In my life, I have seen my mother shift effortlessly into the role of caretaker many times. When her mother was in the hospital, and taking care of the family after the death. When my uncle suddenly suffered a heart attack - and then again when the perscription heart medicine he was taking made him begin to lose his vision. And for my dad, with his various medications and surgeries.
I think we all have our stories of caretaking, whether it it ourselves or another - we each have first-hand witnessed this love of care, being passed one to another. In our Indigenous communities, it can be common.
But what does this have to do with the state of California?
IndigenousNetwork was able to attend this week’s American Community Media briefing on caregiving in California, co hosted with the California Department of Aging. The session was framed as a salute to National Family Caregivers Month, but the conversation reached far beyond one calendar observance. It sketched a picture of a care system held together by unpaid family labor, strained public resources, and quiet personal transformation. For Indigenous outlets that cover elders, sovereignty and health disparities, the briefing offered a roadmap for how to report caregiving as both a policy issue and a deeply human story.
Moderator Sandy Close opened with a reminder that caregiving is both universal and widely misunderstood. Millions of people drive elders to appointments, manage medications or wire money home yet never claim the word caregiver. This lack of language has real consequences. Without the label, they miss the services and protections meant for them. California officials estimate that about 7 million residents are family caregivers who provide most of the long term care in the state, much of it unpaid and uncounted. Their experience mirrors national figures that place the number of family and friend caregivers above 60 million, many of whom are caring “around the clock” in their own homes. johnahartford.org+1
California Department of Aging Director Susan DeMarois came to the work through her own family. She cared for a father with heart disease who lived nearby and a mother with dementia in rural northern California. Those experiences now sit behind a statewide blueprint, the Master Plan for Aging, which treats caregiving as one of its five core goals. DeMarois was blunt about who holds the system together. Unpaid family and friend caregivers, she said, provide most of the long term care in the state. “We honor all caregivers,” she told reporters, “if you are providing occasional or intermittent support, or if you are providing round the clock care in the home, we recognize all of you.” Her department leans on a network of Area Agencies on Aging and Caregiver Resource Centers and is trying to build a “No Wrong Door” approach so people are not bounced from office to office while they are already overwhelmed. That idea should sound familiar to tribal and urban Native programs that are trying to stitch together federal, state, and tribal dollars so elders are not stranded in jurisdictional gaps.
The human cost came into focus through two storytellers. Dan Salinger is a semi retired attorney in Elk Grove who now cares full time for his 93 year old father, Ed, who lives with dementia. The shift came slowly, then all at once. A familiar room suddenly seemed “like a new room” to his father. A ripped cashier’s check sat forgotten in a wallet. A bruise on his father’s face appeared with no memory of a fall. Eventually his dad moved into the family home and Salinger’s days reorganized around bathroom trips, meals, and night time supervision. The work is brutal and he does not pretend otherwise. “Caregiving is the most difficult thing I’ve ever undertaken in my entire life,” he said, “but it’s also one of the most rewarding things.” He described himself as a different person now, more patient and more connected to his siblings, and he called caregiving “humanity” rather than a private failure.
If Salinger’s story mapped a gradual decline, Alma Valencia’s story focused on the years when nobody would name what was happening. A former technical designer, she now cares for her mother, Arminda, who lives with frontotemporal dementia. The early signs looked like unpaid bills, new visitors who seemed unsafe, and growing tension inside a big extended family. Doctors first wrote it off as depression and alcoholism. Only later did the dementia diagnosis arrive, long after Valencia had already sold her mother’s house, become power of attorney, and moved her into her own home while raising two children and trying to hold on to a career. She now identifies as part of the “sandwich generation” and has since left the fashion industry, qualifying through In Home Supportive Services to be paid for a fraction of the care she was already doing. “Caregiving is hard, but not impossible,” she said. On dementia, she added a line that resonated with the chat and with this moment in Indigenous news. “Until there’s a cure, there’s community.”
The system side of that community was sketched by Sonoma County’s Adult and Aging Division director, Paul Dunaway, and USC gerontologist Dr Donna Benton, who runs the USC Family Caregiver Support Center and Los Angeles Caregiver Resource Center. Dunaway pointed to a quote he credits to Rosalynn Carter. “There are only four kinds of people in this world,” he said. “Those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” Benton, who has worked with dementia caregivers for more than thirty years and sits on California’s Master Plan for Aging advisory bodies, warned that policy still assumes short, acute caregiving. The reality is closer to a decade or more of complex home care handled by smaller families who are also working and who must now manage hospital level tasks at home. Both pushed for early planning, not crisis scrambling, and both noted that many services do not screen on income or immigration status, a critical detail for mixed status families and Native households that cross state and tribal lines.
For Indigenous communities, the briefing did not introduce a new issue so much as clarify an old one. Native elders face higher rates of chronic illness and dementia. Many live in remote or under resourced areas. Long term care facilities are often scarce or culturally out of step. In that environment, caregiving is not an exception. It is standard practice, often carried by daughters, aunties, and grandchildren who do not call themselves caregivers and who therefore never get told about respite, support groups, or legal help. The California officials and caregivers on this call were not speaking specifically about Native communities, but the parallels are obvious. The same invisibility that keeps caregivers from naming their role in Elk Grove or Los Angeles shows up in tribal housing, HUD units, and urban Native apartments across the country.
The briefing closed with a question that every Indigenous newsroom can carry into future coverage. How do we treat caregiving not as a private problem, but as shared infrastructure. DeMarois argued that families should learn the landscape of services before crisis hits. Dunaway called for a shift from independence to “aging in place together.” Benton urged families to advocate early for the care they want and to see caregiving as a collective responsibility. Salinger told people not to be afraid of stepping into the role. Valencia returned to community. For IndigenousNetwork, the takeaway is straightforward. Our coverage already ties land, language, and sovereignty to elders. The next step is to report directly on the labor that keeps those elders at home, to name caregivers as central actors in our stories, and to track how policy does or does not meet them where they are.
