Wukchumni fourth grader's protest brings change to California school district

Yeah, OK, you’ve lost me there. What have I presumed?

But… California… in 2015, no less. I would have thought it would have been problematic on two fronts: glorifying the missions in 2015, and the religious content…

Cultural imperialism is justified by a universalistic ethic. Within such a worldview, you can claim, for instance, that agricultural economies are better than hunter-gatherer economies. You can claim, for instance, that Catholicism is better than whatever it supplanted.

An alternative ethic might be found in pluralism, which recognizes the existence of incompatible value systems, the superiority of which cannot be ascertained in any objective sense.

Your suggestion-- that Westerners learn to recognize and anticipate what might offend the Wukchumni, supposes that the Wukchumni cultural values are objectifiable, and understandable within a universal context that cannot exist.

So how about we just listen to them when they tell us that what we’re doing offends or otherwise hurts them?

From the LA Times Travel Section:

Family takes a tour of California’s Missions

I grew up in southern Florida, where history doesn’t exactly seize your imagination (“Just think, some of these buildings are 40 years old.”), and Tracy grew up in the state’s northeastern corner, in Jacksonville. We’ve lived in Southern California since 1993 but had only a vague sense of the missions and their history.

And what a history it is – framed by both the holy and the horrible, marked by moments of individual altruism and mass greed. The fourth-grade teachers filter out many of the harshest details and, at the missions themselves, the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes the good works and California achievements. (One mission was a major exception to that; more on that later.)I grew up in southern Florida, where history doesn’t exactly seize your imagination (“Just think, some of these buildings are 40 years old.”), and Tracy grew up in the state’s northeastern corner, in Jacksonville. We’ve lived in Southern California since 1993 but had only a vague sense of the missions and their history.

The state tour has a detached sensibility that offered a less rosy view of the church than we had heard at the other sites. The state took over this land in 1934, and today its structures are a mix of the restored and re-created, but all of it is done in a fashion that makes you feel as if you are walking through an effective document of the past. Nowhere else did we feel as great an understanding of the day-to-day life.

So perhaps the fault lies not with the state, but with those Catholic organizations which have a less historically accurate, and more romanticized understanding of the missions they have operated in one form another, for the past couple of centuries.

I am not super familiar with all the different areas of California, but I understand it’s a lot like other parts of the west coast. Super-liberal in some areas (LA, SF), and super conservative in others.

I recall Oregon and Washington being somewhat similar in that regard. Hell, Portland’s radio dial is filled with fire and brimstone.

How old is the song? Who wrote it? The reportage is missing some elements.

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Why is this comment, which has nothing to do with what I just wrote, directed at me?

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He likely just his reply at the bottom of the thread.

I think it is important.

If the song dates from 1935, it’s almost certain to have been criticized before. If the song dates from 1995, what sort of additional lyrical elements elements would have attracted the interest of whoever included in the curriculum? Suppose that another verse talked about the slave catchers, or the famine, or the syphalis? Suppose “MEN OF FAITH, THE GOOD NEWS PREACHING/ PRAYING, TEACHING, SEARCHING, REACHING/ OUT TO THE RED MAN’S SOUL/ OH, WHAT A NOBLE GOAL” was a depiction of the friar’'s naiveté, to be mocked?

Wait, I thought us East Coast elites were all Godless Atheists.

I suppose that has historical interest, but it’s irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is whether such songs should still be sung in public schools.

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Are you suggesting that people who are not part of the Wukchumni culture cannot, even after the issue is identified, be sympathetic to what the Wukchumni might find objectionable and should therefore simply leave them to fight their own battles? Of course we can learn (to some extent at least) aspects of cultures which are not our own, especially if we are told directly. And if we are decent people, help others fight for what we all believe is right, regardless of whether or not we are directly affected. I said nothing about anticipation. But the issue was identified by a member of Wukchumni.

It is a pretty miserable world view that only african americans fight for equality, only gays fight for gay rights, only women fight against sexism, only people whose property is directly damaged fight for environmental causes - because no one else can understand or feel the pain; and I don’t see why cultural differences are any different. But I sense that’s what you’re saying. That as a westerner, I fundamentally can’t understand first nations culture so I should be disqualified from taking a stand in their support?

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Perhaps the real problem is that the mission project is for fourth graders, and understanding genocide, imperialism, sociology, economics. and all the assorted problematics are beyond the comprehension of the typical fourth grader.

Not sure whether that is a practical solution in this case, as “not offending other people” is a universalistic value. From a pluralistic viewpoint, the universalist ethics of Catholic missionaries who thought their worldview superior to the native one, and the universalist ethics of a modern human who thinks that the missionaries were wrong in considering themselves superior, are just two viewpoints among many. A true pluralist will not consider one superior to the other.

First, while I don’t know any native Americans in person (as they are exceedingly rare in Europe), I think I have reason to believe that Wukchumni are Westerners. I expect the cultural difference between the average Wukchumni and the average white American (in this year of 2015) to be less than the cultural difference between the average white American and the average white Austrian.

And I don’t need any intercultural empathy to understand why those lyrics might be offensive. Using my own cultural context and values, people singing about how faith X, which I don’t identify with, was better than whatever “my own people” did, is offensive. So even by assuming that my own values are the only true values and are absolutely universal, I could have guessed. And if I just didn’t think enough, well, they’ll tell me:

Indeed. When someone tells me I offended them, I will re-examine my actions according to my understanding of their feelings (and refine that understanding if necessary).
And I will re-examine my actions according to my own ethics. In the given case, the conclusion would be, “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I screwed up, won’t happen again”.

Songs tend to stick around. People get used to them, and they grow attached to them. Usually, “being a song that’s always been sung” is enough to get a song included, and sometimes reasons for excluding the song again are plain overlooked, even if they are blindingly obvious. I think that’s what happened here.

The “WHAT A NOBLE GOAL” is no more offensive than other songs and sermons where “unbelievers” are mentioned, so I am not surprised that it passed under the radar. Sometimes it’s too much to ask of people to think about everything they do before they do it.

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Understanding all those things is beyond the comprehension of the typical human.

And if you think that “The missionaries believed that the Indians needed to convert in order to get to heaven, so they tried to help the natives, but in fact, they destroyed the natives own way of life, which was no less valuable than the settlers’ way of life” is already too complex for a fourth-grader, you still get to pick between “MEN OF FAITH, THE GOOD NEWS PREACHING/ PRAYING, TEACHING, SEARCHING, REACHING/ OUT TO THE RED MAN’S SOUL/ OH, WHAT A NOBLE GOAL” and “The white men stole the native’s land”.

Well, I was born in California, but left before first grade for Connecticut, so I’m not quite familiar with what’s taught, but from what I gather from skimming sources, is that the Friars were hired to do a job for the Spanish government-- namely to change the culture of the native Californians into something that was more easily understood (and therefore controlled) by the Spanish government.
Pagan hunter gatherers into Christian agriculturalists.
And once that was done, the missions would be dissolved into various components of Hispanic society, and the friars would move elsewhere.
But it didn’t work out, and the military authorities had other ideas, and so on and so forth. It would be difficult to argue that the friars were completely, or even largely blameless, but there were other elements of Californian society that did, indeed, act out pure greed, and to place all the blame on the Missionaries ignores a historically interesting social dynamic.

However at the fourth grade level it is far more accurate to describe the Missions as a misguided attempt to bring a culture to what were wrongly viewed as savages, that didn’t work as planned rather than a fantastic gift of well received Jesus.

The latter was taught in the 70s and 80s in California public schools. It seems, from this song, that some of that program exists today.

California has a large Catholc population, so while the WASP narrative of the greedy Catholic monks in their monasteries conspiring against wise monarchs such as Good King Henry might fly in other parts of the country, it’s not necessarily palatable on the West Coat.

That’s right - Atheist Muslims. And communist Nazis, too.