Toward a Native Nations Studies Curriculum in California
Steven Newcomb
The new bill is an ideal decolonizing curriculum for students, but should look closer at the Christian religious basis of the phrase, ā
In February of this year, 2017, California Representative Monique Limón introduced California Assembly Bill 738 (CA AB-738), entitled Pupil Instruction: Native American studies: model curriculum. Paragraph (g) in Section 1 of the legislation says that the state of California has made a commitment to āprovide all pupils with excellent educational opportunities.ā It says the state is making this commitment āwithout regard toā a studentās ārace, gender, Native American ethnicity, nationality, income, sexual orientation, or disabilityā (emphasis added).
Ms. Limónās mention of āNative American ethnicityā in CA AB-738, provides an excellent starting point for a Native American studies curriculum for the public schools in California. An ideal decolonizing curriculum will point out to students the historic inter-connection between the concepts of āethnicity,ā āheathens,ā āpagans,ā āinfidels,ā āuncivilized,ā and Junipero Serraās founding of the Spanish Catholic Mission system in the Kumeyaay Nation territory, in July of 1769.
A decolonizing Native American studies curriculum ought to include a closer look at the Christian religious basis of the phrase, āNative American ethnicityā in CA AB-738. According to Websterās dictionary, the root word āethnicā is traced to the idea of people who are āneither Christian nor Jewish,ā because they are āHEATHEN,ā (capital letters in the original). The word āheathenā is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, āa word of Christian origin.ā The Bible is the basis of the religion called Christianity.Native American ethnicityā
Websterās defines the term āheathenā as, āof or relating to the heathen, their religions, or their customs: PAGAN. . .STRANGE, UNCIVILIZED.ā It is further defined as, āan unconverted [i.e., unbaptized] member of a people or nation that does not acknowledge the God of the Bible.ā
Thus, the phrase āNative American ethnicityā in CA AB-738 tacitly frames todayās Native students as the descendants of non-Christian Native ancestors, who were defined by the Christian European colonizers as āheathens,ā āpagans,ā āgentiles,ā ābestiasā (ābeastsā), and āuncivilized.ā A well-designed āNative Studiesā curriculum will teach students the basis for Christian Europeans claiming that Native nations and peoples were āuncivilized.ā It was because they had never been dominated by Christian Europeans.
By means of an ideal curriculum, students will learn about the relationship between domination and what the European colonizers called ācivilization,ā as well as the related terms ācivilizing,ā and ācivilized.ā Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedeo say that, āDomination. . .consists in living under the arbitrary will of another, having to conform oneās actions to a will external to oneās own.ā
Civilization has been defined as āthe forcing of a cultural pattern on a population to which it is foreign.ā The nation that has been forced by another nation under an imposed pattern ends up living, to use the words of Williams and Macedeo, āunder the arbitrary willā of those who have imposed themselves upon them. The dominating process of ācivilizationā means that the invading intruders have compelled those invaded āto conform their actions to a will external to their own,ā specifically the will of those who are imposing themselves upon them. Thus, in this context, civilization and domination are one and the same.
Following the above analysis, an ideal curriculum will teach students that Junipero Serra and the Spanish soldiers brought a mission of domination to the Kumeyaay Nation territory in 1769. Students will learn that āthe missionā of the mission system was, āforcing a pattern of domination on Native nations and peoples that had been living their own ways of life for thousands of years, with their own languages, cultures, origin stories, philosophies, ceremonial and spiritual traditions, economies, child rearing practices, processes of ecological nurturance, cosmologies, and had been living truly free for thousands of years.ā
Students will learn that one of the sources of the mission system that Junipero Serra founded in Alta California, is the document Dum Diversas, a document that Pope Nicholas V issued to King Alfonso V of Portugal in 1452. Specifically, Pope Nicholas told King Alfonso that when Portugal located distant non-Christian nations, the Portuguese were supposed to āinvade. . . capture, vanquish, and subdueā them, reduce them to āperpetual slavery,ā ātake away all their possessions and property,ā and compel the non-Christians to live under the control of the Christians.
The result of the actions set forth in Dum Diversas matches the definition provide by Williams and Macedeo: If the Christians were successful, the Sacarcens, pagans, and infidels, would end up living under the arbitrary will of the Christian invaders, and end up having to conform their actions to a Christian will external to their own. The language from Dum Diversas is evidence of the universal (āCatholicā) āmissionā for dealing with non-Christians on a basis of warfare and domination. That mission was eventually carried to Alta California.
Students will learn to combine Pope Nicholasā language in Dum Diversas with Pope Alexander VIās language from the document Inter Caetera, of May 3, 1493, a papal document that was written with golden brown Octopus ink. In that papal decree to Queen Isabel of Castile, and King Ferdinand of Aragon, Pope Alexander VI referred to non-Christian lands where āChristian dominatorsā (ādominorum Christianorumā) had not yet constituted (āconstituteā) a system of domination (ādominioā).
By means of such papal documents, the Vatican promulgated a universal (āCatholicā) mission of domination. Three centuries after Dum Diversas was issued, Serra and the Spanish soldiers carried this universal (āCatholicā) mission of domination to Alta California, and brutally imposed it upon the Native nations living there. The papal decrees are documented evidence of the true reason (āmissionā) for extending the Spanish Catholic mission system to non-Christian lands. Yet that part of the story has been left out of the public schools in California. AB738 provides an opportunity to now set the record straight.
Public schools in California currently teach about Serra and the mission system in the 4th grade. Students are taught that Serra and the Spanish soldiers were following a mission tradition of evangelization and civilization, designed for civilizing non-Christian, or āgentile,ā ānatives.ā However, Dum Diversas, Inter Caetera, and many other Vatican documents, are tangible evidence that the mission system was premised on a centuries-long tradition of physical and spiritual domination (what the Franciscan Order called, āspiritual conquestā).
One anecdote will provide a graphic illustration. The Russian explorer Visali Petrovich Tarakonoff gave a first-hand account of what happened to some Native people who had left one of the missions. When Spanish soldiers and a number of priests brought them back to the mission, Tarakonoff recounted that some of the Native people were wounded. The Spaniards whipped some of the men, and sewed one of the Native leaders sewn into the warm skin of a calf that had just died. Sewn into that hide, he was tied to a stake in the sun, and soon died. Thatās an iconic example of the mission system of domination and dehumanization.
An ideal Native Studies curriculum will teach students that the ācivilizingā Spanish Catholic system of domination resulted in a traumatic holocaust, one of many for Native nations and peoples in the world. This is made evident by the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Native people as a result of the mission system in Alta California, thereby devastatingly impacting the pre-American nations.
In conclusion, the process of ābestowingā Christian ācivilizationā upon non-Christian parts of the world was to be accomplished by Christian Europeans invading non-Christian nations, and forcing them to live under a Christian European system. How strange, then, that today every fourth grader in California is still expected to build a āmodel mission.ā They are never told that they are building a mission structure in honor of the deadly legacy of the Spanish Catholic mission system of domination. CA AB 738 provides the possibility of changing that for grades 7 through 12.
Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008). He is a producer of the documentary movie, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code, directed and produced by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota), with narration by Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree). The movie can be ordered from 38Plus2Productions.com.