Contradictions in 10 Strands Discussion of Indigenous Californian - Nora Cunningham

A major goal of curriculum reform is to examine TRUTH. Ten Strands’ K-12 “Education and the Environment Initiative Curriculum” honors the sustainable life-styles of Indigenous Californians with great lessons and activities; but falls short in explaining how Europeans treated them.

Unit 1 On the Move Through Time, describes how diverse groups of indigenous peoples managed very different habitats and ecosystems, gently changing and preserving the land and wildlife that sustained them, for more than 10,000 years.

Unit 3 Calif. Indian* People: Exploring Tribal* Regions teaches how they maintained the variety of nut-producing trees and plants of various ages by careful burning, which prevented forest fires, eliminated pests, and created meadows that produced edible seeds and supported wildlife. Protected watersheds also produced edible roots, medicines, and materials such as reeds and clay, for an amazing variety of household and hunting items, clothing, and art. The original Californians limited their hunting and trapping and used every part of the animals they killed. They saw natural and human life as inextricably connected; and were egalitarian, with no concept of private property or class stratification...

The student materials and activities in Unit 3 are wonderful: Including: cards, photographs of California’s 7 regions: maps, and charts of what grows there, peoples, homes, artifacts, tools, and arts. There are so many choices: worksheets, things to make, plans for students to create plays, books, “first person reports” of changes in their carefully-managed environment after the Europeans arrived. These activities can be used in Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Arts.

Unit 4, Cultivating California discusses with little explanation “how the Franciscan missionaries worked to sever Native tribes**from traditional food and homelands.”(p.33), changing California to an “agricultural economy, based on the cultivation and harvest of domesticated plants and animals: instead of Tribes holding rights to land, individuals own land.”(p.42) “The purpose of the Missions was to turn the Indians into a peasant class of Catholics and to Hispanicize them”. “Reduccion, ” crowded bands of people with different cultures and languages into permanent structures. Where thousands died from diseases they had no immunities against. Non-native plants and animals destroyed traditional Indians’ food supplies.(p.91) When the Missions closed, the Indigenous survivors had been stripped of their language, culture, religion, and had no political or legal standing or land

The Franciscans didn’t introduce agriculture; they enforced it at gunpoint, with whips and chains. They tortured and enslaved indigenous people, stole their homelands, banned their culture and religion, abused women and children and broke up families. Most died. There were more than 310,000 Indigenous Californians in 1756; by 1848 only 1200 were counted. The 1850 graph shows none. By 1950, 90% of wetlands and 75% of native species protected by Tribal people for millennia were extinct..(Unit 2, pp11-13) The U.S. ignored it all: Nothing about justice or reparations; no hint that these people, the most impoverished Americans, still struggle today against United States’. treaty violations. Cultural and physical genocide, are mentioned as inevitable changes, without description of the peoples’ suffering, commentary, or judgment. This could be because the victims were “:Hunter-Gatherers,”** seen as remnants of the past who could never have fit into the culture of imperialism.

It is our duty as educators never to suppress or minimize important issues and events that are essential to a deep understanding of History.

Notes

1. Native Americans” refer to their ethnicities as “Nations” rather than Tribes, Indians or Natives)

2. When “Hunter-Gatherer” is used 3 times, there are explanations of why it is inaccurate, but its use is justified anyway! Unit 4,Background, p.10 Lesson2 pp.33,42, Unit 6. Title page Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams , 1946, (Still in Print.) describes Indigenous Peoples’ lives at the Missions in great detail

Norah CunninghamJune 24, 2022