TRANSCRIPT:
Bria Suggs: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Northgate Radio. I’m Bria Suggs. In any big city, there are people who have moved here from elsewhere, like me, who moved here from Atlanta to Berkeley in July. And in any place with transplants, there’s a sense of pride among the born and raised locals. Here in the Bay, There’s a lot of talk about Bay Area natives, but we don’t hear as much about the true Bay Area natives, the Ohlone people, whose ancestors were here long before the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge or UC Berkeley.
And if we do, it’s often only in a historical context. The Ohlone, whose ancestral lands stretch from Contra Costa County to Santa Cruz. Representatives of the city of Oakland recently passed a resolution to return five acres of land to the Ohlone.
Oakland Mayor: Council Member Fife.
Council Member Fife: Aye.
Oakland Mayor: Council Member Gallo.
Council Member Gallo: Aye.
Oakland Mayor: Council Member Cobb.
Council Member Cobb: Aye.
Bria Suggs: Reporting for Northgate Radio, five journalists unpack Oakland’s [00:01:00] legislation, along with other ways institutions here are trying to repair harm to local Indigenous people. We start with reporter Laura Fitzgerald, who tells us how Oakland became the first city in the country to give back parkland to a tribe without federal recognition.
Laura Fitzgerald: It was Karina Gould, a member of the Confederated Villages of Leshon, who decided that the five acres at Sequoia Point in Joaquin Miller Park would be best suited for the proposal.
Karina Gould: No matter who you are in the Bay, if you end up at this spot now called Sequoia Point up in Joaquin Miller Park, begin to imagine what it would have looked like for thousands of years prior to anyone building here.
Laura Fitzgerald: Gould’s also co director of the Segovia Tay Land Trust, which will be the primary recipient and sole steward of the land. But the city of Oakland will still own the land, so the proposal doesn’t exactly look like what many would expect when they hear the term land back, which is a movement to return stolen land to indigenous communities and, in some cases, [00:02:00] reestablish indigenous sovereignty.
Oakland Mayor: Well, it is incredibly difficult to give back stolen land. You’d think it would be very easy, but we have made it understandably hard to not gift.
Laura Fitzgerald: Mayor Libby Schaaf says officials had to get creative. After negotiating with Karina Gould, the city settled on what they call a cultural conservation easement.
Oakland Mayor: Now a conservation easement is not a complete sale or gift. It’s not a complete transfer of ownership. But what is exciting about it is it really effectively transfers all the rights of ownership. and privileges without going through the incredibly bureaucratic morass of steps that would need to be taken through a sale.
Laura Fitzgerald: The bureaucratic morass includes an environmental review process and surplus land laws. Processes that would have taken much longer than the four years it took to [00:03:00] develop and vote on the current proposal. Part of the slowdown and complications involve federal recognition.
Oakland Mayor: The fact that our Ohlone people are not federally recognized here in Oakland definitely took certain tools off the table.
Laura Fitzgerald: So, this unique approach, a cultural conservation easement, may not seem like a true land backed proposal to some. After all, the Sogorea Te Land Trust and the Greater Ohlone Community will not actually own the land once the transfer is finalized. But that’s okay, according to Karina Gould. By retaining property rights, the Land Trust will be able to lead native habitat restoration, host outdoor education programs, and work on what the Land Trust calls rematriation.
Karina Gould: Rematriation is about bringing balance to the world again as Indigenous women’s work. Not to leave men out, but to realize that through colonization that our sacred responsibilities have been taken away. And to come back to those sacred ways of living, to take care of the land and the waters that we’re [00:04:00] from.
Laura Fitzgerald: Since the City of Oakland will retain ownership, it will still be responsible for fire and emergency management. Local city and state laws will also still apply. Other than that, Mayor Schaaf insists that the land will functionally belong to the Land Trust.
Oakland Mayor: I mean, really, the only restriction are the values that they set forth. They wanted to be clear that this land has to be used for the purposes of natural resource conservation and cultural conservation. They didn’t want to allow The McDonald’s to be built on the site one day, you know, or, you know, stereotypically people would say a casino.
Laura Fitzgerald: Not all in the Bay Area’s Indigenous community approve of how the proposal was developed. Gabriel Duncan with the Alameda Native Art Project gave public comment during Oakland’s City Council meeting on November 1st.
Gabriel Duncan: Exclusive land rights are being granted, to only one tribal group, uh, without actually consulting any of the other [00:05:00] tribal groups.
Laura Fitzgerald: Despite Sogorea Te Land Trust being the sole steward of the land at Sequoia Point, Karina Gould views the proposal as a homecoming for the greater Indigenous community in the Bay Area.
Karina Gould: Imagine that in these last 250 years, the tribe has been homeless in our own homelands. And so that means that we have not had access to actually growing our own medicines or collecting the foods that our ancestors have for thousands of years without asking from permission. This gives us the opportunity to engage in our land in a different kind of a way.
Laura Fitzgerald: Gould thinks this land back proposal could serve as a model for reparation in urban areas where there are other federally unrecognized tribes. For Northgate Radio, I’m Laura Fitzgerald.
Bria Suggs: Where is Sequoia Point anyway? Reporter Laura Isaza takes us on a journey to the five acre parcel in the Oakland Hills.[00:06:00]
Laura Isaza: To see Sequoia Point, you have to get there first. And depending on your situation, getting there is no small feat. So I’m going to take the orange line. The 39 bus. To the intersection of Joaquin Miller Road and Crockett Place. 0. 4 miles to Sequoia Point. In most cases, driving is the fastest option. But not everyone has access to a car.
According to the National Equity Atlas, 12 percent of households in the San Francisco metro area don’t own one. So to see how long it would take, I timed this trip to Sequoia Point on public transit. We’re reporting from UC Berkeley, so I started at the downtown Berkeley BART at 9am. And that was the sound of me missing my train.
How many people actually take public transit to Joaquin Miller Park? Nonprofit Friends of Joaquin Miller Park asked that very question in a survey launched in March of 2022. So far, it found that fewer than 1 percent take a bus. Julie Mills, the [00:07:00] development chair, said this makes sense.
Julie Mills: There is a bus that goes, but it only goes there once an hour, so…
Laura Isaza: I learned that the hard way. Oh, shoot. Okay. The 39 bus departed early 15 minutes ago. So, is this right? The next one is at 1020? It’s, it’s almost 9:30, that’s in a long time. And so, I waited, and waited, and waited. And finally, oh the 39, it’s here! It’s early. Morale had returned. Good, how are you? 25 stops later, I’m ready to hike up the half mile trail to Sequoia Point.
There used to be another bus line, the 339. that went much closer to Sequoia Point, but it was discontinued in 2020 due to falling ridership. AC Transit declined an interview to help us learn more about why. It’s nice to be surrounded by trees, breathing [00:08:00] air that smells like pine and eucalyptus. After about 15 minutes of hiking uphill over tree roots and rocks, I’ve made it.
It is now 10:52 am so nearly two hours later. At the end of my track, I reach a flat. Open area scattered with orange leaves, bottle caps, and the remnants of a fire encircled by stone walls that are graffitied and falling away in places.
Dale Risden: And this is a difficult spot because it does tend to get a lot of trash because it’s flat and we have a culture now, right now, of dumping.
Laura Isaza: That’s Dale Risden, Chair of Friends of Joaquin Miller Park. Several times a month, Dale joins a group of volunteers to pick up trash in the park. And after every clean up day, Dale says, the trash is back. And litter isn’t the only issue.
Dale Risden: One of the biggest problems is invasive species. Um, we just planted the wrong trees.
We’re seeing [00:09:00] lots of change. We’re seeing lots of the pine trees die. They’re just not making it through the drought. Um, probably within Joaquin Miller Park, 20 percent of the forest is dead.
Laura Isaza: Sequoia Point didn’t always look like this. Thousands of years ago, this area of the park would have been teeming with redwoods, some towering over 300 feet high and stretching out more than 30 feet in diameter.
Sunlight flickering through pine needles, branches catching incoming fog from the bay. Water rolling down to the roots below to a subterranean ecosystem even older than the trees themselves.
Karina Gould: Really cut down all the redwood trees that were upped and upped on hills.
Laura Isaza: That’s Karina Gould again, the co director of the Segorea Te Land Trust, speaking at an Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee meeting in September.
The Land Trust has a vision to turn Sequoia Point into a vibrant, thriving area. They want to bring back native plants, remove the litter, and have people from [00:10:00] Oakland and all over the Bay come together to celebrate Indigenous cultures. Karina Gould is hoping to construct a ceremonial structure on the site, inspired by a traditional Ohlone basket design.
Karina Gould: What we hope to do as the Sogorea Te Land Trust, um, is to re engage, um, not just the tribe and not just Indigenous people, to really talk about how do we, uh, take care and steward the lands that we have set aside.
Laura Isaza: There’s still a long road ahead. invasive species, ensuring compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the trash dumping problem, not to mention, it’ll take at least six to nine months to rezone the site for any construction to take place, according to Mayor Libby Schaaf’s policy staff.
After years of talks with the city of Oakland, there’s still one final uphill push. As for me, I’m glad someone’s picking me up and saving me the bus ride back. For [00:11:00] Northgate Radio, I’m Laura Isaza.
Bria Suggs: So now that we’ve ventured out to Sequoia Point, we’re going to take a look at who makes up the group of people so often referred to as Ohlone.
Desiree Munoz: I’m Desiree Munoz, I’m a member of the ……
Bria Suggs: Desiree Munoz gave the land acknowledgement at Berkeley’s Indigenous People’s Day this year.
This Who are the Ohlone? Before white settlers came to California, there were over 17, 000 indigenous people living in the Bay. Despite a past of colonization and genocide, their descendants are still here, fighting for visibility and recognition. [00:12:00] Although Ohlone is the most common name used to refer to the indigenous people of the Bay, it’s a fluid term.
That’s according to Abel Gomez. He’s an assistant professor of Native American and indigenous spiritual traditions at Texas Christian University.
Abel Gomez: So it’s really important that when we talk about Ohlone peoples, we understand that we’re really talking about complex and diverse groups of people.
Bria Suggs: Gomez says there were once 58 distinct tribes in this region.
Abel Gomez: There was never a single unified Ohlone tribe or Ohlone nation in the past, and that is true to this day as well. Some identify with the term Ohlone broadly, others may identify more specifically with their linguistic territory. So Chicheno Ohlone in the East Bay, for example.
Bria Suggs: Gomez says others may identify with their tribal government, like members of the Amo Mutsun tribal band, or with their ancestral village sites like the confederated villages of Leshan.
California was home to more than one [00:13:00] million Native Americans before Spanish settlers arrived in 1769. By the 1920s, it’s estimated that fewer than 20, 000 were alive. This significant loss of life occurred during three waves of colonization. Spanish, Mexican, and American.
Abel Gomez: In the 18th and 19th century, the Spanish established the California mission system along the California coast. And the mission system had two related goals. First, to settle and claim land.
Bria Suggs: And second, to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism. This was done with force. Indigenous people were whipped if they spoke their languages. If they fled the missions, they were hunted down and returned by Spanish soldiers. They were stripped of their cultural identities and called Castaños. Spanish for people from the coast. White anthropologists later morphed that into Costanoan. And nothing improved when California became the 31st state in 1850.
Abel Gomez: With that [00:14:00] came a wave of state sanctioned genocide. The historian Benjamin Madley estimates 9, 000 to upwards of 16, 000 killings by U. S. soldiers, volunteer militias, and vigilante groups, for which the federal and state government paid $1.5 million.
Bria Suggs: The state was trying to erase the existence of Indigenous Californians in a number of ways. Some of the ancestors of today’s Ohlone, the Verona Band of Alameda County, were once federally recognized.
The name Verona came from a train station in the area. The tribe was stripped of its federal recognition in 1927. And when that happened, it was like they no longer existed to the local, State and federal government.
Abel Gomez: The particular histories, as I mentioned of genocide have made it really challenging for survivors of the California mission system in particular to regain recognition status.
Alexii Sagona: I remember being told I [00:15:00] was Ohlone from a young age. Later in my teens, I learned more about Amah Mutsun.
Bria Suggs: The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of Ohlone has been fighting for decades to regain its federal recognition. 24 year old Alexii Sagona is a member. His ancestors were survivors of Mission Santa Cruz.
Alexii Sagona: Amah Mutsun is a politically reorganized community that really came together in the 20th century following us not being recognized.
Bria Suggs: He’s currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley studying indigenous land access and co management.
Alexii Sagona: I became aware of my tribal identity and what the community was working on when I was about 18 or 19 years old.
I then reached out to tribal leadership who informed me about some amazing programs that our community was doing through this organization called the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, which is our non profit. And so in the summer of 2018, I [00:16:00] was a native steward, which meant I was on the land near Año Nuevo State Park in Quito State Valley in Pescadero, California, learning ethnobotany and learning language.
So it was sort of a holistic immersion into culture that was really impactful for me and made me want to pursue, you know, a graduate degree looking at these sorts of programs.
Bria Suggs: The concept of identity can be a tricky subject for Indigenous Americans. Being openly Native wasn’t always safe. For some, it was easier to pass for another race or ethnicity than to be themselves.
Alexii Sagona: What I’ve heard from my grandparents generation is that they were always told to never say that they were Indian and always say they were Mexican. And so that sort of suppression of identity, uh, meant us making tamales on Christmas Eve and other things like that, and speaking more Spanish. So, my traditions are just mixed, generally.
Bria Suggs: As you [00:17:00] heard, the people native to the Bay refer to themselves by many names. But, if they’re going to use one identifier to be grouped under, that label is Ohlone. The exact origins of the term are in dispute, but what isn’t is that its roots are from an indigenous language, not the language of settler colonialists.
Reporter Max Harrison Caldwell brings us another story about names, and what things should or should not be called.
Max Harrison Caldwell: What is this building called?
Student 1: The Art Practice and Anthropology Building or the Anthropology and Art Practice Building. The Arts and Anthropology Building. Uh. The anthro building? I always call it anthro.
Bria Suggs: Max stopped students on a recent Monday afternoon outside a cream colored building on the south side of Berkeley’s campus.
Student 2: I believe it’s named after the anthropologist, the gross anthropologist.
Bria Suggs: That anthropologist is Alfred Kroeber, the founder of UC Berkeley’s anthropology department. He [00:18:00] spent most of his career studying the indigenous people of California.
The building in question was once named after him, but not since January 2021. Here’s Max.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Alfred Kroeber was particularly interested in Native American languages. Here’s a recording he made of a Yahi man named Ishi.
Kroeber housed Ishi in a San Francisco museum. And when Ishi died, Kroeber sent his preserved brain to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remained until the year 2000. Berkeley linguistics professor Andrew Garrett, who’s writing a book about Kroeber, says Ishii didn’t have any agency in the decision to go to San Francisco.
Andrew Garrett: And it’s pretty clear that he was taken there for research reasons. For the first seven months of his almost five years there, he did participate in weekly, um, cultural demonstrations of flintknapping and maybe arrow making and bow making. For the rest of his time, he was just a kind of regular employee.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Who [00:19:00] lived at the museum. UC Berkeley’s Building Name Review Committee weighed this relationship and nearly 600 public comments in making its decision to hammer Kroeber’s name off of the Anthropology building in January 2021. Public comments described Kroeber as a symbol of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy.
Andrew Garrett: He’s the most prominent Californianist anthropologist, and anthropology and indigenous people have had this really… negative relationship based on many damaging things that anthropology in general has done.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Many of those same public comments mention the damage Kroeber did to the Muwekma Ohlone when he declared them extinct in a 1925 book.
University of New Mexico anthropology professor Les Field says that statement had enormous consequences. There was an explosion of construction and development following the Second World War.
Les Field: Major highways and expansion of highways throughout the Bay Area. Housing developments, [00:20:00] shopping centers, and malls.
So this enormous expansion. And the archaeologists the developers hired took Kroeber’s word as law. In the process of doing all that construction, a great many remains are uncovered of the Ohlone ancestors by cultural resource management companies. And because of Kroeber’s statement, that enables their behavior to either destroy those remains, cover them up, sell them, or in many, many ways, neglect to fulfill any responsibility to the descendants.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Both Field and Garrett backed the unnaming of Kroeber Hall. And say Kroeber’s legacy is complicated. Garrett says Kroeber was much more active in supporting indigenous rights than other anthropologists of the time. In 1952, for example, he went to federal court to support the land rights of indigenous Californians.
Back on [00:21:00] campus, it was a struggle to figure out who was responsible for renaming buildings.
Charles Hirschkind: I, uh, I am not in touch with them and actually I do not know who they are.
Max Harrison Caldwell: That’s Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology department. I spoke with him in his office, in the building currently referred to as the Anthropology and Art Practice Building.
Charles Hirschkind: My worry is that we’ll become the Wells Fargo Building, you know, or the Chase Bank Building, when I do think a Native American name would probably be much more, a much better name.
Max Harrison Caldwell: It turned out the committee that decided to unname the building is also not involved in renaming. But after navigating several more layers of bureaucracy, I found James Ford, Chief of Staff at the University’s Division of Academic Planning.
James Ford: So with Kroeber, that process has not officially… Begun.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Ford explained that, when the building was unnamed, the committees involved decided that the campus community should take about two years just to ruminate on a potential new name. After that, the school would send out a [00:22:00] request for renaming proposals.
Well, it’s been about two years, but
James Ford: My understanding is that we’ll revisit the conversation at the beginning of the academic year next year.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Ford says the two year plan was just a guess, but that renaming the anthropology building is definitely on the agenda for a planned meeting next fall with university leadership.
One crucial question, what do Native American students on Berkeley’s campus think?
Alexii Sagona: I would rather look at what anthropology is doing for indigenous peoples more than what their names are.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Graduate student Alexi Sigona, who we heard from earlier, belongs to the Amah Mutsun Ohlone tribe.
Alexii Sagona: If they’re pushing for rematriation, repatriation, and doing really good work with indigenous peoples, then I think that can speak for itself.
Max Harrison Caldwell: He mentioned one anthro professor who he said was doing just that, saying he’s changed the way archaeologists work with tribal nations.
Alexii Sagona: I can speak personally that I have great relations with uh, Professor Lightfoot and his whole team. They really helped [00:23:00] us revitalize our culture. Unfortunately, you know, I wish it didn’t have to be like that, that we had to rely on collaborative archaeology to bring our knowledge systems back. But, here we are today. We want to return to the land and we want to learn our past traditional stewardship practices.
Max Harrison Caldwell: Sagona is wary of naming buildings after people in general.
Alexii Sagona: I feel like every time you name it after a person, five years later you realize that person was, you know, really problematic or something.
Max Harrison Caldwell: But he says the interim name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue either.
Alexii Sagona: Anthropology and Art Practice Building is a mouthful.
Max Harrison Caldwell: For Northgate Radio, I’m Max Harrison Caldwell.
Bria Suggs: The UC campus isn’t the only place in Berkeley that’s seeking to repair harm. While Oakland may be the first city in California to give land back to an indigenous community, neighboring Berkeley was the first city in the country to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.
Andy Kelly: The city of Berkeley recognizes that the community we live in.
Bria Suggs: Reporting on the city of Berkeley’s newest effort to repair damage done to the native people of the Bay Area is Jenna Harns.
Andy Kelly: [00:24:00] Speaking Ohlone people.
Jenna Harns: It’s a land acknowledgement statement. The newest addition to the Berkeley City Council meetings.
You’re listening to the first recitation from November 3rd, 2022.
Andy Kelly: As we begin our city counseling tonight, we acknowledge and honor the original inhabitants of Berkeley, the documented 5, 000 year history of a vibrant community at the West Berkeley Shell Mound and the Ohlone people who continue to reside in the East Bay.
Jenna Harns: While a land back agreement may seem new, many are familiar with a land acknowledgement statement where institutions work alongside tribes to bring awareness to the original stewards of the land. Andy Kelly is the current Berkeley City Council Commissioner. That was him reading Berkeley’s new land acknowledgement statement.
Andy Kelly: These things are secret, right? I mean, at the county, we do the Pledge of Allegiance. At the city, we haven’t historically done that, but we now do the land acknowledgement. And as you’re sitting there as an elected official thinking about how the property that we regulate, the land that we live on is historically the home of the Ohlone people [00:25:00] and we need to do better to acknowledge and recognize that. That’s a very meaningful thing. It brings that consciousness should those issues come up.
Jenna Harns: Berkeley Councilwoman Sophie Hahn wrote the land acknowledgement proposal with Andy Kelly.
Sophie Hahn: A lot of people do not think on a daily basis about the fact that we are on stolen land. And I’m hopeful that that is a stepping stone to a greater awareness of the fact that we live on this land as a result of of a genocidal set of policies that sought and almost did wipe out a culture and a people.
McKalee Steen: Um, I think it’s also important with land acknowledgement statements to not just frame it in the past.
Jenna Harns: McKalee Steen is a Berkeley grad student and a part of the Native American student division on campus.
McKalee Steen: But to also acknowledge the present and future of tribal sovereignty, um, [00:26:00] and then I think more and more. It’s great to also see a call to action with land acknowledgements, to not just stop at acknowledging the land, but seeing how you can partner with, or work with, or support the local tribal community.
Jenna Harns: McKaylee has experience developing land acknowledgement statements and is aware of the critique that they’re performative and don’t go far enough to repair the damage done to Indigenous communities.
McKalee Steen: I think people really want to be able to just like check a box, like, okay, I did that. I’m my conscience is clear. And I hope that’s not what people take it as. I think that land acknowledgements are important. If you can’t acknowledge the land that you’re on and who were the stewards or are the stewards of this land, then we really have no hope for all of the other goals we want to achieve.
So I definitely. agree that they can be performative, but hope that people will take those extra steps so that they aren’t.
Andy Kelly: Trying to even figure out something that’s meaningful [00:27:00] is not impossible, but is of itself just a really big challenge and a really big thing to grasp your head around.
Jenna Harns: That’s Andy Kelly again. He’s definitely looking at Oakland’s land back agreement for inspiration.
Andy Kelly: It’s a really important step in a direction. But I think many of us would like to take. And so we are definitely looking very closely at how Oakland was able to structure their program and how our city might be able to copy that.
The Ohlone people are present members of
Jenna Harns: until then, Berkeley’s new land acknowledgement statement will be read at each meeting.
Andy Kelly: The city of Berkeley will continue to build relationships with the John tribe and other Ohlone tribes. and to create meaningful actions that uphold the intention of this land acknowledgement.
Thank you. So we’ll now proceed to the next order.
Jenna Harns: For Northgate Radio, I’m Jenna Hards.
Bria Suggs: So what comes next? What else will the city of Oakland do to keep repairing the harms done to the indigenous people [00:28:00] here? And will other cities like Berkeley adopt Oakland’s model as a blueprint? No one knows, but the East Bay does have a history of influencing national discourse. Small as the five acres in Sequoia Point may be, the land trust can now start restoring indigenous plants and practices.
Maybe planting a few seeds doesn’t seem like much, but the park’s ecology depends on it. And just as every redwood begins as a sprout, small scale ideas can grow into nationwide movements.
This show was produced by Laura Fitzgerald, Jenna Hards, Max Harrison Caldwell, Laura Isaza, and me, Bria Suggs. Supervising editors are Shereen Marisol Muraji, [00:29:00] Ethan Tovin Lindsey, and Catherine Stier Martinez. Special thanks to our Northgate Radio colleagues, Holly Burns, Annetta Felix, Maggie Fuller, Quagga Ghani, Maria Zuffer, and Jean Zamora.
Thanks for listening, and once again, I’m your host, Bria Suggs.
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