In a clearing 50 yards from the Yuba Feather Elementary School, situated in a ponderosa pine forest in the Sierra foothills east of Oroville, is a small, nondescript corrugated-steel building that looms large in the lives of scores of American Indian chldren. The converted Forest Service tool shed in tiny Challenge, California, is called the Cedar Lodge, harking back to the tribal heritage of cedar-bark dwellings occupied by the Maidu ancestors of many students who now frequent this building. But, in recognition of its futuristic role, teachers and administrators describe the Cedar Lodge as “an electronic cottage, from which we reach out to the world.” Here, children of all tribal backgrounds use modern video technology and computers to study their ancestral legends and pass them on to other students at Yuba Feather and around the world. One parent calls the Cedar Lodge a “safe haven” in which students gain self-confidence and advance their fortunes in the global village that surrounds them.
	Out front, two teenagers, graduates of the state’s 25-year-old American Indian Early Childhood Education Program (ECE), strip bark with a drawknife from poles that will become the upright supports for a more traditional Indian cedar lodge, a conical structure clad in slabs of bark that the children are building next to their converted tool shed. Inside the current lodge, maps and other familiar pedagogical aids share shelf and wall space with traditional American Indian art and crafts and a bank of late-model computers. On display on one of the computer screens is a student’s colorful, wildly imaginative retelling of a traditional legend, “How the Stars Got in the Sky.” It shows a dog flying above mountains like a Chagall figure, spewing specks of white through a black sky. Joan Noel, a longtime ECE tutor, resource teacher, parent and now volunteer, gathered three of her children, who are Konkow Maidu, and a young Cherokee friend to talk about the ECE program, which the kids refer to as “Indian ed.” The Konkow Maidu live mostly in Marysville, Oroville and the foothills to the east; other Maidu tribes are scattered around the nearby mountains and the foothills and valley farther south. About a third of Yuba Feather School’s students are Indians. Also joining the discussion were Jim Graham, the program coordinator from Marysville, who is an Anglo with long experience teaching Indian children in Alaskan bush villages; and Lucky Preston, the ECE resource teacher at Yuba Feather for the past year, who is of Achumawi descent. Both have had years of experience with “at risk” children. “At risk” takes on new meaning in Yuba County. Fifteen years ago, the dropout rate for Yuba Feather students attending Marysville High School was 80 percent. With innovative programs like ECE helping to turn the tide, the dropout rate has been lowered to 30 percent. Graham points out that Yuba County, by various measures, is either the poorest or the second poorest county in the state, with the highest teen pregnancy rate and an unemployment rate twice the state average. Here, he says, a 30 percent dropout rate represents significant progress. In California, the state with the second highest number of American Indians, high dropout rates helped spur legislative passage of the ECE program.
	The Yuba County program serves 40 children at Yuba Feather and another 30 at the school in Dobbins. The county is one of nine sites funded by the state under the Early Childhood Education Program. Yuba Feather’s ECE program is designed for children in grades 1 through 4, with classes on computers, technology and American Indian culture scheduled throughout the school day. The Noel children and numerous other older students return to the Cedar Lodge after school to tutor younger children, to work with computers and traditional crafts, to participate in after-school activities like the parenting skills classes, to plan field trips, to do homework, to talk over problems and to just plain hang out. These older children are always welcome, as are non-Indian children from the elementary school. Funding for older students’ activities comes from federal funds and private grants. The heart of the program has been dubbed CHILD-to-child, with the capitalization meant to suggest how older children serve as tutors and mentors for the younger ones, both in the Cedar Lodge and in regular classrooms. Parent involvement is another important facet of the ECE approach. So much is going on in the Cedar Lodge it takes a student to keep track of it all. Amber Noel, a seventh-grader, describes almost breathlessly what she got out of the ECE program: “We went out and we taught kids about their culture”—both Indian kids and others, she says. “And we learned about it ourselves. And we got to use computers a lot. And we learned about how to use all the equipment and things. And we went and we taught other kids to use it too. And we made movies and stacks [stories in the interactive HyperStudio computer program]. And there was a group after school called Culture Club, and we tanned hides the way they used to, and we had to pull all the hair off and all that stuff. And we made rattles, and we made drums. And then jewelry. In here we made our regalia for when we danced, like for when we danced at powwows.” The program also takes the students on field trips to old Indian sites and to attractions like Pt. Reyes, where Amber’s class visited a bird observatory and the lighthouse and traded traditional crafts with local children, including Pomo and Coastal Miwok students. “A lot of kids have never been to the ocean,” says Joan Noel. “So we provide that door. There’s a world out there.”
	Amber says the ECE program “kinda helped me find out who I was and who my ancestors were, what they were like.” It also helped her figure out where she was going. The 13-year-old has it all mapped out: college, probably at Chico State, and a career as a doctor. Amber’s ambitions are themselves a significant achievement. Native Americans nationally earn college and graduate degrees at less than half the proportions for all students. It is not surprising therefore that American Indians’ median family income is 62 percent of that for all families in the United States, nor that the Native American poverty rate is more than two and a half times that for all families. Jim Graham says the students use the Internet both for research on American Indian subjects and for e-mail. “For instance, we have a program started where we have a big United States map, and the idea is to get an e-mail response from a Native American in every single state. These kids will be sending a story out that they’ve created, a localized Maidu story in their own words. In response, we’re asking that people send us an indigenous-from the area that they’re getting the response from-an indigenous game or a recipe or a story.” Amber’s brother Allen, a year older than she, says that as a result of the ECE program, “My culture is more a part of me.” “I like to know who I am,” Allen says. Through the program, he says he’s become “more outspoken and outgoing, and I can stand up and talk to people better.” That kind of personal presence means a lot to Graham, who said that American Indian children are often quiet, non-aggressive, retiring. “They’re not the ones that throw their hands up in the classroom. They’re not generally the classroom leaders. They’re not the extroverted, outgoing students. They’re more the ones you have to prod information from. A lot of it is just cultural. It’s the way they’re brought up.” The children must also cope with the stereotyped ways in which others view them. “In the regular classroom,” Graham says, “you’d be amazed how much of the teachers’ and the other students’ knowledge of American Indian culture is taken from TV and movies.” But those who have come through the ECE program, he says, have knowledge and skills that other students lack. In the regular education programs, Graham says, “computers sit in the classrooms turned off,” and often the teachers aren’t trained in their use. “So now when these guys [the Indian students] go into a classroom, if that classroom is just getting computers, these kids already have training on computers, and they become the classroom leaders. And their self-confidence just shoots right through the ceiling. It’s just been incredible, the growth that some of these students have made.”
	Allen, a ninth-grader, has parlayed his experience far beyond the Yuba Feather community. Through a nonprofit youth program called Eagle Vision Educational Network, he joined four other children and three adults in making presentations to students in Germany and Switzerland, “showing them that we didn’t all live in log houses.” It was an experience in mutual cultural awareness. Allen recalls people wanting to touch him “to see if I was real or something.” Allen says that the program, with its absorbing projects, has “helped me to stay away from drugs.” Everyone present agrees that drugs are prevalent in the area. Like his little sister, Allen has a clear view of his future. After going to Humboldt State University, he plans to become a veterinarian or a psychologist. The latter seems an unusual choice for a 14-year-old raised in the countryside. Allen says it’s one of his options because “I like people.” Melissa, 19, a sophomore in liberal arts at Chico State University, also sees in the ECE program the origins of her career choice. She wants to teach in the first or third grade, or maybe kindergarten. While at Chico State, she’s volunteered in elementary school classrooms. Why first or third grades? The words she uses to describe her goals are the same she uses to describe the ECE program. “I want to get to them before they get their attitude. I want to give them a good, positive environment to learn in. The people I learned from were positive and encouraged you to do your best.” Melissa’s boyfriend, Jason, a freshman at Butte College who grew up in Challenge, also participated in the ECE program. Jason tells how his C’s and D’s became A’s under the influence of the program and of Joan Noel, who was the resident staff person at that time. Joan recalls an occasion when Jason ran after her, proudly waving his “A” report card and shouting, “Look what I got, Mrs. Noel.” Jason says that for him, the program “was like opening new doors.” Although ECE was set up to serve the special unmet needs of American Indian children, the program benefits all children at the school. Graham says that some non-Indian children come up to the Cedar Lodge after school to use the computers. Others learn of the heritage of their schoolmates through the Indian children’s classroom presentations. Still others go to the lodge to listen to music, to hear Preston tell stories or to dance. They also participate in schoolwide programs like Yuba Feather’s Indian Days.
	The Assembly member who represents this area in the Capitol, Bernie Richter, is deeply involved in the current statewide controversy over affirmative action programs such as the one at Yuba Feather. In Sacramento, the issues are legal, ideological, political. But in the tiny one-store town of Challenge, they come down to lodge poles and computers and self-esteem and a rich heritage of ancestral crafts and stories and values. So far as anyone associated with the ECE program can recall, Assembly member Richter has never visited the Cedar Lodge or watched the animated faces of children researching their cultural roots on its computers. But Richter may play a key role in the future of the program. He has submitted a bill-AB 1700-to the Legislature. In the dry language of legislation, the digest announces the author’s intention to “repeal Chapter 6.5 (commencing with section 52060) of Part 28 of, the Education Code…” The legislative counsel’s digest gives a clearer explanation: “Existing law provides for an American Indian Early Childhood Education Program. This bill would repeal provisions relating to that program.” That language may also be hard for elementary school children to understand, when word gets back to them. Perhaps the Assembly member will find time to discuss the reasons for his bill with his young constituents at the Cedar Lodge. If he does, he will hear articulate young people like Melissa Noel explaining how to nourish the roots of academic progress: “I think you have to know who you are too before you can deal with other cultures and being out in the world. It’s important to have a good solid foundation of who you are and where you come from.”