California School District Approves New Courses on How American Culture ‘Appropriated the Foods of Native Americans’
The Santa Ana Unified School District in California has given the green light for two new curricula that will address topics such as the “appropriation” of Native American foods by American culture, according to a report from Just the News.
The newly approved courses, “Ethnic Studies: World Geography” and “Ethnic Studies World Histories,” will be offered this fall.
These courses will be available to all high school students, with the geography course introducing concepts like “the four I’s of oppression”: ideological, institutional, internalized, and interpersonal forms of oppression.
According to the curriculum, Unit 1 aims to help “students develop empathy for the indigenous Americans who faced cultural genocide as their traditional toponyms have been corrupted and appropriated.”
Moreover, students will learn about the usage of Native American ideology and symbols in everyday life, such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Sacagawea coin.
The second unit of the geography course will address questions like “Why do immigrants to America and Europe tend to occupy the lowest paying jobs and social strata?” and “How has the settlement of Israelis after WWII changed the socio-economic status and sovereignty of Palestinians over time?”
This unit also features a supplemental article from The Middle East Monitor, which claims Israel engaged in “a massive wave of ethnic cleansing.”
The world histories course, designed for high school sophomores, will teach students about “the evolution of people through an intersectional lens that includes the expanded voices of those groups previously marginalized within Eurocentric textbooks,” as stated in the curriculum.
Additionally, students will examine how “the concept of racism was invented to categorize and segregate groups into silos of discrimination, thus providing a rationalization for the inhumanity demonstrated by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, world-wide genocides, global wars, and the destruction of the environment.”
