford shoes, so when I‘d get shoes, good ones, I‘d hide ‗em and go barefooted to my school from there... I didn‘t feel like wearing them. And I‘d hide ‗em, and sometimes I‘d forget, and my grandmother‘d tell me, you better go get your shoes. ―Everyone walked to school,‖ Lorraine W. recollected: Some kids walked from Painted Rocks, which is four miles up the road, walked down. I think the H**s, the C**s, all walked to school, and then the V**s. There was only two or three. That was just above Soda Springs. Everybody walked to school. Up on the Chimney Road, the C**s lived up there, there was three kids walked down from up there. I don‘t know, about three miles. More than 70 years after starting to attend the reservation school, Charles S., like Lorraine W., had a very clear recollection of what the area around the schoolhouse was like: There was a water tank way up in the air that watered the school. And Lorraine‘s mother used to cook for us, in that house in the back long time ago. Her name was Becky. She used to cook for us a lot and we‘d eat back there… There was the old school…there was an old dance hall, where the education center‘s at, and there was a pumphouse right behind there. Where the education building is, there was a pumphouse. It‘s still there, I think. Then down below, there was a big barn, and there was a corral down there, with the barn, where they brought their cattle and weighed their cows and everything like that. It was pretty good sized. If I could draw real good, I would draw all the buildings, because I remember them pretty good yet. There was another office down below. Then up on top like that… right below there was the showers and bathroom right below there. It was pretty good. Lorraine W. described a typical school day:

99 99 We had a big bell outside and it rang for everybody to go in. And we did the Pledge of Allegiance. Our teacher made everybody sit down, and she gave each group [something] to do, first to eighth grade. She had big blackboards at the top of the room kind of sectioned off for the kids. Then she worked with the little kids mostly, teaching them how to read and do their spelling and ABCs and all that. That took most of the morning there. Nobody was in a hurry. And she just went grade by grade, each with its assignment. Lorraine contracted tuberculosis and was sent to Fort Bidwell to recover (see Figure 9). After that, she was sent for a short time to Stewart Indian School in Nevada, then returned to the reservation schoolhouse: By the time I came home and started the fifth grade up here again, we had several different teachers. The first teacher I remember up here…was Seward, Mr. Seward. And he was also kind of Superintendent at the time. And then we had an agent, an agency man, Mr. Vance. He was the Superintendent and he had two boys. Got acquainted with the kids, went to school with the kids, really had a good time. We weren‘t prejudiced people growing up, none of us were. Everybody knew each other, and everybody had good times. We looked forward to our big dances that we had there, our celebrations. Christmas, we always had a really good time because we always had a program for the parents. There was a group of ladies from Strathmore, club ladies, that always made a whole bunch of gifts and stuff for the kids up here. I think everybody looked forward to that, especially for the little bag of candy we got, with apples and orange.

Figure 9. Fort Bidwell schoolhouse in 1964.

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Lorraine remembered that her parents also attended school on the reservation, ―the school up there by Soda Spring, before they moved it down here.‖ Charles S. remembered the names of some of his teachers at the reservation school. ―There was a Mrs. Raust, I think her name was. And afterwards we had Rosa Steele, the Indian teacher.‖ He recalled that he enjoyed studying arithmetic: But I couldn‘t spell. I couldn‘t read very good. They‘d make us stand up and read. Each kid had his turn. Read his part of the book. And then another person had to stand up and read their part. They didn‘t teach all this like they do now. But you had to know what one and one and two and two was. Today, Charles keeps up with local news by reading the Tule River monthly newsletter. He also remembered that as a child, he attended the North Fork Mission School, but then returned to Tule River and stopped going to school in the 8th grade. ―I had to go pick prunes, to eat!‖ He was not sure about whether his grandfather attended school. ―I think my grandmother did, a little bit, but she couldn‘t write her name or nothin‘. My great-grandma never went to school. She‘d just put an x and someone else would sign it.‖ Lawrence G. (Frank, 2004) remembered attending the reservation school starting in the fourth grade: There were grades up to eight in there, maybe two, three, maybe four kids. And everybody graduated in there, and there was only one teacher. I‘d sit here in front, then the first graders, second graders, and third graders, and the fourth graders would sit here in about the middle of the second aisle. And the fifth and sixth graders would sit across from us…The stoves used to light when it was cold in the winter time. Mary V. (Frank, 2004) remembered that when she was at home with her mother and grandmother, ―we spoke the Indian language and Spanish, or Mexican. We had to drop all that when we went to first grade to learn English.‖ Mary and her two brothers and five sisters ―all went to the reservation school. Everybody was in the same boat. We was all poor, all the people on the reservation… maybe

101 101 we made it to town once a year to buy our school clothes, when we started school.‖ She remembered going to Farmersville and Visalia ―to pick prunes to buy our school clothes.‖ She also remembered having a sewing machine at home: I guess I was the only one who had a sewing machine. So just before school would start, well, they‘d all come around and have my mom cut out a pattern and sew it up and make dresses, or whatever for us for school... They‘d sew and visit and make clothes. Mary‘s family bought their shoes in town. ―We‘d get up in the morning and get ready to go to town. We‘d all go… have new shoes, but a pair of shoes to start school with [at] Montgomery Ward‘s. That was our favorite shopping place.‖ Mary never forgot her Indian language or her Spanish, and later became a teacher for the Indian language program on the reservation: It‘s a lot of fun… I thought I forgot some of the words, but it came back once I got into the classroom… Just a very few are able to speak our language. But it‘s funny, the little kids pick it up fast in our class… and they don‘t forget it, either… They‘ll know they‘re Indians and they won‘t be afraid to speak their language. Mary‘s grandmother never attended school, but she remembered her mother also attended the reservation school when it was up by Soda Springs. Isaac G. (Frank, 2004) recalled: I was five years old when I started school… We were told don‘t talk in our dialect on the school grounds. I think that is one of the reasons that our dialect has been lost. We started school in a one-room building where all eight grades were. So you could learn in any grade you wanted to… There was a bunch of us going to school at that time. The only way to get to school was on horseback. Or on foot. I was lucky. I didn‘t have but a quarter of a mile or so to go. There were some that traveled five or six miles to school… School at that time was a lot stricter than they are now. Because at that time, they were allowed to use a paddle or whatever they needed to, to keep you squared away. And I do remember one time when we were supposed to go directly home right after school… There was about eight or ten of us that were caught one evening not going to school. So the teacher lined us up the next morning and used a hose on us. Which they‘re not allowed to do anymore.

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Isaac also remembered a legendary authority figure, Big Jim. I‘m not sure whether he was an official truant officer or not, but… he was interested in the youth going to school. And he would drive around horseback, and he‘d… catch a youth… and bring them to school… At that time, it was quite a bit different from the way it is now. If a youth was misbehaving, almost anyone that was older had the – maybe not the authority to straighten them out or scold them or stuff like that, but they would do it. And it was considered good. But you do that now, you‘ve got to argue with the whole family…My education covered everything I needed. It wouldn‘t now. It probably wouldn‘t cover nowhere near what I would need Because I don‘t have them pieces of paper that says I can… by talking to a person, I can kind of get an idea how to interest them… My biggest thing, I can listen. Flora H. (Frank, 1973) also remembered Big Jim: …the policeman over here. He used to go to dances. He‘d go over there and make you dance. And if you got too much paint or lipstick on, he‘d make you go take some of it off… if the kids didn‘t go to school, he‘d make them go to school… He was really on his horse all the time with his pistol… Got some that didn‘t like his ways, but still he was an officer… he did help the outside officers when they made an arrest. Ginny H. (Frank, 2004) remembered growing up with a very strict grandmother and a long list of daily chores: To feed the chickens, build the fire in the morning… We had to get chips to get the fire, the wood stove, and leave the fire going… She used to do the cooking, especially beans and all those things that we grew up with. For Ginny and her sisters, school was a refuge from work and a place to enjoy the company of other children: The only place we used to play around was when we used to go to school and play with the other kids… We would try to enjoy ourselves with all the other kids, play and have fun with them. When we came home, that was it for us… We had to come straight home. We couldn‘t stay and get in the water and cool off or nothing… We had to do everything our grandmother told us. And we couldn‘t talk back. We had to jump whenever she told us to do something. That‘s the kind of person she was.

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Ginny‘s grandmother was the daughter of an Indian woman and an Irish man who hired Indian girls to work for him. She remembers her grandmother as ―a mean one… an Irish woman that had a temper.‖ Her grandmother still spoke the Indian language, but did not teach it to her grandchildren. ―The only language that she teached us was Spanish. Because she learned that from her husband.‖ Her grandmother was also strict about what the children were allowed to read. When I was a teenager, I used to like to buy those True Story romances… and my grandma used to find them and throw them in the outhouse. Or burn them in the chimney. She didn‘t want us to learn nothing like that, you know? We were supposed to be little angels. Rhonda B. (Frank, 2004) remembered following other children to school before she was considered old enough to go there herself: Because they ate. I‘ve always been a glutton… I remember the teacher, poor thing, she fed us what she could feed us. There was a kitchen. There was a big can of corn that she‘d open. She‘d mix it with milk, cream, whatever, and we had a slice of bread and that‘s what we had. Black pepper and salt on it and everybody, boy, they were eating it. But every day? That‘s what I was going for… or I just didn‘t want to be left… They couldn‘t get rid of me. I finally became a first grader. I learned my animals, and it was just a regular old-time, you know, like before they modernized it. It was count on your fingers. Rhonda recalled that she spoke both Indian and English at home, but only English at school. Annie M. (Frank, 1973) remembered teaching her Indian language to Laurabelle and Lois Kritzer, the White children of the reservation school‘s superintendent, Mr. Kritzer: They would talk to my grandma. We used to go up there on the rocks, where the dogs used to chase the squirrels… and get a pointy stick and twist it until we‘d pull them out of there, and the dogs would kill them. And those two little girls would take those squirrels down to my grandma and ask her to cook it. My grandma used to cook it for them, and they used to tell her in Indian… and my grandmother used to talk to them and they used to understand… One time they gave me a little dog and I brought it home

104 104 and my grandma liked it. And she used to wear the long dresses. And every time that little dog seen her, she‘d go in the garden, and that little dog would pull her by her dress to go take her to go chase the sheep. And she finally told that little dog, in Indian, to go and chase the sheep, and the dog used to go and chase the sheep out of the garden. She didn‘t even have to go over there. She recalled that the principal‘s son, Dave, ―used to jump on my grandmother‘s bed.‖ Charles S. also remembered Laurabelle and Lois Kritzer and their father: His name was Porter. I think his wife is still living. I‘m not sure. But he had two daughters and a son, David. They were here. I forget what the mother‘s name was, though. They used to stay in that house right there. He took care of the whole school. Like a principal or something. I remember him because he used to go bowling sometimes and I‘d go with him. They had a bowling alley on Main Street in Porterville. I don‘t know if it had one lane, two lanes. Eddy C. (Frank, 2004) recollected going to school at the old reservation schoolhouse. During school, he also worked with the Caldwells in the timber, then at 18, joined the Army.

Porterville Unified: Vandalia Elementary School Vandalia Elementary School was first built in 1951, and has since undergone renovation. There is a significant American Indian subgroup comprising 18% of the student population. Vandalia has typically served as the destination for elementary school students from the Tule River Reservation. Fred W. remembered that after the reservation school burned down, he and the rest of the reservation children began to attend schools in town: Riding the bus was different [than riding a horse to school]. All the kids went down to Vandalia. Two busloads. From K through 6. Then they also had the junior high school and the high school- all rode the bus. It was quite a few kids. We got up pretty early, before the bus came at 7:15. And then, if we was on time, we‘d get breakfast, but if we wasn‘t on time, we didn‘t get breakfast. We had to catch the bus. Luckily the bus stopped right outside of our house, and we didn‘t have to walk a long ways to catch the bus, until

105 105 my middle school years. Then we had to walk across the river to catch the middle school bus, because they changed the bus schedules. They had two different buses: one went on the north side of the Tule, and the other was on the south side of the Tule, and so we‘d meet up at Vandalia, to drop off the elementary and Pioneer, and then the buses went to Bartlett Middle School, then they went on to Porterville high school. We‘d ride the bus down into Porterville, get off the bus, then put our backpacks or bags or school books out in front of the room, kind of line them up, because we had to line up to go into class. We‘d go out and play on the playground, then once the bell rang, we‘d go pick up our books and line up before we went into the classroom. Then we went into the classroom and got seated, and we‘d do the Pledge of Allegiance and start our day… I didn‘t like school. I liked recess, pretty much like any other kid. Mrs. Moile. She was my 3rd grade teacher. Mrs. Lovett was my first grade teacher. Mr. Johnson was my 5th grade teacher the first time, and he had an artificial leg, and he‘d kind of kick his left leg out when he stepped. In the ‗60s they didn‘t really have a lot of technology on artificial limbs…I guess my 5th grade year was the one that really stands out for me personally because I was held back a year by my parents because my math skills were not up to speed. But I got a chance to go into Mrs. Olson‘s 5th grade class, and even though she was a very hard-nosed teacher- she‘d grab you by the ear and jerk you around if you was out of control – she mentored me, to help me do public speaking. They were passing around forms one day for Student Body Council, and I decided I wanted to go ahead and try it. I don‘t know why I did it. I had never really done any public speaking in a setting anywhere, but I ran for Student Body Council, my 5th grade year, for the 6th grade season. And she put a lot of time into helping me to face the crowd, and to enunciate clearly, to talk clearly and slowly so people could understand what I had to say. I was successful, because I was Vice President of the student body association for Vandalia my 6th grade year, before I went to middle school. Interviewee Malcolm W. is Indian, but not a member of the Tule River Tribe; he is Hochunk, and his family lived as a child near the base of Reservation Road. A friend of Fred W.‘s younger brothers, Malcolm used to ride the reservation school bus to Vandalia along with the other Indian kids from Tule River. He remembered a negative atmosphere, battered, outdated classroom equipment and unsympathetic, even abusive or racist teachers and staff. My dad‘s native, and my mom is white. They had a kind of a magnet program [at Vandalia], if you will. And they would cluster the native kids.

106 106 We were pretty much in the same track or classes for the most part. So I spent most of my time in those classes with Native American kids… I don‘t have particularly positive memories of Vandalia, whether it‘s just the way I felt. Reality for me was that I didn‘t have female teachers. They had male teachers, which was very rare for elementary. But in the programs at Vandalia, the classes that I had, they were male teachers. Most of them were like military veterans. And they were not particularly open or helpful or friendly. I felt they were particularly disparaging towards kids in general, but especially toward native kids, or native ancestry like myself. I do not recall a positive thing being said to me ever at Vandalia. Ever, in my entire time there. I never had a teacher say, you know, good job. I cannot remember a positive thing. I do remember getting hit. Either a ruler. I got hit a lot with a ballpoint pen, like whack you on the back of the head with that. I got hit with an open hand. On a number of occasions. I also got hit with a paddle. I ‗m not saying this happens every day, but it did happen… I was not a good student, if you look at my report cards. I was not. I failed, Ds and Fs in classes in elementary school. I wasn‘t connected. Everything that we had, as I look back, was beat up. I mean, the desks were these old metal with the wood tops, and it still had the thing for the inkwell. I remember that vividly. And they hadn‘t used the dip in ink for what, 40 years? That‘s the kind of crap we got…I really didn‘t know how bad it was until I became an adult and looked back and talked to other people who didn‘t have that experience. And their experience was just as foreign as mine was to them. I don‘t have good memories of that time. There were remarks made, belittling remarks. Some of them were so hurtful I won‘t even repeat the words. I just can‘t. It‘s too hurtful. But there were remarks made about ethnicity. And then, with respect to me, I kind of look native, and I kind of don‘t. About, you know, being, you know, mixed, and a mongrel and things like that. But there were particularly offensive remarks made by adults toward native kids. Malcolm later became an educator who is dedicated to helping students feel safe, valued, and connected during their schooling experiences. After starting school at Alta Vista Elementary in Porterville, Tule River tribal member Lydia P. changed to Vandalia when she went back home to live with her mother on the reservation.‖ I was really, really shy,‖ she recalled. ―I mean, I would hide behind my teachers. I was painfully shy. I would stay quiet

107 107 and do all my work and I got straight As.‖ She remembered in particular her 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Meincke: I think they finally had to kick her out of the school because she was so old, but she was really, really kind. Kids know when you care about them. And they know when you can‘t stand them. And this teacher, she always loved the Indian kids. She still does. And she was an artist. I do art too. While Lydia did well in elementary school, there were other students who did not, and at the time, there was not a great deal of support available to help those who fell behind. ―I don‘t know if we had an education department then. But we didn‘t have tutors. It was sink or swim.‖ By the time Catherine M. went to school at Vandalia, things had changed substantially. She remembers more support for Indian students, both culturally and academically: One thing I liked about Vandalia was that there were Native American aides that were around there, that came into the school to teach certain things. There was Sony Nieto and Brenda Salas. It was just a regular kindergarten class. And the curriculum was very different there [than at the reservation preschool]. I mean, you were expected to do our numbers, and learn how to read, and share, and that sort of thing. I was just mixed with children of different cultures… Some Indian children from the reservation that were my age… I remember when I would come to school, maybe 3rd grade or 2nd grade, in the mornings we would have like a dance group. We would go to the cafeteria to do these Native American dances, and we put on, like pow wow type dance clothing. Some of the Native American aides would be like our advisors for that, and we would do little dances in the morning. And then we would go to class after that. All of us would go to whatever classes we were from. I also remember Rhoda Hunter came in when I was in 3rd grade. She was – I guess she was friends with my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Widmancy, and she taught us how to write calligraphy. That was interesting. Other than that, generally it was your standard curriculum that I can remember… I was a GATE student. I was advanced in writing, so I was always a grade ahead. I would always have to go out of the classroom when they did reading and writing. That was when computers were kind of coming out, becoming more mainstream, and so I would also get to go to a special computer class with other students, you know, to play games on the computer or whatever.

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Porterville Unified Middle Schools: Pioneer and Bartlett Most of the students from the Tule River Reservation who attended Vandalia for elementary school went on to Pioneer Middle School, which was located next door, or Bartlett. Mary V. was born on the reservation and attended the reservation school until 6th grade. She then attended 7th and 8th grade at Bartlett during the 1930s. At home we spoke Mexican and Indian, and we had to quit that to go to school and learn English. We knew what prejudice was: People called us Mexicans or cholas. My dad came from Mexico. My mother was a full- blooded Indian. She was born up here… I was the only 7th grader [at the reservation school] so they decided it was time for me to go to school in town. I was in the second class to graduate from Bartlett Junior High. I stayed with some people [in town], did some babysitting. My dad was not in favor of sending us off to [boarding] school. My sister Anna was the only one who went to Stewart. Fred W. attended Bartlett in the 1960s. After being held back in the 5th grade at Vandalia, he became more involved in school activities: My middle school years I enjoyed. I got into sports, a lot. I found out that I was gifted as an athlete, and that really helped me and shaped my going into high school. In high school, if it wasn‘t for sports, I wouldn‘t have graduated. I wasn‘t a very good student. I didn‘t take it very seriously. In the middle school, I met a coach by the name of Glen Davis. He was a Navy guy. He went to school in Annapolis. He took a liking to me because of my ability to be a good athlete. And he would drive me home, because we didn‘t have any transportation from Bartlett to the reservation, which is about 25 miles up in the mountains. At least twice a week he would drive me all the way home so I could practice after school. Malcolm W. described his overall experience at Pioneer in the early 1970s: All of us who went to Vandalia just went over to Pioneer. And it was a much bigger venue. You went from an elementary school with a lot of Hispanic and native kids to a school that was much more diverse. I didn‘t find really much success there. I was not a good student. Still felt you know, left out or disparaged for the most part. And that continued.

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Fred W.‘s youngest sister, Tule River Tribal member Susie M., remembered transitioning from Vandalia to Bartlett in the late 1970s, but then being moved by her parents to Pioneer: I don‘t know if they didn‘t want me associating with the reservation kids, but they pulled me from Bartlett and they put me in Pioneer. There was just maybe a handful of us Indians over there-- more the White generation was there. So that‘s where I grew up. I grew up with the generation and became friends with a lot of people in town, as to where maybe if I had stayed at Bartlett, I would have just stayed within my generation of reservation residents up there. I think it was different for me because I got to do more things, you know, off the reservation. I got to go places with my friends and their families. I got to do different things, spend the night, and have sleepovers, and stuff, and I guess they, back then, I was known as a ―sosh.‖ At that time, I didn‘t care. I got to do what I got to do and I enjoyed it and had fun. I made some really close friends, and we‘re still friends to this day. Catherine M. went to Bartlett in the late 1980s: It was a little bit different because a lot of the people I went to Vandalia with went to Pioneer, but there were still some native students from the city of Porterville that also went to Bartlett that I knew and I was related to. Nothing really significant there. It was just standard curriculum there as well.

Porterville High Schools For the generation that attended the Tule River reservation school, graduating from the schoolhouse in the 8th grade was a point of departure from which tribal residents chose either to continue school at Sherman or Stewart or go to work. The generation that came after the reservation school burned down, who attended public school in the City of Porterville, was more likely to encounter its point of departure from formal education during high school. Through the 1960s and 1970s, many reservation-based high school students who attended high school in Porterville did not persist to graduation.

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Like many of elders interviewed, Mary V. (Frank, 2004) remembered that racism was a problem for Indian students: I was smart enough not to let them know I was Indian. They thought I was Mexican- last name R**. I didn‘t tell them I was Indian and I got along great with all the Mexican kids at school. I spoke Spanish. I played it cool. I kept my mouth shut because I knew they were prejudiced against Indians. Lawrence G. (Frank, 2004) first learned the Paiute language from one grandmother, then the Yokuts language from his other grandmother. He moved to the reservation with his father when he was 6 years old and went to the reservation school. Afterward, he attended Porterville High School for two and a half years. Like Mary, he remembered racism among both students and teachers in those days. At school, I tried to get along with all of them, but some of ‗em I couldn‘t. So I just left them alone. Walked away from them… [In high school], I got a good teacher. He looked at me and said something like, What I‘m gonna teach you, you might need it someday. So I did my best to learn. I went into high school and I signed up for classes like math and science, and I couldn‘t learn. The second book in algebra deals with lines and distances, and I couldn‘t understand that. I told my dad, they can‘t teach me nothing down there. One day I got really mad at the teacher. The lady that tried to teach me algebra, she was a heavyset lady, and she was kind of old. I think she used to have some trouble with the young Indian kids. I didn‘t know the word, but I said, You don‘t like us up there, do you? She says, There‘s not too many of you down here. I says, No, there‘s only four, besides me. She said, How are they? I said, Well, they can learn, and I can‘t. You won‘t teach me. She didn‘t know what to say. So she just walked out. So I took all the books, papers, and pencils and walked to Mr. Amlin‘s office and I put ‗em there and I quit. I told him, I‘m going home. They can‘t teach me nothing here. When I got home, my father told me, What happened? I told him, they couldn‘t teach me anymore down there. They said I was too dumb. So I started doing back labor, hoeing and shoveling, that kind. A few years later, I was working in the tomato fields and the boss came around and asked me if I knew how to drive a wheel cat, a field tractor. I said, I can learn. So he taught me, and showed me how. I learned that…

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Lydia P., who had been a straight A student in elementary school, remembered losing focus in high school in the 1970s: I was messing around with boys too much. So my GPA [when I graduated] was like 2.7. We didn‘t really have a lot of role models. I could count on three fingers the number of role models we had of people that were educated. There may have been more, but I didn‘t know about ‗em. Malcolm W.‘s early difficulties with schooling followed him into his high school years at Porterville High in the late 1960s and early ‗70s. Did not do well. Struggled academically. Did not feel connected. A lot of my friends had dropped out by then. A lot of them, by my sophomore year, said that‘s enough. And there were no programs… We rode the bus. There was no other way for us to get all the way, you know, out where I lived and then beyond. I didn‘t live on the reservation, but everybody that lived where I lived and beyond to the Tule reservation, it was really difficult to do athletics or anything, because there was no late bus. You had to try and find your way. There were no support systems in place. There wasn‘t anything. Elementary, middle school, and high school. So you really had to find your way. It was pretty tough. At the end of my sophomore year, I had struggled to the point where the counselors at Porterville and my parents felt that I was either going to end up over at Citrus, which is the continuation school, or perhaps, if I transferred to Monache, which was the other school, and at the time, a newer school, in Porterville. Maybe that would help. So I did. I transferred to Monache. And when I first got there, there were people that really took an interest in me, for the first time in my academic life, who actually had a positive thing to say. The librarian Edra Buckner was Cherokee. She retired just a few years back. Wonderful lady, took a particular interest in me. And she had a pretty good idea of what I had been through. She met with me, great big lady, probably 6‘1‖, 275 pounds, and she was tough on me at first. You‘re not gonna be another – you‘re not gonna be a victim. I‘m not gonna let you fail. And you‘re gonna show up in the morning in my library, and I‘m going to look at all your work, and you‘re going to do your homework, and you‘re going to do it right. I‘m going to get you involved in athletics, and you‘re going to sing in the choir, by the way, and you‘re going to be in drama – you‘re going to do some things that you never did before. And I‘m going to expose you to some things that are going to help you. And she told me that I was going to have to do my part. I was gonna have to work. She was the first one who told me, there‘s nothing wrong with you. You have every ability. You‘re intelligent. You have everything that you need. Then she went around and

112 112 talked to my teachers. I want you to work with this kid. I get choked up just thinking about it. Give this kid a chance. And they did. The teachers did. And for the next two years, I think I got two Bs, and the rest were straight As… It changed my life. It changed the direction of my life. That was a pivotal time for me. When one person, one native person, at one site, took an interest in a kid that, in the whole scheme of things, didn‘t matter. It was much easier to throw me away. But she didn‘t. And that‘s what really started to make the difference for me. I did my part, but I responded well to that. So I was very fortunate. There were a lot of adults there that really helped me for two years. Really, really helped me a lot. The teachers went out of their way. Didn‘t have any money to get any equipment. The coach, he saw me run track. I was out for track. He said, you‘re really fast, I want to have you come out for football. I don‘t have any shoes. You will tomorrow… Coach used to pick me up. Coach picked me up a lot. It made a big difference for me. It made all the difference. And I‘ve never forgotten that. And that‘s why I do what I do today. So when I see a kid who, you know, has his head down, when I see a kid who is discouraged, who is not connected, I know that kid. I can relate to that kid. I relate better to those kids than I do those that come from privilege. I‘m not saying – I just don‘t understand them as well. I relate to them, but I relate better to the kid who has two and half strikes on him or her. I understand them at a different level. And I realize that I‘m unique. Most administrators, principals, were very good students themselves, came from middle class or upper middle class. I did not. After graduating from Monache High School, Malcolm went to Bakersfield College, then Fresno Pacific University, eventually earning his masters in K-12 administration. Catherine M., who graduated from Porterville High School in the early 1990s, also noticed a growing drop-out problem: In high school, we had Native American Club. But when I graduated from high school, there was only one other student from the reservation who graduated with me. The rest of them had dropped out. There was probably about 10 that were my age.

Sherman Institute/Sherman Indian High School Lawrence G. (Frank, 2004) remembered that some of his classmates at the reservation school went on to Sherman. ―My dad told me, ‗Forget about going to

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Sherman.‘ And lots of times they would come after me, and Dad would never go.‖ Lawrence‘s father could have been a member of the generation most traumatized by government boarding school experiences. However, Lawrence remembers his father as not having attended any schooling: ―I don‘t think he ever went to school. He never mentioned school… He went to the school of hard knocks‖ (Frank, 2004). Lucy G. (Frank, 1973) likewise recalled her family refusing permission for her to go to Sherman. We used to do all the work at home while [my father would] go out and work for the White farmers… That‘s why he wouldn‘t let us go to the school down in Riverside, because he needed us at home, I think…Fred had run away from there… My father, he wouldn‘t let us go. We did talk about that… how they weren‘t treating their children right… My grandfather- he‘s the one who told him not to ever send his children over there because they don‘t treat them right, he told them. That‘s why he wouldn‘t let us go over there. Two generations back from Lucy G. could have fallen within the time period between 1890 and 1925, when the Indian boarding schools were at their most punitive and degrading. Nonetheless, most recollections by elders who attended Sherman in the 1930s and 1940s tended to be positive in nature. There was one positive reference from further back. Anna M. (Frank, 1973) described her mother‘s recollection that at an Indian school, probably Sherman, the daughter of a family friend learned how to play … the harp. One of those big, long deals, you know, where you play it like that? … That school must have been a long damn time ago. But my mother said that she used to play it real pretty... She used to have real long hair, and she‘d wear a white dress, and my mother said she looked like an angel. Ginny H. (Frank, 2004) remembered going Sherman (see Figure 10) when she was about 13 years old. ―It used to be called Sherman Institute. Now they call

114 114 it Sherman High School. At that time, it was made like a two-story [mission church], beautiful palm trees all over, green all over. It was a beautiful place.‖

Figure 10. Sherman Indian High School. Undated postcard.

Ginny remembered her father putting her on the train from Tulare to Los Angeles. ―It was the first time I ever been on a train. He got me my clothes, my suitcase and everything… that was the first time I ever did any traveling by myself.‖ She arrived in Los Angeles late at night, and a kind couple took her to the Greyhound depot to catch the bus to Riverside, where she arrived the next morning: I didn‘t know anybody. At first, nobody had gotten up yet. And then afterwards, one by one, I started seeing all of my friends that went to school here [on the reservation]. I saw Ellie A., Letty‘s sister, Zoe and Theresa M., and their brother Ed, and my cousin, Ron C. was there… I went there in 1943 to ‘44. I stayed until ‘45 because [my sister] ran away. She didn‘t like it. So they sent us both home. But they told me, ‗You come back.‘ I was already going to be 15 years old, and right away, I got a job in a packing

115 115 house up here, like a cannery, with the peaches? I started working. I started getting my own check. God, I liked that. So I never went back to school. Rhonda B. (Frank, 2004) remembered going to Sherman with her sister: Some people say it was really hard for them. For me it wasn‘t, because I learned a lot of things. I learned to appreciate other people. I learned to appreciate their way of life and their foods, and I learned to sleep with clean sheets every night and I had a bed. She remembered sometimes being called names: But I‘ve always been proud of what I was… even if they called me a dirty old Mexican or call me different names, I‘d holler back at them in Indian. You ugly thing, I‘d tell them. Because we haven‘t any cuss words in our language… Eddy C. (Frank, 2004) also remembered attending Sherman. I kept saying, I want to be something. I want to be something. I couldn‘t speak English. That was the truth. So I met a guy named Bradley down there. He‘s third year Journalism. He said, you don‘t say you and I. You say you and me. That was hard for me. Whatever you say. You and me. I‘m me. Okay. You‘re you. In those days, many Indian children were picked up by Indian agents and sent to boarding school whether their parents wanted them to go or not. It was also common for boarding school students to be sent off to practice the skills they were being taught while working for families in the area near the school over the summer, a practice schools described as ―outings.‖ Nancy A., in a 1929 letter (Frank, 1973) to the Tule River Superintendent, complained that her daughter, Frances Hunter, had not come home for the summer with the other children, and she wanted to know why. Obviously she had not been consulted. Frances, who was born in 1913 at a time when Indian schools were known for such practices, didn‘t remember exactly why she had not gone home for the summer. ―I think I went outing… taking care of kids and doing a little housework.‖ (Frank, 1973) Flora H. (Frank, 1973) compared her experience attending Sherman (see Figure 11) in the 1920s with what it was like for students who attended later, in

116 116 the 1970s. Flora was 59 years old when she was interviewed in 1973, and she remembered the school as having been much stricter when she attended: We had white uniforms, midi blouses, pleated skirts… navy blue skirts with white… on our tops. I told them girls they were lucky they don‘t have to wear anything in uniform no more…They used to do line ups… you‘d have to stand there for two hours… Some of them used to faint out there. Sunday, noon time….. The school superintendent would march up and down the street…see if you shined your shoes. See if you‘ve got your clothes all pressed. then we‘d just march off to dinner after that.

Figure 11. Sherman Indian High School, circa 1908.

Flora also recalled that the scheduling and movement were strictly controlled: You had to go to school half a day in the morning, and half in the afternoon... If they put you in the dining room, you have to work in there all morning, and then go to school in the afternoon. If they put you in mending – we had a mending room, where all the torn up clothes – we had to learn how to mend clothes. I liked that. I stayed there for three years… you had to darn socks, you had to patch things… I liked that. [We marched to band music], you know, how the soldiers do, how they march? Just like that…

117 117 three times a day. When we went to school over there, we had to get out and get in line for breakfast and march to breakfast with the band playing… We had to be dismissed. She remembered that boys and girls were housed separately, and visits between them were also strictly controlled: If you wanted a boy to come see you… they had to visit you in the living room and there was a chaperone there at all times… Now you ought to see them. They‘re scattered all over, arms and arms, under the tree, around the corner of the building, hanging onto each other… I really don‘t like…the way they have their dormitories now. Going down to Sherman to visit family members attending there in the 1970s, Flora saw that many things had changed since she was a student there. It‘s way different… just like the public school. It‘s free, you do anything… I tell the girls, they‘ve got it pretty easy the way they do… Now they can go to Arlington without even having any chaperone taking them down there… I guess they go to Riverside, too, as long as they‘ve got permission… We couldn‘t do that at all when I went school there. Flora remembered there being about 1200 students, mostly California Indians, when she attended Sherman. She kept in touch with some of her old school mates: ―I used to write some from Tejon… there were Hopis and Navajo there also.‖ Like many others in her generation, Frances did not continue to attend school until graduation. ―I stopped in the 10th grade… just crazy, I guess.‖ Lorraine W. enjoyed her experience at Sherman when she went in the 1940s. It was really good. It was a lot different than it is today. All of the buildings were two stories, and they were real good buildings. Right in the center, we had a big old center court that was long, and the main school was right there. There was a little driveway here, and a driveway there, then there was a big building here, and another one here for the older girls, I think was from 7th to 10th grade, and over here was 11th and 12th… They could also go to college in Riverside. And the boys had the same set up. We had a large dining room, and every class took turns in working in the cafeteria and doing dishes. Each class had a day for that. We had a cosmetology there, a big laundry, a lab where everybody took turns learning things. We

118 118 had a hospital and we had a big building that was a theatre, so we had shows. We had a huge swimming pool, and we always had a whole bunch of bathing suits there, so if you didn‘t have one, there was always one handy. It was kind of like a training school. The 7th to 10th grade went to school in the morning, and the afternoon they had their chores to do, and get their classes. And then it was just the opposite for the 11th and 12th graders. They went to school in the afternoon. So we just kind of switched days. And then we had a big football field. The biggest game was Phoenix, Arizona. They had a big Indian school there. And then Carson City school come down, certain times during the year. It was big competition with that. And we had one of the best bands. We had a good teacher. We called him Paddy McGill. He taught the band how to march real good, men and girls, and he joined every parade that was close by that he could go to, and his band always won the marching band. They were good. And then the one year I was there, the kids raised a lot of money and they made it to San Francisco to play at the fair. Anyway, Benny Goodman and all those movie star bands. One of the girls came back and she said, well, I sat in so and so‘s seat when I was playing the music. And everybody talked about it… I think the biggest part of it was that everybody was friendly. We met a lot of people from different states that came there. I had friends from up in Eureka and Hoopa, ah, it was, ah, one girl from ah, Alaska. Another two three other girls from Fort Duchesne, Utah that went to school there. And a lot of the mostly California, from the north clear down to San Diego, was all there. Me, I enjoyed it. We have a lot of people today say they don‘t like the school, that it‘s different than when I went to school. And now today, when you go down there, there‘s like a whole bunch of little, ah, flat houses. They‘re all separate. They‘re not all in one big building. They got so many kids in one building, and they‘re all just kind of in line. Lorraine recalled that her granddaughter had a very different experience when she attended Sherman several decades later. When I sent my granddaughter down there, I told her what a nice school it was. At the time, I didn‘t know the whole changes of the situation. And then I got a call from her. She wasn‘t raised to be in a big fight or nothing like that, you know. So this one girl didn‘t like her for one reason or another, and beat the heck out of her. Slammed her against one of the big poles there and sent her to the hospital. And she said… this is a prison, she said, this is not a school. We went down there and we picked her up to bring her home. She went back to public school here. She‘s pretty good. She graduated from high school, and she went to two years in Fresno State.

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Tribal member Susie M. described her experience at Sherman in the 1980s and how it differed from that of her son, who attended for a short time in the early 2000s. After junior high school [at Pioneer]…everybody kind of veered out, and I didn‘t really care about school. I went to Porterville for a year and a half, and I was getting into mischief, was getting into trouble... Mom was fed up with it and said, you know, you have one choice. You either go to juvenile hall, or you‘re gonna go to Sherman. And it‘s like, well, I‘ll go to Sherman! I don‘t wanna go to juvenile hall. So she sent me to Sherman down in Riverside, and it was adventurous… I was the only native from Tule there when I went. And I knew nobody… I went to Sherman half of my sophomore year, and my junior year. And finished out there, and came home, but then I went back… I really enjoyed it, after I started getting involved with different things, and different clubs, and started playing softball, and doing my work. It seemed easier for me, and I don‘t know if it was the curriculum, or if it was communication with the teachers. It was fun for me. So I took everything that they offered me and I ran with it. I left Porterville with a 1.43 GPA and I graduated with a 3.43. And I got a scholarship to Porterville College. It was a really big turnaround. Susie does not believe that Sherman offers the same experience today. I‘ve been down there, and there is a change in the kids‘ attitudes, and the gang involvement… a lot of tribes bring that to the school. It‘s way different from when I went. Back then, there was no colors involved. You know, it was just – red, and that was the native in you. Your skin. Everybody was a native, and there was no claiming of north, south, east, west, whatever direction there was, there was no claiming of it. We were all native. But they would have their own tribe that they would claim, and they would have little tribal groups. But the interesting part was that everybody spoke their native language. I didn‘t know mine at the time. I really wanted to learn it, but I guess I really never had the interest. When I seen other people my age speaking it, I was like, wow, man, you guys speak your language? Oh yeah, we talk our language all the time. And so they would see their peers from their same reservation, and they would talk to each other in their native language. And I thought that was cool.

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When her son began to struggle in school, Susie suggested Sherman as an alternative to the Porterville high schools. I think he was trying to see a different way out. I explained my way, how I got out of my way, and was hoping that he would kind of follow in those same footsteps. But everybody‘s different… he didn‘t finish. He came home. He stayed for maybe a semester. A WASC-accredited high school since 1971, Sherman (see Figure 12) recently received a $2.5 million grant from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians to improve its career pathways program. This situation becomes somewhat ironic when viewed in light of the earlier days of the school. One of the most enthusiastic supporters of building the school in Riverside was Frank Miller, then- owner of the landmark Mission Inn. Mr. Miller saw the Indian school as a place he could draw on for staff that would increase the authentic atmosphere of his hotel by providing real Indian people as servants, just as they had served in the past in the Spanish missions (Lovekin, 2012). Today, however, the Sherman school board is dominated by tribally-affiliated Indian members, although the school itself still functions as a government school under the BIA. As noted by Tule River elder Ronnie F. (Frank, 2004): My mother, [Delia S.], said she spent 14 years at Sherman, and when a lot of them left, they cried, because it was the only place they ever knew as their home. But schools were a form of brainwashing, whether intentional or not. My mother, 80 years later, if you talk to her in Indian, she will answer you in English, even though she knows the language. She was told not to speak it. She never taught me one word. Everything I learned, I learned from my grandmother.

Stewart Indian School Stewart Indian School, located two miles from Carson City, Nevada, opened in 1890 with three teachers serving 37 Washoe, Paiute, Shoshone Indian students. By 1910, the enrollment was up to 400 students who received basic

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Figure 12. Sherman Indian School today. instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic while being trained for vocational work: ranching, farming, and carpentry for the boys, and domestic duties and practical nursing for the girls. Like all government boarding schools established for Indian children of that era, the educational goal was cultural and linguistic assimilation (see Figures 13-16). After 90 years of schooling Indian students, Stewart was closed in 1980 due to federal budget cuts and earthquake safety issues. Just a few weeks earlier, Tule River tribal member Patty B. had arrived at Stewart, hoping to attend as her father had done before her. Patty and her siblings recalled that their father never once talked about his experiences at Stewart.

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Figure 13. Indian students awaiting baptism in the Stewart swimming pool, ca. 1900. Source: Nevada State Museum, AllAroundNevada.com.

Figure 14. Stewart baseball team, ca. 1905. Source: Nevada State Museum, AllAroundNevada.com.

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Figure 15. Girls‘ sewing class at Stewart, ca. 1900. Source: Nevada State Museum, AllAroundNevada.com

Figure 16. Stewart Indian School parade float, ca.1946.

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Eddy C. (Frank, 2004) went to Stewart for the 5th grade. ―When I first went to Stewart, I didn‘t know any English. Just my Indian language.‖ Anna M. (Larsen, 2002) elaborated: At this new school, none of the children could talk in their own language; they all had to speak English or they were punished…When I came home, I had forgotten all my language and I had to learn it all over again. I cried when it came time to return to school, and my mother told me that I didn‘t have to go back to Stewart. Joan G. (Frank, 2004), older sister of Lorraine W., remembered her years at Stewart during the Great Depression, between 1929-1934: Big buildings, big hallways, lots of Indian kids. The little boys and little girls were in different buildings. The large girls were in different buildings. Everyone was strange to one another. It was hard [at first] to make friends. I liked when they sent me to the little boys. They were itty bitty ones there and they couldn‘t talk English. They didn‘t understand. They only understood their language, and I didn‘t know their language. But they knew by your actions and motions that you could help them. Because they [were so little that] they didn‘t know how to go to the bathroom. You‘d have to take some of the bigger boys to teach them. It was hard. They‘d cry, poor things. To eat, they had to go to the big dining room, and it was the same thing there. They wouldn‘t eat. They were scared, because they didn‘t eat like that, sitting around tables. It was real rough to get them started to do what everybody else was doing. Joan remembered taking the train to Stewart when she was 9 years old: I went by myself with the train. They used to have a train [in Porterville]; the depot is there but no train. After being around here with nothing, I was glad to get up there. We ate three meals a day and had a good bed for every night. I liked it because I didn‘t have nothing over here. I was being raised by my godmother way up into the mountains. I was the only child up there and there was no one to play with, only old people. My mother didn‘t want me to stay there, but there was no school on the reservation. It was hard to go stay with this or that relative, [especially] if we didn‘t get along. Rhonda B. (Frank, 2004) attended Stewart a decade later, starting in the 5th grade and staying from 1941 to 1949. She also remembered it as a positive experience:

125 125 It‘s the best thing, actually, that ever happened to me. For us, it benefitted us. We were from all over the country: Alaska, Canada, everywhere. Stewart was a training school. There were activities, but it was always work-related. They taught you how to farm- to raise pigs, to raise chickens. You kept records of everything, sales and demand. If you wanted to be an agriculturalist, if you wanted to be a nurse, a doctor, a waitress, a chef, they taught you… They taught you how to be able to work in the laundry, home economics, sewing, cooking, but they took it further: If you wanted to run a laundry, how to categorize all your linens, what went where. A little bit of everything. Joan remembered there being a military atmosphere at Stewart: It was just like being in the Army or the service. The march before we ate. The company A, B, C, D. You stayed with your company and marched around there. In step, too, not just walking along. They always had a leader. Rhonda, who was also nine years old when she started at Stewart, arrived at the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II: My mother and grandmother had raised us, but it was tough for them. The war came on and they wanted to work. Everything we bought, we had a coupon book. Sugar was rationed, coffee was rationed. We‘d never had a doll, my sister and I, except those sock dolls, made out of men‘ socks…The main important thing we learned was how to live with people. How to help each other, because we were there without our parents. The matron could only go so far overseeing you. So those of us who were older would help. This is how we survived. We helped each other. Those of us who were older taught the younger ones – we taught them how to make their beds. All of us got up at five o‘clock in the morning. You got up early in the morning and done your exercise – rain, shine, snow. That‘s how we were healthy. It‘s raining, pouring, and we‘re soaking wet and we can‘t see what we‘re doing. And we‘re happy. We go in and we change, jump in a hot shower, change our clothes. We‘d go to breakfast. Clean up our room: We had to do this. Nobody was going to do it for us. They‘d give weekly inspections,¸ just like the service. They‘d run their hand over the top of a door. We had to clean and polish the floors every weekend. We were all little, but we learned how to run all these machines. We had beautiful wood floors. At home, we had rugs that my mother used to make. Joan added that on the reservation, some people still ―had dirt floors. Just as long as you had a roof, then you were okay.‖ Rhonda corroborated that ―the hard-

126 126 packed floors, they‘d sprinkle ‗em and they‘d get real tough, like clay. You wouldn‘t even know it was dirt.‖ Both elder women recalled some prejudice against California Indians among the students at Stewart. Rhonda recalled: I was raised to defend myself, so I was always on the defensive…There was one [girl] who picked on me right off the bat. She hit me with a hairbrush. She was about my age but she‘d been there longer. So I swung around and I let her have it. Then she left me alone and became my friend – a distant friend, but she always made sure that no one bothered me. She was from Gardnerville. She was Washoe an d she lived in the area. She‘d been there about 2 years before. I was new. [She‘d say],You Indians from California, you‘re no good. You‘re all Mexicans! You California kids, you‘re all rotten. You‘re spoiled! Joan added that the same dynamics were at work a decade earlier, when she was at Stewart: They didn‘t like the Californians. They‘d get mean, but they‘re just mouthy. They were from there, and we went over to their territory. In Rhonda‘s experience: There was always something going on. You could learn to dance, waltz. There was a lot of activity. They showed us all the movies before the public even seen it. We even seen a lot of stars that would come by. I was always curious. Marjorie Main and Wallace Beery, producers, Frank Sinatra – when they were young. They‘d come through and do the entertaining at the airbases, and we‘d see them first. We saw The Yearling – it was in color, and we [usually] only saw black and white. .. I was house president and I became class president. I was always involved in something. I didn‘t have time to fight. But I‘d see it. We had boys crawling into our dorm. They had matrons and I was the house president so I‘d have to check on the girls. There were some older, and they‘d sneak these guys in. I had to rat them out. They wouldn‘t keep them in school if they were doing these things already. We weren‘t all the same age, there was maybe one or two younger in each room, and it wasn‘t good for [them]. The whole boys‘ dorm would be in there if they let one get away with it. Joan remembered very little fun in the strictly structured routine: When it snowed, that was the only fun we had. We‘d get to go to the

127 127 hills. The boys made us something to slide down the mountain. They used to make their own sauerkraut, and they put it in big barrels. They used those barrels, they‘d slick them up and they would go real fast. They‘d nail them together so two could sit… In summer, you went to Lake Tahoe to stay for a whole week. Joan expressed the opinion that comparatively, the Indian students who went to Sherman at that time fared better than those from Stewart: It wasn‘t pretty over there [in Nevada]. Just like a desert – dry grass, no trees, no rocks…Stewart was way out in the boondocks. Students at Sherman] got a better deal. At Sherman they would place you, they‘d find you a job, and you learned by doing. A lot of them got good jobs. We didn‘t have that kind of chance over there [at Stewart]. The staff never talked to the Indian kids… I didn‘t get to graduate. I didn‘t want to go back. When I came back [to the reservation], I had to find a job, had to learn to do something else. They didn‘t give you no credit for anything. No nothing, no papers or anything. Just your grades, and not much of that, just that you attended and how long, that‘s all. Rhonda, who attended Stewart for 8 years, despite enjoying her time there, did not graduate either and found limited application for all the skills she had learned, such as how to set a perfect table, when she returned to the reservation: I took the route of wanting to work with food, for some strange reason. Always in the back of my mind, I had this food thing. So I worked in the employees‘ club. That‘s the first job I had: How to set tables, what kind of a setting, where the fork and the knife go, and I used to dream, someday, I‘m gonna live in a mansion… It was fun. I haven‘t had a chance to use [my knowledge of table setting] but three times in my life… Joan felt that schooling experiences today have changed for the better. Seems to me the teachers nowadays are more eager for the students to learn. Before, the people older than me, they‘d go to school and they couldn‘t learn nothing from the teachers. And they‘d just quit. That‘s why they couldn‘t get a job: They didn‘t have no education. There was nobody to give ‗em the courage, to give them a little word or two to stay in school. I know I never heard it. Today it‘s better. If you can stand to go to school. You can do what you want to. They‘re thinking that now. Before, they didn‘t.

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Schooling Experiences of Mono Indian People: Interviews with Mono Tribe Members Personal interviews were conducted with three members of the North Fork Mono, including two elder women and one former Tribal Chairman. A former Tribal Chairman of the Mono from Cold Springs Rancheria was also interviewed, as well as one member of the Mono from Big Sandy Rancheria. An additional elder from a different tribe who happened to be at the Sierra Mono Museum elder gathering the day of the interview also provided commentary. Of the five Mono people interviewed, three learned their Mono language before they learned English. The researcher was also fortunate to gain access to additional data providing background information on the tribe and its history. Former Tribal Chairman Ron Goode provided a copy of the Petition for Federal Acknowledgment from the North Fork Mono Tribe, For Status Clarification: Reinstatement of Federal Acknowledgment. The researcher also discovered Gaylen D. Lee‘s auto-ethnographic memoir of his Mono family life, which provided insight into interpreting and understanding the personal interview conducted with the author‘s mother, Ruby Pomona, despite the fact that the researcher was unaware that Lee was Pomona‘s son at the time of the interview. Several visits to the Henry Madden Library at Fresno State unearthed holdings housed in Special Collections, including the personal papers of Vernon Brooks, a minister who oversaw the Presbyterian Mission during the 1950s then subsequently served as a spiritual mentor for students at Sherman Institute for two years after his time in North Fork.

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North Fork Rancheria According to Cook (1960), the first recorded contact between Europeans and members of the North Fork Mono tribe occurred when Spanish soldier Gabriel Moraga traveled through the Central Valley in 1806, seeking Eldorado and a site to establish a mission in California‘s interior. In more than 40 trips, he never found either. Nonetheless, Moraga is credited with naming the San Joaquin, Fresno, and Kings Rivers during his travels through the area (Gudde, 1999; Rose, G., 1992). North Fork, located at the geological center of the state of California, first served as a travel stop for sheep herders and cattlemen as they took their livestock into summer pastures up in the high country. Local Mono became identified with the name of the town of North Fork in the early 1900s. Two agents were contracted by the government in 1906 to identify California Indian tribes, villages and encampments. The government expected that most Indian people had claimed land allotments through the Dawes Act of 1887, but many Mono, still living on their ancestral lands, did not share the Euro-American concept of land ownership or understand what they were expected to do to attain it. Therefore, the two agents, in their report, described the Mono as ―homeless‖ or ―landless‖ Indians (Terrell, 1916). After the U.S. Senate vetoed, in 1905, the treaties signed between U.S. government representatives and California tribes (Heizer, 1972), in order to provide for the ―landless‖ Indians, and to facilitate their schooling, the federal government purchased 84 acres of land at a cost of $550 from North Fork schoolteacher Aaron Frederick. The land was to be held in trust by the federal government, as are all Indian reservations. Some Mono Indians were actively discouraged from establishing homes on the site (Lee, 1999). Others used the property as a campground when visiting their children, who were compelled to attend school at the North Fork Presbyterian

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Mission Boarding School. In order to establish the land trust for the Indians, a tribe had to be named in the paperwork, so the government borrowed the name of the nearby town to establish the North Fork Band of Mono Indians on what they now designated as the North Fork Rancheria.

North Fork Presbyterian Mission School The first Presbyterian Church and Indian Mission in the area of North Fork were founded in the 1860s by Joseph Perryman (see Figure 17), a Creek Indian who fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War (Crawford, O‘Brien & Kelley, 2005). Perryman, a Presbyterian minister and the grandson of a Creek chief, subsequently converted to the Baptist denomination. He later returned to his tribe and became a chief.

Figure 17. Benjamin Perryman, Creek chief, and his grandson Joseph Moses Perryman, founder of the North Fork Presbyterian church and mission. Lee (1998) recorded that his grandmother, who was born in a traditional bark house, was one of the first Mono children to attend the Mission in the late 1800s:

131 131 She never forgot the day missionaries came to her parents‘ home at Peyakinu and took her away. Her parents could do nothing to prevent their firstborn child from leaving. Tears flowed, she said. Tuhiwi, as her parents named her, was renamed Margaret by one of the missionaries… Grandma described her loneliness at the mission school, the whippings she endured when she spoke her native language. Her misery finally impelled her to run away, but when she returned home, her parents took her back to the mission, Grandma said, because they had decided it was probably best for her to learn the white man‘s way of life. (p. 150-151) Lee (1998) noted that his grandmother was permitted to return home during the summer months, and that her parents frequently went to visit her on the weekends. Because there were no Mission facilities for boys, his grandfathers attended Castle Peak, a public school that accepted Indian students, which was not the case for most public schools at the turn of the century. Mrs. George Teaford (undated letter, cited in Lee, 1998) reported what happened to a group of Indian children who tried to attend school near present-day Bass Lake in the early 1900s: The little half-breed children and Indian children trudged happily to school one morning. But these children were not to see the benefits of education yet. They were not allowed to attend school. Bitterly disappointed, they turned their backs on school forever. Much of the bitterness still exists in the people who were excluded. (p. 149) Lee‘s grandfathers attended formal education only to the second grade. According to Lee‘s Grandpa John, ―Too far walk there when rain and snow. I stop going‖ (p. 152). Several of Lee‘s uncles remembered being picked up by BIA agents and taken to Sherman Institute in Riverside. His grandmother also eventually went to Sherman for a couple of years, then took a job as a maid ―near Cucamonga‖ (p. 152). According to Lee (1998), the North Fork Presbyterian Mission recalled by elders today was founded by a Dr. Noble in 1903, at a time when the dominant society believed that total assimilation into American culture would be best for American Indians who had managed to survive the conquest of the continent.

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Noble was particularly shocked by the number of young Mono women having children by White men; he perceived many of these girls as having been bought ―from their parents for ten or twenty dollars a head!‖ (Noble, 1903, in Lee, 1998). Appealing by letter to a female benefactor, Noble described his vision of a school ―in which some of the Indian girls might find a shelter during the period of their life in which they are in most danger and be trained to virtue‖ (ibid). The Presbyterian Church acted quickly in response and purchased land to build the mission that same year. Mono elders and renowned traditional basket weavers Renata P. (see Figure 18) and Lula C. both attended the Presbyterian Mission. Lula, who spent her life in North Fork and is fluent in the Mono language, still has unpleasant memories of the Mission and did not attend the researcher‘s scheduled interview session at the Sierra Mono Museum. Renata P. described her experiences at the Mission: When I was at the age of six, we had to go to this Indian Mission up here, right up here. The Presbyterian Indian Mission. That‘s where I stayed during the school term, then I went home in the summer time, and I went home on vacations like Christmas and Thanksgiving. The school was right down here, where the gymnasium is now today. But the buildings are torn down. We had to get used to it. We talked our Mono language. That was out of the picture then. They told us not to speak. I knew a little [English] when I came in, but not too much. [If we did speak our language] we‘d get our mouth washed out with soap or something.We wouldn‘t [speak our language] in front of them… It was different [at the school than] when I lived with my parents. My grandmother worked on her baskets and cooked us breakfast, lunch, and dinner… We would go out in the field and gather materials [for her baskets]. Then on Sunday, we‘d come up on horseback to the church up here, the Presbyterian Indian Mission. Up here [at the Mission], we had to do chores, like sweeping the porch. We had to learn how to make our own bed and keep it neat, and keep our clothes in our dresser drawers. And we always had to stand in line and wait, like when we go to our meals... Mrs. Stiles was the cook, and Miss Hinton was the girls‘ caretaker. And Mr. Hood was the preacher and then he took care of everything up there…We had to go to church, and learn things about the Bible. And sing hymns. We‘d go to evening prayers after we ate our meals

133 133 in the evening. At first it was hard [to learn English, but then I got used to it.

Figure 18. Renata P. as a child. Source: Sierra Mono Museum.

Indian students from other tribes with cross-cutting familial ties might also be found boarding at the Presbyterian Mission (see Figure 19). Tule River tribal member Charles S. remembered boarding at the Mission: ―I had a lot of half- brothers and half-sisters up there.‖ The Mission continued to operate until the early 1950s (Lee, 1999). Mono young people, like the young people of Tule River and other California tribes, in addition to being sent to the Presbyterian Mission, were also sent to attend high school at the Sherman Institute in Riverside. In the late 1930s, Mono students began to attend Sierra High School, located in Tollhouse, about 25 miles south of North Fork. Both North Fork and Sierra Elementary schools served as feeders for Sierra High.

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Figure 19. North Fork Mission students. Source: Courtesy of Sierra Mono Museum.

The passage of the California Rancheria Act in 1958 resulted in termination of the North Fork Rancheria, when only one Mono Indian person, Susan Johnson, was found to be living on the 84 acres of designated Rancheria land. However, this may not have represented the actual number of residents, since the count may have failed to consider the movement patterns of the Mono, who worked seasonally in different areas (Lee, 1998). In the 1980s, Johnson‘s heirs successfully petitioned as ―the Mono Indian tribe‖ to have the Rancheria reinstated. The Rancheria continues to enroll new tribal members periodically if they can prove descendancy from the North Fork Mono as listed on the 1900/1925 Indian Census Roll (Goode, 2004). According to the tribe‘s website, ―Today, the Tribe is the largest restored Tribe in California with nearly 1,800 tribal citizens whose ancestors have used, occupied, and accessed the lands surrounding the City of Madera throughout history and up to the present‖ (North Fork Rancheria Band of Mono Indians, 2011, para.10). Some attrition in enrollment was caused by the growing presence of

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Indian casinos, which induced some tribal members to seek dual enrollment in order to participate in receiving gaming proceeds. In 2002, the North Fork Mono Tribal Council voted to eliminate members with dual membership, providing the option that they could exercise the option to rejoin the tribe through enrollment (Goode, 2004). In 1968, tribes from all over the state joined North Fork Mono elders and leaders for the California Indian Education Association gathering. Alliances and liaisons formed at this time provided impetus for the Indian Education Act of 1972, as well as many other services and institutions that Central California Indian people take for granted today (Goode, 2004). During the 1970s and early 1980s, about 80% of the North Fork Mono earned their living working in the lumber industry, until the lumber mill closed down in 1992. Tribal members work in various professions today, including education at the K-12 and college levels.

Wallace Barcus: “A Controlled Study of Indian and White Children…” A glance through the Barcus (1956) master‘s thesis found in the Henry Madden Library at the beginning of the research process left this researcher initially unimpressed. However, rereading the document further along in the research process revealed greater value and meaning in the data contained there than was apprehended upon first viewing. Barcus‘s master‘s thesis, entitled A Controlled Study of Indian and White Children in the Sierra Joint Union High School District, Tollhouse, Fresno County, California, is the work of an apparently caring educator (see Figure 20) with cultural biases characteristic of his era. Indian education was described as a ―problem‖ schools confronted without government assistance at the time. Barcus estimated that the local Indian population, a combination of Mono, Yokuts, and

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Paiute, then represented about 20% of the student body at Auberry Union, North Fork Union, and Sierra Union elementary schools, all of which fed into Sierra High School. This number is 40-50% higher than the number of Indian students recorded as attending Sierra High School in more recent years (California Department of Education, 1998-2011).

Figure 20. Wallace Barcus with his 3rd grade class in 1954. Source: East Fresno County Historical Society.

Barcus selected a test population matched by I.Q. scores. ―Because so many of the Indian children dropped out of school in the years between the 8th grade graduation and the 11th grade‖ (p. 4), he said he selected all 34 Indian students who had persisted to the11th grade and matched them with White students, then graphed them based on California Achievement Test scores. In his literature review, Barcus cited a University of Chicago study that used a 1928 Merriam study as its point of departure. Merriam showed that 80% of the Indian students surveyed were one or more years behind the educational achievement levels of the general population. The 1948 University of Chicago study showed some progress in the ensuing decades, since more Indian students were attending public school, and ―the percentage of Indian children to be ‗in grade‘ has increased from 6% to

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38%‖ (p. 6). No particular school setting – public, mission, or reservation – was associated consistently higher scores, although he noted that ―Indian children who are in school with the whites do better than Indians who are in Indian schools exclusively‖ (p. 6). Barcus questioned the validity of research about the educational potential of Indian students that was accepted at the time and suggested that Indian students are ―slow learners‖ likely to reach an ―early learning plateau‖ (p. 7). Barcus seemed mystified by what he described as ―the Indian type of home life‖ which he perceived to be ―completely different than… that of the white‖ (p. 7). He noted that only about one-third of the Indian students had both parents. Handwriting was named as an area in which Indian students excelled over whites. ―Indians are interested in formal education,‖ Barcus insisted, noting that ―more and more of the Indians are now entering institutions of higher learning‖ (p. 8). Ahead of his time despite his biases, Barcus questioned the cultural relevancy of I.Q. tests, noting that the ―tests are devised in English for people with experiences of the white race‖ (p. 8). He also questioned Garth‘s (1931) conclusion that ―Indian intelligence was directly correlated with the degree of white blood,‖ while acknowledging that ―the lowest achievement comes from the full-blooded Indians‖ (p. 10), who were dropping out of school in greater numbers than mixed- blood Indians. Barcus‘s 1956 study showed a learning gap between Indian and White students that persisted and widened over time. Upon closer examination, his study was a surprisingly open-minded commentary on Indian education given prevailing attitudes of his time, as reflected in Mono interviews and archival data (see Tables 5 and 6).

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Table 5 Mono Tribe Interviewees Highest Level Completed (if Name Tribe Age Schools Attended known) Rudy A. Eastern Mono, 60s Sierra Elementary, Sierra Cold Springs HS, Fresno State University Some college Rancheria Roger G. Western Mono 62 North Fork Elementary, Sierra High School, Fresno State University Renata P. Western Mono, 86 North Fork Mission, North North Fork Fork Elementary, Sierra HS HS graduate Rancheria Julie G. Western Mono, 70s Bass Lake elementary North Fork Some college? Rancheria Jessica A. Eastern Mono, Big 50s Auberry Elementary, Sierra Sandy Rancheria High School

Table 6

Archived and Other Materials Relating to Mono Tribe Name Format Relevance Source Location Vernon Brooks Personal Brooks served as a Special Fresno State papers Presbyterian Collections, Henry University minister in North Madden Library Fork from 1957- 1964 1969 Oral Politically and Special Fresno State Rosalie Bethel History culturally active Collections, Henry University elder of the Mono Madden Library tribe Gaylen D.Lee 1998 Memoir Son of interviewee University of walking where we lived Ruby Pomona Oklahoma Press Norman, OK recounts Mono history and lifestyle Wallace F. Barcus 1956 Master‘s Principal in Sierra Henry Madden Fresno State ―A Controlled Study of Thesis Union HS District Library University Indian and White Children in the Sierra Joint Union High School District‖ Petition for Federal 2004 Petition Socio-politico- Hon.Ron Goode Hon. Ron Goode Acknowledgment From Community: historical context the North Fork Mono Part B of the tribe Tribe

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North Fork Elementary School North Fork Elementary School was opened in 1924, the same year that American citizenship was conferred on Indian people, which allowed public schools to receive financial support for the Indian students. Roger G. remembered attending North Fork Elementary in the 1950s: I went to the North Fork Elementary School, and that was an older school at the time. It was a pretty good experience. I did pretty well in school until about the fourth grade. That‘s about the time that my father left us. And so, for the next four years, till about seventh, eighth grade, I kind of struggled little bit. I started turning things around about the seventh grade, maybe even the sixth grade. Had a good sixth grade teacher. Her son was my best friend at school, and we got along pretty good. But we moved up, and then I got interested in science, because that‘s what she was, a science teacher. And then, I got interested in writing. I had a really good seventh grade English teacher, and he‘s very famous in town, A. Incher is his name, and he‘s a big time Democrat. He writes articles about me every now and then. I learned, you know, learned to write about my culture. I started recording a lot about my culture back in the 6th grade, with my mother, and I still have those original notes. And that‘s part of the researcher that I am today, and the writings that I do, even having published a book on plants and animals. Those are some of the first things I recorded back then. And so it was really good for me to be able to do that. She was always telling me stories, so I recorded the stories. She knew I liked science, so she‘d get me to record wind, and different things about Earth, and what was going on. Roger G. is a strong proponent on preserving traditional Mono language and teachings, and to have the traditional stories taken seriously. When you‘re looking at the cultural stories, you‘re looking at our old way of life, but what comes back to us, and this is what I was raised with, in the sense that when I went to tell my stories, my stories were always called fairy tales and myths, legends. And that made me feel real bad, because all of a sudden, these aren‘t real stories. And so I quit telling stories, you know, because they didn‘t understand them. These were the teachers… I had positive things, that were very influential, especially those who encouraged me to write about my history. And then, on the other hand, there were those that tried to portray us in a different light, or sometimes to the point that we were still savages, we were still heathens. Teachers, even

140 140 students in the classroom, to where, you don‘t want to talk about who you are. Sometimes they made fun of us. So some of the Indian people, some of the young Indian students I grew up with, kind of stayed together. It was anger about the way Indian people and culture were being portrayed, misunderstood, or left out of the story entirely that eventually led him to pursue archaeology and a career in education. Carrie W., daughter of Tule River tribal member Charles S., remembered attending North Fork Elementary School in the 1960s: I really didn‘t like school, but I went every day, because going to school was better than staying at home. When you were home, you had to work. So I‘d go to school. Try to learn. I ‘m not a reader. I can‘t pick up a book and read it, because if I start the book, I don‘t even know what‘s going on in the first part of the book. I don‘t comprehend really well, so that‘s why I don‘t really like to read. But nowadays, they got people who help you with that. So that‘s cool, you know. But me, back then, they didn‘t have people to help like that. Carrie felt that her daughters and grandchildren, who also attended North Fork Elementary, studied similar subjects but received more academic support: They push the kids really hard to read and write, read and write, read and write, read and write. Oh my God. If they had done that with me in school, I might‘ve liked to read. I don‘t like to read. I don‘t read anything unless I have to… My daughter reads; she loves to read. She used to read all the time when she was going to school; she liked to read. And she liked to write poems. She was a reader and a writer. My granddaughter, she reads and she writes. You know, she likes to do everything.

Sierra Elementary Sierra Union Elementary School was built in the 1930s and ‗40s at Tollhouse, California. Cold Springs Mono elder Rudy A. spoke his Mono language and very little English when he started to attend school there in the late 1950s: What I was told was that you‘re here to learn English. But they didn‘t understand that it was easier for me sometimes to answer in my own language. I knew what they were saying to me. But I couldn‘t answer it. So

141 141 I would answer in my own language. And I used to get whipped for it… And then my sisters, you know, they would blame the Indian girls for bringing in lice. They would put kerosene on them and then shave their heads--just bald. But no one was bringing it in. We had a bunch of little people around we called the Okies, and they had a lot of lice in their hair. But they would blame the Indian girls and I used to get in trouble because I‘d try to protect my sisters. So I would get kicked out of school. Now I took my time goin‘ home, because I knew I was going to get in trouble. I‘d try to explain to my grandfather – my grandfather didn‘t know English. So I would get another punishment again. My older sister was shamed. She said one time, she goes, You remind me of what I had to go through, she told me. So I haven‘t seen my older sister for 15 years, maybe 20 years. To respect that, I stay away. It does hurt. A lot of times it‘s not the abuse, it‘s the memory… It made you kind of separate from your own people… I can remember my teacher, my first teacher, Miss Ann. she was the one that kept whipping me, forcing me to learn English. She had a ruler. We called it the 13-inch ruler. It was only 12, but we called it 13, because it always seemed that it reached beyond 12. And it was always the native kids, you know. We pointed out one time, and she‘d hit us again: How come you don‘t hit the white kids? Boom! You don‘t talk to me like that. She said she was teaching us. We needed to be taught. We didn‘t learn. And, well, it worked. We did finally make sure we always talked English. Because we didn‘t want to get hit. So it did work. You thought, real quick, uh oh, what word did she want? It made you think. So in our own language, we knew what we wanted to say. But we knew if we said it in our language, that we would get hit. So we thought real hard to say the English word. So that we wouldn‘t get hit. So it kinda did work. ‗Cause it forced us to. We were around 8 years old. English was secondary when I was growing up. My mother spoke English, but she only went to third grade. My grandmother and my father didn‘t know much. My grandfather knew none. Just enough to get by, when he‘s comin‘ down to Cherry Auction, to trade, you know, for a cow or something. He didn‘t have to speak English, he‘d just point, you know, in Cherry Auction, you just point. So that‘s how he used to bid. And he was real good at it. He‘d come down with a chicken and go back with four cows…

Sierra High School Carrie W. remembered one English teacher who taught three generations of her family members at Sierra High School:

142 142 Mr. Lord! I‘m telling you, he was there when I went to school, he was there when Jessica went to school, my youngest daughter, and my granddaughter went to school and she had him. Mr. Lord. He was an English teacher. He was a pretty cool guy. It was the female teachers that we didn‘t like. The male teachers were cool. Rudy A. shared similar recollections about Sierra High. I remember the female teachers being cruel. I don‘t really remember the male teachers being that way. But they were. High school was a little different. Because now I became a little more aware of what‘s going on. Became a little bit more cunning. Had to be. That‘s when I met Roger G. We‘re Monos, but he‘s north of the river, and we‘re south of the river. We keep an eye on each other…We got into sports. Football, basketball, and wrestling. Football was the best because we got to hit someone, legally. Ron and I used to just really punish ‗em. I‘d tell Roger, you hit ‗em low, I‘ll hit ‗em high. And he‘d say, no, you hit ‗em high, I‘ll hit ‗em low…We were good at it. 1966, we took state. Rudy A. set a personal goal of attending college and earning a degree in business: When we went to Sierra, there was a lot of native Americans going at that time. I think maybe the population was 45 -50% of the high school was Native American. So we could mingle into a lot of different things there. [After graduation] I tried to go on to further my education, to Fresno City and to Fresno State, but there, I couldn‘t make it. I just couldn‘t make it. I couldn‘t stay up with their qualifications. Just couldn‘t do it. When I got drafted [to go to Vietnam], it was like a blessing. It gave me an opportunity to pull out of there. I can get out of it without shaming anyone. I think my biggest fear was shaming the people I grew up with, and my family. ‗Cause I made a promise that I was going to further my education but I couldn‘t. I was havin‘ a rough time, just barely makin‘ grades. I was getting‘ a whole lot of Fs and Ds. So when I got drafted, it gave me that opportunity to get out of it… Rudy described some differences between the learning he experienced at home and the way he learned at school: I think what‘s different is, your relationship with your family was closer. And the teaching was more involved with your family teaching you the songs or the dances or the sweat lodges. I think there was more importance – it was important for each one of them to share something to you. So you became--you felt important. You felt wanted. And you wanted to learn then. You‘re like a sponge now. I think that‘s the difference. You wanted

143 143 what your auntie or your uncle or your grandfather or your mother or your father wanted to give you. Roger G. played football (see Figure 21) with Rudy A. and also graduated from Sierra High:

Figure 21. Sierra High School football team, 1966. Source: Native Voices Vimeo.

What really kept me in school was sports. I was an athlete. A lot of our Indian people were really good athletes. Some were four sport lettermen, per year. I did three, as it was, but that inspires you. And you know people. I was in the yearbook as one of the two friendliest people. There‘s only a few of us that still move around, in the same cliques, 40 years later; it‘s kind of funny.

Schooling Experiences of the Tachi Yokuts: Santa Rosa Rancheria Much of the historical and political context relative to Central California Indian people interviewed for this study has previously been delineated in the descriptions of the Tule River Reservation and the North Fork Rancheria. Of the

144 144 three Central California Indian tribes identified for this study, Santa Rosa Rancheria was founded most recently. According to the website for the Tachi Yokut Tribe (2011): In 1934, the Santa Rosa Rancheria was established on about 40 acres of desolate farmland in Lemoore, California. Forty people lived on the reservation below poverty level, many living in tule huts, tin houses, old cars and chicken coops. The average education on the reservation was 3rd grade level, with field labor as the primary source of income… By the 1980s the Santa Rosa Rancheria had grown to approximately 200 members and 170 acres… and the average education increased to 8th grade level…The Tachi Palace Hotel and Casino… has grown from 86 employees in 1994 to over 400 employees in 1997, one-third of whom are Native American. The average education of our members has risen to the 12th grade and college levels, and living conditions have improved to wood frame housing, block homes and mobile homes. The Palace now offers our youth employment opportunities that would not otherwise be available. Many of our former employees … are positive role models for youngsters on the reservation. Unemployment has dropped below 25%, and most tribal members are now free from AFDC dependence. Tachi Yokuts interviewee Clarence (Kaya) Atwell (see Table 7) grew up on the Rancheria during this era, and served for 44 years as spiritual leader and Tribal Chairman of his tribe. Mr. Atwell, who spoke only his native language when he started his American education at Central Elementary School in Lemoore, oversaw and helped to guide the development of his tribe and its resources for nearly half a century. He said that he dropped out of Lemoore high school because ―there was nothing there for me.‖

Table 7

Tachi Yokut Interviewee Highest Grade Name Tribe Age Schools Attended Completed Central Elementary, Clarence (Kaya) Tachi Yokuts Late 60s Lemoore HS, Lemoore GED Atwell adult school, Cal-Poly SLO

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Nevertheless, Mr. Atwell not only challenges any and all stereotypes regarding the purpose, value, and meaning of education, but also embodies the phrase ―lifelong learner.‖ When asked how he managed, with so little formal education, to lead his people so successfully through complex and challenging times, times that included negotiating the complicated state and federal regulations involved in establishing tribal housing, health care, education programs, and cultural renewal programs funded by government grants and a lucrative gaming operation, Mr. Atwell responded, simply, ―I put my whole heart and soul into it.‖ During my era as a young man, and growing up, that was really a hard thing for me, because I wasn‘t really into education or anything. I was out here. It was a means of life, you know, for our guys to go out and hunt rabbit, and whatever we can get, in order to feed everybody on the rez. That was the thing that was goin‘ on. And when I was goin‘ to school, I had to take speech therapy clear up into the… sixth grade. I was in there, and I couldn‘t relate to them and everything. I couldn‘t talk the language…The reason why was that my grandma (see Figure 22) didn‘t talk very much English either. I was raised the Tachi way, and all the language talk was Tachi, so it was the everyday language for me…Finally, I got to where I could relate to everybody else… They had a lunch program. They fed us there. Sometimes, it was my only meal sometimes. Go to school and get lunch, and that was it. And I says, ―Well, this is all right. It‘s a survival way, I guess.‖ I stayed in school up till the 8th grade. And when I got into high school, my other partner, Vernon, he‘d go to school too. He was just a year ahead of me, and he says, ―Hey, why don‘t you get a job in the cafeteria?‖ They‘d clean up the tables, and clean up the mess after everybody‘d eat, walk around, ―and you get a free lunch!‖ After only a couple of months of high school, he dropped out. Just wasn‘t interesting to me. Just didn‘t relate to me, and everything else. And then I said, ―Well,‖ when I dropped out, I said, ―There are other things to do now.‖ I was doing farm labor work, so I started to go out and work in different places and all over…

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Figure 22. Josie Atwell, grandmother of Clarence (Kaya) Atwell.

A few years later, upon being elected tribal chairman, he realized that dropping out of high school might have been a mistake. William had a little one room trailer that was the tribal office at the time, and they said, ―Well,‖ and we walk in there, and I say, ―Hello, William, I just got nominated to be chairman, I guess. What do I have to do?‖ and he said, ―You‘re gonna have all these letters here,‖ there were a whole bunch of letters on the table, these were all the letters from the BIA, and he said, ―You gotta read ‗em all, and look things over.‖ And I said, ―Oh. Okay.‖ So I grabbed one and I started to look at, started to read it, and I said, ―Damn.‖ It had all these high vocabulary words, and I said, ―Dang.‖ It took me a week to read one letter, and I still had a whole pile there. And I thought, ―This ain‘t gonna work.‖ Mr. Atwell started to attend night school on the naval base at Lemoore to improve his skills, then completed his GED through a special program for tribal members at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. He considered continuing on to college-level studies, but once the tribe started its successful gaming operation, his duties as tribal chairman left no time to pursue further education. My people are my priority now. So I gotta take care of everybody… When Grandma was here, she was the main teacher. She said, ―Someday, you‘re

147 147 gonna be just like your dad. You‘re going to be a spiritual leader and you‘re going to be taking care of the people here.‖ ―Ah, grandma, that‘s all old stuff! That‘s all gone, now!‖ ―Oh no, no,‖ she said. ―It‘ll never go away.‖ She says, ―That‘s gonna be your job.‖ She taught me everything. I would go out here and gather food, gather medicine, all these things, all the stuff that was here in this area… She told me, ―This is the plant for this, this is the plant for that. This is for your headache, this is for that.‖ ―Well, how do you use it?‖ She‘d tell me, ―Oh, you grind it up, and use it that way. Or this, you can drink as a tea.‖ Grandma, she always used to talk about, you know, ―You‘re gonna have to do these things.‖ When I was growin‘ up, five, six, seven years old, I had a little outfit they put on, it‘s called a (tsukh), got a head, a little skirt and everything (see Figure 23) and then I had to get out here and dance, every March the first, which is comin‘ up, around the corner. Gonna have to go out there and dance for the people. ―Ah, all right.‖ I didn‘t know why I was doin‘ it, but I was doin‘ it, because she told me that I had to get out there and do that. I got out here, freezin‘ my butt off sometimes.. And she says, ―Well, you have to continue on with this,‖ she says, ―no matter how old you get, you‘ve got to continue doing the dance and the ceremonies, and the songs, that‘s another thing.‖ ―Well, I don‘t know.‖ ―You‘re going to have to learn all the songs and stuff,‖ and she was telling me teaching me songs and stuff too, so I‘d know it. She taught me the language and everything else, so we were here. She said, ―The main thing is, always have faith in the Creator,‖ she said. ―Don‘t ever let Him down.‖ ―Okay, I‘ll do that.‖ And today, we still deal with the Creator, in a good way, and everything, that‘s all a part of it, our culture, and our ceremonies we do, sweat lodging, talkin‘ with the people, and all the stuff that we have to do… Grandma didn‘t get to see the new casino up here, and didn‘t know all the other things that‘s going on now. But I know she‘d be overwhelmed by what we did, in these past years, with the housing, all the education, all that stuff. Mr. Atwell felt that today‘s tribal members have much greater opportunities in education, and overall, more interest in schooling than previous generations. Some of them just don‘ t care one way or the other. But right now, I think we got probably, maybe 20 or 30 of them that definitely went through their education, all the way through, went through high school, and college and everything. There are still a couple of them here who are still going to college, too. But it has changed a lot, you know. A lot of them are orientated now to get their education. I see some of them here, they say, ―Well, I got my business degree,‖ and all this stuff. And that‘s good. Like

148 148

Figure 23. Clarence (Kaya) Atwell as a child. Source: Tachi-Yokut Tribe website, www.tachi-yokut.com

my nephew, he‘s the GM for the casino, and he went back and got all his credentials and everything. Bill‘s another one. I think all those that are there now, they all got their credentials now and everything. They‘re all graduates… That‘s one thing we tell them, you know, education is the best part. I tell them all, y‘know, to go to school, stay in school, learn all you can. That‘s the main goal now, is education.

Summary of Findings The researcher embarked on this study with the intention of giving voice to Central California Indian people regarding their schooling experiences and to compare those experiences, and perceptions of those experiences, across generations. What was heard and recorded is frequently as surprising as what was not. For example, the majority of those interviewed who attended government boarding schools such as Sherman or Stewart did not report experiencing the kinds of trauma the researcher expected to uncover. This may be due to timing. Stewart

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Indian School, located a few miles from Carson City, Nevada, opened in 1890 and closed its doors in 1980. Sherman Institute, the first off-reservation Indian school in the state of California, opened in1892 as Perris Indian School and was moved to Riverside in 1903. Both of these government schools underwent changes of curriculum and focus as driven by educational policy. The military-style procedures, harsh discipline, forced assimilation and standardized curriculum characteristic of the Indian boarding school experience at the turn of the 20th century gave way to significant reforms enacted in the wake of the Meriam Report (1928) and the passage of the Johnson O‘Malley Act (1934). Sherman became a WASC accredited school in the 1970s, and reflecting liberalization of laws inhibiting Indian language and culture, began to include more traditional culture as part of its curricular and extra-curricular activities. Those interviewed by this researcher, for the most part, attended Stewart and Sherman in the 1920s or later. There is a perceptible shift in their accounts reflecting the move away from the military/vocational model of the turn of the century. This researcher may have arrived too late to record directly the experiences of those who may have been most adversely affected by government boarding school experiences. In the midst of the Great Depression and World War II, some interviewees experienced the boarding school as a relatively safe and stable environment and a respite from the uncertainties of poverty and lack of resources or family cohesion. Several of the eldest interviewees remarked on how different their experience of Sherman was compared to that of their children or grandchildren. The elders remembered Sherman as an attractive campus and their learning experiences were reported as fun or positive. Going back to Sherman to visit children or grandchildren attending there, the elders remarked on the general ugliness of the campus since the old mission-style buildings were torn down and

150 150 replaced in the 1970s in compliance with earthquake codes. They remarked that the curriculum now seems identical to that of a mainstream public school. Other negative reports about Sherman today included a complaint about an influx of gang activity and the traumatic experience of one young Indian girl who was ganged up on and severely beaten by other Indian girls. Several Tule River tribal members mentioned having heard from parents or grandparents about negative government boarding school experiences, but these were not described in detail.

Interviewees’ Perceptions of the Value and Importance of Education Most of those interviewed expressed a belief in the importance of formal, school-based education for upcoming generations of Indian children. That said, many also articulated a desire to see more Indian people become educators, and more Indian educators serving as role models. Many stressed the value and importance of revitalizing traditional languages and including the teaching of native languages and culture as part of an ideal educational offering for Indian children today. Several felt strongly that accurate and complete descriptions of California Indian people and history are conspicuously missing from state standards and adopted textbooks. One interviewee is currently engaged in co- writing a curriculum, funded by gaming tribes, designed to integrate California Indian history and perspectives for K-12 public schools. Grant funding is being made available to train teachers and administrators to implement this curriculum, available free online, into their existing scope, sequence, and pacing guides. Perceptions of schooling experiences ran the gamut from the traumatizing effects of racist or culturally insensitive teachers and peers to stories of selfless interventions by teachers, coaches, and other school-based mentors, some of whom single-handedly turned a troubled child‘s life around to face in the right

151 151 direction. Even those who came away from their public school experiences feeling damaged or believing that they were ―not very bright‖ still somehow managed to use those experiences in a positive way. One Indian boy who was tormented by racist epithets, low expectations, and corporal punishment later became a high school principal who takes the time each year to memorize the name of every student who attends his school. An Indian woman who felt, as a girl, that she was unable to focus or learn in school due to the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome recognized similar symptoms in one of her granddaughters and actively intervened to advocate on the child‘s behalf for academic support services that had not been available when she herself was young. Several Indian children who were punished or whipped for speaking their language in school grew up to be adults who promote the renewal of their traditional languages and culture in educational programs for children of their tribes today. Frankly, after conducting the study, this researcher stands in awe of the resilience and survivability of Central California Indian people in the face of what any reasonable human being might assume to be insurmountable odds actively and deliberately stacked against them. The voice that speaks through all the narratives, interviews, and archival materials collected for this study cries out, repeatedly, the same message: ―We are still here.‖ Not only are Central California Indian people still here, they also have much to share and much to teach us if we are willing to listen. The same aggressive economic, political, educational, and technological dynamics that conspired to marginalize the indigenous peoples of this continent are once again at work in our world, amassing and encroaching in a way that threatens to marginalize many more. The most resilient and successful learners among the Central California Indian people interviewed were not necessarily those who

152 152 seamlessly or facelessly assimilated into the dominant White Euro-American culture, but those who, due to protective, traditional cultural influences in the early years of their lives, took lessons from the ever-changing world around them, constructed a solid foundation of personalized meaning, and applied this knowledge in ways that allowed for the preservation of their identities, both individually and collectively.

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CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION/SUMMARY/CONCLUSION

Introduction Trying to fit together the concepts of schooling and education in a meaningful way with the words and experiences of the Central California Indian people I interviewed, I found myself suddenly standing at the precipice of the chasm that yawns between the dominant or Euro-American society‘s worldview and the very different worldview of the Indian people I interviewed. For example, discerning the differences between cultural conceptions relative to the meaning and purpose of education presents a fundamental challenge to a dissertation project that is inherently conceptually Western and rooted in academia. Differences between the two cultural worldviews, histories, and orientations therefore invisibly permeate the dialogue between myself as interviewer and many, if not all, of my interviewees. Prior to embarking on this study, I had read literature about cultural identity, but I came to realize that I had unconsciously perceived the intellectual traffic in those readings as running one way: People from other cultural backgrounds needing to adapt to White Euro-American society. I did not expect, at least initially, to be confronted with the reality that transculturation (Huffman, 2010) is a two-way street. It was both difficult and discomfiting to recognize the fundamental ontological disparities between the Euro-American and American Indian lenses, and then, having recognized them, attempt to set both lenses aside, even momentarily, in an earnest effort to understand what my interviewees were saying, one human being to another. In the process, I slowly began to catch, albeit through a glass darkly, a glimpse of how dominant White culture might appear to those who perceive themselves to be standing outside of it. It is not always a flattering

154 154 reflection. I found cultural differences thrown into vivid relief in the process of attempting to unravel how two disparate cultures, who share a common time and space, have experienced schooling. There is not necessarily, at least among the people I interviewed, a definitively Central California Indian way of thinking about, looking at, or implementing schooling in the Euro-American sense of the word. Speaking with a wide range of Indian people, from teenagers to elders in their 80s, I heard a variety of opinions and perspectives. Through the magic of archival documentation and preservation, I was able to time-travel and read or listen to voices of others who are gone from our midst. Central California Indian people of today, at least those I interviewed, seem to have wholly accepted and embraced the idea that an American education is essential in order to navigate the complex and rapidly changing world we now occupy. Opinions differed as to how that education should be packaged and delivered as a schooling experience - whether the best approach is simply to support Indian students in the mainstream system, or whether tribes should actively strive to incorporate elements of their traditional cultures into educational experiences for their own children. Some tribes are developing programs that manage to do both. Preservation and perpetuation of native languages was a consistent, though not unanimous, concern. Some of the people I interviewed articulated their own understandings about the difference between schooling and education, such as this elder of the Mono tribe: When my grandfathers used to talk, they didn‘t speak hardly any English, so a lot of their teaching was with our language. They were my professors. And they talked about things that some of the professors in college, in the universities, now talk about. They had no education as we know education now; their education was the land. The survival, the way of life.

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Another Mono elder who teaches American Indian Studies put his thoughts into these words: I‘ve been through college and taught college. But both my mother and my father were far more educated than I was. My mother quit school in the 8th grade, and I think my dad quit in the 11th grade and went into the Navy. But I learned from my mother everything – not everything. I wish that she was still around because I‘d still be learning from her. She could speak about 12 different [Indian] dialects, 5 or 6 different languages. She was always studying. She went to Utah, to Arizona, to Nevada, all over California. People knew who she was, and she could speak to them, in their language. Plus, she knew about the land, and the way things were, about the elements. About the spirituality of the land, and the Great Spirit himself. And that was without the Bible. These kind of teachings, the insight that they had, and the wisdom that they had, they were far greater scholars than I‘ll ever be. American Indian scholar Grande (2004) lyrically framed the heart-breaking question lurking as subtext beneath the spoken words of several tribal elders I interviewed: I have lived and experienced the mythical reality of modern life: all the magical machines, the separation of self from the clan, the deification of Reason and measure, the illusion of the infiniteness of the finite, and the metamorphosis of nature as vital superordinate power to spiritless, subordinate commodity. Weaving its way through this experience, like a small but earnest mountain stream, is the memory and soul of my grandmother. All that she and her ancient culture represent are, lovingly but relentlessly, embodied within me. Inside I feel her dark weathered skin, her waist-long, horse-tail-thick salt-and-pepper braid, the fresh-combed feel of hand-woven fabric, and I think of how these textures resemble me. Through them I feel connected to the immense journey of all our souls as children of this earth. I remember and still sense her smell. I wonder, is it the collective scent of a lost time, a lost culture, a lost people, and therefore an aroma of death? Or is it a smell of becoming-ness, of the eternity of all beings and, therefore, the scent of life? (p. 159) My response to Grande after completing this study would be that it is my hope and my belief that education among Central California Indian people is redolent with the scent of life and exciting possibilities of ―becoming-ness.‖ The voices I heard

156 156 in the process of collecting data for this study recall the lessons of the past and seek to preserve history and tradition while earnestly seeking to prepare upcoming generations to live productively in the present and future.

Summary Expanding on existing literature that chronicles the effects of government boarding schools on American Indian people, the findings of this study underscore the importance of avoiding a one-size-fits-all analysis of, or knee-jerk emotional response to what is a very complex topic. American Indian people were not uniformly or universally traumatized by attending government boarding schools. Statements regarding the positive or negative effects of schooling practices must be thoughtfully and appropriately framed to include consideration of time, place, historical context and the individual involved. Discussion also follows of the impact of schooling experiences on individual and collective identities of Central California Indian people. Part of this discussion involves the differences in the experiences of two men, both Mono tribal elders of approximately the same age, both of whom grew up in similar cultural surroundings. The impact of pedagogy and curriculum on their identities as learners, their resiliency, and subsequent academic experience is explored. In the end, as Tule River tribal elder Jenny Garfield (Frank, 2004) pointed out in one interview session, ―It‘s all about money.‖ Schools cost money to build, staff, and operate. California is currently home to the nation‘s greatest concentration of gaming tribes. Two of the tribes included in this study have active gaming operations, and the third is in the process of negotiation. Both the Tule River Tribe and the Tachi Yokuts have channeled gaming revenues into education programs. Tribes differ, however, in how they distribute gaming revenues, which

157 157 has resulted in mixed feelings about the impact of gaming on education and tribal youth.

Theme 1: Boarding school experiences varied for Central California Indian people. Several interviewees reported attending Sherman Institute or Stewart Indian Boarding School. All interviewees who discussed their boarding school experiences in detail, whether in real time or through DVD or archives, were women who attended between the year 1929 and the 1980s. Although men who had attended the boarding schools were mentioned by several sources, none of these men were interviewed in depth about their boarding school experiences. The implications of this gender imbalance may be significant. How the boarding school experience affected students based on gender, and whether or not cultural norms relative to gender were a factor in those experiences, would be fascinating to explore, but it is beyond the scope of this study to speculate. Based on the data gathered, it is apparent that the Indian boarding school experience was not universally traumatic or even necessarily unduly negative for the Central California Indian people who attended and were interviewed for the purpose of this study. What became increasingly clear was that students‘ perceptions of these experiences depended on who they were, when and where they went, and why they were sent or chose to go. Fear-Segal (2007) touched upon the potential for diversity of experience when she described the difference in impact of a boarding school education on two Indian girls who attended Carlisle just 15 years apart: For one, the schooling experience began and ended in tragedy, but for the other, the boarding school provided a springboard to opportunity. At present, much of the literature about Indian boarding schools tends to emphasize the traumatizing effects of government schools upon Indian children who were

158 158 forcibly taken far from their homes and families and placed in subtractive schooling environments designed to divest them of their language and culture, particularly during the time period between 1890-1924 (Adams, 1995; Churchill, 2004; Lomawaima, 1994; Trafzer, Keller & Sisquoc, 2006). However, Central California Indian interviewees who attended government boarding schools during the Great Depression and World War II reported very different experiences. Some of the difference may be attributed to reforms enacted with FDR‘s appointment of John Collier, author of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, during his 12-year tenure as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Similar to Fortunate Eagle (2010), some of Central California Indian students may actually have gained positive and/or protective benefits from their boarding school experiences, given the poverty and isolation of where they came from. Tule River tribal elder Joan G. (Frank, 2004) recalled, upon going to Stewart as a young girl, ―After being around here with nothing, I was glad to get up there. We ate three meals a day and had a good bed for every night.‖ Joan‘s statement must also be tempered by remembering that the poverty, isolation, and family dysfunction characteristic of many reservations and Rancherias were induced in the process of land theft and forced tribal relocation. Disintegration of American Indian families may additionally have been induced through the lingering trauma still resonating from previous generations‘ boarding school experiences. References were made in archival data and interviews to elder relatives who refused to allow their children or grandchildren to attend the boarding schools, saying the schools did not treat the children right. Further interviewing of tribal elders and additional research examining cross-generational impacts of boarding school experiences are needed.

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Age upon arrival may also have had a significant bearing on individual perceptions and lingering emotional or psychological effects of Indian boarding school experiences. For example, Tule River tribal members Joan G. and Rhonda B. were both 9 years old upon arrival at Stewart. Even though their experiences were separated by almost a decade, both would have been solidly in Erikson‘s (1963) fourth developmental stage of ―Industry vs. Inferiority.‖ In accordance with their developmental stage, both girls reacted positively to the change of environment and the plethora of training activities they became involved in at the school. Rhonda in particular viewed her learning experiences at Stewart in a very positive light. However, Joan contrasted their positive experiences with mention of the sad state of little boys housed at Stewart who were so young they did not know how to eat or use the bathroom independently. For these children, given the lack of adult interaction or nurturance Joan described as being the norm at Stewart at that time, traumatization would certainly be likely, if not inevitable. These little boys would have experienced disruption of the ―Trust vs. Mistrust,‖ ―Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt,‖ and ―Initiative vs. Guilt‖ stages of development, which Erikson described as the developmental tasks of early childhood. Unable to communicate or be understood, traumatized by unfamiliar and uncaring people and surroundings, these little boys would have been likely to develop difficulties with trust, shame, self-doubt, feelings of inferiority and lack of purpose. It would be interesting to take a longitudinal look at boarding school attendees to examine possible connections between age of arrival at the boarding school and any demonstrable long-term developmental effects. As federal policies toward American Indian language and culture relaxed in the 1960s and ‗70s, the government boarding schools became less militaristic and more like comprehensive public high schools. Students of Susie M.‘s generation,

160 160 who attended Sherman in the 1980s, may have been able to integrate the best of both cultural worlds. Susie arrived at Stewart during adolescence when Erikson‘s developmental task is ―Identity vs. Role Confusion.‖ Susie received a comprehensive high school education augmented by identity-enhancing traditional cultural reinforcements in the form of clubs and cultural activities. She described her experience at Sherman as positive, and a turnaround for her both academically and behaviorally. She admired fellow students who knew how to speak their native languages, and later, as an adult, began to study Yowlumni, the language of her father. Susie returned from Sherman with a college scholarship and a strong sense of her own potential. While not all who have attended Sherman in more recent decades have had positive schooling experiences there, Sherman has definitely changed significantly since it opened in 1890.

Theme 2: Experiences with educators (teachers, coaches, administrators) influenced identity formation, academic persistence, and resiliency among Central California Indian students. Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the … lesson that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning… What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul…? (Dewey, 1998, p. 49) The good news is that, across the generations, public schools appear to be getting better at serving the educational needs of Central California Indian students. Many interviewees described the impact, for good or otherwise, of individual teachers or educators. Those educators who contributed in a positive

161 161 way enhanced a student‘s identity, persistence, and resiliency. Those educators having a negative impact on a given student‘s sense of achievement identity functioned as additional risk factors contributing to the likelihood of a negative schooling outcome as well as difficulties with personal identity that, in some cases, persisted into adulthood. Negative experiences with teachers and curriculum were reported more frequently among older interviewees; many of them noted that the schooling experiences of their children or grandchildren were much better. In most cases, interviewees had received more formal education than their parents. Resilience, as simply defined by Rutter (1999) refers to the ―phenomenon of overcoming stress or adversity‖ despite ―experiences that have been shown to carry a major risk factor for the development of psychopathology‖ (p. 119-120). Psychopathology refers to mental illness and distress, and the distorted perceptions or maladaptive behaviors that may occur as a result. Resilience is therefore not an individual trait or characteristic per se, but a response to stress and adversity. The level of risk rises with the accumulation of adverse or stressful experiences. An individual‘s sensitivity to risk may be influenced by temperament, cognitive level, family dynamics, environment, and peers. Many American Indian children, who continue to suffer the lingering trauma of cultural genocide perpetrated on previous generations, are also exposed to an accumulation of psychosocial experiences in the present that predispose them to risk, such as dysfunctional parental behaviors, poverty, or negative peer group influences during adolescence. These children would, as a result, be categorized as ―at-risk,‖ meaning more likely to engage in maladaptive behaviors, such as drug or alcohol use, dropping out of school, or teen pregnancy. These maladaptive behaviors may also instigate ―negative chain reactions‖ that continue throughout life and even across generations. Quinton and Rutter (1988) found

162 162 beneficial effects for at-risk children from positive school experiences, while Elder (1986) found positive outcomes for disadvantaged youth joining the military immediately after high school. Many of the male interviewees reported having served in the military right after high school, and the armed services continue to be a popular career choice for many American Indian adolescents. Rutter (1999), noting that ―positive experiences themselves do not exert much of a protective effect,‖ found ―some evidence to suggest that there may be some benefits if the positive experiences are of a kind that directly counter, or compensate for, some risk factor‖ (p. 133). An example of this would be Malcolm W.‘s experience with the librarian at Monache High School, who took him under her wing after he was transferred there from Porterville High School: The librarian was Cherokee…Wonderful lady, took a particular interest in me. And she had a pretty good idea of what I had been through…she was tough on me at first. You‘re not gonna be a victim. I‘m not gonna let you fail. And you‘re gonna show up in the morning in my library, and I‘m going to look at all your work, and you‘re going to do your homework, and you‘re going to do it right. I‘m going to get you involved in athletics, and you‘re going to sing in the choir, by the way, and you‘re going to be in drama – you‘re going to do some things that you never did before…And she told me that I was going to have to do my part. I was gonna have to work. She was the first one who told me, there‘s nothing wrong with you. You have every ability. You‘re intelligent. You have everything that you need. In Malcolm‘s case, the librarian‘s active support and encouragement counteracted his earlier negative and nonsupportive experiences with other educators and turned his schooling experience around to the degree that he eventually chose to pursue a career as an educator. A comparison of the experiences of two other interviewees further illustrates the potential impact of educators on students‘ development of resiliency. Both Rudy A. and Roger G. are Mono, both are elders, both spoke

163 163 their native language at home before learning English, both were raised in culturally traditional families, both were players on the same high school football team, and both, upon graduating from Sierra High School, desired to pursue higher education. Later on, both became leaders of their people. Yet despite all their similarities, they had very different experiences with teachers in their early years at different elementary schools, resulting in different ways of coping with the adversities they faced. Rudy A., from the Cold Springs band of Mono, attended Sierra Elementary, where his most vivid memory was of being hit by a teacher, Miss Ann, for speaking his native language. Ron Alec nonetheless became a strong proponent of education for his sons when they were growing up, and continues to promote education for his grandchildren. After struggling academically and graduating high school, he started to attend college: I think the only way we can make it better is through education. No other ways. I try. But I just never did have that ability to learn. I wanted it – I wanted to learn. But my mind just didn‘t let me. Rudy recalled how he was punished for speaking his Indian language when he started school at Sierra Elementary in the late 1950s: I was told that you‘re here to learn English. But they didn‘t understand that it was easier for me sometimes to answer in my own language. I knew what they were saying to me. But I couldn‘t answer it. So I would answer in my own language. And I used to get whipped for it… Miss Ann. She had a ruler. We called it the 13-inch ruler. It was only 12, but we called it 13, because it always seemed that it reached beyond 12… And it was always the native kids, you know. Boom!...We did (ha!) finally make sure we always talked English… Because we didn‘t want to get hit. So it did work. Rudy did not consciously connect being punished while learning English with his later difficulties in school and at college. Getting drafted and sent to Vietnam offered the opportunity to escape from his academic struggles:

164 164 When I got drafted, it was like a blessing. It gave me an opportunity to pull out of there…without shaming anyone. I think my biggest fear was shaming my family. ‗Cause I kinda made a promise that I was going to further my education but I couldn‘t…To go to Vietnam, now… I could do that. In the military, it was easy to go up in ranks. But book work, no. I got on the field commission and became staff sergeant, in combat. Now those things I could do, because that‘s part of survival. I know how to take care of myself. I know how to take care of someone else. But you put a book, and the words in front of me, and I‘m lost again. So when I came home, after the first tour, in the 60s, it was bad. I flew into Travis Air Force base, where they had all those protests and things. They were throwing beer cans at us, spitting at us. And they had plastic baby dolls on the spears, and callin‘ us baby killers… We were comin‘ home. We were all happy, comin‘ home… There was like 300-some of us in that 747, comin‘ home, havin‘ a good ol‘ time. And hit that- and hit home- and hit that? Aw, my, that was just devastating. It‘s like – all over again, from growin‘ up… Believe it or not, that‘s what came back to me. Miss Ann. Why, of all the persons? When I landed in Travis Air Force base, and when I seen that, her name came up. Kaufman (1974) defined shame as ―the underlying sense of being irreparably and unspeakably defective which somehow separates one from the rest of humanity‖ (p. 569). Shame, according to Pinto-Gouveia and Matos (2011) ―can be a painful social experience linked to the perception that one is being judged and seen as inferior… or unattractive in the eyes of others‖ (p. 281). The ―memory of a trauma or a negative emotional event can become central to one‘s life story and identity‖ (p. 282). Shame experiences can be particularly damaging in early childhood, and even more so when associated with people who are important in a child‘s life. ―Individuals whose shame memories function as turning points in the life story, as crucial components of their personal identity and as reference points to everyday inferences, tend to believe they exist in the minds of others as undesirable, inferior or defective and to feel and judge themselves as inferior, bad or inadequate‖ (p. 286).

165 165

Rudy had positive experiences that counterbalanced his earlier experiences- not to mention providing an outlet for aggression- when, in high school, his athletic abilities earned him a place on a football team that proceeded to win the state championship. No similar counterbalancing experiences were mentioned for his sister. His description of his sister‘s feelings and behavior suggests lingering effects of shame felt throughout her adult life. For a young girl, to be accused of spreading lice in school and having her head shaved, as Rudy described, ―bald. Just bald,‖ constituted a form of public humiliation from which her childhood sense of self may never have fully recovered. While Rudy managed to repair a sense of self damaged by the shaming behavior of an insensitive and possibly sadistic teacher, for his sister, her shaming experience became a reference point in her identity causing continual pain. Because seeing him reminded her ―of what we gone through,‖ she has avoided seeing her brother for decades, despite the fact that he tried to stand up for her at the time. Roger G., North Fork Mono, and a teammate of Rudy‘s on the Sierra High School football team, attended a different elementary school, North Fork Elementary. Although his teachers there were not fully apprehending or respectful his culture, he did not experience the same intensely negative effects of teacher shaming or corporal punishment while learning the English language. I did pretty well in school until about the fourth grade. And of course, that‘s about the time that my father left me, or left us. And so for the next four years, till about seventh, eighth grade, I kind of struggled a little bit. I started turning things around about the seventh grade, maybe even the sixth grade. Had a good sixth grade teacher. Her son was my best friend at school, and we got along pretty good. I got interested in science, because that‘s what she was, a science teacher. And then, I got interested in writing. I had a really good seventh grade English teacher, and he‘s very famous in town. He‘s a big time Democrat. He writes articles about me every now and then… I learned to write about my culture. I started recording a lot about my culture back in the 6th grade, with my mother, and I still have those

166 166 original notes. And that‘s part of the researcher that I am today, and the writings that I do-- even having published a book on plants and animals. Those are some of the first things I recorded back then. It was really good for me to be able to do that. [My mother] was always telling me stories, so I recorded the stories. In Roger‘s case, the English language provided a bridge between his traditional language and cultural stories as told to him by his mother and success at school, due in part to the encouragement of an understanding teacher. While Roger‘s life was by no means free of hardship or adversity, his was a different pathway to resiliency. Fred W. also credited the support of teachers and coaches with his decision to stay in school: Even though [Mrs. Olson] was a very hard-nosed teacher-… she mentored me, to help me do public speaking…I ran for Student Body Council, my 5th grade year… And she put a lot of time into helping me to face the crowd, and to enunciate clearly, to talk clearly and slowly so people could understand what I had to say… In the middle school, I met a coach by the name of Glen Davis…He took a liking to me because of my ability to be a good athlete…we didn‘t have any transportation from Bartlett to the reservation, which is about 25 miles up in the mountains. At least twice a week he would drive me all the way home so I could practice after school…In high school, I was in four sports: football, I played basketball, I wrestled and I ran track…if it wasn‘t for sports, I wouldn‘t have graduated. I wasn‘t a very good student. After graduating from high school, Fred enlisted in the Navy, and upon retiring from the service, took advantage of the GI Bill to earn a college degree. He works today as director of the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program on the Tule River Reservation where he grew up.

Theme 3: Grounding in traditional language and culture enhances resiliency. Identity, according to Kaufman (1974), ―is a sense of self, of who one is and who one is not, and of where one belongs. It is a sense of inner centeredness

167 167 and valuing‖ (p. 568). While interviewing individuals and consulting archival materials for this study, I was continually impressed by the Central California Indian people I met with in person, as well as those whose words I listened to or read. With or without formal schooling, and in spite of having lived through extreme adversities, they exhibited, for lack of a better word, exceptional resiliency. Elders, in particular, represent a small and elect population on Indian reservations where life expectancies can range from 45 to 70 years old, which is eight years or more below the average life expectancy for other Americans (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Grandbois and Sanders (2009) specifically examined resiliency among traditional elders. The researchers noted that ―There have been virtually no resiliency studies conducted from the perspective of Native American elders although they have had to survive a multitude of challenges and adversities to reach old age‖ (p. 569). They felt that American Indian elders personify both Masten‘s (1994) definition of resilience as ―successful adaptation to life despite risk and adversity‖ and Gordon‘s (1995) ―ability to thrive, mature, and increase competence‖ (p. 569). Elders interviewed by Grandbois and Sanders (2009) used words such as ―the legacy of survival,‖ ―perseverance,‖ ―loyalty,‖ and ―cultural identity‖ to account for their ability to survive and thrive in the face of all obstacles. Protective strategies the researchers identified, which have also been identified by others (HeavyRunner & Morris, 1997) as contributing to elder resilience included tribal identity, family connection, humor, oral traditions and spirituality. I must agree that all these factors were strongly in evidence among the California Indian elders I interviewed. Humor seemed to be a common factor among all generations of the Indian people I interviewed, but was most pronounced among the elders, whether

168 168 traditional or not. There is not a single transcription from my study that does not include multiple parenthetical references to laughter. Rudy A. compared the traditional way he was taught with what he feels is missing from the experience of students in mainstream schooling: I think your relationship with your family was closer… There was more involved with your family teaching you the songs or the dances or the sweat lodges… It was important for each one of them to share something to you. So you became – you felt important. You felt wanted. You wanted to learn then. You were like a sponge. I think that‘s the difference. You wanted what your auntie or your uncle or your grandfather or your mother or your father wanted to give you. Rudy felt strongly that young people today can and should benefit from learning in traditional ways. I don‘t believe that our ways are gone. I believe there are ways waiting for us to wake up, to reach out and bring it back, and every time we bring a circle together, that‘s what we‘re doing… If I could, I would let all my work go, so I could spend all my time doing what I want to do, give back. Just give. Run the sweats. Teach the sweats. Try to reach some of our children that are sick. Try to bring them in here. Try to give them a tool so they have a chance. Catherine M. studied native language as a preschooler with elder interviewee Rhonda B., had American Indian aides in the classroom, and belonged to Indian clubs from elementary through high school. Still, she said, she did not feel she knew anything about American Indian history until she learned about it at UC Santa Cruz. It was there that she began to think deeply about her own tribe and what she might be able to do to help her people: The history of [our] tribe wasn‘t written, and a lot of it was just stories. A lot of those stories are gone now. If more people from the tribe realized what their history was, where they came from, I think they‘d do better in school. Because once they realize that, they know they have to live not only on the reservation, but also within American society, which is very different from living on the reservation. You know, on the reservation, you don‘t have taxes, property taxes; it‘s a whole different form of government

169 169 than it is in the American system. I think for them to be able to understand [their own culture and history first], it will better equip them to handle understanding the American system as well. Tribal elder Rhonda B., who is one of several teachers of native language on the reservation, described the resiliency of earlier generations who were forced to relocate and abandon their traditional way of life: They survived it. What they couldn‘t correct then, because somebody had control of them, when they got older, they could do those things if they wanted to. Joan G. agreed. We can go back to it and survive. And I know our ancestors are smiling, because they didn‘t have the choice, they didn‘t have the chance. Many interviewees equated the teaching of native languages with cultural preservation. While being interviewed in his backyard, Rudy A. told the following allegorical story about a problem he had with a neighbor: There‘s a reason why we put this fence up over here. Their dogs over there used to come over here and make our backyard their bathroom. It wasn‘t the dogs‘ fault. The dog‘s doing what the dog does. So in order to stop that, I put the fence up. So now we became good neighbors. And then I put a gate over there, and my neighbor called it the friendship gate. And now there‘s peace. While it may seem a bit unflattering to realize that Euro-American culture is represented by the dogs in this analogy, the elder recognized that education and schooling present cross-cultural boundary issues that can and must be resolved in a multi-cultural society. He operates under the assumption that resolution can be achieved with a peaceable, win-win approach. Extending the analogy into the educational arena, he mused: How do we regain that peace? What kind of fence do we put up, so we can go on together?. It‘s not blaming. It‘s not hardheaded. It‘s not throwing things at those dogs. You don‘t take care of it that way. I found the most reasonable way. I put a little fence up that you can‘t even hardly see at dark…I think bringing the traditional, that‘s our fence. Bring it back. There

170 170 are some tribes doing it. And it‘s working. They‘re bringing back their language. Teaching their own – the successful ones, they‘re putting schools on their own reservations and teaching it. Bishop‘s a good example. Most of their kids over there speak the language. They‘re very successful with it. Research (Huffman, 2008, 2011) supports this elder‘s belief that grounding in a traditional cultural identity will give tribal children an improved chance of succeeding in higher education. According to Huffman (2008), ―How much difficulty American Indian students will face in college depends in large measure on how they see and use their ethnic identity‖ (p. 3).

Theme 4: The increasing level of education among Central California Indian people is resulting in a desire and need for more jobs that can be filled by tribal members. One complaint voiced by several interviewees was the lack of employment opportunities for tribal members who go away to college and then come back to the reservation. Carrie W. expressed one popular opinion: The thing about it is, the tribe will pay for people to go to school, but then when they get out, they don‘t hire them for the jobs that are open. It‘s like my daughter, she‘s got her BA in accounting, okay, and she put in for a job at the housing place, and she didn‘t get the job. And then she put in for assistant controller not very long ago, and she hasn‘t heard anything back. You know, that‘s her profession, that‘s what she went to school to do… It‘s like, you sent these kids to school, you paid for their education. Use ‗em! If they don‘t cut the mustard, get rid of them! But if they‘re good, leave them there. You know, I‘m a firm believer that every position up here of authority… should be held by tribal members. I do believe in that. I think we should have a tribal administrator be a tribal member. I think the housing director should be a native person…Why should they hire [a] White guy? There‘s Indians qualified to do that job. Tribal elder Fred W. added: You know that for kids to get ahead, they need to get an education. Regardless of whether they come back to the reservation to work, they do need to have that education to be competitive in the outside.

171 171 And I believe that the reservations and Rancherias need to prepare these kids to be away from the rez…They go away to college and come back with a college degree, and we have one kid in particular, he went to Fresno State, and he got his bachelor‘s, I don‘t know what the field is, maybe sociology, and he‘s a janitor, at the gym… And that‘s sad, because here‘s a kid with a bachelor‘s degree, and he‘s gotta go ahead and clean up after other kids because there are no jobs for him on the reservation. Huffman (2001, 2005, 2008, 2010) specifically examined American Indian cultural identity and its relationship to experiences and persistence in higher education, as well as Indian students‘ likelihood of returning to reservations to work on behalf of their tribes. Differentiating between biculturation, which Huffman (2011) describes as ―typically regarded to mean that minority members ultimately experience some cultural loss‖ (p. 2), Huffman prefers, when discussing issues of American Indian identity relative to their experiences as college students, to use the theoretical frame of transculturation: Transculturation does not accept the notion that cultural exchanges necessarily lead to cultural hybridization with resultant cultural loss. On the contrary, the reflective and rational individual is capable of retaining intact Native cultural ways, views, and beliefs while learning the ways, views, and beliefs of a new culture. The point is that the transculturation process has not required the relinquishing of former cultural ways to make room for new ones. (p. 3) Catherine M., after completing her law degree at University of New Mexico Albuquerque, turned down several other offers of employment to serve as Tribal Attorney on the reservation where she grew up. She represents what Huffman (2011) would describe as a transculturated point of view, although underscored by some biculturated feelings: I feel like I was taught to think a certain way in the American school system in order to succeed. And then when I go back to the reservation, and I try to solve problems, I know I don‘t use the mind set as if I were to not have been educated, if I would have just stayed on the reservation… It seems to me I would rather have somebody that‘s noneducated, or hasn‘t gone and learned to think in a certain way, for them to be able to solve our

172 172 own problems in the community. Like, their input would be more valuable than mine…I feel like the people that have stayed in the community, that have been there all their lives, they should be in a better situation to figure out the answers to their problems. I can help, but I‘d feel more comfortable if they were to do that… They have the power to think about what‘s best to do – what they can do educationally for the students. But it doesn‘t seem like anybody is willing to sit down there and think.

Theme 5: Central California Indian people are interested in establishing their own schools in which traditional content, including California Indian languages and history, and mainstream content can both be taught. ―Everyone has a right to education,‖ Article 26 of the United Nations‘ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) generously proclaims. But education and what it means are significantly embedded in culture, and values and beliefs about education are culturally variable. Some (Banks, 1993; Gay, 2003) champion multicultural education as the solution. Gorski (2000) offered the following lofty definition: Multicultural education is a progressive approach for transforming schools and schooling that holistically critiques and eliminates all conscious or unconscious discriminatory and repressive practices in education. It is grounded in ideals of social justice, education equity, and a dedication to facilitating educational experiences in which all students reach their full potential as learners and as socially aware and active citizens, locally, nationally, and globally. (n.p.) Elegantly-worded definitions aside, Banks (1993) and Gay (2003) agree that there continues to be a wide gap between multicultural education theory and practice. Giroux and Simon (1988) blamed former Secretary of Education William Bennett for the obstacles that have largely prevented implementation of multicultural ideals. As Secretary of Education during the Reagan presidency, they say, Bennett successfully institutionalized conservative ideals regarding schooling

173 173 and linked the purpose of education conceptually to big business. Interviewees reflected the general public‘s acceptance of Bennett‘s technocratic concept of education when they described the importance of computer literacy as part of education and schooling for upcoming generations. Multicultural education, according to Giroux and Simon (1988) has had trouble gaining a foothold in a public education system in which policies are decided by a small cadre of decision-makers who hold 19th century elitist attitudes and a vision of schooling as the guardian and perpetuator of Western civilization. Grande (2004) specifically attacked what she pejoratively terms the miseducation of American Indians, stating that ―From the time of the invasion to the present day, the church and state have acted as coconspirators in the theft of native America, robbing indigenous peoples of their very right to be indigenous‖ (p.11). Grande warned that the introduction of multicultural education, while a laudable goal, is essentially meaningless without addressing the reality that ―the Indian problem… has been consciously and historically produced by and through the systems of colonization: a multidimensional force underwritten by Western Christianity, defined by White supremacy, and fueled by global capitalism‖ (p.19). The Central California Indian people I interviewed, for the most part, were not engaged in this type of scholarly or politicized discourse about education, although links between the shaping of cultural values and identity through schooling experiences and the educational process were noted by some. According to Roger G.: Education is about culture, and culture is about education. They go hand in hand. The problem is that when you‘re in school, it doesn‘t go hand in hand. They forget that. And they separate that. Wait a minute, whose education are you giving me? From whose cultural view are you giving me? And are you accepting my cultural view, whether I‘m Hmong, or Lau, or Russian, or Indian – India/Indian, or American Indian. Whose culture are

174 174 you telling me that I‘m being educated by? Especially here in America. Very, you know, political and just arrogant in many cases, what our education is about. One Tule River elder expressed her frustration with the lack of knowledge tribal youth of today have of their own history: ―They don‘t feel it‖ (Frank, 2004). Another Tule River elder, Isaac G. (Frank, 2004) described his disgust with schoolbooks that told a version of history that conflicted with the remembered experience of the people he knew: My teacher and I always argued about our history classes, because I told her they weren‘t true. Whenever I was studying my history and I brought it home and talked to my grandfather, usually there were two or three other older men around there too, and they were telling me that what they were trying to teach you was a bunch of lies. So this is what I carried back to my teacher. I said, Why should I learn what you‘re trying to teach me, because it‘s a bunch of lies. And she turned around and tells me that I was going to have to learn what was in them books, or I wouldn‘t graduate from grammar school… so I said, well, it just looks like here‘s where I quit school. Isaac failed history and as a result, did not attend his grammar school graduation. He continued on to high school , then dropped out to join the military when World War II began: ―I said, hell, you don‘t need a diploma to pull a trigger!‖ After leaving the service, he went back to school and earned his GED. One alternative to public schooling with textbooks that distort or omit Indian history is for tribes to create their own schools or education programs for tribal youth. Since the advent of Indian gaming in the 1990s, many tribes have initiated education programs funded by gaming revenues, including the Tule River Tribe and the Tachi Yokuts, with the North Fork Mono in active negotiation for a casino of their own. The Tule River Tribe has been investigating the creation of a reservation school or a tribal K-3 charter with Porterville Unified. Recently, Lydia P., who works with a tribal education program, accompanied a contingent of tribal employees sent to visit potential school models:

175 175 I was lucky enough to go with a delegation of 12 to Harlem [Children‘s Zone]. It was absolutely incredible. They cover 92 blocks in Harlem, and they have a $95 million budget a year…They also have a charter school. Kindergarten through 12. And those children just have everything imaginable. They take away all the roadblocks to why a child cannot produce and become a productive citizen. And they have a lot of the social problems that we have, so that‘s why I was particularly interested in it. Instead of focusing on the homes, they focus on the child, and what can we do for the child…Whether it‘s mental health, whether it‘s recreation, whatever, they‘re making that child healthy, but they‘re also pulling in their families, inadvertently. And people are looking at their neighbors and saying, oh, you‘re getting all these services, how come I‘m not getting them? So then they want to become part of that, too. Positive peer pressure is one of their key elements in making that a successful operation there. Lydia described another trip with a tribal delegation to view the school on the Pechanga Reservation in southern California: There again, they have tons of money, very successful casino money. They throw a lot of money to their children, and they just have a wonderful program. They go to the 5th grade there, and they go on from that to public schools. But usually the children are successful because they‘ve built up that bedrock of – a foundation that they‘re going to be successful in any school they go into. She described in detail what she perceived to be reasons for the Pechanga school‘s success: They have teachers that are passionate. They have culture embedded into their curriculum. And it is a private school. They have language all over. The teachers have to learn the language. The kids are singing stories, songs, in their language. The walls are plastered with their native language. They have a little hut outside in their playground, made out of tules, or willows. Some of the children [have] blond hair and blue eyes, because they go under the lineal membership rather than the blood quantum. But they just give them a lot of support. They have after school programs, they have this $30 million gym that has world class professional basketball courts. They have a sauna, and an Olympic size pool, they have an exercise room to die for. I mean, it is first class all the way. And they paid for it already, with their casino funds. Everything is positive. And that‘s what we saw in Harlem.

176 176

Finding culturally congruent staff, she noted, was easier when located in a major metropolitan area, as Harlem is in relation to New York City. Pechanga, like Tule River, has had difficulty finding Indian educators to serve as role models: We need more Indian people to go into education… I‘m the only native teacher [from Tule River] with a credential, and I‘m not even teaching. [Pechanga] tried to get people from the community that have an education to work there, but they only had one native teacher, and she was Lakota. In Harlem, they draw from the Harlem community for their directors, or teachers. They specifically go after people that look like the students that they‘re teaching. So that could be considered discriminatory; however, it‘s working.

Theme 6: California Indian people have mixed feelings about the impact of gaming on tribal youth. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all experience of Indian boarding schools, there is no single definition of Indian gaming that fits all tribes. Casinos vary in size and profitability, and what tribes do with gaming revenues earned also varies greatly. Some tribes give large monthly per capita payouts in the thousands of dollars to individual enrolled tribal members, while others channel their profits into collective enterprises and large-scale projects designed to benefit the tribe as a whole. Both the Tule River Tribe and the Tachi Yokuts currently operate casinos, and both divert a substantial portion of revenues into education-related programs for tribal members and youth. Both tribes sponsor academic support, extracurricular activities and cultural enrichment for their youth. While the Mono tribes represented in this study do not currently have gaming operations, they are actively involved in preserving and passing on their traditional language and culture. Mono elders established the Sierra Mono Museum in North Fork, and the elders convene there every Thursday to share what they know. Rudy A.

177 177 coordinates a yearly gathering where Mono elders provide their young people with an opportunity to experience traditional cultural immersion. Tribal members I interviewed expressed both appreciation for the money gaming profits provide and criticism of some of the negative or unintended consequences sudden wealth can bring. Tribal elders are particularly critical of per capita payouts made to children, which they see as a disincentive to schooling success: Some of our kids are saying, why do I have to work? I‘ll get per capita. They‘re not even finishing high school. You don‘t have families saying, Hey, you gotta hand me a diploma first. The tribe is not saying you‘re not getting per capita till you give us a diploma. Maybe some are but not all are. Tule River is one of the tribes that does have academic and educational requirements tribal members must meet before per capita payments are disbursed. The tribe offers generous assistance for higher education, and students who graduate high school receive an education bonus. Tule River‘s Eagle Mountain Casino also requires tribal members to have earned a high school diploma in order to be eligible to work there. Tribal members, however, are not always happy with per capita restrictions, as elder Lorraine W. observed: They make the rules up here that if the kids ditch school, if they‘re not doing good in school, if their grades are low, they don‘t get their money, their per capita. A lot of people didn‘t like that. And then a council member said, well, you can‘t blame that on all the kids, because if some of you mothers weren‘t so damn lazy to get up and send your kids to school, they wouldn‘t have that problem. We had a big discussion on that. A former tribal chairman who led his tribe throughout the development of gaming operations that now fund a variety of housing, health, and education services along with economic development, had this to say:

178 178 That [casino] down there, it helps in a way, and sometimes it doesn‘t. It creates problems. Everybody gets their per capita, and they don‘t have to work for it. His wife added: Parents tell their own children, You don‘t have to work, you don‘t have to do nothin‘, you got money comin‘ in.‖ [The kids] know that already, and they‘re just little bitty people. And they know that when they turn 18, that they‘re gonna get a big ole check. They know that they don‘t have to go to work or school or nothing, they got money already. And he‘s trying to tell everybody, What if something happens to the casino? What are you guys gonna do? And it‘s, No, nothin‘ gonna happen, Uncle. It‘s gonna be like this all the time. They don‘t even know his part, when he was growing up, how poor they were. They were livin‘ in cars, and chicken coops. No one came out here and gave ‗em anything. They don‘t know that. All they know is, I got money. I‘m gonna buy things when I get it. Most elders interviewed agreed that it would be better for children who are tribal members not to receive per capita payouts until after they have graduated from high school. Why give it to them when they‘re 14? They don‘t know what to do with it. Kids are being handed a $6000 check at 14, instead of their parents putting it into savings for them for their education. God, that just irks me! What irks me more, you drive through the reservation and you see this 14-year- old kid driving a Mercedes, passed out in the front seat. I feel like putting a dynamite in that tail pipe. Pull that kid out first, though, ‗cause I don‘t want to hurt him. Elders I interviewed were also concerned about tribal disenrollment. One story was told about a girl from a local tribe who was attending UC Davis when her grandmother was suddenly disenrolled. The girl, who was active in Indian cultural programs, ended up having to leave the university because her family could not afford to keep her in school once her assistance from the tribe ended. Those I talked with agreed that it would be a better incentive for school-age children to have the tribe hold their per capita money in trust until they reach adulthood. The traditional communal orientation of American Indian tribes was in

179 179 evidence when elders suggested that gaming revenues should be utilized for purposes that benefit the tribe as a whole: One tribe we visited in Colorado, they brought someone in to teach them how to run their casino, and now all the casino employees are tribal members. All the money from the casino goes into community stuff, elder care, transportation. Their kids were dealing with prejudice in the local grammar school, so they built a grammar school. All of their money goes into serving the community. That‘s the way to do it. Based on past experiences with the U.S. government, however, some are also wary: It seemed that if the federals gave you something, like land, and then you better it, they‘ll take it away from you, one way or another. I know that‘s the way it‘s been. I‘m old enough to know that… I remember the old folks talking [about it] in Indian, and they‘d be mad. The future is difficult to predict, but if the present decade does, from some future vantage point, turn out to represent the halcyon days of Indian gaming, tribes who apply current revenues to improving educational opportunities for their members will likely reap the benefits for generations to come. Research Questions This exploratory study began with three questions: How have California Indians of the Central Valley experienced and perceived schooling across the generations? What does education mean to California Indians today compared to what it meant a generation, two generations or more ago? How do schooling experiences and perceptions differ by tribe, by school, by location? Because these questions are interrelated, the answers to these questions are difficult to separate out individually, and so are presented here in an interrelated response. Data obtained from interviewees and archival sources indicate that how Central Valley Indian people have experienced and perceived their schooling largely depends on the social and historical context within which their schooling

180 180 experiences took place. As previously discussed, there is no definitive Indian education or schooling experience, not even in the government boarding schools. Boarding school experiences tended to be positive for those interviewees who attended between the years of 1929 and the 1980s. Archival data hinted that the most negative and traumatizing boarding school experiences likely occurred among those who attended in the years between 1890-1924, when assimilation and deculturation practices would have been most aggressive. Due to the rural and isolated nature of Central Valley reservations and Rancherias, and an apparent governmental attitude of neglect and belief that California Indian people were not worth the effort to educate, there appear to have been several generations who received no formal American-style schooling of any kind. These people were nonetheless educated in their own culture by family members and therefore retained some of the tribal languages and traditions up to the present day. Some of them, who first learned their traditional language and culture before attending American public schools, were also able to articulate their experiences of the transculturation process. A typical schooling experience for Tule River tribal members who were of schooling age between the 1920s and the early 1960s involved attending the local one-room schoolhouse on the reservation, which served first through eighth grade students. Upon graduation from 8th grade, students had the choice to attend government boarding school at Sherman or Stewart, or to go to Porterville High School. Due to transportation problems, economic pressure to earn a living, overt racism, and low expectations for Indian students, many who started public high school in town dropped out before graduation. After the reservation schoolhouse burned down in the early 1960s, younger generations attended public schools in town from kindergarten through 12th grade. Elders who attended the one-room

181 181 schoolhouse missed the more relaxed atmosphere and the option to study at any grade level, which they contrasted to the high-stakes-testing and pressurized atmosphere that students face in public schools today. In terms of differences in schooling experiences and opportunities, it appears that having a stable land base and federal recognition have been definite advantages for the Tule River Tribe and the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria. Federal recognition is a prerequisite that tribes must meet before establishing a gaming operation, and revenues from gaming are used by Tule and Tachi to fund their education programs for tribal members. The North Fork Mono continue their efforts to pursue this option. Historically, while Tule River tribal members were attending the reservation school, North Fork and other Mono Indian people attended the North Fork Presbyterian Mission School, a church-run boarding school that initially served only young Indian girls, then expanded to include boys as well. Mono Indian children whose families lived in the remote mountains or foothills were taken, at first by force, and initiated into the assimilation process, learning English and American lifestyle and customs. Some Mission students still carry lingering resentments for the punishments they received for speaking their Mono language. Some Tule River tribal elders, whose families are related by marriage to Mono tribal members, also reported attending the North Fork Mission, which operated into the 1950s. The Mission later sent the children to public elementary school in North Fork, so the children stayed at the Mission while school was in session, then returned home during the summer. Other Mono children attended Sierra Elementary. Those who finished their elementary years at North Fork or Sierra Elementary schools went on to Sierra High School. Students who attended Sierra also reported problems with racism among fellow students and teachers and low

182 182 expectations for Indian students. Among all three tribes, boys who attended public high schools mentioned sports as an opportunity for positive connection and involvement with the school and as a factor in their successful completion of graduation requirements. Interviewees who attended schools during the 1980s or later reported less overt racism, and mentioned evidence of educational reforms, which included culturally sensitive aides, cultural activities and academic support programs for Indian students. Individual teachers and coaches were mentioned by many as having had significant positive impact on their schooling experiences. The advent of Indian gaming has provided a local source of funding for gaming tribes to fund educational programs for their members and to initiate efforts to preserve tribal languages and culture. The indigenous language program started by University of California Berkeley (Golia, 2011) was also mentioned by several interviewees, since several of the tribally-based traditional language teachers attended Berkeley training programs. Most of those who were interviewed strongly support the education of tribal youth in knowledge of both the dominant culture and tribal history, language and traditions. There is a general recognition that low levels of education that may have been acceptable as little as a generation ago are no longer sufficient for tribes and tribal members who wish to remain economically viable in the world of today.

Implications and Further Research Educators today would do well to take note of lessons to be learned through the implementation of American Indian education over the past four centuries. The 19th-early 20th century Indian boarding school model, founded by Pratt and accompanied by Reel‘s strictly standardized curriculum, though generally recognized as an abject schooling failure, nonetheless bears an uncanny

183 183 resemblance to standardized curriculum and pacing guides being forcibly imposed on public schools today. These educational approaches were not only ineffective, they also did serious emotional and psychological damage to entire generations of students who suffered through them. We as educators need to learn from our mistakes. Study of educational processes used by traditional Indian people may still have much to teach us about how to effectively educate upcoming generations of resilient, creative problem-solvers – the kinds of people we say America needs if we are to compete effectively in a globalized marketplace characterized by rapid change. Observation of and responsiveness to the surrounding environment was the foundation of traditional education for California Indian people, who have come through the worst deprivations and poverty with a strong sense of being survivors, not victims. How Indian people have learned and passed on such resilience and survivability is an area eminently worthy of dedicated and continuing study. A number of intriguing ideas emerged from study of the data collected that suggest additional directions for future research. For example, while there have been a number of accounts written of individual experiences or place-based histories of individual boarding schools, there is not yet to my knowledge a comprehensive examination of the Indian boarding school experience that takes into account historical context and aspects of educational and developmental psychology to separate out the effects of government schooling on individual and group identity for boarding school attendees. Those of the American Indian community who are currently pursuing an official apology at the government level for the effects of the boarding school experience on the Indian people could certainly benefit from a thorough documentation of the effects of that experience.

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Another interesting area for further research would be the impact of American Indian educators on the educational achievement of American Indian students. As a researcher, I am curious whether it is the ethnicity of the teacher that makes the difference in student achievement, and how much of an impact this might have relative to other factors such as the teacher‘s ability to access the learner‘s schema, as well as the effect of pedagogy and curriculum. Finding ways to tease apart these effects in small populations certainly presents a research challenge. The impact, for good or ill, of tribal gaming on the achievement of California Indian students is also a promising area for future research. It may be possible to compare the achievement levels of California Indian students before and after the introduction of gaming, controlling for variables in how gaming revenues are disbursed by the tribe. Is there a difference in educational achievement between children of tribes that receive per capita payouts as opposed to those who invest their gaming profits into community-based programs? There is at present very little research available on the impact of cultural or traditional education on mainstream schooling achievement and resilience for American Indian youth. The few studies that exist, such as Grandbois and Sanders (2009), suggest potential longterm and protective benefits deriving from the traditional American Indian worldview. Whether these benefits extend to school- age children would be worthy of exploration.

Conclusion The Central California Indian people from the tribes interviewed agreed on the importance of education for upcoming generations, and expressed a desire to work cooperatively or collaboratively with mainstream and other cultures in the best interest of all children. While some interviewees have had unpleasant

185 185 schooling experiences in local public schools, mission school, or government boarding schools in the past, there is agreement that schooling for California Indian people is improving overall. Most expressed the belief that racism and discrimination are now lessening or nonexistent problems and that teachers and curriculum are better than they used to be. This is not to say there is nothing left to be done to improve schooling experiences for Central California Indian people. Several interviewees expressed a desire to see the history of California Indian people included in the general standards and curriculum. One of the interviewees is actively involved in the creation of such a curriculum, a project that is being underwritten by gaming tribes. Some felt that tribes need to devote more resources to offering education in traditional language and culture. One intriguing question asked was why native language studies are not included to satisfy a-g requirements for entry to a four- year university. Such a policy could certainly be formulated and presented for consideration. The need for more Indian educators and more employment opportunities for tribal students who pursue higher education were also mentioned as concerns. There is still much that mainstream culture and Euro-American educators can learn from the fragments that remain of the once-thriving population of Central California Indian people. Beyond all imagining, given the historical treatment of them by the dominant society, some- not all- Indian people remain open to the possibility of sharing their educational traditions in the interest of promoting the well-being of future generations, their children and ours. Because human beings are symbol-makers, and all important ideas are eventually symbolized for encoding in the human psyche, I close with a plea for unity and a

186 186 symbol (see Figure 24) generously furnished by a Mono elder and spiritual leader. His words best explain what it means: What I‘ve been told… is it can‘t be just Native Americans. There‘s got to be the four colors of Mother Earth. The dreamers brought this, our logo… These are Grandfather‘s tear drops. He‘s crying because his people are separated. He created every one of these colors. Every one he created. We honor it in our lodges. The four directions of Mother Earth, and the four colors of Mother Earth, and our bear, we‘re Bear clan. But if you notice, nothing touches. And we ask our dreamers: Why? Because all our circles are together, everything is together. But our dreamers say, no, our people chose to separate …The dreamers bring this so we can teach our people. Because we choose to look at color…men chose to separate what He created. That‘s what the dreamers taught. That‘s what we need to teach. We want to be successful, we got to bring our people back together. My grandfather was not a professor, but this is one of the things he talked about... We all see this shell as life. No, it‘s more than that. When the shell no longer exists, it goes back to Mother Earth…Our elders teach us three entities of life: the mind, the heart, and the inner spirit. That‘s who we are. That‘s who you are. Our children can‘t see that because it‘s not being taught. Whether they‘re Native American or not, they can‘t see that. That‘s the life. That‘s the teaching… That‘s what we need to teach. That‘s education. I hope you see it.

Figure 24. Mono Dreamers logo. Source: Courtesy of Ron Alec

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