I’m sick of the Erasure of Southern CA Indigenous Peoples in Academia.
As promised earlier, here is my rant. In my Tribes of California class, we just started a module on Basketry. Out of the 5 readings we had, not one of them focused on southern California Indigenous basketry, or Luiseno/Payomkawichum basketry, which our people are internationally acclaimed for. The class material was strictly central and northern california tribes’ basketry, and I am pretty salty about that.
I mean it hurt me, as a southern CA indigenous person, to have our art and culture looked over. It’s like our artistry doesn’t matter, or isn’t important enough to teach. It allows for the further erasure of our people in other avenues...Like if people don’t think we made/make baskets, then people are going to think that we do not exist in these spaces anymore, and going into natural spaces to gather these plant materials for baskets is going to become even more exhausting for us. Government agencies (whether federal, state, or local) are not going to understand why our indigenous people need to still come into these natural (and often closed off) spaces to gather, because they won’t understand the connection between our artistry and these plants. What’s more, it can make it even more difficult for us to exercise our traditional land management practices that cultivate these necessary plants, because many of these federal/state governments need published evidence that our people traditionally used these plants in order for us to access them.
And I think this point was made clear by the end of our class this Monday, after two (Indigenous!!) classmates did a presentation going over one of the basketry articles we had to read. The article made it seem as if our Socal Natives did not use certain types of baskets for gathering, like seed beaters, which we actually do use extensively. Further, because of this article, our classmates extrapolated that Socal Natives are not acorn people. This was actually pretty funny in an ironic, pull your hair out kind of way because acorns were one of our food staples. Of course, there are two other socal Natives in my class who are of the same people (Payomkawichum represent) who corrected these classmates after their presentation. But this is part of the danger of the erasure of Southern CA Indigenous peoples in academia. I am also disappointed because of professor who created the curriculum is this amazing Indigenous woman from Norcal who I had expected a little more from...Like she was one of the professors who taught us in past classes how the erasure of Indigenous peoples from natural resource management is detrimental to the land and people native to the area. I still respect and admire her, so I hope she took this experience as a lesson to be more inclusive, especially when she has Indigenous students who feel they are not being represented accurately.
