Transcript: CORRINA GOULD on Settler Responsibility and Reciprocity /208
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Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Corrina Gould, who is the spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone. She was born and raised in Oakland, CA, the territory of Huichin and is an activist that has worked on preserving and protecting the ancient burial sites of her ancestors in the Bay Area for decades.
Corrina Gould “Because there are many people that can't go back home, but it's then our responsibility to learn what is your responsibility then on someone else's homeland?”
Ayana Young Corrina is the Co-founder and a Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native run grassroots organization and co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women’s community organization working to return land to Indigenous stewardship in San Francisco’s East Bay.
Well, Corrina, thank you so much for being with us. We are so honored to have you on the show today. So welcome.
Corrina Gould Thank you so much, Ayana. I'm so happy to be here with you today.
Ayana Young Well, I read your bio, but before we begin, I'd like to ask if you'd like to introduce yourself further.
Corrina Gould [Corrina gives an introduction in Chochenyo]
It's wonderful to be with you today, relatives, I'm happy to be here in my ancestral territory. I'm also a mom and a grandma. And so my children and my grandchildren also reside in our traditional territory. And I'm just happy to be able to welcome folks from all over the place that are going to be listening in today. And it's great to have this conversation with you today.
Ayana Young Thank you, Corrina. Well, there are so many threads of your work that I'm yearning to delve deeply into. But to begin, I’d like to honor Ohlone territory as a place of tremendous abundance. Prior to development and resource extraction, Ohlone territory was filled with oak savannas, ancient bison, fertile salmon runs, and roaming grasslands. Can you share with us the historical ecology of this territory, and how that memory shapes what Sogorea Te envisions for Ohlone land and Indigenous stewardship?
Corrina Gould Well, thank you so much. I, you know, I grew up here in an urban setting and my traditional territory, and I look at the land, I think, in a different way. And I think that I really started looking at the land in a different way, when we started doing the walks to the shell mounds in the Bay Area. And most folks don't even know what shell mounds are, or I think that we have done a great job in the last 20 years explaining to people that these historic monuments of our ancestors, these burial sites and village sites that were along the coast, where freshwater met salt water, and to imagine the Bay Area in a different kind of way.
You know, thousands of people from all different walks of life come to the Bay Area, different languages, different cultures, which makes the Bay Area really a vibrant place in terms of cultures right now. But underneath all of those cultures, and the buildings lie the ancestral remains of my ancestors. Because of development most of them have been destroyed. And when you look at the Bay Area, I love the way you talked about the abundance, and I was in a conversation with a nephew a few years back, he talked about how the songs of our ancestors were always songs of abundance, different from different tribes that come from different places. Maybe people that had harsher winters their song, some of their songs, may be about “Please help us through this harsh time.” But the Bay Area, if we imagine that this place has only been touched over the last 250 years, so it's really a small time in history that we see anything in the Bay Area. These buildings have been here for a very, very short time, other people being on these lands for a very short time. And so if we can imagine the different waterways in the Bay Area, probably, you know, anywhere between 30 and 50 different streams and creeks that used to run through here. Freshwater was abundant. So I like to think if we can imagine the Bay Area in a different way today, we see hundreds of thousands of people here and we see thousands of people without homes, and we see hunger. And 250 years ago, it was not even a concept, hunger or people without a home, and that there was enough fresh water here. So every creek in the Bay Area, you could drink out of. And so I can imagine that my ancestors lived in this paradise, you know, not that long ago.
But I also imagine that today, as we're looking at climate justice and climate catastrophe happening, that it would not take that much for us to reverse this. There were acorns here that were in abundance, but also seeds and the vast amounts of plains that were filled with grasses and wildflowers that we would use the seeds to eat. And so there was just so much that was here in the Bay Area, and the landscape has changed in a short period of time. But I imagine that if we went back to a way of living closer to the land, that the land could still hold us and sustain us in a way that we would not see homelessness, we would not see hunger in the Bay Area. But I think that human beings have gotten away from having a connection to the land. And that's really why we're in the place that we're in today.
Ayana Young. Yeah, absolutely. I love to imagine through you what the place of your ancestors was, and that it's still there. It's still underneath the buildings, like you were saying, and yeah, it's a really beautiful vision to think that it could come back and I believe that as well.
Well now, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is the first urban Indigenous-led land trust in the country, and I’d really like to focus on Indigenous land reclamation in urbanized areas, like the Bay Area, where for the past two centuries the land has been developed beyond ancestral recognition, and this development is expected to continue amidst ongoing speculative investing and as people continue to migrate into the Bay Area. So can you talk about land reclamation in context to living in a city, and the power this reclamation holds for tribes, like your own, who are simultaneously on ancestral and urbanized territory? How are cultural lifeways still ever present amongst the cityscape?
Corrina Gould That's a great question. And I like that word, “reclamation,” and we use the word “rematriation,” right. And I really love that because we're not only the first urban Indigenous land, we're the first Indigenous women-led land trust. And I think it's important that it's women that are leading the forefront of bringing back our historical, our lands back to a way of being. I think it is really important that we talk about what does rematriation mean, because it really is a part of where we're trying to do with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust was really created because we're a non-federally recognized tribe and we had been doing work in the Bay Area for years - bringing our ancestral remains out of the universities and institutions and putting them back into the land. But as a non-federally recognized tribe, we have no land base. But it's important for us to also talk about the fact that this is an inner tribal women led land trust. And the reason is because of the policies of the United States government forced relocation into cities, that we decided that we're working with women that have been here for three and four generations now that have been moved into urban settings and needed places where they are able to have ceremony, able to be in touch with the land and grow traditional foods and to have medicines available to grandchildren that have not ever been back home to their own territories. And what does it mean for us, as the Indigenous people of this land, to take care of the guests in our territory.
But rematriation is really about maintaining and passing on to every new generation, the languages, ceremonies, customs and laws of our people, and maintaining the sacred ties to our ancestral lands and keeping within original instructions given to us by the Creator. And so because of colonization, and the way that it happened here in California, it’s different than any place else in the country because of the genocidal policies that happen with the Catholic Church and the chattel slavery that happened within those missions. And then when the new Mexican government happened, our tribe, tribal people were also enslaved by them and then by the United States government.
So when we look at that whole thing and the disruption of family ties with each other, and the loss of land and the loss of our ceremonial ways, it really is Sogorea Te’s job and work to rematriate the way I talked about, to bring back those ceremonial songs, the languages, the places. And we've been blessed to receive the first quarter acre of our territory back to us a few years ago, and working with people that are now in our lands. And the reason it's so interesting is that this is all tied to other Indigenous places.
The reason that land came back to us, besides doing the hard work of doing the education, was that people began to hear that there is something that's more meaningful when people are doing work, people were moved by the work of our relatives at Standing Rock. And people from all over the world went to Standing Rock and helped to stand for the water. And when folks from the Bay Area did that, these young people that run Planting Justice had two acres of land on our territory and they were running an organic nursery there. But what they did was, they were so moved by the work that was happening in Standing Rock, they actually went to the elders there, and asked what they should do when they came home. And the elders told them that they should work with the First Nation’s people on whose land they're on. And they really took it to heart and they set up a meeting with Johnella LaRose and myself, and Johnella is the co-founder of both Indian People Organizing for Change and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, and we've been doing work together for over two decades.
Planting Justice offered us this quarter acre of land on the two acre piece of property they were using to give it back to us to create a cultural easement so that we could have land back. And the way these ancestors are, amaze me, because this piece of land sits along the Lisjan Creek, where our tribe is named, and it's a half mile walk from my own home. And in the idea of rematriation, of bringing back our traditional ways of really thinking about what we leave for the next seven generations or for our even for our grandchildren. This gift of creating an arbor on our territory that had not been here for over 200 years, was created not just by the Indigenous people, but people from all walks of life, were able to come to the front, to the to the land, when we had brought the redwood trees there and helped us to take the bark off the redwoods to sand them down, to ready them, to be stood up, to create an arbor place where we have ceremony, a place where California Native people dance together, that we are able to welcome people onto our lands. This place was created here on our territory, so that it would be a center of bringing people to that fire again, to- not just remember as Indigenous people, the connection to our land. But for all people that are now living on our territory, what does it mean to be a guest on Indigenous peoples land? What does it mean for us to have a reciprocity with the land again? How do we be good guests and good hosts? While we're taking care of this land? And what does that mean together to dream of being on this territory?
Ayana Young Over this spring and summer, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of movement that is causing settlers to begin examining their relationship to place, I’m thinking specifically about the mass removal of statues depicting incredibly genocidal and oppressive figures, but I’ve also seen how this momentum has been really challenging for others because of the dominant telling of history...And it’s led me to think about our attachment to histories that diminish settler shame and how as long as we remain attached, collective ignorance will grow. So, I’d like to ask you about how reconnecting with the land, through Indigenous led stewardship, requires all of us to talk about the distortion of history? How is it necessary that in order to meaningfully participate in land restoration, we need to congruently relearn history?
Corrina Gould That's a great question. You know, a couple weeks ago the statue of Junípero Serra was taken down at Golden Gate Park and in 2015, we led movement around “No Sainthood for Serra” and the Catholic Church decided to make this horrific genocidal maniac a saint and, you know, we've liken him to Hitler, you know, because of the genocide that happened, because he brought the Catholic Church, and his ideologies from Europe to our territories, and that was the beginning of the end of our ceremonies and our sacred places and our languages and songs.
And so for many California Native people, it was a very big time of mourning, when this happened. And the crazy thing that we really learned while we were doing this, and this, this took place all over the country around Junípero Serra becoming a saint within the Catholic Church, it really began the conversations of what does it mean to have this sainthood? But also, what does it mean, to really look back in history and find out how did this all begin? And I think that, within the United States, at least, we do a very poor job at telling the history from the Indigenous people's point of view. And it does a really good job of what I call paper genocide of our people, our people are talked about in fourth grade about how we used to live, and never talked about in the current situation. So it's always about an Indian in the past, almost this romantic idea of Indigeneity, a long time ago and about primitive people, but never talked about in a present form. And so it's what I call, again, paper genocide, where we're talked about as if we're extinct.
Even within the city of Oakland now where I live, or Huichin, which covers six Bay Area cities, many people don't know that Ohlone people exist, it's really been the last 25 years of us really pushing the envelope, standing up for sacred sites to talk about the connection of land and people in human beings. But it also started this conversation about the Doctrine of Discovery. And the Doctrine of Discovery was what allowed European countries to not only settle on Indigenous lands and to try to take those over. But it also created this way for people to create slavery. And so there's the connection between African people coming to Indigenous lands, and Indigenous people also being slaughtered and being enslaved in our territories. The Doctrine of Discovery basically says that we as people, brown and dark people, only had half souls. And because we only had half souls, it was that it was okay to take the land, either by conversion, or by sword.
And so that Doctrine of Discovery allowed for the colonization of the world really, and enslavement of African people. And so those conversations began to happen in earnest during 2015, at least in my lifetime, I remember that being a pivotal point of talking about that, even us going to Catholic churches and talking to nuns that were setting up these talks, these dialogues about Junípero Serra. Having conversations in community settings, there were many people that were upset to hear the truth of history. But we did decide at that point, those that were organizing around “No Sainthood for Serra” that we would always speak the truth to history. And even though people get upset, I think that that's the problem, we get these ideas, if you grew up in the Bay Area, or in California at least the history here, and most fourth graders grew up making sugar cube missions, and talking about what wonderful things that the Spanish church brought to the Native people here. And not really examining the destruction that happened not only to the people, but to the lands by the animals that they brought here, by moving the waterways by covering them up by you know, all of the different things that happen on the lands are not talked about in our history books.
Today, as we're looking at the Black Lives Matter movement, right now, we're at this pivotal point in history where we need to begin to really speak the truth about what happened on these lands. And to further examine how it is that this country that was built on the stolen lands of people, and the stolen bodies of others, needs to come correct in a way, needs to really talk about the histories. What I find when I talk about these histories with young people is that, I'm talking about fourth and fifth graders, they understand that slavery is not a good thing and they understand justice in that kind of way. They're at that point in their development, their mental development, about right and wrong justices. It's the adults that get uncomfortable when we talk about it. The adults that want to hold on to this idea of romanticism, of the Spanish bringing all of these great things the Indigneous people, to you know my ancestors, and not talk about all the horrific things that happened as a result of them coming into the lands and taking from them.
You know, when we're talking about stolen lands from people, we're not talking about a past, we're talking about currently stolen lands, that their lands are continuously being stolen from Indigenous people. The Wampanoag people had their territory taken from them by, you know, by this country. We talk about not that long ago, Ruth Ginsburg wrote a document out disallowing native people from receiving a lake and some land back using the Doctrine of Discovery. We talk about us, continuously, when we were in 2011, in Vallejo, California, what is our village site of Sogorea Te’, when we went and took that space over, that land that was a ceremonial place, a village site, it was a burial site, and still the land being taken, and not allowing us to have ceremonies there, or disallowing us from being on our own territories without having permits from park districts and I'll disallowing us from having our ability to gather foods in our territorial places.
So the taking of land is not something that's in the past, it continues to happen today. The reason that it's important also for us to start having these conversations about the truth in history, what happened, is that we cannot right what has been wrong. We cannot, if we do not examine how things have happened here. We can just go back not that long ago and look at what Germany has done. And Germany has taken responsibility to the genocide of Jewish people by telling the truth to that history, the horrific truth of what happened in those gas chambers, the horrific truth of what happened during that era of Nazism that was happening then, not that the Nazism has gone away, but to acknowledge that this horrific genocide happened. We don't talk about the genocide of Indian people in this country, we don't talk about the genocide of African people and the taking of their language and their traditional belief systems and bringing them to a land that, that they didn't know, and making them having them be enslaved. And so we don't talk about those things because people, I think, are afraid to touch the pain. And I think that what's today is asking us to do is to touch that pain to open it wide. And then from there, we have to heal, we have to bring it back to the rematriation of land. It's important that Indigenous people have access to their land, to be given back the land that was stolen from them, to acknowledge that this land, this new country, this very young country, has done horrific things and they owe both Indigenous people and African American people a huge debt. And so unless we begin to talk about those conversations, unless we're very honest about it, we're not going to move forward.
Ayana Young I think many of our listeners will really resonate with your approach to settler responsibility and reciprocity, in that even for those of us who already care deeply about the land, we still also have a responsibility to the ancestors who tended the land and present day descendants... So, with this preface, I’d like to talk about the growing number of organizations and offerings that encourage settlers and occupants to pay a land tax, like Real Rent Duwamish, and of course Sogorea Te’s Shummi Land Tax. What does the Shummi Land Tax do, and why is it important to frame it as a tax or rent, rather than a donation?
Corrina Gould That's a great question. I want to say that we first started out the Shummi Tax in about 2016 and we got this idea from the Wiyot people who are in Northern California, and they had received an island back and didn’t have anyway to restore it back to its healthy self and they needed to clean it up and so they started this tax idea. We asked permission if we could use it here in the Bay Area and I actually worked with allies and accomplices to put this together. It was something that was brought to us and said, “Maybe we should try this out here in the Bay Area”. And so we did, there was an ally, who now works for me, or actually he should probably be an accomplice, and he and his dad created the the platform on our website that we actually put out on 2016, and just by word of mouth that we were going to open this up, this Shummi Tax, and Shummi in the Chochenyo language, from our territory, means a gift. And we didn't really like the word tax and we were trying to figure out a different word to use, and we still have not come up with one because taxing, you know, has this negative connotation. And people hate the word tax and what that means. But it's kind of stuck for whatever reason, and that people understand that there's an obligation - when we hear the word tax, there is an obligation.
So we ask people if they live or work or benefit from living on our territory that they do this honorary tax, and the tax really what it does, it helps to pay for the work that we're doing to rematriate land in our territory, to build this, the central ceremonial places to help us to create these people are now calling resiliency hubs, a place where we all gather, a place where when things are not so good, either man made or natural disasters, that we have places where we could help the communities that are around us to make sure that they have necessary first aid and water and things available to them. And so another way of taking care of our communities, is by creating these places.
Ayana YoungYeah, there's so much there. And I really resonate with this idea of the Shummi Land Tax and the obligation of those who are living and profiting off living off these lands to be responsible to take care of the land and the First Nations folks who are also taking care of it still today. So I really appreciate all the labor that you and others have put into this and-
Corrina Gould I think that's what's wonderful about the tax, and there is Real Rent Duwamish and Manna-hatta Fund, that’s doing it in New York and we just had a conversation with another tribe in Washington, D.C. yesterday and we're hoping that people pick this up in all the different tribal areas, that people have a responsibility. But sometimes our folks that live in our territories, don't know how to engage. This actually gives folks a real concrete way of actually giving back and helping the traditional people of that territory, do the work that they need to do in order to bring back the language songs and ceremonies, but to take care of our relatives when they come from out of the area. And not just the Ohlone people, and I always say this because we have a responsibility for everybody that now lives in our territory. How do we then do that? In a traditional way, everyone that lived in the territory would give something so that we're all taken care of. And so this is a way of traditionally doing this as well, it's a traditional thought process. It's like, we are all trying to live in a reciprocal manner. And so our job is to take care of folks here. How do we do that as good hosts if we don't have good guests also participating in the reciprocal relationship? And so I think that that's what Shummi does, it helps us to have a reciprocal relationship on this territory, not to close an eye, a blind eye, to Indigenous people still being here. But how do we live as good guests and come in a good way?
Ayana Young Absolutely. Well, I’d like to ask you about using private land trusts as a tool for Indigenous sovereignty and how they are an example of conservation existing outside of the industrial or traditional environmentalist framework....as paradoxical as that might sound...How do Indigenous land trusts subvert, or re-purpose, the very colonial history of land conservation, and additionally, why are they especially important for non-federally recognized tribes?
Corrina Gould Yeah, okay. So really, the only way for us to get land back in our territory was to create a land trust. And really, we didn't know what a land trust was when we first started out. It wasn't in our purview for a lot of different reasons. Indigenous people don't generally think of land trust, I think, you know, land for a federally recognized tribe is put into trust by the United States government, so that's what reservations are, the land is put in trust so that they have, that the reservations can exist. For non-federally recognized tribes. And really, I think that people should know that missionized Indians in California from the bottom, from San Diego all the way up to Sonoma are not federally recognized along the coast of California, and so that means that multiple tribes are landless Indians, you're landless, even in your own territory.
And so the land trust, it was a beautiful thing, it was a gift. I mean, my ancestors are so amazing that they give us these gifts of meeting people and putting us in contact with those that are supposed to bring us these ideas or, or knowledge is that we didn't have before. And Beth Rose Middleton, who is a professor at UC Davis, became a good friend and ally of ours, and she wrote her dissertation at UC Berkeley called Trust in the Land and it was about Native land trusts, and Native land trusts had just begun, not that long before we did the takeover in 2011, and it was really about bringing land back in different kinds of ways. We had federally recognized tribes that were buying back land, they had casinos, that were buying back their sacred sites, so that they could have, they could have access to them again, and that they could take care of that land in different kinds of ways. We had non-federally recognized tribes that only had an acre of their land, that they had a long term lease on so that they could do ceremony and they could do education on it.
And so really, it was because I was brought to a meeting after the occupation in 2011, Beth Rose invited me to a meeting of Indigenous land trusts, that I found out about them. And they were mostly mostly guys, Indigenous men that were at the meeting. And I was like the, you know, one of the only women that were there. And that's when I met my friend, our friend, Dune, Dune Lankard. And it was at that meeting back in 2011. And, I asked him a question, you know, he and I hit it off, he told me about his story of saving the land after the Exxon Valdez spill. And as we were having lunch, I just asked him, I was like, “I noticed that there's a lot of men here. Is this a boy’s club?” That's what I asked him. And he laughed, and he said, “Yeah, it really is, you know, not only here in Indigenous land trusts, but also other land trusts.” You know there are thousands of land trusts across the country, people are trying to preserve land for animals or landscapes, or different kinds of things.
And, and what I really found out about other land trusts, non-Indigenous land trusts, is that for a lot of them, they're about putting up these big old fences with no trespassing signs to save a particular area from being touched or, or destroyed. But Indigenous land trusts are really about re-engaging people back into the land, really touching the land and really working with the land and bringing medicines and ceremony and stuff back. And not only Indigenous people, but really trying to bring everybody along with us. And what does that look like for us to re-engage with the land in a different kind of a way? And so I really appreciate this being a tool, a mechanism for us to be able to do that, especially for us that are non-federally recognized that want to have access to land for ceremony, for re-burial, for a way for us to grow our traditional foods, again, for us to have places for us to just be.
And I think that that's different from a park, you know, it's really talking about what does it look like to be on sovereign Indigenous land in the middle of a city? And what it really means is that Indigenous people are leading what's happening on that land, are leading the ceremonial places, are really re-engaging in our tribal territory, our tribal people, back into a way of living in a more reciprocal manner, really bringing people on to the land to learn about language. And I think that people are hungry for it, not just our people, other people that are living in our territories now that they understand this relationship, that they're wanting to engage in a different kind of way. I think when we live in cities and urban places, we forget that we are still a part of the the circle of creation, that we are always trying to run away to the mountains or run away to the ocean to run away to nature, we forget that we are part of nature, that we are supposed to be in that circle as well, human beings, having land in these places, Indigenous people taking in land through these, these tools of land trusts right now allows us to engage, again, allows other people to engage in this idea that we are still a part of this circle of creation, how do we get ourselves back into balance so that we don’t feel that we are apart, but a part of.
And so I think that that's what's important about having urban Indigenous land trusts, is that we don't have to feel like we have to go outside somewhere, we can remember that we are still part of something.
Ayana Young Well, talking about land trusts, I’m thinking about how there is also a conversation to be had on trust, or perhaps mistrust, and the harsh reality that so many settler environmentalists don’t trust Indigenous people to hold full title to land, they would much rather see land preserved in the hands of large scale non-profits. I’m curious to hear how you have navigated this environment, as well as the logistics of Indigenous land trusts. How do you see checks and balances operating and how can we foster integrity in conservation and land restoration work, amidst a world that continues to peddle scarcity, greed, and extraction?
Corrina Gould That's a great question about the mistrust of Indigenous people of their own lands. It's this paternalistic ideology that settler colonialism has brought, that we don't know how to take care of our own territories, not looking back 15,000 plus years of Indigenous people taking care of their territories, and having an abundance before anybody else got here.
You know, I think it's a huge ego trip as well, to think that they know what's best for us still. And it really does come down to this paternalistic idea of us as being inferior. And so I think using the land trust, as a tool to get it into our own hands is great. And then I think it's this settler colonial ideology that buying and selling land is the right thing to do. You know, when there was definitely no idea on our territory, or in Indigenous territories across Turtle Island, about the buying and selling and piecemealing and extraction of, of our native territories. That's a very new idea that came to our lands and really in California, only a very new idea that only came a couple hundred years ago.
And so I think it's possible for us you know, when we talked earlier in the conversation about truth telling, I think it's important for us to sit down with those, our friends who want to be friends of the Earth, to also understand that they need to be friends of Indigenous people. Many times throughout recent history, we've seen Sierra Club and other large organizations that have not been so willing to have Indigenous people talking about the importance of land and really stepping forward to be those people that speak on behalf of our traditional territories.
And I think it's important that we begin to listen, you know, we talked about this movement right now, with the settler colonial statues going down and we talked about, we talked about the importance of telling truth to history right now, I think it's important right now also, as we're going we're moving as a as a human race towards this catastrophe of climate blowing up right now, that we need to be able to listen to the Indigenous people of this land, because there are original hidden instructions on how we're supposed to be. And in order for us to bring that into balance, we need to listen to Indigenous leadership around what those stories were for thousands of years, we as Indigenous people knew how to live on this land. And so how is that not important to listen to right now, as we're moving forward in this place where these catastrophes are happening all over the world. And one of the catastrophes is COVID. You know, we need to listen to what COVID is telling us right now, their horrific disease that's happening to us and but while we've been sitting in place. You know, I kind of feel like Mother Earth, kind of put us in a sit time as human beings to kind of learn something to look at what happened while we were sitting for a very short amount of time, was that the air plant cleared up that the water is started to become restored, that the animals that originally lived in territory in places where cities are now, came back. And so it's important for us to look at what's happening in the environment, and how we have had a huge impact on that as human beings.
Ayana Young So I’m hoping we could now talk about the gendering of land conservation and the necessity of having Indigenous women and gender non-conforming folx lead land restoration efforts. Historically, I think many of us know what has happened when patriarchal, hetero-normative men hold land, but perhaps you can share with us how the land is calling back a different kind of energy, one that possess knowledges of of care that extend prior to dominant patriarchal modalities?
Corrina Gould Yeah, I think that that's why Johnella and I really decided to do a women-led land trust, because we looked at what's happened since men have been in charge of land and the extraction of land, the buying and selling, because what has happened to our lands has also happened to women's bodies and so there's a real correlation that when settler colonialism happened when they, when people came to Indigenous lands, they first destroyed the sacred, and then they stole and rape the women and took the land. And so it's a deep wound that also affected men. And so we need to bring this back into balance and we are told in ceremony, through our medicine people, not just California medicine people, but medicine people from all over the world that now is the time for women to stand in their rightful place.
And I think we need to figure out what that means. And so when we talk about the rematriation of land, it's really about what is our responsibility and our relationship to land as women, as Indigenous women, were given particular songs for medicine, for the waters. And so those songs, and those medicines have not been woken up in a long time. And in order for us to make a change in this further creation, we need to stand in those places we have taken care of, it's our responsibility as women, right, we give, we give life. And so in our thoughts, it's like, okay, we bring life into this world, but it's also women and two-spirit folks, that responsibility for helping people to leave this world, you know what I mean? It's the ceremonies that go with your next journey to the next world. It's our responsibilities of knowing how to care for, for our elders, and to take care of medicines, to sing to the waters, because we, we also hold water, all of human beings, all of creation, holds water in their body, women hold water in their body in a different kind of way, when they're able to give birth or when they're pregnant. They hold their children in their own water. And so to have these water songs is important to remember this creation, it's really about remembering what our original teachings were. And to remind our, our male counterparts, what is their responsibility as well, to come into a balance.
So it's not about leaving men behind. It's about remembering what our responsibilities are, what are all of our original teachings are, whether you're male, or female, or neither, that we all had our own original teachings of how we were supposed to be in this world, we have to go backwards in order to go forward. And that's what I, I really run into when we talk about the land. When we talk about our ceremonies, when we talk about living in reciprocity, it's really about going back so that we can go forward in a good kind of in a good way, to remember what we were originally taught, and everyone has original teaching, sometimes we forgot, because of moving around the world, because we're far from our own homelands, because we can't go back home, because there's many people that can't go back home. But it's then our responsibility to learn “What is your responsibility then on someone else's homeland? And how do we look to women's leadership?”
Currently, I'm finding that there are more women that are doing land trust more, Indigenous women that are doing land trusts, for those same reasons, as we're bringing up our children and our grandchildren. As we're nurturing the songs and the ceremonies to come back. As we're bringing back the medicines of our, our traditional territories and learning how to use them. Again, it's the women that are doing that, and are bringing our brothers and our uncles and our fathers and grandpas along with us to remember those songs that go with them, to remember how we're supposed to be on this land together. And so it's important for all of us to know, it's just right now that the women have a different way of being on the land, and that we have to look towards that way of being on the land in a softer way. In a way that we have a reciprocity, to the lands to remember not just our original teachings, but our responsibilities.
You know, that's why we work with Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu, about bringing the salmon back home, her salmon that are in New Zealand or Aotearoa, how do we bring them back? Because we have a responsibility as salmon people as well, to sing to those salmon as they come home, to sing to them as they go out to the ocean, the waters flow from Mount Shasta to Sacramento and down to our delta ,out to the Bay. You know, it's the same waters that are that we share. And so singing those salmon home and singing them back out to the ocean, it's a responsibility because they feed us, they feed the lands, they take care of us. And so remembering what those responsibilities are. And it's difficult when you're in an office all day long to remember that, “Oh, I have a responsibility to go sing to those salmon. I have a responsibility not to flush my medication. down the toilet, I have a responsibility to say thank you to the water because I need it in order to live.” And so it's really simple things that we have to remind ourselves to teach not just ourselves again, but to teach everybody else.
Ayana Young Beautiful. Thank you. And in in preparing for our conversation, I came across the history of shellmounds, which are sacred funerary mounds, that were across Ohlone territory prior to mass development...And within this story, you’ve also spoken about how in 1909, Nels Nelson, an archeologist, mapped the remaining shellmounds, leaving a record of where these ancestors were buried, which really led me to think about the importance of our actions today - Nels Nelson, didn’t stop development and he was certainly a part of the very society responsible for destroying these burial sites, but small acts can help future generations subvert cultural amnesia and serve as a conduit for remembrance...So I wonder if you’d be willing to share the ongoing importance of preserving and protecting these shellmounds, as well as your wish for how folks can meaningfully contribute to the re-storying of the land, even if through small acts?
Corrina Gould That's a great question. You know, Nels Nelson, I believe that my ancestors put particular people, gave them particular jobs, and they did them way before I was born, even before my mom was born, that Nels Nelson created this map, and why would he do that? Who cares? If a bunch of shell mounds are being destroyed, a bunch of you know, Indian burial sites were being destroyed. But for some reason, he knew that they were really important. And there was mass development happening in 1909, around the Bay Area, and he knew that these were funerary places and he thought they were important enough to map them. And so he found on his original map, 425 of them that were in the Bay Area, and it gives us a footprint of where our ancestors were. ANd he didn’t have to, the development was going to happen. It did happen anyway. But he put this map together. And he allowed us to have, after I talked about the genocide that happened three consecutive times in our territory, it gave us a map to really remember the ancestors so that they could remember us. And I really, truly believe that's what happened when we did the shell mound walks between 2005 and 2008, that we walked these shell mounds for four years, praying at the places that they had been.
And we know from experience that these shell mounds even though they're covered by railroad tracks, and bars and apartment buildings, and schools and parking lots that underneath them, still remain our sacred places, and still remain many of our ancestors buried. And so it's our responsibility to go to those places and to pray at them. And to acknowledge that our ancestors were there, just like we had done for thousands and thousands of years. The one shell mound, you know, we, in 1999, we tried to stop the development of the Bay Street Mall, and the Bay Street Mall is built on top on top of one of the largest of the 425 shell mounds there that circle the Bay Area. It was a brownfield before the city of Emeryville decided to put them all on it. And we asked them if they would just clean up the brown field and allow it to be open space to talk about the history but also the resiliency of the Ohlone people. And instead, they put a shell mound there and decided to create a little representation for thousands of years. So of course, we ask people to come out every year on the day after Thanksgiving and participate in a ceremony and a sign waving and information giving that we've done for 20 years now. But we also are protecting and preserving the West Berkeley shell mound, the oldest shell mound in the Bay Area. It's on 4th and University and it lies underneath a parking lot. And for the last four years, we have done interfaith ceremonies there, prayer there, we have invited people from all over the world that have come and prayed with us and stood with us. And it's really the allies and accomplices that have shown up at meetings and have sent in letters of support and have really done beautiful artwork on the land and have really supported the work of the Ohlone people in preserving this sacred site from being developed upon.
And now I know people's eyes might see a parking lot. But for us, this is part of our cosmology. It's a place where our ancestors first lived along the Bay, right along Strawberry Creek. There were more than one shell mound that had been there. It was a place of ceremony. It was where we had song and where we sent our ancestors to what is now called Alcatraz and had ceremony on these lands before they took off through what we call the western gate where our ancestors go to the next journey, where is now the Golden Gate Bridge. And so this particular sacred site we've been fighting to preserve and protect, we won a lawsuit that we joined in with the city of Berkeley against the developers in December, but of course, the developers are taking it back to court. And so we're continuing to fight that.
And so, you know, during COVID, we have not been able to meet there as much. But we did have an interfaith prayer service there a few weeks back that was on Facebook Live. And I think folks can still access that if they'd like to, but also shellmound.org talked about the history of the place, allows people to donate to our legal fund, because this is a legal battle. Our sacred sites and ancestral burial places are not covered by federal or state laws, so that they don't get destroyed, numerous ceremonies, you know, places where my mom and my dad are buried right now, where we would never think about putting a you know, Dunkin Donuts on or anything, but not so much about our ancient burial sites. And so really encourage people to go there and look to help us to, to continue to fight to save this place. We have a concept there of what we’d like to do if we ever get a willing seller, we would like to recreate a shell mound there where we could talk about it, we'd like to put an arbor there, we'd like to open up Strawberry Creek, where it originally went across that land so that people can see the water. So many of our waterways are underneath the cement and streets and nobody sees the beauty of that water. And we forget. And so, you know, that's what I would encourage people to do about the shell mounds.
Ayana Young At this time, we feel how so many are trying to break away from this culture that has forced our hand into domination, propelling us to the end through exploitation of people and land...As we come to a close, I’d like to ask how you see us moving into this space, where the desire for ending our ongoing consumption and exploitation exists in tandem with profound affirmations of Indigenous Sovereignty and liberation for all. What is your vision for land restoration and what are the tools that you see are necessary to resist anything that disrupts the healing, sanctity, and rhythm of life?
Corrina Gould Hmm, I think we just need to stop as human beings. You know, I always go back to when I talk to you know, my kids, I talk to other people, and you know, you can go into a store. And you can see, I don't know, hundreds of little plastic, say little plastic chairs for kids, right? You can see hundreds of them stacked up and you can go and then imagine that multiplied throughout the country. And like 50 stores in every city has the same thing. Why do we need all of that? Why? Why is there this need for this?
I think we need to think about living together in smaller places. Really talking about going back to almost like a village like living where everything that you need is within walking or biking distance. You have your schools, you have food available that you have doctors that are living there. We have to go back into making a smaller footprint, that we have everything available here, we need to get away from this idea of consumption and capitalism and go back to a way where we're sharing with each other.
I think people are beginning to come up with this idea, even within the cities, if they have trees that have plums on them, and somebody else has lemons on them that maybe we can exchange stuff that we need, that there's enough food, that we don't have to think that we need everything out there, we really need to stop producing stuff that's not necessary. We really need to produce only the things that we need in order to survive. We need to produce music and art. We need to have joy and ceremony. We need to have, we need to stop thinking that, you know, one of the things that COVID has really taught me as well is that all of these meetings that we thought were necessary, are not as necessary as we thought they were, you know, all of the all of the time that we spent running to this place in that place was not necessary. It's taught us that we need to spend more time with our families because we yearn to spend time with our families that we've not been able to touch and hold. It reminds us of what is really possible in this world, again, is that we don't need to work for somebody, we need to work for the collective better of all of us, that we need to clean up our waterways and that we need to ask for permission. And we need to ask for forgiveness, we need to say we're sorry that we've destroyed all of that was given to us to take care of. And that we can make it better.
We know that we have the technology right now to actually reverse some of these things, to open up the creeks to clean them up, we have enough hands to actually put in the plant life that's going to actually clear the waters again. We don't need oil, we need to leave it in the ground. We need to figure out a different way of being on this Earth with less things. And I think that's it, we don't need the things, we need each other, we need to be back in right relationships with each other everything else that lives on the Earth. I think that one of the great things that our relatives in Aotearoa or New Zealand is doing is that they are creating, and it's crazy that we have to think in this kind of a way, but it's an order for human beings, I guess to wrap their minds around it again, but to make water and mountains have personhood, to give land a personhood so that we can begin to think that they have the same rights as us. Right, water is alive and we need it in order to survive? So give it the right to do what it's supposed to do. That corporations in this country have personhood, that is beyond. Why would we do something like that? When we need to give the land and the water and the mountains and the trees and the fish their own rights to sovereignty, so that we can come back in right relationship. I think that's what we need to do. In order for us to survive in order for our grandchildren to survive. We need to come back. And if that's the way we need to do it, then I think that then we should use that tool to do it.
Ayana Young I don't have words. Thank you so much for all that you have said in this last response and the entire conversation. Thank you so much for your time. I want to encourage any of our listeners who live in Ohlone territory to look into paying the Shummi tax, and I’d like to ask you if there is anything else you’d like to share or request from our listeners?
Corrina Gould Yeah, I thank you Ayana for this wonderful conversation today. I ask people wherever they're listening from, to work with the Indigenous peoples on whose land they are to realize that where they're living has thousands of years of history, of language, of song, of ceremony to find out how they could help to give back land to Indigenous people to work towards a working relationship of reciprocity, while we're on this on their territories. To figure out how best to, for all of us in order to survive is to go back and to remember how to live in a better way and grow food, grow medicine, share food, and not think of food as a commodity, but it's something that every living person and being should have access to. And I think that you know, as we go forward together in this world, that we walk on her a little jump a little more gently. Thank you so much.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast, the music you heard today was by Shayna Gladstone and Amo Amo. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Melanie Younger.