BY KEVIN SAWYER – A Native American student at Sacramento State University was expelled because she took issue with her history professor’s version of Native American history. Chiitaanibah Johnson,19, who is Navajo and Maidu, took offense when her history teacher preached that what happened to the Native American population was not genocide.
The teacher, she said, actually took offense to the use of the word “genocide” claiming that isn’t what happened to the Native American culture. She said the professor, Maury Wiseman, started his lecture and used the word “genocide”. Then Wiseman said that he didn’t think that’s what happened. He said that most of the Native American population was eliminated by diseases that originated in Europe. Genocide, Wiseman declared, tends to mean that it was done on purpose. He doesn’t seem to think that Native Americans were nearly wiped out, or forced into prison camps, on purpose for the benefit of white expansion.
Johnson said she wrote down what Wiseman had said yet had to contain her fury because she felt that she didn’t really have enough to lodge a formal complaint or to challenge Wiseman directly in front of the class. Two days later, however, Johnson said she had her smoking gun.
“He made it a point,” Johnson said, ” to say that indigenous people were not peaceful. I was upset for obvious reasons. He…made it a point to say that native people were killing each other before white people arrived.”
Then, Johnson said, Wiseman began going on and on about how brave the white explorers, especially the Portuguese, were without even mentioning the horror of the murder and the slave trade that was going on during these “explorations”. Again, Johnson became infuriated and challenged Wiseman in front of the entire classroom. She took issue with his melodramatic discourse about the brave Portuguese explorers and she informed Wiseman that the Portuguese, “became rich by enslaving and raping indigenous lands and people that they ‘discovered'”.
She took issue with Wiseman’s rebuff of genocide telling him that is not what happened. She demanded that he begin to tell the students the actual truth of the matter. Wiseman, of course, claims that she humiliated him in front of his students. He began to yell at her and tell her that he didn’t appreciate her making him out to be a racist and a bigot. Wiseman didn’t seem to understand the definitions of those two words but, nonetheless, kept on yelling at Johnson.
Wiseman accused Johnson of hijacking his class and of taking what he was saying out of context. Johnson thought his words were quite clear and could not be taken out of context. Wiseman, infuriated, threw her out of the class and expelled her from the course. Johnson was rather shocked that she got no support at all from her fellow classmates.
“I had zero support from anybody in that classroom,” Johnson said. ” All of the research that I had done was very traumatizing. To read about babies being slammed against rocks being held from their ankles, to hear of people being lit on fire while they were still alive, too hear of them being disemboweled, and having their arms and hands chopped off. I know these things to be true. I didn’t call him names, I did not say he was racist, I did not use foul language…he raised his voice at me and was talking over me…”
No comment. of course, from the authorities at Sacramento State except to say that they are investigating the matter and that a teacher doesn’t have the authority to expel a student.
“I have been dealing with this kind of racism since I was a little girl,” Johnson lamented. “Indian kids all over the country get shut down for questioning things like this. Johnson also remarked that California history should be taught the way it actually happened. She explained that “Johnson” was a name give to her ancestors because the white authorities considered their real names far to difficult to even try to pronounce.
She spoke of the abuse suffered by her Maidu ancestors in California. She told about how one of the first thing California politicians did was place bounties on the Maidu people. The bounties declared that the California government would pay $25 for a Maidu scalp of $5 for the whole head.
“I had nightmares about my people being burned alive or drowned after hearing or reading stories like that”, Johnson said. “When I read about Ishi, the last of his tribe, in elementary school, I cried. He lived to see everybody he ever loved systematically and deliberately murdered.”
PHOTO CREDITS: Indian Country Today / Autumn Payne