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DULCE LAWRENCE: Call it acculturation, assimilation, or Americanization. Some say these are just fancy words for what amounts to cultural genocide, the wiping out of an entire minority culture within a nation. There are at least two minority cultures in Minnesota that have grown to represent a significant population in our schools-- Chicanos and Indians.

Roberto Avina of Saint Paul is the coordinator for a state migrant affairs. He told the committee there are about 3,000 migrant Mexican-American children and 5,000 permanent resident students whose native language is Spanish. He said, because they don't speak English, they are handicapped from the moment they enter school.

ROBERTO AVINA: Most of the migrants that come to Minnesota come from the Rio Grande Valley, which runs all along the line of the Rio Grande River and is right next to Mexico. It takes 36 hours by car to go from Minnesota to my hometown, which is Laredo, Texas, which is part of the United States, which is next to Mexico, with 99.10% of the people are Mexican-Americans.

And everywhere you go in that neighborhood, you speak Spanish. There's no need for English. Why? Because people from Texas go across the border to shop. People from Mexico come to the United States to work in Laredo, Texas. And so there's a continuous flow of the language and the culture. Now, here we have the migrants coming from this area. This area has bilingual, bicultural education.

And because of the employment, because of the work that is in Minnesota, they pack up their things, family and all, and they come to Minnesota between April and November. My question is, what do we have here in Minnesota to meet the needs, to bridge the gap so that they do not lose what they've learned in Texas when they come to Minnesota?

DULCE LAWRENCE: Roberto Avina stressed the need to gather more accurate data on the numbers of children who need the program, and so did Indian educators. Paul Schultz, education director of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, cited the high dropout rate, alcoholism, and suicides among Indian youths. And he blamed feelings of low self-esteem and cultural inferiority imposed by the white society. He described what happened to him when he entered seventh grade in International Falls.

PAUL SCHULTZ: Suddenly, we were no longer acceptable as Indian children, but as Indian adolescents became social threats. The problem was is that within that, we begin to get a defined role that we were expected to fill. And that role was basically with the failure kind of script, a script that said we would not amount to anything. We would not graduate. We would not successfully hold employment, that we would be lazy, that we would be non-verbal. We would be many negative things. And that was the script we were confronted with.

Now, the fair treatment in the school, I would indicate to you at that point, left also. And I can indicate to you, and I can remember very vividly sitting in classrooms, where those of us who were Indian were put in a certain segments of the classroom, certain sections, and where we were, in fact, physically beaten by teachers. This was brought to the attention of the school by our parents. We did not tell them because we were afraid of what the implications might be, that it might just subsequently result in an increase in the physical beatings. We were told that we represented nothing but a bunch of dirty, rotten, drunken chips who were on the streets of International Falls and who were contributing to the problems of an otherwise lovely, democratic community.

I don't say this to belittle or deny International Falls its positive aspects, but I say this to you to indicate the kind of feedback that was coming from many different sources in that community, that we were expected not only to ingest, but to somehow find within that feedback a kind of identity that would allow us to survive. We were not being judged as a person, who had certain characteristics, but were rather identified by characteristics, which then defined what kind of a person we would be. I can remember that I began to grow to hate being an Indian person because of its limitations.

DULCE LAWRENCE: Paul Schultz, education director of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe. Carrie Schommer of the University of Minnesota Department of Indian Studies gave the committee a sample of her native language, Dakota.

CARRIE SCHOMMER: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

DULCE LAWRENCE: Carrie Schommer of the University of Minnesota Department of Indian Studies.

The Nelson Spear bill would appropriate $900,000 for 10 bilingual-bicultural programs in the state. The first $300,000 would go for a general needs assessment, the rest for the pilot programs themselves. They'd be placed in migrant, urban, and reservation communities on the basis of applications received from school districts. And they'd be elective and open to all. If bilingual-bicultural programs accomplish their goal, all Minnesota kids and parents will have a chance to learn the real meaning of cultural pluralism. I'm Dulce Lawrence at the Capitol.