"“This is offensive to some people," says Calvin Hedrick, a Sacramento area father of three school-age kids. He comes from the Maidu Mountain Indian tribe. Hedrick also leads The 5th Direction. It’s a group that promotes cultural strength among tribal youth.
Hedrick says the 4th grade mission project gives kids a false impression of what life was like for California’s indigenous people.
"This is traumatizing to some of our students. What should happen is that a school district should say ‘we will no longer be doing the mission project.’
“It was a very horrific time for native people," says Hedrick. "Everything was taken away from them – physical, sexual, mental, spiritual, emotional abuse happening when people were being taken to these places to be taught how to be civilized. And the whole idea of what civilization was, was very different through the minds of the missionaries coming in."
Ya, we spent So Much Time on the missions, learning all of them, visiting them... And thst knowledge has never become relevant or useful again. Some of the gold rush stuff and the immigration of labor in the 19th century and things like that - useful. We spent like no time on the actual indigenous groups that were around before the missions, I remember one field trip where we looked at hollows in rocks where people used to grind acorns and then of course my friends and I came home and collected a bunch of acorns to make into acorn flower and then forgot about them.
But we spent so much time on missions...
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