“We acknowledge we are gathered upon the ancestral lands of the Seattle area’s Federally Recognized Indian Tribe, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, who historically lived throughout the areas between the Cascade Mountains and the Puget Sound, what is also known as the Salish Sea.”
These 43 words were the topic of much debate during the Enumclaw School District’s Feb. 12 board meeting, when directors ultimately voted 3-2 to keep the reading of the “land use acknowledgement” on the board’s agenda.
The ESD Board has been using a land use acknowledgement in some form since 2017, when one was placed on the board meeting room wall. The Board began reading an acknowledgement out loud at regular meetings starting in November 2020, but the acknowledgement has been altered since then.
There was limited criticism and praise of the acknowledgement over the next three years until Director Paul Fisher announced during the Feb. 5 work study that he planned to move to no longer read the acknowledgement at meetings. Fisher and Director Ben Stouffer voted in favor of the motion; Directors Tyson Gamblin, Scott Mason, and Julianee DeShayes voted against.
Although the matter-at-hand was about reading the acknowledgement at the meetings, it’s unclear whether the motion would have eliminated the acknowledgement, as both Fisher and Stouffer confirmed in later interviews that they would not support using the acknowledgement elsewhere, either as a permanent display in the board room or on the school’s website like on the White River School District’s site.
More than a dozen people spoke at the public comment period about this discussion, and still more attended the meeting to show their support for their side of the debate.
In short, one side believes it’s unfair to be singling out a subsection of people and not others, or that the acknowledgement is virtue signaling.
“This is removing the reading. It’s not removing the acknowledgement… of the relationship we have with the Tribe,” Stouffer said at the meeting. “This is the grandstanding at the beginning of the board meeting that we’re talking about.”
Both Stouffer and Fisher added that they support the district’s relationship with Native Americans, and that they’re intention with this motion was not to harm the district’s relationships with the Muckleshoot Tribe.
Vivian Cadematori, who recently lost her race against Director Tyson Gamblin for his board seat asked the Board if the statement led to any improvement in the educational outcomes for Native students.
“Because as far as I can tell, there aren’t any. It’s virtue-signaling, pure and simple. And it’s said to make the board, the school district, feel good about themselves,” she said. “Policies and statements that position one group as ‘oppressors’ and another group as ‘oppressed’ create a culture of victimhood when schools should be empowering all kids and providing equal opportunities for all.”
The other side holds that the acknowledgement is a recognition of the long-standing relationship between ESD and the Muckleshoot Tribe, that it helps make Native Americans visible when they’re often invisible in American education and culture, and that eliminating it is a sign of disrespect for that partnership.
Muckleshoot Tribe’s Assistant Tribal Education officer Dr. Cathy Calvert, who helped form the district’s acknowledgement back in 2017, and ESD’s Cultural Support Program Manager Sui-Lan Hookano, whose program provides academic, cultural, social, and economic support for the district’s indigenous students, spoke in favor of the acknowledgement.
Calvert, who gave a presentation about ESD’s history with the Muckleshoot Tribe during the Feb. 5 workshop, was clearly frustrated with the board members who brought this forward, perhaps especially because a non-binding majority of support was established during that meeting to keep reading the acknowledgement.
“I guess because some of you inherited a partnership, you’re taking it very for granted and you are not valuing the work that has gone before you, and you’re ready to throw it away,” she said, adding that this is a “heartbreaking and disturbing” motion that will impact the district’s relationship with the tribe. “By offering something and… taking it away, how classic is that?”
Hookano said that the adoption of the acknowledgement six years ago was unanimous, due to the fact that the then-directors understood the relationship that ESD had with the Muckleshoot tribe.
“Critical conversations and community histories and current issues are working toward solutions for healthier environments and humanity. It doesn’t separate people, it brings them together,” she said. “… Those threatened with change were willfully ignorant and should not hold leadership positions in education if they are not serving the best interest of all students and remain in their beliefs and biases and fragility.”
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS
After the meeting, Cadematori and Valerie Segrest, who spoke in favor of the reading, offered additional thoughts and clarifications of their positions in interviews after the meeting.
“Although on its surface, the land acknowledgement is a statement of fact, if you listened to the speakers in favor of it, it’s obvious it represents much more than that. It is an acknowledgement at every Board meeting of the atrocities that were committed in the past against the Native American people and a condemnation of those who were responsible,” she said in a prepared statement, adding that it’s ESD’s job to focus on education. “Victimhood doesn’t help anyone. If anything, it paralyzes individuals and creates resentment and anger.”
But Segrest — a mother of two Enumclaw school district kids, Muckleshoot Tribe member, and co-founder of Tahoma Peak Solutions, a firm that provides Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training with a Native lens and other services to support indigenous people — said that the acknowledgement is not only about the past, but the future as well.
“It signals a practice of beginning to create visibility of a story that’s so deep and rich,” she said, comparing Black History Month and the “heavy” school curriculums surrounding it to the lack of a parallel education when it comes to Native Americans — not just in Washington state, but across the country.
According to the 2016-2018 Reclaiming Native Truth report, which Segrest read parts of at the board meeting, 87% of state history standards in 2011 did not cover Native American history after 1900, and 27 states did not specifically name any individual Native Americans in those standards.
Additionally, the report found that in American culture, if Native Americans are discussed at all, they are often seen through a “deficit frame” that focuses on alcoholism and poverty rather than their “strengths, resilience and contributions” to modern society.
“We’re just starting this work. Taking anything back takes us back a couple of steps,” Segrest said, adding that reading the acknowledgement — as opposed to having it on a website or displayed elsewhere — is a reminder that Native Americans are a part of contemporary American culture, as well as its future. “It’s been really hard work to lift this narrative up, largely because… the education system fails it.”
