Honoring Elder Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez During Native American Heritage Month
“Honoring Auntie Georgie, Chair of the Chumash Women’s Elder’s Council for her life long journey in being a literary voice and activist for our California Indian Peoples and sacred places. Through the written word, her captivating skills in storytelling and wicked truth telling when speaking as an advocate for our people, she can make you laugh, cry and sometimes cringe simultaneously, painting a picture with her words that most of us recognize but somehow cannot verbalize. She gives us a voice that makes our spirits rise!” — Luhui Isha, Cultural Resources and Associate Director, Wishtoyo Foundation.
My Japanese Schoolhouse Home
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez
It was summer, 1945. World War II was coming to an end. Nazi Germany had surrendered and the horrors of their death camps were being told throughout the world. The war in the Pacific against Japan was still raging, but, soon, it would end when two atomic bombs would be unleashed on humankind, one dropped on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. I was nearly six-years-old that summer. I always remember it as one of the most perfect, beautiful, peaceful summers of my childhood.
Like many California Indians, and other landless American Indians exiled across the United States in a vast diaspora overlooked by historians, my family was always looking for a place to make a home, renting houses in the neglected parts of southern California, usually small poor places, later, Housing Projects, but that summer we lived in an empty Japanese schoolhouse in the hills above East Los Angeles. The schoolhouse was then on the property of Zeke’s hay ranch where my father worked on a hay-bailing machine. When the wind blew, the gently sloping hills of uncut hay rippled across the land behind the schoolhouse like an undulating ocean of gold.
Oak trees grew in clusters in the clefts of the hillsides beyond the schoolhouse, dark green and lush. My father, a Chumash man born in 1897, told us of older times when hundreds of oaks covered the hills. My father’s coastal homeland, from San Luis Obispo to Malibu and beyond, is still some of the most expensive, prime real estate in Southern California. At that time, the Channel Islands, the islands of origin of all the remaining groups of Chumash peoples, were no longer accessible to the people. After the Mexican American War ended in 1848 when California became part of the United States, California Indians not on reservations or rancherias were labeled as transients and jailed and later indentured to settlers as farm hands or domestic help. After the Gold Rush, the slave trade of California Indians began in earnest. Young women and girl captives brought a high price when sold to White single men. My parents did not speak of these atrocities or of the world war raging across other parts of the world, instead they pointed to the beauty around us, the sacredness of the earth and all creation, the lovely song of Meadow Larks and the distant honking of geese flying above in formation across the blue, blue sky. To my parents, it was important that we knew that beauty, goodness, was everywhere, around and inside all of us, despite what may seem to the contrary.
The Japanese schoolhouse was like a palace to my mother, a Tohono/Akimal O’odham woman, who had rarely lived in a city house before she married my father. She was twenty years younger than my father and she delighted in the most ordinary things. To me, Mama, and my two younger sisters, the schoolhouse was a magical place. The schoolhouse had been constructed a few years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 so in that summer of ’45 the schoolhouse was in very good condition. Pepper trees with long thin branches and fern-like leaves drooped like weeping willows towards the earth and swayed in the wind beside the long front porch of the schoolhouse. That summer, before we arrived, my father had restored one side of the Japanese schoolhouse as our living quarters. He partitioned that side of the house to create a bedroom and kitchen area for us. The screened-in porch on the east side of the schoolhouse became the kitchen area, overlooking the rolling hay fields of Zeke’s ranch.
The morning after we arrived at the schoolhouse, my mother took me, my four-year-old sister, Patricia, and our baby sister, Susan, to explore our new home. The schoolhouse was mostly one large room with open wide windows beneath the gently curving roof my father admired. The large room made up most of the original schoolhouse. The wooden floors were smooth and the room’s low windows had wooden shutters and no glass. We called that room, “The Playroom.” When I asked where all the children had gone, my parents only said, “They had to leave.” I learned, later, that the large room had been the main classroom for the Japanese-American children who had been taken away with their parents to distant Internment Camps after the war with Japan began. My parents were especially saddened by this.
My mother had worked in the fields with many Japanese American friends and my parents knew how they were unwillingly taken from their homes and farms. One of my earliest memories is of Japanese ladies dressed in beautiful kimonos beneath large paper lanterns of many colors strung above us like a rainbow in the night. I learned early that beauty and goodness can live side-by-side with tragedy and sorrow. That is the story of my parent’s life.
This has been the story of my long life.
In my old age, I often go back to that summer of my Japanese Schoolhouse home. I remember the night sky filled with stars and the lessons my father taught us about the mystery of starlight, how some of the stars had died long ago, and how their light had finally made it to our sky. You could not tell which stars were still alive from those that had died. Now, we are in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, their deaths forever altering their families, the lives of the dead shining like stars in the night sky. I am sure there are thousands of stories of beauty and goodness in these tragic times. It is part of the larger story of humankind on this earth.
My father would tell us the story of how he nearly died during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20 that killed millions of people worldwide. People were dying all around him in a crowded hospital. Somehow, he got out of bed, put his clothes on and went outside to sit on the stairs, his face lifted to the sun. Every time he told this story, even in a darkened room, he would lift his face to the sun, reminding us that life on this earth is precious, Sacred. Even in dark times, we are always a part of a deeper, more lasting harmony, woven throughout our lives in a beautiful, grand tapestry of a greater goodness and love. This, I was taught, and I pass it on to you.
Peace be with your Spirit.
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez is Chumash and O’odham (Tohono and Akimal). She is a nationally published writer and taught for the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach for twenty-seven years. She is the Chair of Wishtoyo Foundation Chumash Women’s Elders Council. She continues to be an advocate for the survival of Indigenous languages, cultures, and Sacred sites.
©Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez 2021