 We're going to start with Jonathan here representing the Romatisch-Alone. What does the land-backed movement mean to you? Well, the land-backed movement is, I think, incredibly important for Native peoples, primarily because we have, as a part of our culture, a very intimate relationship with land. To be a little more specific, when we talk about land-back, land is usually discussed as property, and so we often find ourselves saying, well, you know what, it's not just land to us. So when we talk historically about losing land, losing our land, it's not just land that we've lost. Native peoples have an intimate connection with all of nature, and we understand the interconnectedness of all things and the interdependence of all things, and that relationship, our very intimate relationship with our land, which we know very well and have tended for thousands of years, that relationship is terminated, or was terminated historically, when land was taken away from us. So when we talk about getting land back, you know, for us, it's far more than just thinking about the return of property. It's about restoring that relationship of Native peoples to the land that really defines us as a people, it defines our culture, it defines our spirituality. So land-back seems like a very simple thing to say, but in reality, most people, when we talk about getting land back, don't really understand how significant and important getting land back is to Native peoples for reasons other than the possession of property, which is what land is currently in our current system, and what we can effectively use that land for. But Native peoples we don't think about, again, we don't think of land as something that's to be owned, we don't think of land as something that's to be used. We tend to think of land as something that we have a responsibility to care for, and those instructions are in our teachings, they're in our culture, they're defined in part and integrated into our spirituality. So land-back is never just simply getting land back, it's something more deeply meaningful to us. Thank you. Secretary Snyder. Thank you for the question, and I knew this was going to happen where we'd all be kind of thinking along the same lines and might have duplicative answers, but I agree in that land-back, I think, at its core is a restoration of a relationship that's been here since time immemorial, and that was disrupted with people who had a different idea about what the things on the earth are for. From a Native perspective, all of our origin stories, how we identify as people is based in the land that we're from. So typically in contexts like this, I'll actually read from this book called We Are the Land, which has kind of a seamless integration of Native histories, oral traditions, origin stories, and what we would think of as kind of objective Western-based histories. So the book starts with several origin stories that talk about how certain people came to be, certain features came to be named, and it's all interrelated and integrated. And I think what we're talking about when we talk about land-back is similarly we're not talking about a transfer of property rights, we're talking about a restoration of a relationship and an identity that is interconnected. I am probably the representative of the man on this panel, since I work for the governor, work for the state, and work for probably one of the biggest offenders of the, and perpetrators of the genocide here in California. To kind of just give some context for those who are unfamiliar, there were lots of Native people here, everywhere in California was a Native place. This was the most largely populated place north of Mexico pre-contact. That continued with a steady stream of decline as the mission system came in, and when Americans found gold, pretty much almost every single Native person was decimated. The lands were taken, resources extracted, and Native people were in the way. So necessarily you had to remove Native people from the land. You had to take the things that were on the land, and you had to sever that relationship because Native people would keep coming back. Native people still come back. And so what we're trying to do, at least from a state perspective, and how we're trying to facilitate land-back is restoring that access, that relationship with the overlay of the fact that we live in an American state in 2022. And so there's a lot of other people here, a lot of other legal structures, and a lot of other mindsets here. But really what we're trying to do here is ensure that when Native people come back to the land and continue that relationship, that we're removing those barriers to that relationship, which means not just having land transfers of land that was once in ancestral territory, but now it's completely decimated and is a super fun site. It means we want to restore the land and restore the people, and that needs to happen at the same time. Thank you. I think about it in many different ways. When I put my Indian lawyer hat on, the term use and occupancy comes to mind. And that was the way that our relationship to land was defined by the Supreme Court and essentially colonial powers who sought to divest us of our title and ownership. That we somehow, that right to land ownership was taken from us somehow by the so-called conquest of America. And I think that while our relationship as Native people is much more complex than title, I really feel that title is important in today's world. Our ancestral territory is often referred to as wine country. It's Pomo country. But there are landholders there. They have been able to accumulate generational wealth. They've been able to provide businesses and opportunities that end up harming our land essentially. It's about the usurpation of authority and control over our homelands. Much has been taken from us, our narrative about our history in academia, our cultural heritage and the collections that have been seized in university warehouses in the Smithsonian. And our authority to say what's best for our traditional landscape has been taken. A little bit more about the history of California is that we had 18 unratified treaties. Those treaties didn't represent all the tribes in our state. But had those treaties been honored, there would be seven more million acres of Indian land in this state. And there aren't. There's less than 500,000 acres of Indian land holding. So it's very critical as we work to revitalize our culture, to revitalize our languages, to build economies, to support our people that we have land to do that on. And having a few acres here and there when the government attempted to buy back land during the Rancheria system in the early 1900s doesn't help our communities thrive. I've worked in partnership with different land trusts and organizations over the years and my role as the museum. We work with Native youth and our goal is to ensure that they're not strangers in their ancestral territory, that they can go out and identify the plants and medicines and foods that are essential to their bodies, to their DNA. But access is a big issue. And in order to be able to steward the land, we often have to create MOUs and partnerships or revise public park policies that often criminalize traditional gathering. And so we work really hard to overcome those obstacles, but we're often faced with kind of a tokenism by non-Native people. I often say, I get invited to offer a blessing, but I don't get invited to a boardroom. And it's essential that we have decision-making power over lands in our ancestral territories. It's essential that we have title. It's really critical that my youth or our youth are able to go to the land and engage with it every day, not just during acorn harvest season. We have to be able to care for the land spiritually. It became very evident in the 2017 fires and the successive fires that have hit our region that traditional ecological knowledge is a necessity. Our traditional stewardship of our land is not only beneficial for us, it's beneficial for everybody who shares our ancestral spaces. And so I think it's really critical that we have a seat at the table, that we have decision-making authority, and that we are able to access land on a regular basis in order to steward it in the way that it needs. Thank you for that. If we can kind of building off of that, Jonathan, if you must speak to maybe what some of the challenges or obstacles are that may be very unique to Ramatish, but also just more broadly to getting land back at the political level, community level, economically, whatever you'd like to emphasize. Sure. So just so everyone understands. So the Ramatishaloni are the original peoples of the San Francisco peninsula. And up until this year, none of us have lived in our ancestral homeland for 100 years and we haven't held land in our ancestral homeland in over 250 years. So it's a long time in coming and we're obviously working on trying to acquire access to land, whether that's lease, co-management, or even legal ownership, unfortunately. If you offered me a thousand acres today, I would say no, because we do not have the financial, legal, and human resources necessary to tend that land over time. It would become a burden, not a benefit. So what is lacking from the land-back discussion is the idea of capacity. We need capacity to hold land and to retain that land and to develop that land if we chose to do so. That discussion is hugely problematic right now because most California Indians from Sonoma de San Diego along the coast of California, who incorporated into the California missions, are landless and ineligible for federal recognition. So there are a lot of unrecognized tribes in California who will likely never be able to receive land as a result of gaining federal recognition. So we have to find ways to get land and land on the peninsula, as many of you well know, is incredibly expensive and a thousand acres would probably cost us about $10 million. So that's one obstacle, which is that Native peoples, especially unrecognized tribes that are poorly resourced, would need that capacity to accept land in the first place. Secondly, most of the organizations with whom we work, who manage land like the major land trusts on the peninsula, or others including cities and counties, cannot give land to us without some sort of restrictions, whether that's a conservation easement or just the absolute inability under their current laws and policies to gift land to Native peoples. Those are obstacles that really make land holding nearly impossible. And so that's a really huge obstacle that we confront on a regular basis when we're out there trying to acquire parcels of land for our tribal organization. I'll speak a bit, I think, to some of the challenges that we see in government in transfers and then also kind of higher level, how do we help others navigate all of this. I think at a baseline, capacity is one thing, but also just general lack of awareness of California Indian country is another thing. And if you think you understand it, you probably have only skimmed the surface or talked to one person, and it's incredibly complicated, but it doesn't have to be. I think generally from organizations, private capital, the government even, there's a lot of goodwill right now in wanting to do the right thing, but a lot less of a thick skin when it comes to the fact that the right thing isn't the right thing for everybody. And so you are going to be navigating a lot of conflict, you're going to be navigating a lot of historical trauma, and you're going to be navigating a lot of different ideas about what land back even means to people and whether you are doing the right thing. I will say if you're on the path of land back, you're already doing the right thing. But what we've seen in some of these partnerships is that there's a lot of hesitancy because there is conflict. People will speak out. There's hundreds of years of just built up trauma, anger, resentment about not having that access that as we kind of navigate those spaces, you are going to get a little bit of kind of fallout as you try to do the right thing. So one thing I would say, talk to more people, learn more, understand that conflict is a good thing because it means people care. If they're not talking to you, you probably did the wrong thing and they don't want to work with you. From the government perspective and from the state government perspective specifically, we have both our land back type of initiatives are grounded in the governor's apology that he issued in 2019 for the historical genocide of California native peoples and the massive land dispossession and other prejudicial policies that came from the American colonization of California. Granted off of that, he in 2020 issued an administration policy on ancestral lands which encourages state entities to seek opportunities whether it's providing funding sources or whether it's actually land transfers for native people to own or access their ancestral homelands. One piece of this is that from the state's seat, we can be a leader in this space but we don't actually have a lot of land. So the state itself, well the federal government is the largest land holder in California. They have about 50%. The next largest is private ownership which is at about just under 50%. And a lot of that is utilities who like PG&E who have large land holdings. State has about 3% and then local government have about 1%. So when we're talking about the things that we can actually transfer at the state level it's very small scale but we can facilitate policies that would allow for transfers like the PUC's land transfer policy that they have over their privately owned utilities. So I think just from the actual transfer level it's much more difficult for the state to do that because we also have laws and regulations that are specific to each agency commission and department. So for example the state lands commission has certain restrictions about what they can do and how they can transfer lands. So necessarily they're going to have restrictions on those transfers. From kind of the policy and legislative level as well they're all beholden if we're in a representative democracy they're beholden to the taxpayers and to the voters and so they aren't going to do anything that they view as being potentially controversial and so we as the administration can push as much as we want but if there's a district where people are prioritizing conservation period which by the way doesn't exist there were always people everywhere in California so the idea that you have just this pristine wildlife is a fiction. But if you have places that prioritize that over reintroduction of ancestral and native knowledges and people and native led movements to kind of be back in those spaces you will hit roadblocks because they still need to get into office so I'm kind of skimming the surface here but I'll pass it off to Nikki. It's hard to get legislative representatives attention when you're one percent of the population they just don't consider you a big voting segment right. I think that for me in my experience you know being in a non-profit for 20 years now it's really funding. We you know funders fund projects not land back in my experience and so that's the majority of the issue that we've had and and it's cost a living you know it'd be great to have a hundred thousand acres we're looking for five and you know that's what we figure that we can afford to to steward and manage but it would create an opportunity to grow that it's it's difficult because there's been so much commodification of our culture you know every time a new vineyard goes in our baskets and cultural heritage items come out and when people bring them to the museum they say well how much are they worth they don't want to give it back they want to know what the monetary value of it is and so that you know monetary value is is attached to land and for us it's really about the opportunity to revitalize our foods and improve our health while our people were were you know waged they waged the first governor of the state waged a war of extermination on us one way that they continue to perpetuate genocide is to exterminate us through food and dietary related disease and if you look at other cultures that are able to live here and thrive in California many of them have their food we don't have our access to our food you know often it's just ceremonial access and so we really need to create an opportunity to be able to harvest food from our land and introduce our traditional food into our diet diet on a daily basis to improve our health and that's going to take getting land and and being able to to ensure that the cultural and nutritional resources in that land are distributed to our community so there's lots of challenges but i would say most of the time it really comes down to money and and the ability to afford to to get titled to the land and to oversee the land and care for the land and and create a legal framework in which that land can be protected for future generations thank you so if you have questions for the panel we'd appreciate you um picking up your phone and going ahead and inserting them into the app i believe that's been made available to folks to to put questions in the first question that's been submitted does the land back movement also focus on cities and if so what objectives of the movement uh what are the objectives of the movement in a city context could ecological connection interdependence be uplifted in cities i think i think i would hand it off to john that i would say cities are also native land so yes uh so that's a good place to start of course uh we we're actually in relationship right now with the city of san francisco to require land um and when of course they they made the offer we asked for them to give us back our land by the way and think about that for a minute think about what it means for a native person who's sovereign in their own ancestral homeland to have to ask somebody else to return their own land back to them and then the response is well we can't do that and and so we're we're in the process of working with the city of san francisco now to figure out a way to be able to do that because of course it's possible right of course it's possible a lot of lawyers are going to be involved in that process i'm sure it's also incredibly important as most of you know uh that native peoples be very well that native peoples are very well aware of of the issues related to climate justice so we know full well that marginalized communities especially in large cities do not have as much can you know tree canopy uh green space park space garden space in their communities and exposure right to to those kinds of of green spaces are actually beneficial for mental health and so the the absence of that is a critical problem for those communities so the answer is yes we are trying our best to gobble up as many parcels of land as we possibly can in this case within the city and county of san francisco and then return those lands back to marginalized communities in the city and and we're we're sort of calling this temporarily our you know community gardens program and and we're working toward that end and of course our our goal is to at least initially to focus on the american indians in the city and county of san francisco but there's a lot of land hopefully that we'll be able to acquire and give back so we're working on that and we're not doing it just for ourselves but we're trying to do it for other marginalized communities as well but but we're using our status as the original peoples to try to accomplish that um so that's that's my tentative response to uh to the question okay all right or you want to um i would just say in addition to that you know with land acknowledgments now there's a tendency to um you know raise the level of visibility of native people which is a necessity um but land going beyond land acknowledgments it's about consultation and partnership and doing that in a meaningful way and and combating a razor and raising visibility is really important but it's also important that we think out of the box and that we create opportunities for native people to participate in leadership in the cities and and have a voice in in the planning and and you know all of the things that that go on with with expansion and development and all of those things so i think that's important i think too it's important to reindigenize or indigenize the way that you think about cities coastal communities places where people like to be if they like to be there now they've always liked to be there so most of the cities most of the coastal communities places like lake tahoe where some of the most densely populated places in california pre-contact so the idea that even um there might be an exclusion for where there's more concrete or where people have beach homes or where they have you know the things that they like to enjoy now that that might be a place that would be excluded from land back is a problem so i think we need to be thinking constantly about kind of in our mental virtual reality what would this be like if this all wasn't here and what would people view as important where the places i view is important because they probably viewed them as important back in the day pre-contact and one thing i did want to point out which is a good example of how some cities are looking at um just land and access and benefiting native people is there is a voluntary tax in um uh oakland area um for the benefit of the sagoratay land trust and so basically people who are landowners and people who live in the area can voluntarily um donate a tax basically i don't even like the words i'm using but that's the concept great and we have one as well by the way it's called the unican land tax so you can find it on our website yeah and we're using their model that's a great model all right so the questions are pouring in and we've got about 13 minutes 14 minutes left uh if and there's so many want to ask um what can funders do right to support the land back movement what funds can people contribute to and to support land buyback can fund our five acre parcel of of savannah woodlands that that we're seeking to um create an acorn flower supply so our youth a few years ago came up with a great idea in order to get traditional foods into our daily diet and they said let's have an acorn protein bar so we have acorn bites and in order to build a business around an acorn protein bar we need acorn flower and in order to create flower we need an oak savannah where we can harvest acorns and and and create that flower chain supply so there's lots of different projects throughout indian country that support food sovereignty that support land back that support cultural revitalization so it's really just funding those projects um being creative and and engaging native people uh is voices in in the community and yeah there's lots of opportunities if i if i can hijack this for just a quick second politely sitting here listening to everyone's responses i have um something i'd like to say about this as well and it ties to the capacity building issues so for unrecognized tribes on the coast um just really having documentation that clearly identifies your ancestral territories is super important right so both for funders right but also for the tribe so that you know that when you're working with a tribe that is the rightful community to that region right and it's very hard talk about navigating difficult landscapes right that's one of the things that can really be challenging um and you don't want to do it wrong because it creates additional harms within native communities as well as um challenges for for you right so um so it's something that has to be taken very seriously and that may mean helping fund genealogies for a tribal community right um tied to villages right because at least for much of coastal california we're village-based communities right so we have an ancestral footprint um there's a lot of different ways to help capacity build um in addition to right um staff positions and so forth with the tribal communities most of us have nonprofits right that work alongside with our tribes um those uh operate to help uh our work in our case we are working on decommissioning um diablo canyon right with PG&E and so forth so we need to work with all of our partners but it's none of our day day jobs right it's voluntary on the side in addition to all of the other work we're doing so capacity building really does look like a lot of different things to um unrecognized tribes especially so sorry about hijacking them well and on that note to funding um lawyers so a lot of what land back looks like is creating cultural easements negotiating with the state negotiating with private landholders negotiating property transfers negotiating um capacity building for 10 years and then the tribe actually owns it in full after 10 years as they and um funding um native people to be able to um uh be back on that land so we have a lot of youth who could and a lot of people generally who could learn relearn the skills that they need to be um stewarding these lands and and there's a lot of meat out there so lawyers um land management um even uh as Kusla mentioned um just funding people to be able to be full-time tribal leaders um because that's not even with federally recognized tribes even not even guaranteed we'll keep moving um how is the california land back work positioned with california reparations task force work for descendants of slaves what opportunities do you see to align both important efforts i can answer that very quickly because under statute the reparations task force is limited to um well this was a big argument so i'm not even going to say but it was it was for that community um and not for native people so we have the truth and healing council which is a very similar but executive order created council which um uh council member kessler motha sits on um and that i convene as the governor secretary of tribal affairs um but they're looking at how to have a bigger broad based recommendation based on land that makes sense for all of you but also for the the general community and the legislature to think about how to change statute i think it's important to you to acknowledge that there is indentured servitude in california for children my um my great great grandfather was an irish man not many indian people you know i always have to say uh what a cherry key princess or something like that but um he came here in 1859 and purchased my pomo grandmother at the age of 12 years old and so you know our last name is the colonial brand the settler colonial brand and and many of the women who intermarried with uh gold miners uh were not able to inherit property or assets from them and um their children you know suffered because of that so i think it's important also to add that to the conversation thank you what similarities slash connections do you leverage with other native communities and are there ways to strengthening what seems like a universal struggle native hawaiian homesteads well i'll start um one of the odd concerns that people have when they start working with california indians is the fact that sometimes we don't all get along and of course that's okay because we don't expect all white people to get along either but no one ever actually really is concerned about that for some reason they're concerned about all of us getting along and the reasons are pretty obvious right they uh they want their jobs to be easier and their jobs are made easier when we purportedly all get along but we're independent nations and we're not all the same and we do our best i think to uh to build bridges and relationships one with another and some of those relationships uh that have been broken over time uh have been broken for a very long time and so people will actually offer to put us in a room to help us solve this problem of not getting along which is incredibly patronizing and inherently racist so we get offered uh restorative justice mediation regularly to help solve that problem so there's a politics to the californian communities that folks are not very well aware of and it's okay we don't all have to get along um and certainly we don't have to get along for the sake of someone else's you know ease of doing their own uh doing their own work that said there's a positive to this which is that many of us in california know each other and we're actually working to increase honesty and integrity in our communities and we're actually having quite a bit of success and the sort of older generation of leaders in california uh and their style of of leadership is sort of fading away and there's there's a new model emerging and there's a lot more partnerships um and you know by our definition not yours um civility among us and and progress um because of it but um but please do not expect us all to get along any more than you would expect members of any other uh race or ethnicity to get along that's that's uh not okay obviously i would use to add to that because i get asked all the time from museums and institutions oh there's so many tribes there's so many alonis which one do i work with you know and my response is all of them and and i think that it's really critical that if you are partnering with tribes and and there is you know there's issues on the table um don't just work with the tribe that you find the easiest to work with um don't pick your favorite um you know work with the ones that challenge you that challenge those foundations um i think that's really critical that that we look at the broader community when we're doing work and engagement and i'll say um just from kind of a high level perspective well i'll start with one thing and i'm not trying to start fights um but um california has been one of the most neglected places in the united states for native peoples um if you go to dc a lot of the attitude is that california is too complicated and it's complicated by design i think um but uh california ends up being one of the most complicated places to do a lot of good work because it is so neglected and um so the idea of um us trying to lead by example can be very hard and kind of um cause fights but i would say that from at least the policy making perspective we are trying to lead by example so when we do things like within state government within federal government within um the cities uh and the coastal communities i think most of our perspective is if this is a good idea and it works for you please take it amend it to to work for you um and we want everybody to do well in these spaces um similar with um the issues at monica and in hawaii i think all of us realize that we're all part of this same struggle and we all support each other um in this space even if we do have some conflict and i think at the end of the day we all realize that there's kind of a bigger fish to fry out there um and um would welcome those that collaboration great so we have slightly under three minutes left and some really great questions um i'll choose the possibly um one where someone can knock this out in a very short period of time uh what about the parallel water rights back um water back conversation in california that's the most complicated i know you got two minutes yeah you got two and a half minutes i'll defer to you thanks um you know my dad and my dad left us in in 2020 uh he was a native american lawyer for his career and for the last couple of decades he was saying water waters the issue and you know it's we're we're headed into water wars and um it's you know it's just as critical um when i was talking about you know the food sovereignty and and one of our native elders would always say kill the food kill the culture and whether it was killing us through eradicating buffalo or our salmon um you know when the salmon are gone so are we and so i think that it's really critical that we we look at water and the health of water and um and ensure that um tribes have a seat at the table can i just add on that is that because i just like picking apart all your questions but thinking about water separate from land is not the way to do it you have to think about it as a whole thing because it's all the same so the water the land the food the spiritual connection the community building housing all of it is the same thing and so you can't have a land back without a restored environment without water access without the land the animals and the um and kind of the quality of life that that would have been here pre-contact do you like to add anything to that Jonathan um no can i say something else sure you got 40 seconds yeah no i just i just wanted to say uh to to follow up on my earlier comment so that it's not so overly negative we are forming alliances with lots of american indian groups and doing some amazing things together both here in in the bay area and in other places so there's a lot of progress that's been made again progress by our definition there's a lot of relationships that have been built and we've had a lot again of successes again success by our definition and so things are actually looking really good for us as we move forward but we do desperately need financial support in order to do that work and remember no blessings without boardrooms thank you so much for joining us today