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People get tired of reading books.
-Vera Rocha, member of the Gabrielino Indian Band
It's not Anthropology 101.
When students arrive for UCLA Extension's "Prologue to the 1990 Los Angeles Arts Festival," they won't be sitting in a lecture hall. Instead, the course-which begins Saturday as an adjunct to September's Los Angeles Festival-will meet at the First Unitarian Church on 8th Street, the first church to provide sanctuary for Salvadoran refugees.
And their first assignment is not a term paper, but to take part in the blessing ritual of California's Gabrielino Indians. The ceremony involves a group leader passing an abalone shell filled with burning white sage among the participants. The Gabrielinos believe that inhaling the smoke drives out evil and carries the prayers to heaven; the abalone shell, "the oldest living thing in the ocean," represents the oneness of all living things.
The blessing opens "The Culture of Relocation," the first in a three-part course designed to examine Los Angeles' emerging ethnic groups outside the dry realm of textbooks and academic research. Later classes will take students to a Korean Buddhist temple and to Maverick's Flat, an Afro-American nightclub in the Crenshaw District credited as "the birthplace of disco." The course, which was offered to 300 to 400 L.A. Unified School District teachers earlier through the Los Angeles Festival, is now being offered to the general public through UCLA Extension.
"You can't always (learn) things from a library, or from a third person," said Phyllis Chang, education coordinator for the Los Angeles Festival. "We've eliminated the third person . . . or the specialist who gets up there and says: `I have studied Latino culture, and here are my findings.' It is...