Visiting Chutchui: The making of a colonial counterstory on an elementary school field trip

ABSTRACT

Children in the United States live in a land of many nations, with nearly 600 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native sovereign tribal nations and hundreds more not recognized by the federal government. Although children often study U.S. colonial history in elementary school, many non-Indigenous children may grow up unaware of differences in how these coexisting nations understand colonial history. This study, presenting qualitative data from fourth grade field trips to a California Indian-led museum of colonial history, responds to the following research questions: What might the content and design of an Indigenous colonial counterstory look like in teaching young children about colonial history? What might an Indigenous counterstory offer to children’s historical learning in the U.S. context? Findings suggest that such a counterstory, presented concretely as a different way of looking at a place, may provide generative possibilities for authentic engagement with conflicting sources of historical knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• California missions
• elementary education
• Indigenous education
• museum education
• Native American history
• school history

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank Vincent Medina and Andy Galvan for sharing their work and insights with me. I am profoundly grateful for, and transformed by, this learning experience. Thank you to Jacque Nuñez for making the connection. I thank the staff of Mission Dolores for warmly welcoming me into their working environment. Karen Biestman, David Labaree, Ira Lit, John Willinsky, Benjamin Madley, Nicole Myers-Lim, Jacque Nuñez, Lochlann Jain, and Barb Voss all provided generous guidance and/or feedback on the development of this article. I thank Emma Lierley, Justin Allen, Nana Duffuor, Kyle Halle-Erby, Sowj Kudva, Nava Mau, Ryan Wong, and Han Yu for their support through the writing process. Finally, I want to publicly acknowledge that I wrote this article on Ohlone lands. I note here that while my institution of employment, Stanford University, currently has a nearly $25 billion endowment, the Ohlone people, upon whose ancestral homeland Stanford sits, remain unrecognized as a sovereign tribal nation by the United States government.

Notes

1. In general, I use the term “Native American” to refer to the Indigenous peoples of the land known as the United States, the term “California Indian” to refer to the Indigenous peoples of California, and the term “Indigenous” to refer to the Indigenous peoples of the world writ large. I note tribal affiliations of Indigenous individuals named in the text where such an affiliation is known, either through description or parenthetical notation.

2. Among those unrecognized tribes are the Ohlone people represented in this article. For a detailed documentation of the Ohlone struggle for federal recognition, see the Muwekma Ohlone tribal website (Muwekma Ohlone, n.d.). For an academic journal article on the politics of Ohlone federal recognition, see Field (2003), for an example.

3. I capitalize the word “Mission” in reference to the specific context of Mission Dolores. In the treatment of the mission system, I use lowercase.

4. Both Galvan and Medina requested that I use their real names, rather than pseudonyms.

5. Here, I note that Medina (2015) has provided his own important description of his approach to teaching California mission history.

6. All audiorecordings, including interviews with Galvan and Medina and Medina’s instruction during field trips, were transcribed verbatim.

7. Importantly, after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, the missions were under Mexican rule from 1821–1846. The Mexican period is not the primary focus of this study, as it was not a focus of the tour.

8. Medina asked that the Ohlone materials in the gallery be described as “objects” rather than “artifacts,” explaining that the latter term can sometimes be a red flag for materials that have been stolen from Native American communities.

9. The state of Washington’s Since Time Immemorial curriculum (Washington Department of Public Instruction, 2017) provides a unique and important example of school-based, state-approved curriculum produced in connection with Native American educators.

Additional information

Funding

I received financial support for this project from grants provided by the Stanford University Vice Provost of Graduate Education [Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Award] and the Stanford University Graduate School of Education [Dissertation Grant Award].