How do we learn and teach about history in ways that expand our understanding and deepen our capacity to act with love and wisdom? Achachemen Native Californian community leaders Jerry Nieblas and Domingo Belardes share their insights and the impact of the Acjachemen Education Initiative.
How well do you know the history of your community? What was happening 50 years ago in the place where you live now? How about a hundred years ago? How about a thousand years ago? Some might wonder, “Were there people living here a thousand years ago?”
If you're like most of us, you might have no idea who those people were or how they lived. If you're from California, you might know something about the gold rush. After all, one of our football teams in California is called the 49ers, referring back to that history. And you might have built a model of a mission in fourth grade. That's what most California students remember about studying California history. But that only takes us back 200 or 250 years. What about before then? Who lived here and what can we learn about them and from them?
In Orange County, California, our indigenous community—that is the people who were here a thousand years ago and whose descendants still live here today—are the Acjachemen people. Vanguard University and the Orange County Department of Education have partnered with Acjachemen community leaders Jerry Nieblas and Domingo Belardes to launch the Acjachemen Education Initiative, offering tours of historical and cultural sites to educators from across Southern California.
In this episode, you'll get a flavor of what Jerry and Domingo have shared during these tours. And stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear how you can participate in a tour and learn much more about Acjachemen culture and about Orange County and California history.
Welcome to Education for Love and Wisdom. My name is Jeff Hittenberger and I serve as director of the Graduate Education Program at Vanguard University of Southern California. During the past few years, I've seen lots of fear and anger dominate conversations about American education. But I've also seen lots of love and wisdom from students, teachers, families, and community members. That's what we’ll concentrate on in this podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Domingo Belardes is a craftsman, an artist and a storyteller who collects the artifacts and reconstructs the tools, games, and clothing of traditional Acjachemen culture. Domingo is the curator of the Blas Aguilar Museum and Acjachemen cultural center with Domingo.
Jeff: I know you have deep family history in the Acjachemen community. Could you talk to us a little bit about your family history to begin with?
Domingo: So let me start with my mom’s side, because that's where we are right now, is the Blas Aguilar Adobe. That's their historical home after the Spanish came in 1769. Prior to that, their Jauneno descendants lived in this valley in the different villages. Once Blas Aguilar came here in 1840, he married Maria Gutierrez, who is the Juaneño descent. So on both sides of my family, my grandmothers are the Juaneño lineage. And then my dad's side, they're the Spaniards that came over. They weren't soldados, vaqueros, they were more of the aristocrats that came over. They had ranches. They were vaqueros, they were horsemen. And they brought that over with them. They had beautiful horses—stallions and things. And that was their trade as trainers and as what would you call majordomos on the different ranchos here.
Jeff: So you really have this deep, deep family history that goes back to long before the Spanish arrived, the Acjachemen community that was here for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived. And then you have family from the Spanish people who arrived and your family has lived all the stages of California history. You mentioned the Spanish period, the Mexican period, the Rancho period, then the American statehood and everything since then, your family has lived.
Domingo: They've gone through all those different cultures and all those different governments was probably the biggest thing, because at different points, depending on which government you're dealing with, whether it be the newly 1821 Mexican government that was established, and then later on when the Americans came over with their government and their whole “manifest destiny” cry for owning from coast to coast type of thing within all those different governments and all those different social, I guess you could call them, hardships. Our family survived. They adapted and learned what they needed to do to carry on their family history and move forward.
Jeff: And I know one of the things that you do as an educator is you have collected many of the artifacts of that history, both here in the museum and in the displays that you take out to schools of artifacts dating way back to the pre-Spanish period and then up through those various stages. Could you talk a little bit about how did you assemble all of these things? That's got to be a huge amount of work that's gone into that.
Domingo: Yeah, that's what I started doing, doing early on. We were seeing a lot of our artifacts come out of the ground because of the development of either neighborhoods or shopping centers. What we started doing is the landowners would donate them to different museums because we didn't have a museum and they needed to be curated in a certain way. So, we started taking photos of those different artifacts, whether it pertained to a bone artifact and awl, or if it pertained to maybe an arrowhead or shell beads, depending on where they were coming from—bone beads. I mean, I could go on and on with the different artifacts.
Most of the artifacts that were coming out are either out of bone, out of stone or out of shell. All your plant material, wood material would disintegrate. So, it took me a couple of years and a couple of different avenues to go through and recreate a lot of the pre-, what I concentrated on first was the pre-mission times, the different artifacts that they needed to survive. These are things that they would gather and then they would have to alter. So, the craftsmanship and the quality that they would master, either for flintknapping, basket making, bead making was really phenomenal. And then you get into the historical aspect of what the missions brought. They brought a lot of different trades, [like] furniture makers. They made tables and chairs. So, there's where you're carving the wood, you're knowing the different types of wood and things like that. Metal workers, the blacksmiths, you got to know the certain temperature. The metals got to be…you've got to know how hard to hit. How soft what you're making, whether it be a nail or a lock for a door.
So, one of the other things that really draw me to that fact is, once again, you have craftsmanship, you have quality. They're taking pride in their work, working hard to master that and be proud of what they're doing. And one of the big things is they're making things with their hands. And then the artistic part of it is probably the other part. The ingenuity and the creativity is probably what really made me proud to be able to learn all those different aspects and the technology that went along with it. A lot of people say the word primitive, and I laugh at that because that couldn't be further from the truth. The technology and the things they kept track of in the environment, in nature, being able to know the cycle of the moon and how many days it takes it to go through that. Knowing the seasons when it's going to rain—when you have your rainy seasons, when you have your spring—when the flowers come out. And then when you have your fall, when a lot of the plants start to die off and it's not all the plants that die off. Me and Jeff are here talking right now. And it's the beginning of September. And right now our season right now has the acorns are coming in and that's what we what we would be gathering right now. And that would be the main food source. And I'm talking about pre-mission times. That would be the main food source to get us through the winter time.
So, there's a lot of technology there, a lot of observing what's around you and knowing that you're a part of that and that you're not going to do anything to mess it up and things. So, yeah, very interesting.
Jeff: So there really was a very sophisticated relationship to nature. There was, in a sense, this scientific awareness of the cycles of nature and how to harvest the right things at the right time to create the technologies that you needed to navigate through the seasons. And you do such a great job of sharing that on these Acjachemen education tours that we've been doing for educators over the last year. Can you talk a little bit about how did it become such an important value for you to share the Acjachemen culture?
Domingo: What clicked for me was being out on some of the sites. Like especially where the toll roads are. I was out in areas that hadn't been developed yet, so I was seeing what our people were seeing, the animals, how they moved and the different plants when they would grow and where they would grow. I went into one area and identified three plants that I had never seen in other areas that I had been in. So then that part of it, like, whoa, wait a minute, I actually have to go to different areas because the plants don't all grow just in one spot. So it's not like today where you go to a grocery store and everything's there for you. Basically, all of Orange County was a grocery store. You had to go to different areas to be able to cultivate the different plants that you were using and even the animals. I know when I would get higher up in the mountains with the foothills and things like that, I could see the quail. And it was so funny because people get this ideology like the bear, the mountain lion and the eagle. These are all these strong animals that people take as their totems like they talk about them. But for us and for what I understood about our people is it's actually the quail and like rabbits and like some of the smaller game is the main source of their meat. It wasn't them eating deer every day and things like that, because if they did that, a lot of it would spoil. So they managed that aspect of it. If they had a bigger group where they needed more food than they would probably go get a deer. So there's that aspect of it.
Being able to talk to other elders and things was really interesting. So then it started to put a whole picture together, which is something you don't ever really have complete. You're always, for me, I'm always trying to learn. I'm always trying to find out different information and what's for me, it was I did learn other cultures first off and saw what they did. And then that would help me come and ask questions for my culture and how we would do things and things like that. So that's what really made it. And it was just something in my heart, like you need to find out all this different information and try to bring it together and put it into where you can share it with other people.
Jeff: I absolutely see that in action in in the way you share your discoveries. And really, it sounds like ever since you've been a teenager, you've been on a journey of reconstructing—not just recovering artifacts but reconstructing a culture and way of life and how all of these pieces related to each other and how they were part of the communities who used them and that's really the story that you that you tell so effectively.
Domingo: Yeah, it's taken me quite a few years to get to that point. What you're seeing is a long, long journey that I'm still on and I'm probably at the middle of it. But it's starting to get to the where like, yeah, this is this is what we're looking for. You're getting the right idea of what we're talking about. That story, I guess, is what we're mostly looking for is of our people is what I'm trying to share and to make sure that they know that these people weren't waiting for the Spanish at all. They got up every day with a purpose and enjoyed life. They did. They laughed. They cried. They buried their dead. But all in between all that it's what we do even today. They lived life and worked and did what we do.
Jeff: Real lives that you're helping us really be able to see and visualize in a way that historically, in some respects, those stories of people's real lives have been neglected, forgotten or actively suppressed. And you're, in a sense, resurrecting those stories along with your community.
Domingo: Trying to share them, trying to let everybody know there were really creative people that were adaptable to their situations. They would make the best of it and then carry on.
Jeff: Well, Domingo Belardes, I am so grateful for the way you are doing that every day, bringing kindness and thoughtfulness to the community of Orange County and to the Acjachemen community and drawing on the wisdom that you inherited from previous generations. You are making a difference. And I thank you for that.
Domingo: Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate doing this. I’d just like to say one thing in my language: Domingo says Acjachmen word for Thank you.
Jeff: Thank you.
Domingo' reflections remind us of the deep roots of the Acjachemen community that endured even through the extraordinary disruption brought about by the arrival of the Spanish in the 1770s. The ancestors of the Acjachemen people were pressed into labor to build Mission San Juan Capistrano.
The Spanish took away their names, as conquering powers have done throughout history, and called them Juaneños, giving them a new identity based on the name Mission San Juan Capistrano. San Juan morphs into Juaneño. This phenomenon was repeated up and down the California coast, as the indigenous people pressed into servitude at Mission San Gabriel were called the Gabrieleños and those pressed into servitude at Mission San Luis Rey were renamed the Luiseños and so on.
So began a history of displacement and disruption that echoes into the present. The survival of the Acjachemen people—like other California indigenous communities—is a tribute to their courage and strength in the face of seemingly impossible odd and brutal campaigns against them, brutality intended to silence their voices and erase their histories. Jerry Nieblas talks about breaking “the grand silence,” restoring the voices of his ancestors whose voices were systematically suppressed. Jerry is one of the key historians of the Acjachemen community. He preserves the stories of courage and he documents the stories of pain.
Jeff: I am delighted to have the opportunity today to interview Jerry Nieblas, who is a leader in the Acjachemen community. We are sitting under…
Jerry: Great grandmother oak.
Jeff: …great grandmother oak. Tell us a little bit about the tree, Jerry.
Jerry: The great grandmother Oak represents our people. I learned early on when I was young and would come out here with my grandmother and again quietly observe her going to the great grandmother oak. I didn't know this oak was referred to as that at the time. And I would watch her come over, touch the Great Oak and leave an offering. And I didn't want to question my grandmother, but I would just watch her just observe. And every time I came out to the land here, which was frequent, I was able to put a little more of the puzzle pieces together. And finally I started asking questions and asked her, I said “Nana”—that's what we called our grandmother—I said, “Nana, what are you doing with the tree? What, is there someone buried here? Are there burial grounds her?. I said, you're treating it as though it's a burial.” And she goes, “No, no, just the opposite.” She goes, “This great grandmother oak represents our people.” And she goes, “Step back and look at the oak. Look at the trunk, look at the massive branch system. Look at the growth.” And at that time when I was coming out here, there were still some acorns being produced.
She goes, “This represents our people and people aren't even aware of it, our tribal people aren't aware of it,” but she goes, “This represents the strength and the endurance and the fact that we will continue on just as this great grandmother oak has, and the oak has always been sacred to our people. It's something that nourished our people.
And at the time, I never thought it would play out like this where I would someday be sitting under the great grandmother oak under her shade in her cool breeze. I mean, she's still taking care of us. And so it's a very powerful symbol to our community and not too many of even tribal members knew about the great grandmother oak, and I shared it with a lot of them. It's breaking the grand silence. And now a lot of our people come out here. They'll have little gatherings out here, and it's because they realize the importance of this great oak what it means to our people and that—like this great oak—we will continue on.
Jeff: Well, it is it's an extraordinary expression of your history, the history, the Acjachemen people. And it sort of anchors this park where we're sitting, which is Putuidem Village. It's in honor of Putuidem Village.
Jerry: Right.
Jeff: But in the San Juan Capistrano, I know it's just a shadow of what the actual Putuidem Village was. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Jerry: This is a little dot of what this village used to be. This village was huge and it was a village of families, family units, Acjachemen/Juaneño men, women and their children. We were hunters and we were gatherers. And this land was very important to us because it offered everything that we needed. There was plenty of game. There was plenty of acorns from the great oaks. There was a lot of wildlife. There was a lot of fish in the creek. At that time it ran. But one thing that was really important in this land produced water. It was wetlands. And that's why this village was founded. It was founded at a time where there was drought, severe drought. And the people, a group of people under leadership at the time from the ancient village of Sajaveet, which was more or less on the east side of San Juan Capistrano, you could say they decided they needed to find another village. And this site was particularly important because it was wetlands. So there was plenty of water out here.
So, you had the game. It's going to feed the people and also provide the clothing or any other materials that they needed. The bone was even used to make weapons into the arrowheads and whatever. So this
this land offered everything that our people needed and what the family unit needed. There were little villages within the villages, little clans—groups of people within the village structure. So it was very, very important to our people, Putuidem was. But this is just a small little part, was a huge, massive village of thousands of people. And we're back here. It's unbelievable.
And even me, I learned along the way about this village because like I told you, my grandmother, who is my greatest history book, would come out here and I would just watch her and the things that she would do. And I shared with you one time she came out here together the first mustard of the year, and she needed to take from this land of Putuidem, which had always taken care of our people, which is why it was founded. She had to take from this land the first of the mustard growth in order to continue that nourishing her family with it.
Jeff: What a beautiful thing for you to experience with her as a child.
Jerry: It was. It was.
Jeff: And it speaks to this deep history that you know so much about, but which so few people in Orange County or state of California or frankly, in the United States know. To the extent that people know the history of the area, they think about missions and what Capistrano the arrival of the Spanish, they may have some vague idea that there were people here before then, but with very little knowledge. How did you develop your understanding of that deep history, drawing on your family sources and so on, so that you can begin sharing with educators across Orange County about that deep history, the thousands of years that preceded the arrival of the Spanish?
Jerry: You know, when I was very young, I was a “Gomez,” a nosy, curious person. So I would sit and especially when our elders are gathered at barbecues, at family gatherings, and I would listen to them talk because they would always talk about the old days, the oral histories. And I learned that those oral histories were something that had been carefully, carefully passed on generation to generation. They were handed down. But I also realized as I silently for a couple of years, just sat back and watched and heard the stories and watched the people in the facial expressions and the body language of the stories they were speaking of.
They were so deep and rich. But there was also a fear connected with the stories that we were told, don't share, don't tell anybody about these stories. If anybody comes up to you and says the writing a book, you don't tell them anything. These stories have to stay within the family they have for generations, and that's the way we want it. And then I started to really pay attention. And I realized the pain that our families went through and the pain that came out when they were talking about the stories. There was a lot of good, don't get me wrong. But I think that the pain that I saw, the tears that I saw come from the eyes was a real moving experience for me. And it drove that curiosity even deeper in me. I had to find out. I had to put again the puzzle pieces together. What about these stories? How can I learn more? What about this silence? What's this silence all about that they have to stay within the family circle? What what are the tears about? What is the pain about? And so I really started to ask questions.
And I think I've shared with you in the past the one day I was already in high school and I had already heard a lot of the stories and had gone out to the different sites that were connected with some of the stories that I heard, like the jail that is in the El Adobe, that Mestizo, Manuel Veloros, stayed in for several days after he murdered my great, great grandfather. I snuck into that cellar because there was nothing on the south side of the adobe when I was growing up except fields and orange groves. And so I would go to the rear of the El Adobe. The cellar door was open. And of course, that “Gomez,” again, as I call it, that curious jury would swing the doors open and go down. And I remember the impact of that experience going down into the jail, underground jail. And all of a sudden I started to realize in me that, okay, now the stories are coming to life. They're not just stories anymore. They're coming to life. I would go to the different adobes where things had gone on were the stories had been connected with those adobes and the history started to come alive.
So in high school, I decided I was going to ask my grandmother. I knew something about our history because it was always quietly important to our people and to my family. But I remember going to my grandmother's one afternoon and I walked in. She was sitting there saying her rosary in Spanish, which is something you never wanted to walk in on because she did the full 15 decades. And so you just but once you got in, you couldn't turn around. I let her finish your rosary. And then I said to her, because I saw my grandmother very close. I saw her every day. I said, I want to ask you some questions. I hope you understand. And she looked at me. I was okay with that. And she said, half in Spanish, half in English. What was that? I needed to know. So I said, “Nana, tell me about our family. Tell me our history. Tell me where we came from. Tell me your connection.” And that's when I had the real impact of the oral stories and the grand silence. My grandmother for the first time looked at me like she was mad. It looked like she was mad, irritated. She tensed up. Her whole body language changed. And she just stared at me and I said, “Can I ask you some questions about our family?” And again, I got this deep, dark stare and I realized but I wasn't going to back away. And so I said, “OK, now let me just ask you, where are your parents from?” And there was a long pause and then the first question: “What do you need to know this for? And so I told her, “I want to learn about our family. I want to learn about our history. I hear your stories. I've heard them for years. And I've heard other members of our family talk about the stories and I've heard other families talk about the stories. So, I want to know more about our people. We have an obvious connection to these sacred lands.”
So just this blank stare, again—deep, dark stare. And I said, “Can you tell me where your parents are from? Felipe and Florencia.” And she said, “From here.” Very stern, matter of fact—no more. And I thought she'd say more, so I waited and I realized she wasn't going to say anymore. And I said, “OK, Nana, where were their parents from?” Long pause. Long, deep, dark stare, “From here.”
This went on six or seven times with the ‘from here’ answer. Finally, she looked at me and she told me in Spanish—I can't say it in Spanish—but she told me in Spanish, “Jerry, we've only taken the water from this land. We've known nothing else.”
And to me, that was that was the end, I didn't need to ask anymore what she was telling me, and I learned that along the way after that comment, what she was telling me is our people were from here. And that's when she started to finally open up. And for five years, I spent those five years with her going to historical sites here in San Juan Capistrano, going to the adobes that remained talking about the people going to the cemetery and looking at the headstones and learning about the people and their families of the people that were buried up there. And my grandmother had a fourth-grade education, no more than that, but she was a strong, dynamic woman, formed by a life that had been tough life, that hadn't been all that good for her. But she opened up. She became my history book and it was amazing. And I have everything well documented with her. And I have photographs from her.
And I remember one day we're well into maybe second or third year of doing this. And she said, “I'm going to tell you something, Jerry. What do you want to do with your life?” And I said, “Well, not I'm not going to stay here in Capistrano. I'm going to go to Spain. I want to live in Spain for several years and learn about the family part of our family that came from Spain.”
And she just looked at me again with that silence, not so stern this time, but just listening to me. And she asked me again, she goes, “Well, you're not going to come back to Capistrano?” And I said, “I don't know, but I need to live in Spain for a while. That I know.” But she goes, “Let me tell you, you're not going to Spain.” And I laughed at her. I chuckled at her. I said, “Oh, yeah. Like, you know, you're going to know what I'm going to do.” And she stayed very serious. And she goes, “You'll never go to Spain and have all my grandchildren. You will stay here in Capistrano. And of all my grandchildren. You will become a leader in this community.” And I just I remember then staring at her and she said, “You will become a protector of our history. You will stay in San Juan and you will become a leader for your people.” And I kind of snickered at her and she told me in Spanish not to snicker at her because it would be—like I said, ‘I'll show you because I'm going to go to Spain.’
Seventy-one years later, here I sit.
Jeff: Jerry and Domingo remind us of the strength of the Acjachemen community and the strength of other indigenous communities in California in the face of almost unimaginable suffering. We cannot study or teach California history without acknowledging the atrocities that occurred here. But even more than a story of suffering, the story of the Acjachemen people is a story of extraordinary courage—courage that continues into the present as the Acjachemen and other native Californian communities continue to contribute to the rich diversity of our state. Part of their message is: We're still here.
As educators, we are stewards of history. The truth matters, however uncomfortable it might be. We are committed to equipping new generations of educators to embrace people's stories, learn from history, and be a part of building communities that embrace all people so that all can flourish. Jerry closes his remarks with a special appeal to educators.
Jeff: Well, Jerry Nieblas, I so deeply appreciate you sharing your stories, enriching our community—really giving a deeper understanding to educators across Orange County about the history of the region where we live so that the next generation can build “the beloved community” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said.
Jerry: Yeah, there we go.
Jeff: …and learn to live out of a place of love and wisdom rather than out of place of fear and anger. So, thank you so much—so deeply appreciate it.
Jerry: You're welcome. But again, on the educators. They’re just going to be so important to this process. I can sit here and tell you my stories, they can be recorded, they can be documented, and that's fine and that's good. And it's a good thing. But the educators are going to be part of that. Like I said, they're going to be taking that into their classrooms, they’re going to be taking it and sharing it with their students. And a new generation is going to learn more about our history than I think was ever taught in the past. Us telling our stories, me telling my stories, and then the educators taking those stories and running with them is going to be a good thing. I think.
Jeff: Absolutely. It's going to be a good thing. Thank you so much.
Jerry: You're welcome.
Jeff: Really appreciate it.
Nathan: Education for Love and Wisdom is produced by the Graduate Education Program at Vanguard University of Southern California. My name is Nathan Brais. and I serve as program coordinator. You can learn more about the history of native Californians from two recent books, We Are the Land: A History of
Native California, by Damon Akins and William Bauer, Jr., and California: An American History, by John Mack Faragher. If you are an educator in Southern California, you can participate in a Acjachemen Education Initiative tour if you're interested. Email us at loveandwisdom@vanguard.edu. That's loveandwisdom (with no spaces) @Vanguard.edu, and leave us a message. Special thanks to Bonnie Stachowiak, Trevor Van Winkle, Domingo Belardes and Jerry Nieblas for their contributions to this episode. See you next time on Education for Love and Wisdom.