Day -29: More on Colonization

I got to do another lesson this week about the attempts of Spain to colonize the indigenous peoples in California through the establishment of missions. Our role play last week of sixth graders coming to claim our classroom for their middle school and ordering us to do their homework worked so well, I decided to do another role play this time. Most of the class imagined they were Ohlone people (the first groups to live in the San Francisco Bay Area), while two students played the roles of the Spanish, coming to order the Ohlone to live at the mission. After a brief skit, I had students do a quickwrite, completing the sentence "If I were an Ohlone and the Spanish tried to tell me that I had to live at Mission Dolores, I ..."

Students' responses were fascinating. Two students said they would start a war. "Yo quiero mis derechos," (I want my rights) one of these students wrote.

Seven students said they would try to escape. "Yo me escaparía porque conozco más el bosque," (I would escape because I know the forest better) one escape planner wrote. Below his writing, he drew a picture of a Spanish soldier shooting a gun at him while he fled into the trees.

Five students wrote that they would go to Mission Dolores because they didn't want to get killed by the Spanish. We talked about how the Spanish had guns but the Ohlone only had bows and arrows, and this fact seemed to figure heavily in these students' decisions. "Yo hubiera dicho que si porque ellos tenían armas," (I would have said yes because they had weapons) one mission-goer wrote.

Seven trusting, optimistic students decided that they would go live at the mission because there might be more food there and maybe the Spanish would help them and teach them things. As one student put it, "Así yo tendría una mejor vida para mi y para los otros Ohlones. Ellos me podrían enseñar cosas que podría hacer" (That way I would have a better life for myself and for the other Ohlones. They could teach me things that I could do.)" "Yo les daría una oportunidad y ver como es así y si no me gusta allí, me voy," (I would give them an opportunity and see how it is there, and if I didn't like it there, I'd leave) another wrote.

Janette wrote a nuanced response. (She is often the most thoughtful writer in the class.) "Yo me escaparía," she wrote, "porque yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia. Pero si se llevan a mi familia pues con gusto voy" (I would escape because I wouldn't have wanted to be separated from my family. But if they take my family, then I'd go with pleasure."

I think these responses, which were really not guided by me at all, ended up reflecting the real range of choices that the Ohlone made - and that indigenous peoples around the world have made when faced with colonization.

I found my students' responses fascinating from a linguistic perspective, too. Social studies is basically the only thing that I teach entirely in Spanish, and I only get to teach it about 60 minutes a week now. As a non-native Spanish speaker, I had to stop and think about Spanish verb tenses when I posed the hypothetical quickwrite question in the conditional - "what would you do if ...?" These are the exact same verb tenses that even my most fluent English-speaking students cannot accurately produce. But in Spanish they could use tenses that I can't really produce correctly, like Janette's past perfect subjunctive ("yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia").

My students need more opportunities to write sophisticated compositions in Spanish and to draw on their knowledge of Spanish as they build their knowledge of English. I definitely can't rely on Houghton-Mifflin and other state-adopted materials for this kind of curriculum, though!