 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our program. We are the land, a history of native California with co-authors Damon Akins and William Bauer. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of events at the Mechanics Institute, and we are very proud to co-sponsor this event with the California Institute for Community Art and Nature. We are also very pleased to collaborate with the University of California Press and with our colleague David Olson, associate publicist, and University Press, University of California Press is the publisher of this new book. For those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and remain one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature a General Interest Library, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and the Cinema Lip Film Series on Friday night, so please visit our websites. We are open now Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And so you now can come into our gorgeous library. And as we open up, we will also be having our in-person tours, but for now you can still take an online tour with Taryn Edwards, one of our librarians on Wednesday at noon. And before we go on with our program, I'd like to introduce our chief executive officer of Mechanics Institute, Kimberly Scrofano. Great, thank you so much. I just wanted to say thank you to all of our panelists and collaborators. This is we're really excited about this program and we appreciate you taking the time. And we hope that everyone enjoys it and that sometime soon we're going to be hosting our events in our historic building at Mechanics Institute of 57 posts. So thank you very much. Thanks Kimberly. Also, I'd like to mention that we will have a Q&A after the conversation. So please hold your questions to the end and put them in the chat. Also, We Are the Land by Damon Akins and William Bauer is available at alexanderbook.com or at any of your independent bookstores. Now it is my pleasure and honor to introduce Malcolm Margolin, former publisher of Hay Day Books, and the executive director of the California Institute for Community Art and Nature. And Claire Greensfelder, associate director for creative strategies of ICANN, to tell us more about their mission and their activities before we start our event. So please welcome Malcolm and Claire. Thank you. So, if we were to talk about us when we talk about you, I think I find Cancer Institute is one of the best places in the world. I think we've had programs over there for 20 years now, close to 30 years, and some of the most innovative programs I've ever said. And generosity has been spectacular, and I think if you, yeah. Oh I'm sorry about this. It's 14 years of Parkinson's. But if people do not know my character, too, please make sure you are on the menu, please make sure you are preserved. it's a unique institution and it's really a support and it's a center of cultural life and it's a great tour club. So, and it's, California institutions, it's an institution of what we're doing. I think we need to be clear, can you be on the out on this one, be clear, can you be on the out? Great with you. Yeah. Breaking up. Breaking up. Claire, I think you're having internet challenges. Can you guys hear me? You're going. Wait, can you hear me? Yeah, no. I can't see any indication that you can hear. I think Claire, we're going to take. Yeah, sorry, we did a sound check before and of course now it's not working. But just to say that the, thank you Malcolm. Okay, we're thrilled to be with you. We love the Mechanics Institute, all of us for community art and nature. We have three major programs. Can you not hear me? We focus on California Indian programs. We also have a series of programs on California Indian Arts. We also are working on a project for re-mapping California looking at place names and how they can bring back old place names and stories. We're working with California Indian Contemporary Artists to preserve their archives and we're also been co-sponsoring a California Indian Arts and Culture Festival for the two years ago. We're going to do one again online in a few weeks that we have. If you'd like to get in touch with us you can reach us at info at californiacan.org and also at our website at californiacan.org and I apologize for my sound. It was fine 10 minutes ago. Thank you so much for having us and we're thrilled. Thank you so much to let us know and inform us about your programming and please everyone go to their website. They've got some great programs going on. So we are the land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the indigenous people who shaped it and we are very pleased to welcome our two co-authors Damon Akins who is associate professor of history at Guilford College and is joining us from Greensboro, North Carolina and he also spent time in California as a former high school teacher in Los Angeles. Also William Bauer who is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian tribes and a professor of history at the University of Nevada and is joining us from Las Vegas. This book is an incredible history. The research and the attention, the detail, the panorama of this new book is just astounding and so I'm honored to welcome you both. Please welcome William Bauer and Damon Akins. Thank you very much for letting us, hosting us and thanks again to California ICANN for hosting as well. It's really, it's an honor. I wanted to echo, I am joining from North Carolina and so I think Willie and I have, the practice that we've employed as we've done these, these events is that we announce where we're coming from. I'm coming from the land of the Sahara, the Kauai and the, and currently various bands of the Suponi Nation and, and, and wish I was in the land of the Ohlone. Hello everyone, thank you all for coming and thank you for that wonderful introduction. Again, my name is William Bauer and I'm speaking to you today from Southern Paiute lands in Las Vegas, Nevada. And so I think what Damon and I have kind of thought about doing is, is I think we kind of provide kind of a short introduction or kind of a discussion about how and why we wrote the book and some of the things that we hope to accomplish with it. I think we're going to read a couple of passages from the book to kind of round out and provide a little bit of kind of detail and give a flavor I think for, for what we've done in the text and then kind of open it up for a question and answer. I mean, I'm kind of blown away by how many people are here on the on the call tonight. And so I think it's fantastic that there's so much kind of interest in the book and we look forward to a lot of kind of a good question and answer with as many people as we possibly could or possibly can. So we are the land is really kind of a it's a survey. It's kind of an overview of California Indian history. So we start with creation and we really try to go up as to the present as possible. And so we as much as we kind of sent this book to the to the press about a little more than a year ago. And so we are if you kind of are able to kind of read the book or when you go through it, you'll see that we were able to provide some references to how California Indian nations responded to and shape the COVID-19 pandemic. So we tried to make the book. Yeah, I haven't seen a round belly. Mustangs kind of call out in the in the chat in a long time. So that's pretty cool, actually. So we try to make the book as kind of as present as possible. So we did kind of make some references to to California Indian nations in the COVID-19 pandemic. Um, I think that one of the one of the kind of the guiding lights are the guiding guiding influences behind this text is that we wanted to refute the notion that California Indians have disappeared from the state. Rather, we make the argument that California Indians and California Indian history is central and is vital to understanding the entire history of California and if we might be so bold to understanding the history of the United States. And I think part of that is is a conversation that we had with it with a California Indian author or California Indian writer and an event in San Francisco. This and then the writer said, you know, that this idea that California Indians have disappeared, that California Indians have some how vanished across the state was still persisting in the into the 21st century. And so if a if a prominent California Indian writer is saying that this idea that California Indians have vanished is still persisting in kind of public memory. I think that that a book like this needs to kind of tackle that idea head on and refute the notion that indigenous peoples have have have disappeared. And so we we we have we've attempted or we we do kind of center California Indians and make that indigenous peoples in California are central to the story of of California, right? And so the the the argument that we make here is that California Indians have maintained a relationship with the land at the same time that settler colonial policies by Spain, Mexico and the United States and California have attempted to to divorce dated peoples from the land. And that's part of why we kind of name the book we are the land. The title of the book kind of went through a couple of iterations. But I think by titling the book, we are the land we center California Indian people in the history of California and that you can't understand California history without understanding California. We can't you can't understand a California history without understanding California Indian history. Yeah, I'd add a couple of things to that. It's an excellent example of what we were thinking. What one thought that came to me while Willie was talking is a couple of days ago. I think largely because of the work promoting this that California can had done. I received an email from somebody out here in the southeast that wanted me to perhaps go on their radio program and talk about some of the issues the book raised. But the but but wanted to see if I could talk about Cherokee, Seminole and Creek because the host was afraid that that people just aren't going to recognize any of the tribes or know any of the history. And it struck me as an understandable but at the same time, you know, exemplary kind of part of the problem. Like I wanted to say, yeah, and in fact, I did. I wrote back to him and said I'd be happy to to to speak on the program. But I think the purpose of doing that would be to illustrate how important California indigenous history is to national native history and national history in so many ways. The fact that we have some stereotypical or we have some very specific understandings of what native people are that still hold a lot of sway. I think was was something we were wanting to add a voice to that. The other thing that Willie mentioned briefly, but I'd like to emphasize a little more than in a few minutes, I may read from this along those lines is that we really wanted the book to emphasize the the present. I mean, it seems implicit in the idea that we wanted to emphasize that California native people had not disappeared, but we really wanted to make sure that we were as as often as possible doing what historians sometimes are a little uncomfortable doing. And that is playing with presentism, bringing things up to the present and showing how the legacies of what's happened in the past are still operating today. And while we didn't maybe for our readers, thankfully go into the jargon of settler colonialism, I think the framework, the intellectual framework that settler colonial scholars have provided, which emphasizes the ongoing and persistent nature of colonial processes. We're not in a post-colonial world. We're engaged in colonial practices right now. Those those those impulses really helped us think about how to draw connections to the present. We wanted people to recognize what they saw in the book, but also find things they did not recognize at all. And I think that that kind of focus on the 20th and 21st centuries, it was kind of a guiding kind of folk or a guiding light for us as we began to kind of write the book and think about how to frame it. I think one of the really kind of the cool things that we do with the book is that we build on the work of other Indigenous scholars, including other kind of Indigenous California scholars who have written kind of on this topic. Right. So if you kind of look at the what the landscape of what people have kind of written about kind of California Indian history is that there's been two other scholars have written kind of these surveys, these kind of overviews of California Indian history. The first was the by the Lenape scholar, Jack Forbes, who wrote a book called Native Native Americans in California and Nevada. It was first published in the 1960s and then was revised in the 1980s. Jack was an early leading figure in the development of American Indian and Western history in the 1950s and the 1960s. He was a political activist, especially in the realm of education and helped found DQ University and also was one of the founders of the Native American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. And that program is quite unique because it's one of the few Native American Studies programs that grants a PhD in Native American studies in the United States. The other was the work of Rupert Jeanette Costa, who wrote the book Natives of the Golden State. Right. So Rupert was Kauia from Southern California. He was also a political activist in the realm of education. He wrote about how American Indians were depicted in textbooks in other in other realms. And his wife, Jeanette, was Cherokee and they co-authored works with him. And they were really kind of active in the field of kind of education and how indigenous peoples are treated and depicted in textbooks. I think these are great books. They're really helpful. I think that there's kind of two problems with them, or at least two kind of deficiencies right now. And that that's coming off kind of too harshly, obviously, on them. But they're both a bit dated, right? So Jack's book was kind of last published in the 1980s. Rupert's was in the 1990s. So they're hard and difficult for people to get a copy of. And so we thought it was now was time to kind of provide a kind of a revision of those two books and make it accessible to kind of a wider audience. And then the other big thing that Damon mentioned is that both of those books really don't give a lot of coverage to the 20th and now, right, we're two decades into the 21st century. And so we really wanted to have a book that centered kind of a 20th and 21st century experience for indigenous peoples in California. So I want to do something sort of funny. I'm going to invite you to do an experiment if you happen to have the book with you. If you don't, it's not dependent upon that. But if you happen to have the book with you, I would ask you to open it to page 78 and 169. That would be like this so that you're you're having both pages open. I noticed this as I was looking through it the other day that if you look at page 78 and you look at page 169 at the same time with the intervening pages kind of bracketed off, what you see on the left is a photograph, is a illustration by Louis Choyas, the Russian illustrator of Mission San Francisco in 1816. And it is Native people at the mission playing one of a variety of hand games. And when you look on page 169, you have a photograph of many women playing a hand game at the Grindstone Rancheria in the 20th century. I don't know the date, probably early 20th century there. But it struck me as I was just kind of going through the images and these two jumped out at me that they're depicting the same thing, you know, and we could probably find if we spent the time and energy to look at many, many, many other images that speak to that same. We could trace images that track that way. I think it gets to that idea that the practices that Indigenous people in California have engaged in persist and persist in new ways. And if you think it's a good time, I'd like to read a little bit from the book and I'm going to read from the end along those lines. I'm going to read the first few pages of the conclusion. And I hope that my volume is louder now. I'm just annoyed by having a mic right in front of my face. But that I did see in the chat that people were having trouble hearing. So I'm going to read from the conclusion, which is called Returns. In January of 2019, the city of Eureka approved the return of 202 acres of Indian Island to the Weot tribe. The transfer was the third in a series that began in 2000 and restored approximately 95% of the island to tribal control. The first was the purchase of the site of Tuluot, one of two historic Weot villages on the island and the spiritual center of the tribal universe for more than a thousand years. In private hands, non-Indians used the site as a boathouse. Discarded toxic batteries and leaking fuel had contaminated the soil and erosion and looting had disturbed the thousand-year-old six-acre shell mound adjacent to the site, which included numerous gravesites. Tribal chair Ted Hernandez said, it's sacred land. This is sacred. This is our sacred property. It's where our ancestors are. That's where our ancestors are buried, and that's what we recognize it as. It's the center of our world. While this marks what is perhaps the first instance of a municipality returning land to its indigenous occupants outside the context of a lawsuit, the Weot story up until that point was tragically familiar. In an early morning raid in February of 1860, American settlers attacked temporary campsites on the island with axes, hatchets, and clubs, killing almost all of the mostly women and children who had gathered on the island for the week-long World Renewal Ceremony. This was the third or fourth attack on Weot settlements in the area in a 24-hour period. The total number killed is unknown, but certainly reached the hundreds, constituting the majority of the Weots living in the Eureka area. After the attackers left, Weots returning from the mainland found a few survivors among the dead, an older woman stuck in the mud and singing a warning song, and small children among them an infant crying in his dead mother's arms. She had been killed along with the rest of his family, but the infant, Jerry James, survived. The Indian Island Massacre almost wiped out the Weots. The federal government removed the survivors first to Del Norte County near Oregon, but they returned, and then the Weots were moved to the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern Humboldt County, but they came home. Then they were moved to the Round Valley Reservation in Mendocino County, but they returned home again. Many Weots lived hiding among the Willows, a term they used to describe this hiding. Eventually, a church donated 20 acres of land south of Eureka to the tribe, which became the Table Bluff Reservation. In 1961, the federal government terminated the tribe the following year, Del Apprentz, the last documented fluid Weot speaker died. Weot people and history followed a familiar narrative in California. Despite their efforts, they seemed to be vanishing. In 1970, Albert James, president of the Far West Indian Historical Center Association and grandson of Jerry James, suggested it was time for the Weots to get Indian Island back. The goal of the organization was to construct an Indian Historical Center on the island, including an auditorium, museum, and library. The city of Eureka made a small step in that direction voting to officially rename the island Indian Island rather than retain the name Gunther Island, a tribute to an American settler who occupied the island after the 1860 massacre. The effort to reclaim the island coincided with and mutually reinforced the effort to regain federal recognition. Efforts across the state resulted in a series of lawsuits against the federal government for restoration of tribal status. In 1981, the Supreme Court settled the case in favor of the Weots at Table Bluff. The Bureau of Indian Affairs reinstated the tribe, a gesture that helped in their efforts to push for the return of the island. Albert James' niece, or Jerry James' great-granddaughter, Cheryl Sidner, moved back to Eureka from San Francisco and pestered her mother Loretta and grandmother Hazel to tell the stories of her people. She learned that the creator put the wheel out there, the creator sent rains and flooded the earth. All of creation perished except for a boy and a girl who survived the flood, secure in a big basket sewn up tight and stocked with provisions by their mother. When the water receded, they found themselves at Indian Island. Cheryl Sidner described her family's attitude towards history as matter of fact. Her parents were generous and welcoming, but she summarized their outlook as blunt, quote, things happen, you die, end quote. Her great-grandfather survived and it was up to his ancestors to go beyond that. She was not supposed to be here, but was. So she worked with others to raise money, selling t-shirts, baked goods and posters and asking for donations at university events and meetings of organizations such as the National Congress of the American Indians. In 1992, the Boathouse on the Island shut down. In 1996, Sidner became the chairwoman of the Weot tribe. She organized candlelight vigils to raise consciousness of Weot history around the region and she built relationships among Indian and non-Indian residents of Eureka. A flurry of intense fundraising efforts in the late 1990s eventually raised the $106,000 to buy the 1.5 acre site of Tuluot in 2000. The return of the site to the Weot hands allowed the tribe to protect shell midden from further erosion, but the toxic chemicals, fuel and metals of the boat yard had contaminated the land. The tribe secured grants from the EPA and the California Integrated Waste Management Board. And an acre and a half is slightly larger than a football field and a team of specially trained archeologists wearing white hazmat suits and looking like astronauts in a construction site sifted through the entire site with shovels. They screened every shovel full of dirt for artifacts and eventually the archeologists removed and these figures we were questioned on at various points in the editing because various copy editors thought that this must be a mistake. But they sifted out 88 55 gallon drums of contaminated waste from the site and two 40 yard long dumpsters of metal removed and recycled. Given the proximity of the shell midden and the numerous gravesites, a consultant on the project described it as like excavating a contaminated site at Arlington National Cemetery. The tribe rebuilt the shoreline to prevent further erosion and replanted indigenous plants. Under Seidner's leadership, the tribe continued to press for the transfer of the rest of the 40 acres north of State Highway 255. In the summer of 2004, the deeds were signed and gifts exchanged transferring the land to the tribe. In 2017, the EPA gave the tribe its Excellent and Sight Reuse Award, the first time a tribe anywhere. In the United States had received such recognition. In January of 2019, the city of Eureka returned the bulk of the island south of the highway. The Tulawat Project embodies survivance and eschews the narratives of victimhood. And as Seidner described it, shows that quote, we aren't shadows today. We are not forgotten. We are still here. We are still a people. We still cast a shadow. I wanted to read the conclusion because I think it does a number of things in addition to pointing to the survival and to the persistence. It points to two other things that were central to the book. One is the centrality of place. And the other is more of a writing issue. We knew that in writing this book, we were going to need to find ways to weave together complicated stories in ways that made sense to the reader. And often that meant taking individual people's stories and place the stories that are really deeply bound in specific places and weaving them together because of what they represented. And in this case, what was happening in and around Eureka is very representative of a resurgence that's happened even significantly increased since we published the book for claims and demands to return land to its indigenous occupants. We had no idea how much that particular issue would balloon in the year since we submitted the manuscript. But we really feel like this is a critical part of where California Indian history is right now is contributing to ongoing activism. Yeah, I mean, thanks for adding that. David and I have joked a little bit about what the second edition of this book will look like in both of us. Sometimes David and I think Blanche is at the thought of doing the second edition. But I think part of the point, I think David makes kind of, or two points that I like to kind of build on there, David, I think one is the kind of the complicated nature of writing a book like this, right? California is so especially diverse, right? California is the most diverse linguistic place in North America, right? So more than a hundred different indigenous languages were spoken within the boundaries of the state of California. Now, I mean, that's kind of an artificial way of kind of thinking through these things, right? And I think one thing that we try to do was problematize the current borders and boundaries of what is California throughout the text. And I think that that, and then that diversity and that difference within the boundaries of the current, within the state, right? Carried on throughout the text. And we especially kind of saw that in the 20th century where the Northern California and Southern California possess different histories which created kind of in different developments. So for instance, in the 1930s, the United States passed a law called the Indian Reorganization Act that gave tribes the opportunity to kind of reorganize their tribal governments and engage in economic development programs. And then Northern California tribes based on their histories and their perspectives tended to kind of favor the Indian Reorganization Act. And then tribes in Southern California tended to kind of oppose and not like a lot of the things in the Indian Reorganization Act, kind of based on their histories and their different kinds of relationships with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Affairs. And then that decade later when the United States policy shifted gears to a policy called termination which sought to end the trust relationship between the United States and American Indian nations, tribes in Northern California tended to kind of oppose or kind of look sideways at that termination. And then justifiably for their own reasons and for their own perspectives, tribes in Southern California tended to favor termination a little bit more than those in Northern California. And so I think, you know, it was, I think David and I had countless kind of phone conversations about how to wrestle with the kind of the complicated and then contested narratives within the boundaries of the state. But I think in those conversations, we began to kind of see more and more kind of the rich and deep history of California Indians in California and that that idea that California Indians somehow disappeared in the 19th century or something should stun everyone, right? Because California Indians are driving kind of politics and land and issues in 20th and 21st century California. Now California Indians then and now remain quite active in influencing events within the state and elsewhere. And David alluded to with the land back movement that we see it that has spurred on grown in the last year, but also, so I mean, for instance, you can't teach, you can't understand I think the history of Indian gaming in the last 30 years without understanding what happens in California and without how California Indians have kind of pushed that battle throughout the nation. And I'd add that I think it will become increasingly clear in the near future because of some work that a number of other scholars are doing in much more depth that you can't really teach the history of reservations in the United States without thinking about the model that the missions played in the minds of the early reservations that were established in California in the 1850s. That's a connection that makes a lot of sense when you lay these issues alongside each other of missions, reservations, but we have for so long kept the missions as a kind of a separate thing away from our discussion about reservations. So Stephanie in the chat asked a question about who the target audience is. And I think it's a really good question. It's one that we spent a lot of time thinking about when I was introduced, I think it was Laura that said that I used to teach high school in Los Angeles and I enjoyed that very much and did it for a number of years before I went back to grad school. And so I had in my mind a pretty good sense of what maybe not high school readers but high school teachers and others would be looking for and needing. Not that I was writing the book for that but I had this idea, I mean the sense that I know what people look for when they're a teacher and they're teaching a class and they need something that they can use that's usable in the classroom. And then when I came to Guilford the place I teach now Smaller Arts College it's sort of the other side of the 18 year old divide. I see some of the people that used to be very much like my students now coming in and in a different stage of development. So I think we really wanted to make sure that we didn't leave out the general reader but we couldn't design the book for a general reader alone. And we had to balance some issues. We wanted it to be very recognizable to indigenous people. We wanted them to see themselves in it, see their family, their kin, their people or stories that resonated deeply with what they had done and what they'd experienced and what they'd heard. So we wanted it to be very understandable and recognizable to people in California. We also wanted it to work in an academic setting because as Willie has pointed out the amount of the lack of knowledge about California Indians is still surprising and it has changed dramatically in 10 years. I remember about 10 years ago being at a conference with really, really intelligent, really active scholars who work and study Native American issues and them saying to me, I don't know. I mean, I don't know much about California because what books should I read? And there was a few to point to but it just wasn't getting the kind of traction that we felt it deserved. So I think we were trying to balance. And then as somebody pointed out when we were in the midst of the copy editing process that he said every member of the state house needs a copy of the book. And it suddenly lit up like, oh, that's an interesting idea. I mean, we hadn't thought of policymakers as a potential audience, but I think we designed and wrote the book in a way that people who are not academics such as policymakers or general readers. I'd love to see this book on the sale at every mission bookshop. I think that would be a really valuable intervention. Yeah, so there's been a couple of questions where statements kind of in the chat that kind of talking about what's the content of the book and what we've done. And so I think I might kind of launch into that or kind of discuss that in a couple of ways. I think first is, I think interestingly, I think that the book was kind of born, born in California too. I think David and I were at a conference a couple of years ago and maybe we won't say how many years ago now, right David? But in Oakland, California and kind of after a couple of day sessions and listening to other kind of people kind of talk about Western history and American Indian history, kind of we thought about kind of the need for a book like this. I think for the various audiences that Damon mentioned, like one, like indigenous people, indigenous people within the state of California, K through 12 instructors, and then also people who teach California history at the CSU level and at the UC level. And so I think kind of for producing something for that kind of audience is, I think was key to us. And so the book is, you know, it is structured around kind of 10 chapters. And I think it is in a lot of ways, it does kind of follow a customary kind of chronological narrative, at least for us, you know, it begins with creation stories and how California Indian people kind of understand their creation within on the land and within the boundaries of the current state. We examine kind of encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the 16th and 17th century. We have a couple of chapters on the Spanish colonial period. And then we kind of move into the Mexican colonial period and then the California Gold Rush and then move into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And so we try to be as kind of comprehensive as possible within that. And so, you know, we kind of address it from like, as some people say, from creation to casinos. But I also think like casinos and beyond trying to get into like I've said before into the 21st, 21st century. But then we include also these short vignettes in between in between each chapter. And we call these kind of native spaces. And what we try to do with these native vignettes is to kind of reveal the longstanding indigenous presence in certain places important to California Indian people. And so we talk about Yuma. We talk about, I think what has been kind of the most controversial choice of us that we've chosen is Rome. Maybe someone on the call could kind of speak a little bit more authoritatively to us that we have here. Sacramento, Yuccaia, the East Bay, Riverside, Los Angeles, the Ishi Wilderness and San Diego. And I think one of the things we want to have readers do with these vignettes is if they're in a place like Yuccaia, if they're in a place like Riverside is to be reading the book and then like look out one's window and hopefully kind of see the place around them in new and unique ways. And so we hope that these native vignettes will allow people to reframe what people might know about California and provide a kind of a different perspective on the land and the space that is California. Yeah, we have an equal number of chapters for the 20th century and the time before. So half of the book deals with the 20th and 21st century. And as somebody in the chat mentioned, we struggled a lot with periodization. And for those who aren't historians, periodization is one of those sort of nerdy things that we argue about at conferences if you drinks in. But it essentially means that we break things down into historical periods. And for so long periodization has occurred along the lines of politics or military or economics, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Johnson administration. And those are to put it mildly not that relevant to most people's lives. And so when we were thinking about how to periodize it, we walked a tightrope between trying to make it legible to people who had a periodization of American history that followed some very standard things. The Civil War, for example, and Glen Matthews is on the call. She's written about the Civil War in California and struggled with these things as well. But that's not a periodization that matters in this case. That's not something that matters at all. So we could eliminate that one. But obviously the gold rush, we can't ignore that the gold rush was a vital and critical part of California history. In fact, it and the mission period that preceded it acted as sort of two sons that blinded a lot of people to what was happening between it and just before and just after it. It's almost like a kind of a gravitational pull once you start getting close to the mission period, readers sort of expect, oh, and now we're doing the missions and now we're doing the gold rush. It's hard to, I often remind my students that in 1847, no one knew there was gold in the hills. No one's sitting around saying, when's the gold rush gonna start? It's already 1847. So we wanted to pull back away from those kind of anchors of periodization because they weren't as relevant. Those were, but in doing that, we looked instead of looking at the gold rush as the story of the gold rush, we looked at it as the story of this dramatic intervention into California indigenous lives in the interior and across the state, a rapid kind of introduction of a new kind of violence and a new level of dispossession and the ways that they accommodated it and the ways that they negotiated it. And with the missions, we were very attentive to what the missions looked like from outside the missions. We paid attention to what happened within, but we were also really curious what it looked like for those peoples who were not necessarily directly affected by it but were indirectly or in some ways directly but at a distance. And then there were other times when we struggled with the periodization because we were wading through new material that no one's really made a periodization argument for, historians tend to get pretty touchy when we start making periodization arguments for the 1990s, like we were still in it, it's too early. And so we wanted the spatial place, the places, the native spaces as a chance to move out of the chronology and sort of set that issue aside and just focus on place because the book's ultimately about place. And I think I'm both really pleased with the way that turned out. It's gotten a really good response from readers. And again, back to the pedagogic issue, I'm looking forward to using those vignettes perhaps separate from the book or as a launching pad for research the next time I'm able to teach the course that I teach out here. Yeah, I think those vignettes are really kind of important to how we wrote and understood the book. I think that I don't need to speak for Damon here but actually kind of writing those was actually kind of the funnest writing part of this book is kind of experimenting and using those vignettes to kind of unpack some aspects of California Indian history. One that I really liked in the book is a place called is Ukiah California, right? So Ukiah is right off the 101 north of San Francisco. And so as much as we wanted to kind of center in on well-known places that people kind of know about California, right? The East Bay, Los Angeles, Sacramento. We also wanted to kind of center and highlight places that people might kind of think are kind of marginal to California history. But I think part of our argument is that they're not. And so by looking at a place like Ukiah California we identify it as being kind of a central site in pomo geography and ceremony and in life. So put the pomo people of Northern California when it becomes marginalized, it becomes rural, right? Through the processes of colonization and colonialism. So if you kind of look at it, like I think what Damon was saying before the California Gold Rush, Ukiah wouldn't be considered rural or isolated, right? It's center, it's part of a pomo world. But these kind of processes that we detail and talk about a little bit in the book kind of marginalized and make Ukiah kind of a role place. But we're able also then to kind of tease out and discuss kind of pomo survivants in this place. And so in the late 1870s, pomo workers bought back land. So with this kind of effort to kind of regain land in the 21st century was ongoing in the night, was going on in the night, it was in the 19th century. In the 20th century, right? The federal government designated pomo lands, some pomo lands as rancherias, a unique land holding into that is a unique system of land holding that is unique to indigenous peoples of California. So again, kind of speaking to the unique, kind of partly the unique nature of California. And then also in the 1980s, the ability of pomo people to kind of lead efforts to overturn termination policies and to regain status and federal recognition in the 1980s. And in the 21st century, indigenous peoples in the Ukiah area are prominent in the gaming industry. We were asked by one of our readers, right? Also the cannabis industry that is quite well known in Northern California. So I think by kind of highlighting both well known and maybe not so well known places, we're able to kind of provide a kind of a rounder more fuller understanding of California Indian and California history. Yeah, I see a great question in the chat. And I know we're also close to the time when we're the transition to check questions. I wanted to address this one. I think it's Lucy's question about the national parks. So years ago, Ken Burns came to the college, the small college I teach at and the friends of the library always often invite professors at the college to do kind of ancillary talk. So when one of the speakers for our speaker series comes, the faculty would do an event for friends of the library and others and I was asked to do the talk on that. And I declined. I said, I'm not necessarily a fan of Ken Burns work. I think he does some great things well, but there are issues that I have with his work that I've never really, at that time, never really thought about. And the director of the friends of the library who was a really, at that time, really garrulous and funny, crunchy old guy. He was really great. But he said, oh, great. That's even better. Figure out why you don't like Ken Burns and then do that talk. And I was like, all right. So I spent a month and I watched a lot of Ken Burns and I read interviews. And that was right around the time that the national parks film had come out. And all I had to say when I gave this talk was national park. The film is called America's Greatest Idea. Every national park is on native land. And so when we say that, that America's Greatest Idea does not include native people who are dispossessed from the land that every national park sits on, or we are trying to claim somehow that was good for them. And I think nobody in that crowd that night was comfortable with that argument. But what was also interesting is everybody was sort of bewildered by it. And to watch how much has changed now to go from there to David Truer's article in last month's Atlantic in which he makes a very compelling and very thoughtful argument for why it is that the national parks would be better managed by the indigenous people whose territory it is. And that is an argument that would have fallen like, I mean, it would have been a drop of rain in a desert late national park 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even eight years ago. So I think that speaks to a dramatic change in the way that people are thinking about giving land back, about reparations in general. And I also think it speaks to something that I often try to work with my students about, and that is it shifts our notion of time. Occasionally I would get a somewhat recalcitrant student, maybe an unreconstructed southerner whose attitudes about native people followed along with some other outworn ideas. And they would say something along the lines of like, United States conquered the West, US won. And I would say, well, not yet. It's not over. I mean, it's not over because it doesn't end. It's not a thing that has a beginning and an end. It's an ongoing struggle. And I think that kind of revising the chronology we use is a lot easier to imagine. I have no doubt, I remember telling my students, I have no doubt that at that point that the Washington football team would change their mascot, I just had no idea when. And they felt incredulous and then a year later it was done and I have no doubt that there will be a spate of land, a return of land to indigenous people over the next decade or two or 20. It's just hard to predict when and where and how. I know that there's a lot of questions and I think everyone's eager to discuss the book with us and we can talk about it. But I might kind of maybe wrap up here with a bit of a reading because I know there was a question in there about kind of the revitalization of kind of ceremonies. And I think one of the things that we actually did is, about a year ago, I think the UROC nation kind of held a jump dance to kind of, to help kind of as part of a world renewal ceremony to restore the world given kind of what was going on with COVID-19 and the world kind of falling out of balance. And then one of the ways that we integrated that into the book was we didn't talk about that in the 21st century, in the last chapter. We actually talked about it in the first chapter, right? So it becomes, when we talk about the world renewal ceremony in the first chapter, which is that kind of that time before, that kind of the time period before European contact, that it was something that has been ongoing since the creation for indigenous people. So that we kind of speaking to the long history of kind of ceremonies. And so I might kind of conclude a little bit with a reading from again, from the last chapter, right? Chapter 10, which is entitled, Returning to the Land. Beginning in May of 2001, women and men at the Hoopa Valley Reservation revitalized the Hoopa women's ceremony called the Flower Dance. Hoopas hold the Flower Dance at a young woman's coming of age. During the late 19th and early 20th century, federal and state genocidal and assimilation policies undermined the practice of the Flower Dance. Male anthropologists such as Alfred Krober considered the Flower Dance a relic of a primitive past and indicative of the Hoopa's less civilized nature. In the 20th and early 21st centuries, Hoopa women, Melody George Moore and Lois Riesling brought back the ceremony. Hoopa scholar, Kutcher Riesling Baldi documents this revitalization. And since the first ceremony, more Hoopa girls have requested the ceremony and Hoopa people have developed new songs. Elsewhere in Northern California, native peoples commemorated the traumatic events in their past. In 1863, the United States forcibly removed 460 concaos and Maidus from their homeland near Oroville and Chico, California. The army imprisoned the concaos and Maidus in a corral outside of Camp Bidwell. Subsequently, malaria swept through the people waiting for the force march. And on September 4th, 1863, the army began to march the concaos and Maidus the 100 miles from Camp Bidwell to the Round Valley Reservation. Only 277 concaos and Maidus arrived at Round Valley two weeks later. The rest remained behind on the trail too sick to continue. Oral histories of this ethnic cleansing recall that soldiers killed the elderly women and children. Native people at Round Valley and at Chico though, held this memory. In 1968 and in 1969, Round Valley tribal leaders reminded this state of California of this ethnic cleansing when the state and the Army Corps of Engineers proposed building a dam on the Eel River, which would have flooded the reservation and relocated the Round Valley people. In 1993, Round Valley tribal member Galen Asville worked with the National Forest Service to mark the trail with interpretive signs. Three years later at the conclusion of that effort, the descendants of the survivors of this ethnic cleansing began an annual walk along the route. In 1996, people gathered at California State University, Chico to hold the first walk. The Nome Colt walk has been instrumental in the process by which Round Valley Indians heal historical trauma. Galen Asville said quote, there's a lot of hurt, a lot of pain in Round Valley. We can't change what happened, but we've got to heal sometime. I think the dedication will have some closure for us. Arlene Ward, then chair of the Machupta Band of Chico Rancheria, said that her grandfather would not attend the first Nome Colt walk. Quote, he would not come. He said it would be like going to a funeral. End quote. For others though, the walk has been a way to reunite the Round Valley community, much like the flower dance at Hoopa. Fred Downey, a Round Valley tribal member added quote, we're able to walk together and be a loose net family again. The positive thing that this walk is healing. We can learn a great deal and our kids can learn a great deal, end quote. Additionally, Round Valley Indians established intergenerational connections on the walk. Kenneth Wright, former chairperson of the Round Valley Reservation said quote, it's important that our youngest members take part in this annual event, end quote. Shortly before her death in 2011, Anita Rome, the last living descendant of someone who was forcibly removed by the United States in 1863 and my grandmother, greeted her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who participated in that year's walk. And so unfortunately last year we weren't able to hold the walk because of the forest fires that hit in Northern California, went through the area that people would do on the walk. But I just talked to my mom last week and she said that my aunt is going through the process of making sure that we can do the walk and renew the walk again in the fall, so. Shall we turn to questions now? Yes, we're gonna turn to questions in both the chat and the Q and A. We'll go back and forth. So Pam, would you like to start reading off a few of the questions? Yes, I'll start with Stephanie Greene's question in chat. Curious about whether you've been able to make use of the holdings of the Bancroft Library or language archives at UC Berkeley. People would like to begin to research the history of the lands of their own institutions. How would you suggest people begin? Land deeds and then what? We made great use of the Bancroft Library. It's a treasure trove for records. And the language archive is phenomenal as well. In terms of advice, I think that's a great place to start. The archivists and librarians, they are very aware and knowledgeable about how to navigate what can often be somewhat complicated records. In terms of deeds, those are very useful in some things, but also a real pain to work with. I mean, they're really a challenge in a lot of ways. We've also used the manuscript census, the Indian census rolls, which are very controversial and problematic, but yet nonetheless, they document very well how much native people moved around, which was exactly what they didn't want them to do, which is really a lovely thing to watch. It's a great tension to watch in the records, especially if you also can get the letters where superintendents are saying they won't stay put. And it's a great, it's a lovely thing to see. Will you have anything to add there? Yeah, so yeah, I think like with David, I've been going to the Bancroft Library and using the resources at the Bancroft Library for many, many years. I used the Bancroft for my first and second books. So it's been kind of a vital resource in conducting research on California Indian history. And I think actually the other thing in terms of land deeds, one of the, I think actually an underused collection or underused source is at the National Archives, there's actually kind of a records for, I think it's called like the realty office. And so these records were kind of holding and recording land allotment. So in the late 19th, early 20th century, the federal government initiated policy called allotment, which was kind of allocating lands to heads of household, Indian heads of household, right, land plots. And then they kept kind of copious records of those, but you never know what you're gonna find in there. So when I was doing research for my first book a long time ago, I looked up my great-grandfather's realty records in that collection and I found a stack of letters about him during the Great Depression, like literally that thick, right? And really one of the cool things about that was my dad didn't know about it, my grandmother didn't know about it, hit his daughter, my aunts didn't know about it. And so it was a way to kind of find and find records that we didn't even know about and be able to kind of at least repatriate them back to my family and things like that. So I think that the more kind of the research you kind of do in these kind of things, you're gonna find these kind of unexpected things in archives like at Bancroft or even the kind of the National Archives. The one I use the most is when it's open, right? It's in San Bruno. So the next question is from Q&A, it's from Max Stevenson. Does the book address traditional indigenous land and watershed management practices such as fire and fisheries? It does, that is an area that I wish we could have and would probably address differently. So I think there's a couple of examples that we've thought about a lot since the book has come out. We reference fire, we work with fire, there's some different parts in the book where fire plays an important role. But nowhere near what I think and what others have pointed out, the central role that fire played in native wildlife management could have taken, I mean, it's filled many books on its own. And then also I think the work that's being done right now, particularly in the Klamath River in terms of dam restoration or destruction of the dams to restore the free flow rivers, that's something that is an emerging issue and I'm tracking in, we're both tracking it very closely and I think both of those would be top three things that I would love to add into or elaborate on in a revised edition if we have the chance. Question, Bill S in chat. My family has land in Kern County that was previously to Batulabi homeland. Does the book give any attention to the natives of the Kern River watershed? I think it shows up in a few of the chapters. I think in general, what I would say is anybody who goes to this book with an interest in a specific particular community is likely to be, if not disappointed at least left unsaciated because we have moved around the state so much. There's not any of the tribes or nations that we treat with anything that would approximate quote coverage because there are just so many but certainly the Kern County that region factors in in the fourth chapter which deals with the period right after the decline of the missions when a lot of the formerly affiliated native people moved back into the interior bringing with them a lot of ideas and in some cases diseases and it really the effect of it rippled up into the central valley. Yeah, I think they've kind of built on that question and the response actually the both of the questions actually is I think sometimes a book like this has to be a bit kind of superficial or that kind of airplane view of kind of historical events in the past but what we hope is that the book can then kind of sponsor or kind of get people to kind of think about these issues that maybe we gave kind of short drift or we just couldn't have the time or space to do so. So I think giving more attention to issues about kind of fire and fire management, watershed management, indigenous peoples in the Kern Valley or Kern River Valley I think those are kind of viable and important kind of topics for people to kind of investigate and develop. And so hopefully the book, I think people will be kind of inspired by some of the shortcomings that the book has. I know we've both developed next projects out of what we couldn't find in looking for the book. There's a question in chat. It's also about research is Marsha, where is the land allotment office and was there any value at California history library? So the land allotment records are a bulk of them the majority of them would be in the national archives and in San Bruno, if we're Northern California, they'll be in San Bruno. And then I think Southern California, they'd be down in, I think that the National Archives has moved out to Riverside, right, Damon? Yeah, yeah. There's parents who are wild in Riverside. Yeah, and then I'm not sure how much of the resources that we use from the California library. I mean, I think when you read the book, you'll note I think a book like this is typically relies heavily on secondary sources. And so I think we would be, we rely on kind of the scholarship that has been produced before us and what we've done is hopefully kind of provided a unique reinterpretation of the material of the scholars who have gone before us. Well, this question in Q&A from Alyssa, have you written about the Russian presence in California like Fort Ross? We did and we wrote about it fairly extensively. For a couple of reasons. One, because the Kashyya community there featured prominently in the ninth chapter in a roundabout way. And this is one of those ways in which we're trying to draw connections. The ninth chapter deals, it's on reoccupying the land and it deals really with the period from the 50s to the 80s, the 1950s to the 1980s, really focusing on the 1960s and 1970s. And so what we had been able to do by situating the Russian presence at Fort Ross among the Kashyya and the Coast Miwok was to then be able to illustrate in the ninth chapter the kind of persistence and continuity when things that were happening there, we could reference back. So it's there. And then also the shows up, I can't remember which one, it was in Rome, the native vignette on Rome. We also discuss other, that deals with a complicated story about Pablo Toc and Agipito Aminix. They were both Luis Daniel boys who traveled to Rome to study for the priesthood. And as part of that discussion, we wanted to also illustrate ways that California, other California people, life forms, artifacts, objects traveled to Europe. And so we factored in there that there are a group of Kashyya dancers who traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia to view California Indian artifacts. A question in chat from Allen, the Round Valley Forced March was how long? It sounds like Cherokee Trail of Tears. How would you compare those ethnic cleansing examples? So they're a little different, right? In the sense that the Round Valley Walk was about a hundred miles. So it starts in Chico, California and then it goes west, the trail goes west over to the Round Valley Reservation. If you look at our map, like if you look at a Google map of it, you make, oh, that's, you know, it's a hundred miles, whatever, but you got to go over kind of the enormous mountain range that goes up to about 7,000 feet above sea level. And so it's for the horse march at the time, like I said in the reading, it took about kind of, it took about two weeks and almost half the people kind of, half the people perished. And so that's our story. Many tribal groups have their own kind of these stories about kind of ethnic cleansing. I think the way that people kind of think about them is always, they've always been struck by the way in which people kind of have similar thoughts and memories about these events. So for instance, I think if you kind of look at the Cherokee one, the Denei Long Walk and even the one in Round Valley, it's striking to see that people always describe themselves as being rounded up like animals and herd it, right? And so there's a kind of an interesting kind of intellectual argument I think that has made that the ways in which kind of people process this and thought about that and recorded it in their oral histories. And so as much as there are kind of extremely kind of similarities between these experiences, I think that, you know, there's differences. There's different moments in time, right? The 1830s and the ethnic cleansing that comes out of the Southeast is in terms of kind of scope and scale is obviously much bigger than what happened to Kankau and Maidu people in the 1860s. In Q and A, there's a question from an anonymous attendee. What about the upsurge and adoption of land acknowledgement before events, especially academic events? The land acknowledgement trend is good to see. At the same time, seems like it's perfunctory wokeness because it's not tied to any actions to actually address the injustices anyway. It's a great question. I'll dive into that one since I've done a little bit of writing on that for some current projects but one of the first things I did is I tracked Google Trends to see when people started searching for land acknowledgements and it's an amazing example of what Google Trends can do because people start looking for the word land acknowledgement in a meaningful sense in February of 2018. It is, it is dateable. I mean, before that people would look but it didn't rise to the level to get charted. So it's a flat line and then it peaks and unsurprisingly it peaks in the second week of October and the third week of November every year and each year it has gone considerably larger. So we can understand very easily the driving factors here in terms of the original. Somebody else in the chat had also asked what's gone on the last five or 10 years to change things. I think that the political climate that was occasioned or brought about or exacerbated by the Trump presidency or at least some of the polarization that attended it certainly motivated a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum and certainly with a lot of activists. And then clearly the Black Lives Matter movement that came out of that has animated a lot of other groups to begin to articulate their demands. And I'm always very careful with my students to point out that land acknowledgement is not a diversity and equity and inclusion phenomenon. It is different and it needs to sit separate from that. It's a question of sovereignty and it is about identifying historical wrongs that can be righted in ways that are different than simply than some of the other issues that my students are really animated about with social justice. So in terms of the perfunctory nature, I think that's absolutely the case. I'm working with the committee at my particular college right now and I and a few other people involved had to slow the process down because others wanted to really get on board and get a land acknowledgement up on our website. And a number of us pointed out that we don't have a good relationship with the native people whose land we were about to acknowledge and that that's not a sustainable or it's not the right thing to do. And so we need to build relationships that have gone that we've abandoned. And so there's a group that's now working on that. Actually, I had this discussion with a student earlier today, a grad student that I'm working with who had just read the book and we were kind of talking about the text. And for her reading the book, she was able to kind of think, she thought actually kind of the native spaces was a way of kind of engaging with this kind of move towards land acknowledgement. Is it becomes actually kind of a tangible way that hopefully readers begin to understand and rethink that the land in that space that is around them and hopefully kind of drive to some of the more kind of the tangible things that I think Damon was just kind of talking about in the response. Well, there's a related question by John Gammon and forgive me if you've covered this, but is there any momentum among those universities to give back land or money earned from that? No, but it's an inevitable thing. I mean, it gets back to the question earlier, like, oh yes, it's absolutely going to happen. And but I don't know of any, maybe San Marcos. I don't know if there's something happening down there, but I can't think of any off the top of my head that are actively talking about giving control over land. Repatriation is different. Certainly that's mandated by law. Repatriation of artifacts and others, but in terms of like actually seeding control of territory, the only example I can think of is the University of British Columbia, which has something much stronger than faculty orientation or staff orientation you meet with the tribal community and you go through a process of asking and recognizing the people who are hosting and they build themselves as a campus that is hosted by and on the unseeded territory. I'm forgetting to forget the particular tribal community, but that's been that way for a few years. Even if I recall, right, this kind of issue that you see is really kind of flared up right around like a year ago, right? When we were almost kind of putting the book to bed, when we were kind of sending it off. And it was kind of, when we were finishing the book, it was so odd, right? It's like we said, it's in the middle of the pandemic, but it was a little bit before kind of the Black Lives Matter protest against George Floyd, about the murder of George Floyd. And so it was so odd, we were kind of stuck in our houses and isolated and like so much stuff was kind of going on that we would have liked to kind of put into the book, but it just, it was kind of an interesting kind of, the more I kind of think about what has happened in the last year and in relation to us kind of finishing this text and the things that we could have covered would have been, I think even the question about fire that happened earlier in the chat, you know, those, the big wildfires that kind of skaved kind of Northern and Southern California kind of came in the summer. And we just, you know, if we were kind of thinking about the book differently, we probably would have included more of that coverage. It just, sometimes you're kind of a product of a moment when you're at a book like this. Yeah. You know, one of the quick thought is that the High Country News published about a year ago, maybe a little longer than a year ago, a great research piece called Land Grab Universities that tracks all of the land that was granted to universities around the nation and how they came to acquire it and traces it back to its indigenous occupants and how they lost it. And it's a really, really phenomenal resource that a lot of colleges, students at colleges have started turning to in their own university, even it's places like North Carolina State saying like, this is the amount of money, the dollar amount that we got from the federal government by stealing land from indigenous people in California. So it's a really, really interesting piece of research. Michael Warburton asks, were there any indigenous approaches to revaluing resources or assets and changing circumstances? It seems civilized types are perplexed at what to do when fossil fuels are obviously more valuable to humanity left in the ground than extracted for any purpose. I think that's the core issue about the land back movement, right? And I think what Damon was saying a little earlier about national parks and having more kind of indigenous kind of management of national parks. I think that's at the center of this thing, right? Is that, and that's not to say that, many tribal nations on the Northern Plains, for instance, exact kind of financial benefits from fossil fuel extraction and that sort of thing. That's their sovereign right to do so and that sort of thing. But I think the question kind of gets at how to manage land and relationships with the land, right? And so kind of why things are even valued. So for some groups, the value of a place, value kind of in parentheses there is the ability to kind of go and perform ceremony there. And that's not a value and a use that's obviously gonna be kind of emphasized in a capitalist extractive industry setting. Alyssa Lynch asks, any coverage of Los Angeles draining the Owens Valley for a hundred plus years? Tribal water rights are not recognized in context of first in use, first in rights. Yeah, it's there. You can't tell the story of Los Angeles without that story and you can't tell the story of the Owens Valley without, I mean, there's about three or four different stories that all intersect right there. Yeah, and I think, oh, sorry, cut you off there, David, and my apologies. And I think one of the other things that we mentioned in that when we're, when we do that, we also kind of mentioned kind of the long, the ongoing efforts of the Owens Valley kind of Indians or I had the water commission, I can't remember the acronym that the organizations that's down there in the Owens Valley fighting for those water rights. So as much as we kind of like, as Damon was alluding to, we talk about kind of Owens Valley, its connection to Los Angeles in the 1930s, but also we kind of bring that story as much into the present day, kind of the present day kind of political activism as we could. Pam, I do notice there are two people with their hands up. Are those questions that are coming through a different channel? Hold on, let me see. Let's just continue with the question. Okay, sorry. And cause we got a wrap, we've got a wrap up in a few minutes. Yeah. Okay. So is it challenging, this is from Marie, is it challenging to write a history in which much of the audience has a different culture than the peoples whose history you're recounting? Is the book more history or culture? Wow, those are two big questions. So I'll take the first one and you take the second one, Willy, maybe. It is challenging. I get the hard one, thanks, Damon. I appreciate that. It is challenging because we were both in very different ways and for very different reasons, very aware of the fact that we are not, we are writing about something that we are not participating in. Even the degree to which in some instances, Willy is writing about things that he was involved in, that that doesn't shade out beyond his own experiences. So I know that we, I know that that was a real challenge to us. Yeah, no, I think we write, I mean, we're not anthropologists. And I mean that by saying, I mean, I think we have a kind of a different, kind of a tune to this. And I think one of the differences between say writing kind of, what kind of something about kind of kind of culture or writing the difference about end in history is this kind of is an emphasis on change and continuity over time. And I think that was something, Damon kind of alluded to this, I think earlier in our discussion today is that, yeah, there's, you know, Europeans initiated change in California, but also I think that we were able to kind of document, I think hopefully well, read the aspects of continuity that indigenous peoples have kind of maintained ideas about identity, relationships to land and place throughout North America, throughout California history. Okay, so that we have time for one more question from anonymous attendee, what do you think about land tax for native rematriation? For example, do you live on traditionally John Olan land, much of the East Bay, would you like to support our rematriation initiatives? I can take that. There are a number of these, Sigourte is one of them. And I don't live in that region, but I have explored ways to support it. Currently, that particular one is really based on where you are located and the degree to which your location and whether you own or rent a home, how that impacts. So, but I think there, this is a growing phenomenon. I mean, Venmo has changed land-back movements in a phenomenal way, because it makes it so easy to capture people who are accustomed to activism by cell phone and asking them to honor their claims. You claim that you believe in these things. So, here's a space where you can send a little bit of money. Yeah, and I think the key part of that, and I think that's why I always appreciate when David kind of reads from the conclusion of the book, is that I think a lot of people think that the past is the past, and it's unchangeable. But that's not the case, I mean, as Damon kind of talked about in his reading, is that that land was returned. If you think about the 1970s, no one would have thought that was possible. But here we are in the 21st century and land is being returned to indigenous peoples. And so, these things are not, that the past is still kind of present and these kind of policies and these things can be overturned and changed. Great, well, I wanna thank both of our authors, Damon Aikens and William Bauer for an incredibly inspiring and insightful program and bringing us from taking the past, bringing it into the present so that we can move towards cultural equity. So, I wanna thank our audience and I wanna thank Malcolm Margolin and Claire Greensfelder and Lydia Laporte on the staff of the California Institute of Community, Art, and Culture, and Nature. I think you can hear, oh, you'll put that in there. For being our co-sponsors on this program and also to UC Press that has published this incredible book. I hope that everyone will go out and get it at a bookstore near you. And we look forward to seeing you on our future programs. This will be recorded and available on both of our organization's websites through Mechanics Institute YouTube channel. So we hope that you'll review it again or share it with friends and we look forward to seeing you at our next programs. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks everyone for coming, appreciate it. Wonderful to be a part of it. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you virtually. So, where are we going for drinks? I heard, I didn't hear. Cyber drinks, cyber drinks. That's right. I'm going to end the Zoom now. It's great seeing everybody. It was wonderful. Thank you very much for all your work. Wonderful. And again, I apologize for my sound problems, but wonderfully bet. It is. Maybe we can do another with the California ICANNs. Yes. Okay, take care. Bye-bye. Thank you.