"Your mother sang to me," at OMCA, Sunday, Oakland

After the movie was over, after the panel discussion had concluded and the director took a selfie, over his shoulder, with the audience as we straggled out of the auditorium, all the former students and teachers of Hintil were invited on stage for a group photo. It felt as if the family reunion we had been witnessing was finally, then, actually getting started, now that we were leaving.

The film itself was barely about how the school was established: when kids on Alcatraz during the Native occupation in 1969 needed a school, elders created one for them, and afterwards (in a moment the film essentially yadda-yaddas), OUSD was convinced to incorporate it in Oakland. The movie was even less about what the school is now, though in the panel discussion, it came out that the school still exists but there are few native kids in it, for the simple reason that there are few native kids in the school district in general (“who can afford to live here?”). That was why they all talked about it in the past tense, though the real reason was that all the speakers were former students and teachers, who were not so much talking about the school itself as about the persons it had helped them become, who remembered going there with a kind of passionate reverence that was, to be blunt, pretty goddamn moving and powerful. That Native people were brought to Oakland from everywhere to be assimilated, and schools were the primary sites for that violence, but that Hintil was where they became individuals, together, among other Native kids who were also from a specific tribe, from a specific place: A teacher told the story of when she had been a kid, years earlier, and being taken to the San Francisco Zoo, to see a bear; at age 4, she was told where she was from, and that hers was a bear clan. “‘And don’t you ever forget it!’” she remembered, laughing; “That was my Hintil.” And then she made it for her students. One recalled remembering with other now-grown students the songs that were sung to them, during naptime, to help them sleep, songs they remembered without ever having learned where they were from, or what they meant, because all the mothers and aunties were from different tribes, different languages, different traditions. They were Hintel songs, to them. “We are family,” he said, holding tears in eyes like jewels, “because your mother sang to me. We are family because your mother sang to me. What is more important than that?” All of them said the kinds of things about a school that every school would want said about it, about how it gave them confidence and security and knowledge of who they are. But in that room, you believed them.

The director had a Dodgers hat in the film and a Ballers hat in the flesh, and he mentioned in passing being abused by his teachers in Catholic school—made to stand in front of a urinal holding two bibles—and white supremacy was always in the background of everything anyone talked about, but it was kept in the background, joked about, held lightly, a thing familiar enough to be held lightly. So, too, was the present administration and its war on everything that Hintil stood for; that Ms Rachel is being hauled in front of the Justice department for caring for the children of Gaza, or that what this school did was—without using the name—exactly what is being attacked as DEI, all of that, too, referenced, held lightly. There was a land acknowledgement, but there was no liberal piety to it, no exculpation; “I am so happy to be here, she said, but I always feel strange about doing this, because I know where I am from.” After she told us where that was, and about her people, she explained that it was important for us to know that, a nice reminder that the people on that stage weren’t the ones carrying the moral burden. And as we carried it out the doors, into the halls and garden of the OMCA, we also carried that vision of all those children, now grown strong and sure, remembering, together, onstage, in power and light.