Ling Final Project

Your assignment is to write an advisory report to Governor Jerry Brown on the scenario described below. You are the leader of one of Governor Brown?s research units

and need to provide Brown with all the information which should be necessary for him to engage in the negotiations which the scenario involves.

The situation:
Construction work carried out on Indian reservation lands in the southeast of California finds that there are oil reserves located in this territory, of an unknown

amount. When this discovery is made, the California Indian Council, a group linking Native American Indians from many of the tribes in California, issues a statement

to the state government that it will only allow further exploration of the oil reserves and their future exploitation by the state if the state agrees to initiate

bilingual education programs for Native American Indians in California. Such a proposal/demand is entirely within the rights of Native American Indians living on

reservations in the USA. These reservations have the legal status of private property, in the same way that the land on which individual residences are built is often

private property (hence if we dig in our back yard and discover gold or oil, we retain the right to exploit this resource as we wish; it is not state property, nor

does the state have any automatic access rights). NOTE that it is not known how much oil may be present in the Indian territory, but the first signs suggest that the

oil reserves could be huge. As the US is in great need of locating more energy resources within its borders, the prospect of a major onshore oil field in California is

very significant.

Your task is to:

(a) research and provide/summarize information which will be relevant for talks between Brown and representatives of the Indian tribes of California. Some of the

topics you will need to cover will be listed below.

(b) outline two or more positions/policies that Brown could attempt to adopt, and indicate very clearly how Brown could best argue for each of these different

positions. In this sense, you should think of yourself as advising both the prosecution and the defense in a courtroom case. What arguments can best help/be used to

support one type of policy, and what are the other arguments that could be used for other policies? Remember, it is Brown as governor who will ultimately decide which

policy the state will officially try to pursue. You should be trying to provide him with the best arguments for each possible approach to the situation which has

arisen.

(c) make YOUR OWN recommendation, balancing out the pros and cons of the information you have presented. So, having shown how the different policies might best be

argued for, you should indicate which approach you yourself would try to pursue if you were Brown.

Types of approach you might outline as candidates for consideration

[1] Promising bilingual education to Native American Indian tribes in California.
This will satisfy the Indian tribes, but will create other problems. Major issues that this will most probably raise are:
How will other minority language groups react to the news that Native American Indians will be provided with bilingual education? Will this result in claims from other

groups for bilingual education, and if so, how can this situation be dealt with? There are various possibilities: (i) re-examine state policy on bilingual education

and its funding from state/government funding, and consider whether wider bilingual education should be reinstituted in California (this would in turn have budgetary

consequences which could be discussed), (ii) try to claim that Native American Indians constitute a special case in some way ? is this feasible, and how might it be

done? There are other possibilities that you may try to think of.

[2] Not offering bilingual education to the Native American Indian tribes
Supposing Brown were to try NOT to offer bilingual education to the Indian tribes, the state will still want access to the oil that may lie in the Indian reservations.

Is there any way that Brown can NOT give in to the request for bilingual education but still get access to the oil (without the use of force..)? Might it be possible

for Brown to persuade the Indian tribes that bilingual education would not be good for them? How might Brown do this? There are various ways. You might consider some

possible strategies undesirable from your own personal standpoint. However, like an attorney charged with defending a client who he may think is actually guilty of a

crime, you must try to present the best case for these other approaches. There is one very important guiding principle you must follow in this. Assume that the

American Indian groups have hired their own team of language and linguistics experts to advise them, so you cannot present a position that is based on statements that

are obviously untrue or which could be disproved by other experts. For example, you cannot state that bilingual education always impedes cognitive development in

children, hence should always be avoided. The linguistics experts for the Indian group will be able to cite case studies where bilingual education has been very

successful. It is important that you give Brown arguments that can be used which could not be easily refuted and cause him to be embarrassed (otherwise your next

assignment will be making the coffee for everyone in Brown?s HQ).

Topics/questions/issues you will need to consider and provide information on

[1] The language situation of Native American Indians in North America in general and California in particular. How many groups are there, to what extent do they

maintain their languages, what are their approximate numbers (you can find this information easily on the Internet)? This information will also be relevant IF you

outline an option of trying to provide bilingual education for all Native American Indians in California. It will be relevant for costs and feasibility ? how many

tribal groups would resources have to be made available for? What would the difficulties be?

[2] Various aspects of bilingual education.

a. the situation of bilingual education in California (and more briefly, in the US)

b. Prop 227 ? what is the present legal status of bilingual education ? what does Prop 227 really do? Does it outlaw bilingual education, or government support for

bilingual education, or what? In one of the approaches you will probably outline (giving some form of bilingual education to the Indian tribes), there may be a need to

try to find loopholes in the law ? figure out what Prop 227 does and does not allow, and whether granting bilingual education to the Indian tribes would really violate

Prop 227. This information is already present in some of the readings you have done for the course.

c. Does bilingual education continue to occur in any form in California? Does this have government financial support?

d. One approach you might possibly outline as being available to Brown could be to make arguments that bilingual education is in fact beneficial for children, and

therefore that there might be reason to support it. What would be the ways you could best do this? First, what good arguments could be presented in favor of bilingual

education in general? Second, is there any way that Brown could seem to support bilingual education now, without seeming to be saying that Prop 227 is wrong? In other

words, what kind of political ?finesse? or ?spin? could be used to try to allow for the state to support a new program of bilingual education despite Prop 227 having

been voted in by a majority in 1998?

f. The issue of the advantages and disadvantages of bilingual education is not as simple as
people have sometimes assumed in the past. The positive and negative effects may depend on the background of the children or adults who undergo bilingual education ?

are they trying to acquire bilingualism in a sequential or simultaneous way, do they come from families where both parents speak a minority language, or where parents

each speak a different language? It may be useful for your proposals to highlight some of the complexity of bilingual education and how this may be relevant for the

scenario you have to deal with.

Consequences/problems
As already noted, there will be potential problems and consequences for each approach you outline. It is your duty to anticipate these problems and inform the governor

of them in your report. You also have to try to suggest ways around them, if possible.

In one policy approach, in which the promise of bilingual education is given to the Indian tribes, an obvious, major consequence and problem will be that (a) other

minority groups in California may try to demand (more/some) bilingual education, (b) pro-English only groups may argue that the government funding of bilingual

education goes against Prop 227. How can such problems be addressed?

As most of the Native American Indian languages in California have not been standardized or provided with writing systems yet (and hence also have no ready teaching

materials), you may like to consider how this may have an impact on the policies that you outline to Brown. This information could be useful in more than one way.

With regard to a potential policy of offering bilingual education to Native American Indians, governor Brown (who does not know too much about language issues in

California) will want to know whether such a step would lead to any of the controversy that exploded with the Oakland Ebonics proposal. Indicate in brief whether there

are similarities between the Ebonics initiative and providing bilingual education for Native American Indians, or whether they are so different in nature that Brown

wouldn?t risk any public outcry if he approved the latter (in other words, is there any chance that people might connect Native American Indians bilingual education

with ?bilingual education? for African Americans and engage in the same level of heated public debate as in 1998, when the Oakland proposal was first made)?

Complication
The Indian reservation on which oil has been discovered is mostly in California, but also extends into Arizona, and there are members of Native American Indian tribes

living on this land too. The California Indian Council did not make any demand for bilingual education for tribes in Arizona (yet..), but policy planning clearly has

to bear the ?Arizona-complication? in mind. In your report to Brown, you should provide information on the situation of bilingual education in Arizona. This is easy to

find on the Internet. Searching for ?bilingual education in Arizona? will quickly bring you to websites discussing proposition 203 in Arizona, and how this may have

gone further than the California Prop 227. Brown will have to have meetings with the governor of Arizona to try to work out some coordinated policy. So that he can

interact with the governor of Arizona in an informed way, provide an overview description the situation of bilingual education in Arizona too, and how this may affect

planning decisions.

Referring to the Indian reserve and the tribe which is located there
You can refer to the Indian reserve as the South Mojave Reserve and the name of the Indian tribe living there as the ‘Hacama’. There is only one tribe living on the

reservation, but they are requesting bilingual education for ALL Indian groups in California, not just their own group. One other note, the Hacama language hasn’t been

standardized yet, though there is some initial description of the language.

Resources
To help you in some of your fact-finding, you should consider the following reading, which is in the course reader, reading number [4].

?Language Loss and Revitalization in California: an Overview? by Leanne Hinton

The following web-sites also have useful information:

https://www.nahc.ca.gov/population.html

https://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Native_California

References/bibliography
If you make references to any websites or published works, please provide the details of these briefly at the end of your proposal, in any reference format you like.