High schoolers in California have the right to honor their community and culture by wearing cultural or tribal regalia during graduation ceremonies.
It’s a right codified by Assembly Bill 1248, which took effect in 2019 — a year before the class of 2020 abruptly found themselves walking the length of their living rooms as graduations moved online. With COVID-19 precautions having largely fallen away, in-person graduations are back in full swing this year.
Pleasant Grove High School graduate Louie Lopez planned to wear an eagle feather gifted from a family friend, a mortarboard beaded in a goose pattern — geese are an important Maidu creation symbol — and a ceremonial sash at his commencement.
Lopez’s mother, Jessica Lopez, is the former chairwoman of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu Indians and said she brought in the American Civil Liberties Union for support in late April, after the school asked her to fill out a form for her son to wear tribal regalia. She said she wasn’t made aware of the process earlier, and that the school told her she had submitted the forms too late once she filled them out.
The district said information about requests to wear cultural regalia at graduation is provided to students and parents “beginning in late winter and continuing through to graduation.”
“The school district went through the lengths of trying to determine, you know, whether or not he can only wear one cultural item, or the other, and at that point, they were trying to tell me that their graduation caps were not to have any adjustments made to them … and also that his eagle feather had to be the same length as the graduation cap,” she said.
The district said the process for adding “personalized adornments” to a student’s cap and gown is designed to avoid promoting any symbols of hate speech, profanity, obscenity, drugs or alcohol.
“At the conclusion of graduation ceremonies, a review and an analysis are conducted by district administration and principals as part of Elk Grove Unified continuous improvement efforts,” the district told CapRadio in an emailed statement. “A component of this review is addressing the District policy related to appropriate graduation attire.”
While the school eventually stepped back, with Louie Lopez being able to wear all his planned adornments, Jessica Lopez said it’s not the end of the conversation.
“It's not for them to decide what is Native culture or [what] Native [regalia are] acceptable for them … they shouldn't have that choice,” she said.
A task force — greenlit by a 2021 bill — is developing a report for best practices on implementing AB 1248. But Lopez says her son’s story is just one way the public school system has inhibited Native students' ability to celebrate themselves and their culture, following a history of education being used as a tool to force Native people to assimilate.
For Native students, tribal regalia at graduation is a “symbol of resistance”
At a press conference last week legislators and Native community leaders came together to reaffirm students’ rights to wear tribal regalia during graduation ceremonies. Andrew Alejandre, chairman of the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, criticized the way Native culture has been viewed in schools: “This is not a decoration, nor is it a costume. It is an identity, a culture … that has meaning and history.”
“Where is the fight against those who use our traditional regalia as a costume?” Alejandre said. “Where is the fight against the schools that are still using our culture as a mascot? Where is the fight against derogatory terms against Native people?”
Native suffering has been inextricable from the American public school system: From 1819 to 1969, Native children were separated from their parents and relocated from their ancestral lands to over 400 federally-funded boarding schools across 37 American states and then-territories. Those schools ran assimilation programs meant to change Native Americans’ beliefs, identities and languages.
Three of the biggest were in California, which today has the largest Native population in the United States.
A 2022 report from the U.S. Department of the Interior found that hundreds of children also died during their time in the boarding schools, with the relocation and assimilation policies having “contributed to the loss of … life, physical and mental health, territories and wealth, Tribal and family relations and use of Tribal languages.”
Tedde Simon is the Indigenous Justice Advocate for the ACLU and said at the press conference that the phenomenon reflected the United States’ government’s use of “the school setting as a tool of genocide.”
“Their hair was cut, their clothing was taken, their names were changed, they were prevented from wearing [Indigenous clothing], from speaking their indigenous languages,” Simon told CapRadio in a separate call. “And these ‘schools’ were intended to be places where Indigeneity would be removed from students scrubbed as their Indigenous identities.”
While federal boarding schools no longer exist, a variety of factors continue to impact Native students’ experience in public schools: 24% of Native students attend rural schools, which tend to have fewer resources, and over 20% of Native students reported having been suspended at least once in their life. There’s a lack of Native representation among teaching ranks, too.
There has also been a lack of accuracy in representing Native culture: California’s widely-assigned “mission project” — usually taught in fourth grade — emphasized the construction of mission structures over explaining mission experiences, like Native Americans having been pushed to convert to Catholicism, then being forced to work at the missions after conversion. In 2021, California ranked among the states with the most secondary schools using Native mascots.
In light of the violence public schools have enacted against Native students, Simon told CapRadio that for Native students especially, graduation is a “momentous time for an entire community to celebrate.”
“It’s not just about a specific, individual Indigenous student who has made it to high school graduation, but it’s about this family and community that has supported that student to be Indigenous, and celebrate their Indigenity at high school graduation,” she said.
The Native American Rights Fund notes that every year, graduates across the country have requested legal support to ensure they can wear an eagle feather during their graduation — a protected right under freedom of religious expression.
She added that Native children having the right to wear their tribal regalia during graduation isn’t just an affirmation of their Indigenous existence.
“Wearing regalia — for many students — is a symbol of resistance,” Simon said, “and one’s right as Indigenous students reclaiming the right to an education that honors their culture and heritage instead of one that is seeking to erase and destroy it.”
Task force created by California legislation aims to educate the educators
The task force’s creation follows years of legislative discussion and precedent — even before high school graduates won the right to wear cultural and tribal regalia through AB 1248, there were cases like Titman v. Clovis in 2015, in which a Clovis High School student sued for the right to wear an eagle feather at his graduation.
And in 2017, AB 1248’s precursor — AB 233 — made it to the governor’s desk before it was vetoed.
Then-Governor Jerry Brown said, “To the extent that there is a dispute about what a student can wear at school graduation ceremonies, I believe those closest to the problem — principals and democratically elected school boards — are in the best position to make wise judgments.”
The current law passed the following year. In 2022, Assembly member James Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe, authored a legislative mechanism meant to ensure Native students wouldn’t have to litigate their rights to wear regalia.
It created a ten-person task force to create best practices for enforcing AB 1248, with the group mandated to submit a report to the legislature with its recommendations by April 1 of this year.
Heather Hossler, the executive director of California Indian Legal Services and a member of the Hoopa Valley tribe, said during last week’s press conference that the task force must “identify the abuse of administrative discretion that's being exercised.”
“Schools should never be in the position to put requirements on what type of tribal regalia is acceptable,” Hossler said. “If schools intend to exercise their discretion, there must be transparent standards with minimal burdens, or restrictions that promote and do not thwart A.B. 1248’s goals.”
In an emailed statement, the Elk Grove Unified School Board President Nancy Chaires Espinoza said she was “proud of our district for adopting policies far more expansive than what state law requires, in consultation with our Native American Education Program, Native American Parent Advisory Council, and local tribal leaders.”
“Through this collaboration, we will continue to address any issues that Native students and parents bring to us,” her statement reads.
The district adopted a policy allowing for students to wear cultural or tribal regalia at graduation in 2017 and said it updated that policy to reflect the state’s language once AB 1248 was passed in 2018.
“Having celebrated several more graduations so far, we are very proud of how our students have honored their culture and their identity by wearing a wide variety of personal and cultural regalia,” the district said.
But Jessica Lopez says she hopes Elk Grove Unified will remove its regalia permission form entirely — that it’s not about a process, but the ask for permission itself that’s the problem.
“They’re violating that law, then they’re not protecting our students,” she said. “Even though my son’s already crossed the stage, what about the next kid, or the next kid?”
And she’s looking to see how the task force will hold administrators accountable for learning how best to support Native students in their districts.
“If you are not properly educating your principals, or your school administrators, on laws that affect your students, then you're doing an injustice to your schools that you represent in your district,” she said.
