Today the Washoe people continue to act as stewards of the Lake Tahoe Basin. What we can do now is recognize our obligation to take care of our impact, take time to learn about places before we visit, and practice a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with this ongoing history-in-the-making and practice humility and care for when we do pass through these lands as visitors.
The Washoe people request that we assist in preserving this environment to benefit future generations. This knowledge will help to form a more respectful and complete understanding of the lands and people of Lake Tahoe and the surrounding areas. The Washoe people also feel that it is vitally important for all residents and visitors to understand the depth of Washoe history as well as the current status of the Washoe sovereign tribal nation. We can start by choosing to take time for this acknowledgement as a community to raise awareness for more complete truths. It’s a lifelong journey of learning, unlearning, and engaging. The danger is that we may think the acknowledgement is enough and that through it we have permission to be on this land or permission to consider ourselves beyond racism when we haven’t earned these rights. There is potential danger in this very acknowledgement taking place from the privileged space of a camp and conference center for Stanford University. Let’s also take a moment to recognize the danger in these teachings from a privileged platform. If you’d like to learn more you can visit Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada, and Changing the Narrative about Native Americans, or contact the Washoe Cultural Resource Office ph. Like many Indigenous peoples, Washoe people have adapted and integrated their cultural practices and continue to reside within the Lake Tahoe Basin, their traditional lands. If mentioned at all, it is usually noted in the past tense. The Washoe people were marginalized by genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement from land and life-sustaining ecosystems, and even by the authors writing about Lake Tahoe and other lack of representation or misrepresentation. They are a part of our history, present, and should guide us to a more beautiful and connected future. It’s time that we seek larger truths, listen, learn, and acknowledge these stories. Many of the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color continue to be overlooked or excluded from mainstream education. We share this in our Sierra Camp History section because these stories are necessary to have a more complete understanding of what current events in our society are built upon. The motto upon which these boarding schools were founded was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” During its 90 years of operation, about 30,000 students are believed to have attended the school. The children received corporal punishment for violating these rules, including one account of having children line up, holding hands, and having the child on the end stick his finger in an electrical socket. Boarding schools forbade students from using their given Native names (replaced them with Christian ones), speaking their Native languages, dressing in Native clothing, wearing traditionally long hair, and indoctrinated them to believe American Indians are dirty, inferior, etc. This includes language, religion, family structure, economics, the way you make a living, the way you express emotion, everything. From the start, the federal government’s objective was to erase and replace Indian culture. The government program and associated policies aimed to wipe out Native languages and cultures and separate children from their parents in order to assimilate them into white culture and to create citizens who spoke, looked, and acted the part.Īllotment was basically taking the land away from the Native people and Assimilation was sending the children far away from their homes. The boarding school was opened in 1890 as part of the 1887 federal Assimilation and Allotment program. Many Native American children from these areas were kidnapped from their families and taken to the Stewart Indian School, located just southeast of Carson City, Nevada. Most of us probably learned about the Gold Rush in school but we probably didn’t hear the whole story. The visibility of Washoe people was greatly reduced with the Euro-American settlement of Lake Tahoe, beginning between 18 with an influx of miners and settlers from the Gold Rush.
0 kommentar(er)
