Indigenous Land (rights, stewardship, futures)
Discourses on Reparative & Regenerative Allyship
I wrote and presented these opening remarks for an event at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, Xučyun, Unceded and Ancestral Ohlone Land on October 8, 2019.

While first acknowledging our presence on unceded and ancestral Ohlone land, I wanted to begin with a few slides and commentary to set the context for tonight’s panel, the content of which will situate around indigenous land rights, stewardship, and questions for the future.

The subtitle to tonight’s event is “discourses on reparative and rengerative allyship”. This is mainly set to be inclusive; to recognize my position here, and to invite you all here as well, to witness.
Ancestral trauma is the belief that we hold memory in our bodies and in the ways we respond to the world. If these vessels of matter that we call our bodies can pass on something as deeply grounded as grief, then our lands too must be reflections of the past — conflicts, care, mistakes, unions, repair. As we ponder in our ivory tower the way we use land to increase health and economic wellbeing, we must always consider this implicit hauntology; that we are sowing a future on someone else’s past.
America’s institutionalized racism shows up in planning history in some of its most insidious ways. It is etched in our built environment and it scars our societies. If we are to shift the paradigm, it is requisite that we consider reparations as part of that movement. As future leaders in these decision-making roles, it is also our responsibility to help shift consciousness away from settler-colonialism, the granddaddy marker of the patriarchal capitalist system.

For millennia before Europeans settled in North America, the indigenous peoples of California flourished with vibrant cultures, rich traditional knowledge handed down through the generations, and were the original stewards of the land. In California alone, there were 80–100 ethnolinguistic groups.
The territorial claims of colonial powers like the United States are rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery, which authorized European/Christian colonization of non-European/non-Christian lands and peoples. It was codified into law in the late 1800s and became the lynchpin of property law, wherein lands were legally stolen and patriated during Manifest Destiny, ultimately justifying the supremacy of extractive, capitalist industry over indigenous uses, including spiritual and cultural connections. This system effectively redefined land as an object to be conquered and exploited; not preserved, protected or maintained for future generations as traditional tribal land stewardship had done and continues to do. This marked a turning point in history wherein any subsequent federal tribal law would be founded on a legal framework that legitimized the conquest and exploitation of Native lands, setting up for failure tribal fights against business interests, as was the case in Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
The devastating effects of settler colonialism including genocide, forced removal from lands, and cultural assimilation on both tribal peoples and their environments has resulted in disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, crime, and disease.

In spite of tremendous challenges, tribal communities in our state are incredibly resilient, continuing to hand down invaluable cultural knowledge and rich traditions, which continue to thrive in Native American communities across our state today. There are 110 federally recognized tribes and 81 groups seeking federal recognition. There are about 720,000 AI/AN citizens in California, about 12% of all AI/AN live in this state. Only 3% live on reservation or Rancherias.

We also need to acknowledge the complicated history of academic institutions, including UC, in their relationships with tribes, often extractive by nature.
The Morrill Act of 1862 established land grant universities, transferring acreage left over from the development of the Transcontinental Railway to state governments to help fund the creation of public universities. The goal was to provide higher learning to the children of settlers, farmers, and frontier prospectors, not just to the offspring of the railroad barons. It is rarely mentioned who occupied the land before it was “left over” from railroad expansion. Land grant status was not conferred to Native American colleges until 1994.
As Sharon Stein argues in her article on a colonial history of higher education, while indigenous dispossession in the decades prior to the Morrill Act was not specifically enacted so as to fund land-grant institutions, the resulting accumulation of lands by the US government was a prerequisite for the legislation. That is, the accumulation of indigenous and black lands, lives and labors provided the conditions of possibility to establish many public institutions that continue to be both dependent on and vulnerable to privatized accumulation. If capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups, racism and colonialism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires.

So how can we disrupt this accumulation? Not only can we and should we be thinking in terms of reparations, but we can think about how our institutions can support regenerative possibilities for those who have been systematically dispossessed. When we talk about land and urban-ecology, we can regard indigenous knowledge for what it truly is — an answer to ill or collapsing systems, societies, and environments.
Winona LaDuke sums this up with her argument that native societies’ knowledge surpasses the scientific and social knowledge of the dominant society in its ability to provide information and a management style for environmental planning.
Traditional ecological knowledge shows up in many colonized ways that can and should be decolonized: natural resource conservation, prescribed fire management, recycling, permaculture — one could even argue dense development was pioneered by native communities.

This is a screenshot from a short film on the Green New Deal, narrated by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
This imagined scene shows construction workers preparing lands for renewable energy projects consulting with the indigenous community before breaking ground. This type of stakeholder engagement is in process to a certain extent, especially with federally-recognized tribes, but I would argue that until the environmental movement restores an indigenous framework that traditionally values the environment for its spiritual and cultural essence, it will never fully succeed in creating legal, economic, or social frameworks that recognize the inherent value of preserving and protecting our lands, water, and air.

Recognizing that justice is black, brown and indigenous, I believe, is the first step our communities and our country as a whole needs to take. The path to liberation begins with acknowledgment but it doesn’t end there. So how can we address the problems that imperialism continues to create? First, recognize that indigenous, black, and brown communities have organized collective resistance since conquest began. And then, to learn from this resistance in ways that would not reproduce colonial relations. As Stein puts it, “we would have to disinvest from our perceived entitlements, certainties and supremacies and face our own roles in the violence of accumulation.”
References
Forester, John. Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes (2009).
LaDuke, Winona. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures. Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy (1994).
Nagle, Mary Kathryn. Environmental Justice and Tribal Sovereignty: Lessons from Standing Rock. The Yale Law Journal Vol 127 (Jan 20, 2018).
Stein, Sharon. A Colonial history of the higher education present: rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education (2017).