What’s in A Name?
Why one local school district is renaming some of its schools
A new school year is underway. All over the country, kids, lamenting summer’s end, are descending on K-12 campuses. Two of those kids are mine. My oldest started eighth-grade last week at his beloved Northern California middle school. Yes, I said beloved.
Personally, you couldn’t pay me to be back in middle school — braces, puberty, mean girls — no thanks. And I don’t think I’m alone in that conviction. But my kid loves it. And what’s even weirder to this Gen X mom is that that seems to be the consensus for most of his peers.
When my son started at his school last year, I knew it had a great reputation. Located in California’s capital, it enjoyed strong alumni support, featured committed faculty, and boasted robust extra-curriculars. There was only one thing that bothered me.
Its name: Sutter Middle School.
The name plastered on my son’s many school tee’s and athletic gear. A name that made me cringe.
For you non-Californians out there, allow me to give you the rundown on John Sutter, for whom the school was named.
Sutter was a Swiss immigrant who arrived in California in 1834. For decades, he was idealized as a heroic figure who “discovered” California, created the first settlement in Sacramento, and inadvertently set off the historic Gold Rush. However, a more fulsome history paints a much darker picture.
Sutter’s Shady Backstory
Sutter arrived in California having fled debtor’s prison and after abandoning his wife and children. Thereafter, he negotiated a land grant for 48,400 acres from Juan Bautista Alvarado, then governor of Mexican California, giving Sutter near total control over the land.
Sutter lured the region’s Indians into working for him with false promises of profit, but contemporaneous accounts reveal the brutal conditions many met under Sutter’s employ.
While some were paid and worked for Sutter voluntarily, for others Sutter’s Fort was tantamount to a prison from which they could not escape. Sutter kept 600–800 people in slavery, he forced laborers to feed from troughs like animals and maintained a “harem” of young Indian girls as young as twelve.
For many community members, yours truly included, Sutter’s name has longed evoked feelings ranging from discomfort to outrage.
One former Sutter parent whose views mirror my own is Emily Mizokami. When her kids were there, Emily was deeply uncomfortable with the school bearing the name of someone who was, in her words, “gross” and “horrible.”
Years later, long after her kids had left the school, Emily found herself thinking about Sutter — the man and the school — once again.
The Call for a Change
It was the summer of 2020, in the wake of a national rise in attention to racial justice issues following the murder of George Floyd. Sutter Medical Center, located less than a mile from the middle school, took down a prominent statue of Sutter and released this statement:
There are important conversations happening across the country about the appropriate representation of statues and monuments, and we look forward to listening to and participating in future conversations about how our own community may display artwork from the different communities and individuals that have played important roles in Sacramento’s history.
The removal of the statue spurred Emily Mizokami into action. Before she knew it, she was circulating a petition, gathering more than 1,000 signatures in all. Mizokami reached out to school board members, local California Indian advocates, and community leaders. Eventually, she found an ally in the district’s director of Facility Support Services, Nathaniel Browning.
In the fall of that year, the school district, acknowledging the problematic histories of certain men for whom some area schools are named, began exploring the idea of name changes.
After some COVID-related delays, Browning presented a proposal to the school board on September 3, 2022. The Board adopted the proposal on December 15, 2022, agreeing to change the names of Sutter Middle and two other area schools, Peter Burnett Elementary and Kit Carson International Academy.
The district sees its decision as part of the district’s “commitment to confront and interrupt racism and create safe learning environments that are welcoming, inclusive, and inspiring places for all of our students and staff.”
A 20-person committee of community stakeholders was tasked with proposing new names for each of the three schools.
My boys and I attended a community meeting last spring, to learn more about the process underway. There, Browning detailed costs associated with the name changes, including an estimated $150,000 for Sutter alone, but was unequivocal that such expenses would not hinder the process already underway.
At the same meeting Calvin Hedrick, Director of the 5th Direction, presented a special history lesson on John Sutter.
For California Indians like Hedrick (of the Mountain Maidu tribe), seeing Sutter’s name on so many city landmarks — more than a dozen in all — conjures pain. His organization works to eradicate imagery and curricula that serve to perpetuate harmful myths about Sutter and other colonizers, replacing them with a more accurate history of the Golden State.
Addressing the long-standing discrepancy between the myth and reality, Krystal Moreno notes, “The story is controlled by the teller.” Moreno grew up in Sacramento, attended Sutter Middle School, and is Native American. Yet, at the time she attended the school, she knew almost nothing of Sutter’s cultural terrorism against California’s Native peoples.
A lot has changed. Now, she works as the program manager of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, for the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.
Moreno says, “the correct story needs to be told” and notes the important role schools play in setting the record straight. She sees progress among some area school districts who are “recognizing that they have indigenous students in their schools, and they want to, you know, be able to create space for them as well.”
Cindy La Marr, a fourth-generation member of the Pit River and Paiute tribes, is less convinced that much has changed since she began her work promoting education for Indian children forty-odd years ago.
La Marr has long been a fierce advocate for Indian youth both locally and nationally. Among her top priorities is ensuring educational opportunities for Indian youth.
La Marr told me, “It’s not about you as an adult, how you felt about your glory days of school. It’s about children and especially Indian children. How can children go to a school that has a R*dskins mascot and feel good about themselves or their school?”
When my son went back to school last week, he walked the same halls and greeted the same friends and teachers as he did last year.
But signs of the de-Suttering of the school are already apparent.
And when my son and his classmates have their eighth-grade promotion ceremony next spring, their certificates will read “Miwok Middle School,” the name chosen by the committee, in honor of one of the region’s Native tribes.
As Jasjit Singh, one of the district’s Board’s members, has stated, “Our school sites sit on indigenous land. It is our duty to build inclusive and welcoming schools, and in many ways, that begins with the name.”
To be sure, the school’s name change is but one step along the way to decolonizing our minds and our communities. As Emily Mizokami put it, “it’s not going to solve systemic racism in California and United States.” Still, she said, “at least we’re taking this step. At least a kid can hold their head up high when they walk through the door, you know?”
I do know.
And so does my son.
And in the months to come, when he inevitably asks me to buy him new “Miwok Middle” schwag in the form of tees and hoodies so he can display his school spirit, I’ll gladly fork over the cash. No cringing required.
Lindsay Bennett is a human rights lawyer and freelance writer. As a lawyer, Lindsay focuses on a range of social justice issues. As a writer, Lindsay focuses mostly on essays and opinion pieces, like this piece in Ms. She and her two sons live in Northern California with their beloved Australian shepherd and a bunny named Pedro.
