SAN FRANCISCO -- Lorenzo Baca wears a baseball cap embroidered with the words, “Native Veteran.” He is quick to point out, however, that he is not a military man. “I’m a native veteran of U.S. government oppression,” he explains.
It is one of many hats Lorenzo (he prefers to be called by his first name) has worn over the course of his 62 years of life.
Native American spiritual leader. Firefighter. Actor. Stuntman. Musician. Comedian. Poet. Prison Chaplain. Video Artist. Educator. The nation’s first man to receive a master's degree in American Indian Studies (from UCLA).
On Jan. 4, Lorenzo added another distinction to his long resume: He became the first Native American spiritual leader to offer prayer for the 2010 decennial census, by performing a sunrise ceremony at the northern foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. to signal the kickoff of the census bureau’s self-coined “portrait of America” bus tour and publicity campaign.
Lorenzo was contacted and asked to participate shortly after performing a ceremony for an American Indian educational program at Sacramento State attended by one of the bureau’s employees.
Lorenzo Baca, Photo: Jacob Simas
“I couldn’t believe they called me at first,” he said.
After all, Lorenzo had spent the better part of the last decade in a direct legal fight with the U.S. government. In "United States v. Baca," he was charged with four misdemeanors for filming a Native American celebration on government property without a permit and trespassing on a cultural resource - a reproduction of a ceremonial Miwok roundhouse - at Yosemite National Park in 2002.
Lorenzo says the charges were bogus -- that he didn't need permission to film, and that the cultural resource in question is nothing more than a replica built by non-Indians, lacking any real ceremonial or spiritual significance, and that Yosemite Valley is the ancestral land of the Paiute who never had roundhouses.
Eight years, two convictions, and $100,000 later, the case was reversed by an appellate court in Fresno, but only after Lorenzo and his defense lawyers came across an article in the San Jose Mercury News' website with photographs depicting William Wunderlich, the Yosemite court magistrate who presided over his case, with a noose hanging in his chambers. Lorenzo and his lawyers argued that the photograph was proof of the judge’s bias, and that he should have been removed from presiding over the case. The Fresno court agreed.
“Eventually there was justice, but I just happened to have a little education in my background," says Lorenzo. "I know my rights and I know how to ask questions. If I didn’t have a public defender paid for by the government to defend me, I’d be in some prison right now.”
Despite his eventual victory in court, Lorenzo says the legal process took a toll. He became ill, lost jobs, and was steadily harassed by anonymous phone calls and clicks - to the point that his friends and family grew fearful for his safety.
So when the U.S. Census Bureau came knocking in late 2009, his initial reaction was not without a dash of suspicion.
It took a phone message from Lucky Preston, his friend from the powwow circuit, who is a trusted elder friend, to ultimately convince Lorenzo that the census was a cause to be taken seriously.
“I thought, well, if he’s calling me, it must be cool. It must be legitimate,” he says. “And because the government is always making mistakes, I thought that maybe we needed some prayer.”
Early Years
Lorenzo speaks cautiously about being perceived as a spokesperson for American Indians. “I only represent myself,” he says. “I’m a member of groups and tribes and so on, but everything I express is based on my experience and my education. And because of the diversity of my background, I think I have a unique perspective.”
Lorenzo was born in Arizona in 1949 to a Pueblo Indian mother and a Mescalero Apache father, who had moved the family temporarily from their ancestral home in New Mexico after he found work in the mines.
PAGE_BREAK
Like that of many other Native Americans, Lorenzo's life in the rural southwest was hard. He bore witness to the destructive cycle of poverty and alcoholism as it played out in the community and within his own family.
As a teenager in the mid-1960s, he decided to pack his bags and move out west to Los Angeles. The war in Vietnam was heating up, and like so many others of his generation, the era played a role in shaping his political consciousness and identity.
“I never agreed with (the war),” he says. “I saw the government was sending people of color to a foreign land to kill people of color. That’s how I saw it. Who says they’re the enemy?”
Lorenzo immersed himself in art, poetry and academics at Long Beach State. In the early 1980s, while performing his poetry on the UCLA campus, a friend approached him and encouraged him to apply for the newly created American Indian Studies program. By 1984, he had graduated with a master’s degree in AI Studies, making him the first man in the nation to earn such a degree.
Lorenzo’s journey from rural Indian country to the big city is not unique. It is a path that was taken by thousands before him, and thousands since. The relocation of Native Americans over the past 60 years, in fact, has made Los Angeles home to more Native Americans than any other U.S. county, with an estimated population of 155,000.
Members of tribes in Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico "head to the west for economic reasons,” says Lorenzo. “The history of Indians coming out to the west coast, a lot of it had to do with government relocation in the 1950s, which was a program to ‘educate’ native people. It was the government goal that all men should be welders and all women should be nurse’s aids. So, you’d be given a stipend, some relocation money, and be set. And parents want the best for their kids, just like any culture.”
Lorenzo believes similar motivations are still at play on today’s reservations and rural Indian communities. Young people, he said, get tired of the rural areas and want to experience city life. Yet urbanization comes at a cost.
“Youth may become detached from their tribal roots and nature. That’s the biggest disaster,” says Lorenzo. “But I think what happens with all of us is, the older you get the more you start remembering your roots, and hopefully if that culture is still intact somewhere, they can always go back to it.”
Lineage and The Census
“I think that lineage is important because there’s no denying it,” Lorenzo says. “Who your grandfather was, or your grandmother. You can’t change that.”
Lorenzo believes that in order to keep native cultures intact, individuals must have the freedom to claim their own identity, free of government restrictions.
Documentation methods - such as tribal enrollment numbers - used by the United States government have not always respected an individual’s right to do so, he says.
“Tribal enrollment numbers were documentation devices invented by the federal government to eliminate Indians,” says Lorenzo. By defining heritage based on a person’s percentage of tribal ancestry, he says, the government controlled tribal population numbers.
“If the federal government decided you needed to be at least a quarter Indian, then it follows that whoever is a quarter blood and marries outside the tribe, automatically their children are going to be eliminated,” he says.
It wasn’t until the advent of casinos relatively recently, says Lorenzo, that tribes became recognized in practice as sovereign nations with real political power. As a result, the tribes have come back to defining for themselves who they are, he says.
It is an idea that Lorenzo believes is connected to the debate of whether or not American Indians should participate in the decennial census.
“I hope that people are beginning to feel free to claim their lineage, even though it was a great, great, great grandmother, and they wouldn’t qualify as a quarter blood, they could still identify themselves and say, this is who I am, because it has to be respected by the government,” he says.
Cultural Identity, Colonial Mentality and the Census
Lorenzo has spent years working inside the California prison system as a Native American chaplain, and it has provided him some unique insights and experiences.
“I’ve done counseling, teaching, ceremonies and sweat lodge ceremonies in the prisons,” he says. “There’s a need for me to be working with that population. It’s part of my spiritual mission.”
Through his work providing spiritual guidance to the prisoners, he has witnessed examples of how cultural identity can be both a source of strength and a cause of division.
“Among the men who are incarcerated, this whole identity thing is a problem. (The inmates) wanted to dictate who would participate and who wouldn’t participate in our ceremonies inside the prison,” he says. “There were some Yaqui participants from Mexico, which angered some of the colonized brothers from North Dakota because they were Mexicans. And I said, 'Hang on, we’re talking spirituality and we’re talking prayer. If you really do believe in the creator and that power, how can you disrespect and mistreat your cousin?' I would tell them that they had been brainwashed. 'Educate yourselves, open up your mind and see.'”
Lorenzo is taking the same approach in regard to self-identification on the census, which is relevant when considering that the 2010 census questionnaire categories are not inclusive of every single ethnic group. Native people from Latin America for example - a fast growing segment of the U.S. population - are being instructed to check both the Hispanic and American Indian box on the census form, for lack of a better option.
Nevertheless, says Lorenzo, there is also power inherent in taking an inclusive approach to native identity.
“My definition of Native American extends from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego, “ he explains. “We used to migrate up and down. We use macaw feathers in ceremony with some of the Pueblo tribes, which could only have come from Mexico or Guatemala. My point is, we have to discontinue being colonized and unite, because if we acknowledge that we’re all related, then that’s where the power is.”
Finding Balance
Lorenzo says the way he lives his life is a matter of balance. He has clearly chosen to approach the census within this context, weighing the benefits of being counted against the potential evils of government trickery.
“It’s been my observation that systems inherently become corrupt,” he says. “When you are dealing with governments, there is no accountability. So we have every right to be suspicious of government activity. The census, however, is something that we pretty much have to trust because there’s no alternative. I hope I’m not wrong, but I see that the benefits outweigh the evil, especially for Indian people.”
Identity theft and an invasion of privacy by the federal government top his list of potential evils. “There is trust involved,” he admitted. “It all depends on the motivation of the person who controls the data.”
However, he said, the amount of money spent on vital services for American Indians makes census participation worth the risk. More than $400 billion in federal spending, including money earmarked for American Indian health, education and employment programs, is distributed every year based on population and demographic information gathered from the bureau’s decennial census and the annual American Community Survey.
While the bureau still has major work to do in convincing American Indians that it can be trusted, Lorenzo says he has personally chosen to approach the census as an opportunity to begin reversing some disturbing trends.
“I find it interesting that as a group, we have always been underrepresented in the census,” he says. “Yet we are overrepresented in other areas: In prisons, in school dropout rates, in domestic violence incidents, alcoholism, suicide rates and diabetes.”
Just as it took the words of a trusted friend to convince him that the census was important, Lorenzo hopes his words will have an impact on others who may be having doubts about being counted.
“If my brothers and sisters see my face, if they see a face they can relate to,” he says, “maybe they’ll consider that the census is actually okay.”
Related Articles:
Officials Urge Arab Americans to Participate in Census
Comments