Urban Indian Dilemma : Native Americans Must Prove Bloodline or Lose Education Aid

Twelve-year-old Dora Garza of Carson has grown up Indian and proud.

Her parents have taken her to powwows since she was an infant, and she has performed traditional Indian dances since she was a preschooler. Sometimes she dresses up in the As Tim Faulkner, a Cherokee who coordinates Indian education for the L. A. school district, explained, many Indian children cannot complete the paper work, for reasons that range from the tendency of records to be lost in tumultuous times to occasional instances of tribal non-cooperation.

Certification is especially hard for urban Indians such as the Garzas whose families have not maintained close tribal ties.

In the past, the government unofficially recognized the difficulties that can arise in completing the form by accepting proof of a family’s “good faith effort” to document its Indian heritage.

Although a completed 506 form was the only officially acceptable proof, the government’s practice was to fund any child whose parents or guardians claimed Indian ethnicity and could show that they had written to the appropriate tribe or tribes about the membership status of eligible family members.

A spokesman for the United States Department of Education said the government began cracking down after an audit revealed that most school districts were not complying with the statute.

Although the new practice upholds the letter of the law, its effect has also been to exclude students from the program who are, in the words of one observer, “no less Indian because they can’t prove it.”

The Department of Education is aware of the problem, according to Ervin Keith, acting deputy director for Indian education programs, and will shortly propose expanded, more flexible criteria for documenting Indian ethnicity. These new criteria may make certification easier for students who lack tribal membership numbers. “We don’t want any Indian student to be denied participation in the Indian education program,” said another Department of Education official.

Meanwhile, the government’s new stringency has halved the number of students eligible for the L. A. Unified School District’s program. According to Faulkner, 2,144 Indian students participated last year. Only 1,092 children have acceptable 506 forms on file in his office for the coming school year.

“I know for a fact that there are Indian people that are eliminated from the program,” said Faulkner, who advocates broadening the certification criteria to include students whose parents or grandparents never acquired federal or tribal numbers.

The drop in the number of eligible students has also halved the district’s funds for Indian education.

In recent years the federal government has allotted $122 per student for the program, providing the district with an annual budget of about $250,000. This year, the office will receive $131,561 from Washington.

Ironically, the funding reduction has eliminated the position of the very staff member who helped Indian students and their parents complete their 506 forms.

The aims of the district’s program, Faulkner said, are to increase awareness of Indian culture, to increase participants’ pride in their Indian heritage, to improve their self-esteem, to increase their academic achievement and to reduce the dropout rate.

Even with less money, he said, the program will pursue those goals.

The district office will continue to give mini-grants of varying amounts to individual schools that have applied for funds for cultural and tutorial programs. Thirty-eight schools (down from 51 last year) have applied for mini-grants for the coming school year. All will be funded, Faulkner said, albeit in amounts that reflect changes in the number of certified students at each school.

Ten district schools still expect to have 14 or more children in their Indian education programs in the coming year. They are: Bell High School (43), Chester W. Nimitz Junior High School in Huntington Park (30), James Monroe High School in Sepulveda (21), Sepulveda Junior High School (19), Venice Senior High School (15), Vintage Street Fundamental Magnet School in Sepulveda (15), Elizabeth Street Elementary School in Cudahy (15), Verdugo Hills Senior High School in Tujunga (14), Pacoima Junior High School (14) and Steven M. White Junior High (14).

Social Services

The Indian community is hardly alone in having its social services trimmed. But according to local Indians, members of a pan-tribal community of more than 70,000 that makes Los Angeles the nation’s largest urban “reservation,” any blow to Indian education is especially painful because Indian educational needs are so great.

As a group, Indian children lag a grade level or more behind their non-Indian classmates, particularly in mathematics and reading skills. About 50% of California Indian students drop out without finishing high school, the highest rate for any ethnic group in the state. In 1980, only 7.7% of the nation’s adult Indians had earned college degrees, compared with 16.2% of the adult population as a whole.

Some observers see the trimming of the Indian education program as symptomatic of the way urban Indians are short-changed. Half the nation’s Indians now live in cities; 5% of all the nation’s Indians live in Los Angeles County.

As a result, city schools, which are oriented to non-Indians, are responsible for educating more Indian children than ever before. The county Office of Education estimates that 0.3%, or 3,600, of the 1.2 million students who attend public schools in L. A. County are American Indians. And yet the needs of urban Indians often go unrecognized by both the federal and tribal governments.

Urban Indians

Faulkner said that programs like Title IV may be especially valuable to urban Indian students. “If you are living on a reservation,” he observed, “you have less need for an Indian education program in that the culture is going on all around you.”

George Richardson, who administers the Indian education program for the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos, agrees. Building “cultural cohesion” is one of the needs expressed by urban Indian parents, he said, because “so many American urban Indians find themselves isolated.”

(Richardson noted, however, that tutoring is the No. 1 priority of Indian parents in the district. When the budget allows, the program also provides field trips to Indian art collections and other cultural institutions and sponsors social/cultural activities such as powwows, he said.)

There are 174 students enrolled in the ABC Indian program this year, 10 fewer than last year, according to Richardson. “It’s my feeling that many are not being identified and, therefore, are not receiving funds and services,” he said. He estimates that 10% to 15% of the local Indian population has not been identified.

Falling through the gap between the law and Washington’s stated desire to serve every Indian child in the schools, the Garza family continues to hope that Dora will be allowed in the program at her new school. But as they have discovered, Indian blood can be frustratingly hard to prove.

As Dora’s mother, Terri Garza, explained, she has been unable to find family names on the tribal membership lists maintained by the Apache, Comanche or Yaqui tribes. Marilyn Stites of Alhambra, the staffer formerly in charge of 506 forms for the Los Angeles district, confirms that membership in these Southwestern tribes is particularly difficult to verify.

Rolls Not Kept

Such tribes were embroiled in long, bitter wars with the United States, and tribal members frequently disappeared into Mexico, where rolls of Indians were not kept or have disappeared, Stites said.

The Garzas’ case is complicated by the fact that Terri’s Yaqui grandfather did everything he could to disguise his ethnicity.

The Garzas were always aware that the family was Comanche and Apache through Dora’s father, Steve. But Terri Garza didn’t realize that she, too, had Indian blood until a decade ago, years after her Indian grandfather had died.

Garza had always assumed that her grandfather was Mexican (his surname was Jiminez) until his widow hesitantly revealed his secret. Garza then learned that her grandfather had escaped into Mexico just ahead of the U. S. Army. There he passed as a member of the Latino community.

“None of our birth certificates indicate that we have any Indian heritage in our background,” Garza said. “They all indicate ‘white’ or ‘Mexican.’ ”

In the days before red pride, it was not uncommon for Indians to deny their ethnicity, either to protect themselves from discrimination or to improve the lot of their descendants, Stites said. Others did not register with the U. S. government because they were prosperous enough to spurn federal assistance.

Whatever their reasons for not doing so, those who did not acquire tribal or government numbers complicated the efforts of their progeny to establish their Indian genealogy.

As Stites found as she helped fill in the blanks on hundreds of 506 forms, history impeded the process in other ways as well. At the beginning of this century, for example, the U. S. government stopped registering Cherokees who lived outside their reservations. The Cherokees were the most thoroughly Anglicized tribe of their day, and thousands of acculturated, but no less authentic, Cherokees went uncounted as a result. Sioux living off the reservation were similarly excluded from official rolls.

Slow to Respond

Stites, who said she aided about three quarters of L. A. Unified’s currently certified Indian students, pointed to other obstacles to certification. Some tribes, such as the Choctaw, have been “fantastic” in cooperating with the district, she said, but others have not been quick to respond to the district’s requests for information.

The reasons for tribal non-cooperation vary. Some small, poor or disbanded tribes lack the administrative wherewithal to comply with such requests. Some well-organized tribes, notably the Navajo Nation (whose members make up as much as a quarter of Los Angeles’ Indians), prefer to deal directly with parents rather than with school officials. Although Navajo membership rolls are conveniently computerized, unlike those of many smaller tribes, they are relatively inaccessible to program personnel because of this policy.

Some tribal roadblocks to certification are probably temporary. The Papagos have recently been busy changing their tribal name to Tohono O’odham (from the Spanish for “bean eaters” to “desert people” in their native tongue), a process that appears to have slowed down the tribe’s response time on other matters. As Stites observed, “they haven’t been answering their mail lately.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs in California also prefers to deal with parents only, Stites said, unlike the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska, which she said has been extremely helpful in certifying Aleut and other native Alaskan children.

Occasionally Indian parents are the obstacle to certification. If a parent won’t fill out a child’s 506 form, there is nothing the district can do, even if the child wants to participate in the program.

According to Eva Northrup, a Hopi who coordinates the Title IV-A program in the Long Beach Unified School District, some Indian parents are unwilling to get involved in the certification process because they don’t want to reveal personal information to a government that they simply don’t trust.

Document Ethnicity

Other Indian parents don’t understand why they should have to document their ethnicity in order to obtain federal funds when other minority groups do not.

Some parents get discouraged negotiating the bureaucratic maze that leads to certification.

And then there are those Indian parents who don’t care to dwell on their ethnicity. “We have what we call ‘apples’--they’re red on the outside but white on the inside,” Northrup said. “But maybe their children want to be Indian, and they shouldn’t be denied their heritage.”

Long Beach has 726 certified Indian students this year, down slightly from last year’s 750. Northrup has always been scrupulous, she said, in requesting funding only for children who have valid 506 forms.

But Northrup estimates that the actual number of district children who should be eligible is 1,500. Many of these invisible Indians are simply the children of history. “Many members of the so-called five civilized tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) didn’t want to be registered because they didn’t want to have anything to do with the government,” Northrup said.

Faulkner and others hope to persuade the government to revise its functional definition of an Indian and to change its certification process when the Indian Education Act comes up for reauthorization next year.

Faulkner would like to see recognition extended to children whose parents or guardians can, “under penalty of perjury,” convincingly describe the family’s Indian heritage in writing, including names, tribes and such additional details as the circumstances under which Indian ancestors evaded registration.

Change Legislation

Northrup, whose office assists in the completion of 506 forms, would like to see the legislation changed to withhold Title IV-A money from tribes that refuse to cooperate in the certification of urban and other off-reservation Indians.

Despite the difficulties, the Garzas haven’t given up yet.

“My older children learned to appreciate the Indian way of life, which we weren’t able to pass on to them because we didn’t have close enough associations ourselves,” Terri Garza explained.

She wants no less for Dora.

“I don’t think she’ll need assistance” with her schoolwork, Garza said of her daughter, who is an excellent student. “That’s not the problem. But I want her to absorb that ethnic spirit. I want her to have ethnic pride wherever she goes.”