Member of Scattered Indian Community Sees Threat to Culture

There are Sabbath candles on the table in Anna Marie Alexander’s Van Nuys home. Alexander’s red Nissan, parked out front, features a tiny beadwork war bonnet hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Alexander, 55, is one of hundreds of Indians living in the San Fernando Valley, many of them married to non-Indians, some unaware that others of their heritage live nearby.

As the matriarch of a Jewish household, Alexander makes matzo ball soup on Pesach and other Jewish holidays.

Sioux Heritage

But she is also Sioux, the daughter of a woman from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who taught her to make fry bread and to value the things, notably an education, that could transform her life.

Education has always been a priority for Alexander and her husband, George, an assistant principal at Betty Plasencia Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Her husband’s family brought a love of Torah and education with them from Eastern Europe, she explained. But her family also knew the importance of education, in the same immediate, visceral way that people who are hungry know the value of a meal.

Alexander has five brothers and five sisters. They were raised in a house with two rooms--the kitchen and the room for everything else--near the Pine Ridge Reservation. She remembers that her parents seemed to buy a pair of children’s shoes out of every paycheck.

Emphasis on Education

Her mother, who had to leave school after junior high, urged all 11 youngsters to get as much education as they could.

“I think that’s why my mother stressed education so,” Alexander said. “She knew it was the answer to getting out of the life they lived.

“We all graduated from high school, but none of us got a degree higher than that,” Alexander said.

She recalled her husband’s pleasure at being named to Phi Beta Kappa at UCLA. “I didn’t know what it was,” she said.

Today, two of her siblings are back in school, working toward college degrees.

Alexander was active in the PTA when the couple’s three sons, now 33, 32 and 25, were growing up. There was never any doubt that the boys would continue their education after high school, she said.

“In our household, the only question was which college the boys were going to go to,” she recalled. All three attended California State University, Northridge, where the younger two earned degrees in accounting.

Community Programs Needed

Children of middle-class Indian families like the Alexanders are not deprived of the basic financial and emotional support that young people require. But there is still a need for Indian programs in the community, according to Alexander, who for more than a decade has been a community representative to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Title IV-A program, whose goals are to heighten awareness of Indian culture and improve self-esteem and academic performance.

“Valley Indians are very dispersed,” she explained. “Most schools have only two or three Indian children or even one family.”

It’s not unusual, she said, for Valley Indian children to grow up not knowing another Indian child.

Twenty-two public elementary and secondary schools in the Valley have federally funded Indian education programs. Several of these are active, particularly the program at Sepulveda Junior High School, but most are limited as a result of the small number of children involved.

Organization Dissolved

Alexander said she feels the lack of Indian institutions in the Valley. CSUN has an Indian studies program, but the San Fernando Intertribal Organization is moribund and no new Indian organization has emerged to replace it.

“There are no powwows out here, no Indian center,” she said. “There’s no organization or cultural event that regularly takes place that allows Indians to come together.”

(Lyman Pierce of West Los Angeles, a Seneca and Onondaga who heads Los Angeles’ Indian Centers Inc., said his organization opened a branch in Sylmar to serve Valley Indians but closed it because “we couldn’t find them.”)

Alexander, who was thrilled when each of her sons was bar mitzvahed, said she wishes that they had had access to an Indian education program when they were younger. Their mother, after all, is of a people who also have suffered greatly and have been greatly blessed.

“They don’t know my culture as well as the Jewish culture, and I think that’s sad. When I go, I think that tradition will be lost with my children.”