California school district curriculum now includes: How Americans appropriated Native American food

The board of California's Santa Ana Unified School District has voted to approve two new curricula including lessons with such "essential" student questions as "How has American culture appropriated the foods of Native Americans."

The school will now feature "Ethnic Studies: World Geography" and "Ethnic Studies World Histories" as courses this fall after the board approved the courses last week.

Any high school student can take the geography course, which will introduce concepts such as "the four I’s of oppression" – ideological, institutional, internalized and interpersonal forms of oppression.

In Unit 1 of the geography course, the curriculum states: "Students will develop empathy for the indigenous Americans who faced cultural genocide as their traditional toponyms have been corrupted and appropriated."

Students will also learn about examples of Native American ideology and symbols used in everyday life such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Sacagawea coin.

In the second unit of the geography course, students will learn how to answer questions such as "Why do immigrants to America and Europe tend to occupy the lowest paying jobs and social strata?" and "How has the settlement of Israelis after WWII changed the socio-economic status and sovereignty of Palestinians over time?" The unit also includes a supplemental article from The Middle East Monitor that accuses Israel of "a massive wave of ethnic cleansing." 

The world histories course, which is offered only for high school sophomores, teaches students about "the evolution of people through an intersectional lens that includes the expanded voices of those groups previously marginalized within Eurocentric textbooks," per the curriculum.

"Students will learn how the concept of racism was invented to categorize and segregate groups into silos of discrimination, thus providing a rationalization for the inhumanity demonstrated by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, world-wide genocides, global wars, and the destruction of the environment," the curriculum also states.

The CEO of the antisemitism watchdog StandWithUs, Roz Rothstein, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the board "voted to approve ethnic studies courses that erase 3,000 years of Jewish history and connection to Israel, by framing Jews as colonizers in their ancestral home. ... The courses include one-sided and inaccurate materials regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and exclude the history of Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab states and Iran."

Madeleine Hubbard is an international correspondent for Just the News. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.