 I hope this smile shows how excited I am to be here today. I'm excited that you all are here today, but I'm most excited that our guests are here. We haven't been doing a lot of in-person programs. We enjoy and we love promoting and standing behind authors and people that we want to support. So I think this is especially exciting for us to have you both here today. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Aloni peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush community. Now to our main event, which brings you back to my smile, author Tony Platt and Milton Reynolds in conversation, Grave Matters. Grave Matters is the history of the treatment of native remains in California and the story of the complicated relationship between researcher and researched. Tony begins his journey with his son's funeral at Big Lagoon, a seaside village in pastoral Humboldt County in Northern California, once Opuae, a bustling center for the Yurok in the site of a plundered native cemetery. Tony travels the globe in search of the answer to the question, how do we reconcile a place of extraordinary beauty with its horrific past? Grave Matters, the controversy over excavating California's buried indigenous past, centers the Yurok people and the eventful movement to repatriate remains and reclaim ancient rights. But it is also a universal story of coming to terms with the painful legacy of a sorrowful past. This book originally published in 2011 is updated here with the preface by the author. Tony Platt is a longtime academic and activist, the author of 13 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of criminal justice, race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He is currently a distinguished affiliated scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley, and a member of Berkeley's Truth and Justice Project. He is taught at the University of Chicago, Berkeley, and California State universities. Milton Reynolds is a San Francisco Bay Area-based career educator, author, equity, and inclusion consultant and activist. His activism has been devoted to disrupting systems of racial injustice with a focus on juvenile justice reform, law enforcement accountability, environmental justice, youth development, educational transformation, and disability justice. His efforts are devoted to creating a more just world in which all people are valued and treated with dignity. Milton's publications include a chapter in Seeing Race Again, Countering Color Blindness Across the Disciplines, Handbook of Social Justice and Education, and one in the recently released, Leading in the Belly of the Beast. I'm thrilled to bring this to all of you, both here on YouTube and on Zoom. It's something we at the library love to support. We love to have this type of program, this type of programming. We're proud that we can bring this to you, and we're especially excited to have both of you here with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for the warm introduction, and thank you to the library for hosting this event. So, Tony. So, Milton. I'd love to get a sense of what motivated you to write this book in the first place. Grave Matters is a really impressive piece, but I know it came from some deeper motivations, so I'd love for you to share that with us. OK. Thank you for the invitation to be here, the San Francisco Public Library. I'm really glad to be here and talking to people that are here and those of you that are watching on the internet. So, this book started a long time ago, and, you know, usually when academics write books, they come up with a really good plan, and they plan the research, and they plan the work, and they plan the time to do it, and then to the ocean and a large lagoon. And it's a place that I've always seen as getting away from the metropolis and taking a break and so on. And a place that I was aware of about the history of the Urock people and other tribal groups that lived in this area, because it was a very flourishing area. It was a place of plenty of water, plenty of food, plenty of wood for building homes and boats. I was aware of that, but I was not aware that it had been a burial ground and also a place that had been plundered by professional and amateur archeologists and anthropologists. And two things happened very close together. One was a personal tragedy, and the other was really a social tragedy. The personal tragedy was that our son died in 2006, and he'd been very ill for a long, long time, lived a lot longer than we expected. And in a note that he'd left, he said that he'd like to have his remains scattered at Big Lagoon, this area. So we did that to honor him and to honor his wishes. But at the same time, I began to look more closely into the history of different kinds of mourning and different kinds of cemeteries and the way that people deal with death. And I read a lot about the Urock traditions and discovered that what we did with our son was very comparable to what the Urock had done there for generations. So that was the individual tragedy that got me interested in the issue of how we commemorate the past. And then about the same time, about a year later, that took place in 2006 and about a year later in 2007, the Urock tribe, through its cultural committee, began a campaign to try to get their historic lands recognized and protected. And I began to work with them in about 2008 and on a committee that I helped to form with them, a committee to recognize this land, to commemorate it, to do something to protect it from further digging up, and also for people to know more about this history. And then in the course of working on this political project, it wasn't yet a research or an academic project or a writing project. In the course of doing that, I realized that I knew very little about who the people were that dug up these gravesites and what happened to the human remains and the artifacts that they dug up and where did they go. And the Urock elders told me, well, of course, we know that story and we know what happened. But they ended up saying, if you can write something that will reach audiences in California that don't know this history, then go for it. We would support you doing that. And I wouldn't have done it without the support of the Urock elders at that time. One of the first things that an advisor in the tribe told me is he said, you're gonna meet a lot of hostility and a lot of suspicion about doing research up here. And before you do the research, you probably should read a lot of the materials that were written by journalists and archeologists and anthropologists about the history of this region and read that material and then you'll understand why there's so much distrust that you're coming here, you're white, you're coming from Berkeley, you're coming from the university. There's a long tradition behind you that's been pretty hostile to this district and this area and this people. So that's how the project started and it started off by me trying to get answers to the questions of who are the people digging up this place? Where do they take? Where do the human remains go to? Where do the artifacts go to? And that took me on this much longer journey to museums in Europe and back on the East Coast and eventually back to Berkeley, my alma mater and where I taught for many years and where I'm now based to Berkeley because Berkeley was very, very responsible for acquiring a lot of the goods that came from native people and from their grave sites and from their village sites. And also it turned out, which I didn't know until I discovered this, that Berkeley was the main repository of thousands and thousands of human remains. So you stepped into a pretty hot conversation one that's obviously freighted, right? And so I'm wondering what hopes did you have for the book and what conversations were you trying to provoke? Well, I was first of all trying to provoke a conversation in myself because I'm somebody that's written a lot about race, knows a lot about the history of race, have taught classes on races, have written about it. And what I realized was that this was an aspect of the racial history of California that I knew very little about. There's a way in which historians and writers about race tend to separate the history of native people in California and elsewhere, but particularly in California, separate that from other issues of race. So for me, this was a learning experience. This for me, this was learning about something that I should have known and didn't know and I should have seen and didn't see. So for me, that was that kind of journey and that conversation with myself. And then in the course of doing the project, I hope as any activist does when we write things, I hope that the institutions that had been responsible for these plunder of village sites, of native sites would take some responsibility for that. And so my hope was, again, naively, I shouldn't have been so naive as a longtime activist. I know these things take a long time. I mean, think about the civil rights movement. It started in the 1860s and began to be successful 100 years later in the 1960s. So I should have known better, but I assume that when Berkeley heard my reports on this, read the book that people at Berkeley would then do something to try to make amends for the role that they'd played in this and that they would begin to talk about repatriation, repatriating things that they'd taken from tribes and also that the issue of reparations would be on the agenda. But basically at that time, 10 years ago when this book came out, the University of California, but particularly the Berkeley leadership, treated me the same way that they treated the tribes. They ignored the requests. They didn't sit down to have conversations. They didn't want to have a deep reckoning with the past. And so it was pretty much dismissed at that time and largely made no impact on the institutions that had been responsible for this. So I know that when you get on a set of ideas, you can be like a dog on a bone. So I know you didn't give up on the conversation back then and a lot's elapsed. I mean, we're 10 years removed from when the book first came out with the second edition coming out shortly or actually here. So a lot has changed as well. So I'm wondering from your perspective, how has the shifts over the course of the last 10 years sort of affected both the conversation about these issues but also your understanding of it? Well, I was very glad when Hayday offered to republish this book and try to get it out, particularly to younger generations and to college students in ways that it didn't happen 10 years ago because the political cultural atmosphere has really changed. I think the main thing that has changed is that the tribes of California have been very active at the political level in the legislature. They had something of an ear from the previous governor, Brown, but they got a governor in Newsom who would listen to them in a closer way. And so Newsom was the first California governor to put out a public apology for genocide that took place in the 19th century and also made a commitment to helping the tribes repatriate thousands and thousands of human remains tens if not hundreds of thousands of artifacts that either were taken from village sites, taken from graves, or were hustled out of this from the survivors of genocide and the devastation that took place in the wake of the gold rush in the late 19th century. So they had somebody who was listening and the legislature then began to pass legislation that would support the legislation that was passed at the federal level, NAGPRA, the Native American Graves and Protection Act, Repatriation Act, which was designed a very, very important piece of civil rights legislation for Native people, was designed for institutions that had federal money and that had collections of human remains and artifacts to do an inventory of what they had and to then publish that inventory. This happened in 1990, the federal legislation to publish that inventory in the federal register at the federal level and then tribes would be able to look at that and make claims to get things back. So that was 31 years ago and 31 years ago by their own reckoning, the university had at one time collected something like 11,000 Native human remains primarily from California but also from other parts of the United States, also from Mexico, Peru and Egypt in the late 19th century and the idea was that out of that, then tribes would make claims and that things would happen. So 31 years later, university by its own account still has something like 9,000 human remains. I think it's actually double that from the research that I've done and that they've been very, very slow to go through repatriation but in the last few years, we've seen the tribes pressuring the legislature and the governor. We've seen California legislature pass legislation to speed up repatriation. We've seen the university rather reluctantly and slowly begin to respond. They're now beginning to do land acknowledgements. There still isn't an official university of California land acknowledgement but they're encouraging different departments and institutions in the university to do that. They've also finally now opened up a building that's gonna be used for native students. They've taken away the names of four buildings that are named after people that have a very strong racist history including the lead anthropologist at Berkeley. So those are all beginning steps and that gives me some encouragement also to work with native people on campus, to work with the tribes, to work with the tribes in the Bay Area that all the Bay Area tribes are federally unrecognized. They're fighting for recognition. That makes it harder for them to have the resources to take on a powerful institution like the University of California but that's encouraging to see that happening and I'm hoping now that with pressure from tribes and from the legislature with people beginning to do organizing at the university with the revelations just recently about Hastings College of Law and the efforts there to make changes that now this is a time to try to try again. So going back to the text I know in the original in the book you focus primarily on UC Berkeley's Anthropology Department as a primary point of focus and a number of things have happened since then that suggests that there might be a broader conversation sort of taking place. I'm wondering would you be willing to sort of to speak to that? Is your attention still focused narrowly or it has it broadened in scope? So this is part of the conversation with myself so if you could say that being up in Big Lagoon and in Humboldt I discovered and learned about a history that I didn't know and should have known. The same is true about Berkeley. I spent many, many years on the Berkeley campus. I came here to do a masters and a doctoral degree. I taught here for a while. I taught elsewhere then came back. I'm based back at the university now. I've known quite a bit about its history but I didn't really look deeply into the origins and development of the university. And when I wrote Grave Matters I focused primarily on the archeologists and anthropologists and also then the world trade, how this happened at a global level that there was this trade starting in the late 19th century where people were accumulating and stealing and buying native artifacts and then selling them to museums all over the world. And then that happened with human remains too. Though because of the history of genocide in California and because of the history of displacement of people and because of people being moved off their traditional lands it was very easy to go into native settlements, longstanding native settlements that had been abandoned to go in there and to dig up graves and to get artifacts and to take them away. So California was very, very important to the development of American archeology and anthropology, not just Berkeley. So my focus was on the anthropologists and the archeologists and trying to understand how they justified this and how they justified it to themselves and how they made sense of it. But in the last few years, particularly during the pandemic I've been able to go back and do much deeper research at Berkeley and in the university to find that I'm starting the story now in a different place than where I started the book Grave Matters. I'm starting at the beginning of the university. And one of the earliest things I learned is that Berkeley was in the market for collecting human remains and artifacts long before there was an even anthropology department. This happened in, starting in the university actually opened up in Berkeley in the 1870s. And from the first year of the university they are collecting artifacts on the Berkeley campus which proves that there was actually a settlement there, I think for between five and 10,000 years. But they're collecting them from all over the place and they're also beginning to collect human remains in the 1970s and displaying them on campus. So this is a much older set of issues and problems than the anthropology department and archeologists. This is going on for 30 years before we have an anthropology department. And also it has the support of the regents, of the president of the university and later on by a wide variety of academics not just anthropologists. So this is where the lessons of what today is called critical race theory or looking at structural racism or systemic racism. This begins to be the framework for looking at this. So I now begin to look at how the institution itself, how the university as an institution was involved in this. And I start off by looking now for the new book that I'm working on, by looking at human remains and artifacts, but now it's expanding into a much broader understanding of how the university imagined itself racially, how it supported people that had very strong racist views about human history and human development and how this was not just the matter of a few bad apples or renegade anthropologists, but this was a systemic issue. And that's where I'm leading to now and that's what I'm beginning to look at now. So I know in the past in conversation we've spoken about the history of sort of this extinction thesis that Native Americans weren't fit for modernity, right? And when I hear about the language I've heard you use, the hoarding of artifacts and bodies, it suggests that people were working with the assumption that indigenous people were either no longer here or would soon not be here. And I'm wondering, what was it like to dig around in the archives when people were engaging in this way with not just people's artifacts, but literally their relatives, the remains of their relatives? Yeah, I would say that this two years of doing this research has been very difficult, very difficult to actually go into these archives. I call them archives of death because I'm reading the archeological reports and the university reports of the people who went out on these expeditions and dug up the grave sites and brought skeletons or parts of body pieces back to Berkeley. That what struck me in reading this documentation is the way that the human beings, the descent, the ancestors who were being dug up were being viewed as specimens, not as fellow human beings. And I read thousands of pages of reports here looking rather desperately for somebody who at one time would say, oh there but for the grace of God go I, or these are fellow human beings that are here, or that we have a lot in common with these people who've died here. And the university was also bringing back maybe a 10th of what they dug up and the rest of what they dug up they then would just put back in pits where they were digging and where they were doing their expeditions. And I looked there for some kind of ceremony, some kind of ritual, some kind of moment of silence to honor the people who died to have some sense of the solemnity of the moment. But I didn't find one example of that and I read thousands of pages. And so it reminded me a lot of people who've done work on the Middle Passage. You know the slaves coming from Africa, coming to the enslaved people, coming to the United States on the Middle Passage, the incredible death rate, the humiliation, the horrors of that. And very difficult to reconstruct that because the slaves, the enslaved people did not leave written records or all records that were easily found. So the historians who've written that have had to go to stories, they've had to go to songs, they've had to go to myths to try to reconstruct what it was like to be in the Middle Passage. And also they write too about the challenge and difficulties if you're a writer with any kind of humanity of dealing with this material. So I didn't have to make this stuff up or imagine it or go to myths and stories because I actually had records here. But that was a pretty sickening, disturbing experience. I had to sort of come up to air a lot of times. And then the other thing when I went through the records of what was written about the tribes, I found that California intellectuals contributed a great deal to what I call the California story or the myth of progress. This is our version of manifest destiny. This is the notion, just look at for example, look at the University of California's slogan. It's brand that it uses right from the 1880s to the present. You can find it on all over the place on memos that still go out from the university. It's fiat lux, let there be light. And let there be light was used as the slogan of the university and that comes out of the Old Testament where God said there was darkness and then I brought light. And the university very much thought of itself as bringing light to the darkness and all that goes with that. And so when you think you're bringing light to the darkness you don't have to take seriously the people that lived here for five, 10,000 years before who survived really well, who had creative lives, who figured out ways to live in a sometimes a difficult environment but created communities and ceremonies and rituals and songs and artifacts for maybe 10,000 years. The university didn't think of itself as having to take that seriously because it was coming to a wilderness. And then you see this, I'll give you an example of three different parts of the California story that California intellectuals and other intellectuals helped to promote all over the place. One was that it was a wilderness, that California was a wilderness and that if it wasn't for the university and for the pioneers and for the entrepreneurs that came here the land would have never been made to grow. And so that wilderness idea is very strong and in some ways it's a very convenient mythology and a very comforting mythology because it then doesn't have to deal with the fact of the missions, the Spanish missions coming here and working people to death. It doesn't have to deal with the gold rush and the genocide. It doesn't have to deal with the displacement. All the things done by human beings to other human beings. If you create the story that there was a wilderness here, you don't have to face that horror of the past. So that's one part of the California story. A second important part of the California story was that people had been stuck in the Stone Age. This notion that people lived here for thousands of years but they were the same 500 years ago that they were 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago that they'd never changed, they'd never adapted, they'd never, and when you describe a civilization or many civilizations of people with multiple languages and great diversity, when you describe them as being stuck in the Stone Age, it's another way of saying that they were incapable of human development. They were incapable of living full creative lives. So that would be a second example. And the third example that in some ways is a very key to understanding how the California mythology gets created is that for the most part native people in California were seen as lacking resistance. And when you describe human beings under great oppression as not fighting back, the implication is that they're somehow complicit in their own demise. This happened a while after in the early 1950s. There was a widespread view that Jews had been killed in the Holocaust because they didn't fight back. And that there was something embarrassing for the people that survived. I mean, that story changed within about five or 10 years after the end of the Holocaust. But this view of Jews not fighting back and somehow being complicit in their own murder and their own genocide, you see that in California. You find very few accounts of people fighting back. So one of the things I did in Grave Matters was to go back and to interview people and to find documentation which talks about the long history of resistance and opposition. People in the Bay Area often remember and know about Alcatraz and the occupation of Alcatraz. But this has a longer history going back to the 19th century. And I thought it was very important to rescue that history and to give the people that were engaged in that history their full place in the history. When your ancestors are dug up from their graves, when your artifacts are stolen or pilfered, you fight back. The idea that people don't fight back under that circumstance is absurd. So reclaiming that history, I think is a very important thing to do. Native tribes do it all the time. They have those histories. They have those oral stories. They respect and honor the people that were engaged in that history. But this book was aimed at writing for people that don't know that history. So I'd like to sort of come back and interrogate this idea of maybe archival silences a little bit. I know that it required you digging around and doing some different kind of work, but in past conversations, we've also talked about the ongoing nature of this narrative. When you first published the book, we'd spoken quite a bit about the Sugarcube mission or the mission project that so many students across the state of California were asked to contribute. And in a recent conversation, it's asked a group of teachers how many of you have been asked to complete this and they almost all raised their hands. So this seems to be an ongoing thing. I know that when you originally published the first edition, you were in conversation with educators up north and I'm wondering if you would be willing to share a little bit about that because I think it's a time of reckoning and I think it's interesting to look at different models and some of the ways in which we have to look at things or in some cases, hidden in plain sight. Yeah, well, this is a very entrenched way of thinking about the past in California. I think because the story of progress is so important to the way that California history gets taught. There was pretty much nothing here and then we arrived and then there was war and there was some terrible things that happened and we're really sorry about that, but then it was this straight line of progress. And so the textbooks, and I went through a lot of the textbooks over throughout the 20th century, even into this century, the textbooks tend to tell that story and they acknowledge in different ways that some things happened that shouldn't have happened, but generally it's a story of progress, sort of California moving towards being productive, being creative, being wealthy, being up there with the most productive nations in the world, being multicultural, being diverse, having a variety of people that contribute to this progress and so on. And I think one of the things that's interesting about the pandemic that's happened is that that story is now beginning to run into a brick wall, that the pandemic gets people to look a lot more deeply and closely at the reality of inequality and injustice in the larger society and in particular in California. So when Grave Matters first came out and I worked with Milton and we worked with teachers, we worked with a lot of teachers who were very concerned about the fact that their textbooks didn't give them the history they could teach and Milton's worked a lot in that. You've done a lot of work in that area and I was more working at the college level and then also trying to take on the intellectuals, the faculty that perpetuate this mythology and so on. And we found a lot of teachers to talk to and to work with who are, you know, who wanted to change what they do in the classroom, but it's very difficult when you're up against an institution of official textbooks and a lot of things to teach, you've got to become expert in a lot of things. And just last week I went to teach to give a class on the Berkeley campus to undergraduates. There was about 50, 60 people there and I asked them how many of them undergraduates, how many of them have grown up in California, how many of them had been exposed to learning about the mission when they were younger. And most of the people put up their hands and said, yes, we learned the mission history, you know. The Spanish came here and they brought the missions and they tried to civilize the natives and the savages and they built these beautiful missions, et cetera, et cetera. And then I asked them, I said, so how many of you just got the same old story? And except for two people in the class, everybody then gave descriptions of things that you were talking about years ago and that when the book came out we were discussing. So that's made me realize that taking on this discourse of the California story, this story of progress that Berkeley and other intellectuals have helped to develop and distribute, that this is gonna be a major challenge to do this. And I think you Milton are more hopeful about this because you see what's happening at the middle school and high school level and maybe you could just say something about why you have more hope than I do about this at this point. I mean, I think for me, hope resides in the fact that young people wanna be in these conversations. I think as we look at an increasingly diverse classroom, it's not just in California but all across the country, it's important for educators to know that our students are motivated by questions that are rooted in their existential realities, their processes of navigating and questioning. And one of the challenges that teachers themselves are oftentimes frightened of these conversations are more interested in maintaining a sense of themselves as good people. Having said that, the conversation does change and it does evolve. And so I'm actually excited about some of the possibilities that are merging like ethnic studies. I think ethnic studies itself is a platform that it probably requires a little bit more interrogation. I think moving into a conversation about relational or comparative racialization could help students deal not just with a different set of lived experiences but also with the power dynamics and the institutional nature of imposed hierarchies. I think so much of this history exists because we don't ask the questions about how it came about rather accepting that it simply is. And so for me, I think curriculum is something that is open to interrogation, to investigation and most importantly to modification. So I am hopeful and I think that there are opportunities to get young folks involved, not just in understanding the history but translating that understanding into civic agency and civic action. And by ethnic studies you're referring to the new legislative requirement that ethnic studies be taught in high schools, right? Yeah, taught in high schools but I hear in different places that districts are thinking about how do you sort of move these conversations down to the lower levels, down to elementary school or down to middle school. And again, I think from a developmental perspective, kids are gonna be asking these questions. They ask them at all different ages, right? I'm not necessarily willing to visit sort of genocide on a first or a second grader but there are questions about why things exist and why things are where they are. You've taught me a lot and I know even your partner Cecilia has sort of taught me a lot about looking at interrogating public spaces like monuments or memorials and I know that even on Berkeley campus there are monuments and more memorials that in some cases lifts things up and in other cases obscure things. So I'd love if you could actually talk about that for a little bit and then I wanna actually pivot our conversation into what are your hopes moving forward but I'd love for you to talk about some of the monuments and memorials if you'd be so kind. Yeah, so the current project has many aspects to it trying to figure out how Berkeley and why Berkeley got into the business of the term that I use now is hoarding, human remains and artifacts. Partly driven by sort of a racist eugenics of wanting to study the supposedly inferior status of native people but now I think, now having read a lot of this material and the internal material, I think it had a lot to do with hoarding that Berkeley, when Berkeley started they aspired very early on to be competitive with Stanford, with Harvard, with the British Museum, with the Smithsonian and to do that you need big benefactors like the Hearsts, for example, the Hearst family, giving tons and tons of money and do it and then you go out and you just buy up collections and you buy up human remains, you dig up human remains, you go out and find people that are impoverished and surviving the genocide and trying to live away from their traditional lands who are now willing to sell their artifacts for a pittance and getting those in the same way that a lot of people bought up the artifacts that belong to an artwork that belong to Jews at the end of World War II and there's still battles going on today about reclaiming that artwork and how people were not in an equal relationship, they were forced to sell out of their economic necessity. So the university has that long history and that set of relationships and the project involves trying to understand all these different aspects of it, the current project which is really the follow up to this book and one of the things that we're looking at is a team, a team of people that have been researching this for the last year is to look at the memorials and monuments, not just the naming of buildings but looking very closely at everything on the Berkeley campus and for those of you that have walked through the Berkeley campus, it's pretty interesting to go with a view of looking at what's there and what does it stand for. So you find the Hearst name everywhere, there's Hearst tennis courts, there's a Hearst street, there's a Hearst mining building, there's a Hearst museum, there's a Hearst Greek theater that some of you have no doubt been to for concerts or graduation ceremonies. That money comes from George Hearst who died and then left it to Phoebe Hearst, his wife but George Hearst made his money primarily in two ways one out of taking out tons and tons of gold from the Dakota Hills, helping to run off the Sioux that occupied that land and taking gold from that land and not only doing that but then doing incredible environmental damage to the Dakota Hills and the other place was in the copper mines of Peru where he hired hundreds and hundreds of indentured labor primarily indigenous labor and worked people to their death at an incredibly high rate, pulled out copper to bring back to the United States from Peru. So that's the early fortune and that's the person whose name is everywhere on the campus but there's many other examples. You know, we have part of the most prestigious library at Berkeley is the Bancroft Library one of the most prestigious in the world in fact. I just did a lot of research there named after a self-taught historian who wrote the most disparaging, despicable things about native people and did a great deal to support and amplify the myth of the so-called vanishing race and then right in the middle of the campus in one of the most important places right next to the Campanile is a memorial to a man on campus who fought in the Indian wars of the 19th century and who received a Congressional Medal of Honor for fighting and killing in that war. He's memorialized on campus. Very few people see the memorial, walk past it all the time. Don't realize that it's a memorial to somebody that basically fought and killed in the Indian wars. There it is right in the center of the Berkeley campus. Many, many other memorials and namings like that and so it's a good thing that the university is now under pressure from students not their own doing but under pressure from students remove the names of four people from buildings but I don't think this kind of building by building approach or waiting for students to protest is the way to deal with it. I think you need to systematically look at everything from who's memorialized on campus, who's not memorialized, who's forgotten, who doesn't appear. There are no memorials to indigenous people on the Berkeley campus even though it was indigenous lands that made possible the development of the University of California. There's no memorials to the atrocities that took place that allowed the university then to collect the human remains and artifacts. There's no documents, there's no memorials that give a presence to that on the Berkeley campus. So it's not only who's there, it's also who's not there and to do that requires not just waiting for a protest about a particular name. I think it requires a reckoning with a much more systematic problem. So before we see if there's any audience questions I'd love to sort of think about this idea of reckoning just a little bit more. You've done a tremendous amount of work and I'm so appreciative of the work, the scholarship that you've done and I know that you do it for a reason. So if you think about the kind of reckoning and accounting that UC Berkeley probably amongst other institutions should probably be engaged in, what would you like to see come about as a function of your research but also in regards to attending to these atrocities visited against the tribal communities? How do they make amends for their transgressive behaviors? Well, first of all, we have some really good models now from the East Coast. We have several universities that are trying to come to terms with the fact that they got their earliest beginning and funding from money made in the slave trade. And there's some universities on the East Coast that have done some remarkable things. Done serious investigation, set up centers to research, how they got involved in the slave trade and how it worked and what happened. Not just sort of a generic apology but a really in-depth understanding of it, looking at the finances of it, looking at where that money went to. Some of them are providing scholarships to the descendants of people who are enslaved. They're setting up memorials and educational events on campus. Those kinds of things I think are a model so it's not like we have to start from the beginning or that there aren't things to be done. There are many, many things to be done. I think the priority at Berkeley though has to be sitting down with the California tribes and having them at the table of a discussion of reckoning. It's something the university has never done. There are other places that have done this but it's not happened here. And that means that would not be an easy process because there's a lot of bitterness, there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of distrust. It's not like you can just say, oh, I'm gonna form a committee and have these different representatives come here. The whole process of how you talk about a reckoning and what's on the agenda for that reckoning has to involve the full collaboration, participation and development of these relationships with tribal communities. Tribal communities from the Bay Area but also statewide because Berkeley was doing this statewide in California. It's particularly in Northern California. It's not just a Bay Area issue. And for me that's the priority, that's the number one thing and that won't happen quickly and it won't happen easily because you can't just do it in a pro forma way. You could do it in a pro forma way and often powerful institutions like to think, well, I'll just do a land acknowledgement and change a name here and a change name there. Powerful institutions wanna do that but I don't think they should do that and I don't think that's the way to deal with this. My own personal view is that I think land has to figure in a reparations program in the long run. Berkeley got its start from the Morrill Act of the 1860s in which the Lincoln administration took lands that they said were uninhabited and free, stole those lands, took they'd been occupied for generations by native people. They took those lands and then they gave it to the state of California and other states to start a university. So Berkeley's startup money comes from native lands and that was a sizable amount of money that was made off the sale of those lands and the profiting off those lands. The regions, the early regions were very much the businessmen, occasional woman, but primarily businessmen of California and then secondly Berkeley's, the land on which Berkeley is occupied was a long standing, a lony land. At least 5,000 years, maybe 10,000 years. We now have detailed evidence of where they were on the actual physical campus. We know what artifacts were collected. We know what grave sites would dug up and so on. So to come to terms with having a university based on a place that was a long standing settlement and a grave site is important. And today, you know, most people don't know that the Berkeley campus has in its basements in the Anthropology Museum, it still has by its own count 9,000 human remains but from my research, I think it's twice that many. Most people on campus and in the Bay Area don't even know this. The idea that Berkeley, the campus of Berkeley is an unconsecrated cemetery is really what it is and that you're walking constantly by or over the ancestors human remains. I mean, it's a very profound thing and for me it's changed my relationship with the place. You know, once you know something like that and then you walk on the campus, it changes the way you think about it, it changes your relationship with it in a very profound ways. So beyond that, I have some specific ideas but I wanted to just stop there because I think collaboration, consultation with tribes, dealing with land, California University is one of the big landowners of California, dealing with land. I think for me, those two things would have to be taken on in a serious way. So thank you for that and leaving us with that image. And I'll reach out to Alejandro. I know that we've got a virtual audience. I'm wondering if they've got any questions they'd like to share with us. So the question that we've just received through the internet is, I mentioned it briefly but I'd like to go into a little bit more depth. The question is, why did the university from the beginning think that they had to accumulate so many human remains and so many artifacts? Why did they have to do that? So I'll just go back to a point I made earlier because I now think that it has a lot to do with how the process got going. In the book, I don't use the term hoarding or I don't use the term accumulation. I used to think that the primary reason that the university acquired human remains was so they could study them and do research on the human remains and come up with various theories. Those theories were very much a part of eugenics. They were looking for explanations of why native people had, quote, vanished. What could they find in the bones that would suggest they were an inferior race? They were trying to prove that. They already had the idea in the head that they were inferior and then they wanted the data to support that. Not very good science in any way. And secondly, they were looking for racial differences between races. This was before anthropology and most scientists began to talk about one single human race that well into the 19th century and for some people well into the 20th century, there are multiple human races. And Berkeley scientists wanted to study what was the difference between native people and white people and African American people and so on. They wanted to look at whether there was something physiologically in the human remains that would explain why there were different races as well as why some races, quote, died out. So that was definitely a motivation but I quickly learned and I've learned more deeply in the last few years that for the most part, university didn't study the human remains. I don't know, maybe 3%, this is a guess but I just wanted to give you a sense of what percentage of human remains actually gets studied. Maybe 3% out of what I think is like 20,000 plus. And the way that they're bringing them back to the university, they're digging up the gravesites or they're getting other people to bring up the gravesites, they're bringing them back to the university and I'm sorry to have to say this because it's a hard thing to face but they bring them back and unless the skeletons are complete they then break up these human remains into different body parts and put them in boxes with not very good documentation. So when Berkeley was invited by the federal legislation of 1990 to do an inventory of everything they had and to say what they had and where it came from they really couldn't do that because they didn't have the documentation and one of the things that I think the university needs to do is to come clean about that. They've never come clean about that. They keep pretending as though they have a serious inventory of what they have and I don't think they have. And so they bring it back, they break it up into boxes and they put the boxes in basements and walls and different places on shelves and then it just became like a hoarding process. That's why I use that term. It's the best term I could find to describe it. Why are they hoarding? Why are they accumulating? Isn't this the American way? Isn't this what we do? Why do we go into the store and why do we need 25 different cereals? But the university was hoarding in a very particular way. They wanted to show off the stuff they had. They wanted to have more artifacts and more human remains and the Peabody at Harvard and the Smithsonian and the British Museum. I now think that Berkeley does have the largest collection of human remains in the country and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the largest collection in the world. Which because we don't have an accurate count of what they have. So I think that it had a lot initially to do with hoarding and catching up and wanting to be able to show off what they had. And so when I went through the annual reports of the governing body, they're writing about this. This isn't stuff that they're ashamed of or hiding in the middle of the night. They're writing this up in reports. We have a skull from here. We have a body from here. We have a ceremonial artifact from here. We're so proud. We're publishing it on our annual reports. And then we're gonna display it and show you these things. Until tribes organized until the 1990 legislation all this stuff got displayed in exhibitions and so on. And Berkeley even sort of had a human zoo when they brought a surviving Yahi member of a tribe back to San Francisco in the early 1900s known as Ishii and put that person in a museum in San Francisco and people in the thousands would come to watch him doing things. That was a very popular entertainment in Europe and North America in the late 19th and early 20th century. So to answer the question, I think that the hoarding and then they had in mind and Phoebe Hearst and the Hearst family had in mind that they would build a very grand museum in Berkeley and in this grand museum they'd been able to then display all of this and that never happened for a variety of reasons. So everything then ended up in boxes, in crates, on shelves, in basements, in storage places just sort of abandoned and stored and dehumanized. There's a lot of vulgarity and desecration for a little return. Yeah, yeah. Do we have any other questions from the audience, Alejandro? Yeah, the question is how is the process of getting federal recognition of tribes, particularly in the Bay Area, where all the tribes are federally unrecognized and is it making a difference now having a native woman as the head of the Department of Interior in Washington, D.C. There's no question having her in that department and having her in Washington, D.C. as a voice is gonna be different. I mean, God knows it's gonna be profoundly different from the Trump administration. So there's gonna actually be a meeting with tribal representatives coming up very soon that's been organized by the Department of the Interior with the support of the White House. There's gonna be a national gathering to talk about the state of native tribes throughout the country and also the high level of violence against women. So that wouldn't have happened in the last regime. And we're gonna see a lot more symbolic activities like that. We're gonna see a lot more protection of native lands that were indigenous lands that were removed by the Trump administration. In terms of the struggle to become federally recognized, it is a very difficult long process. You have to go through a whole technical process. You have to do a lot of research on the history. You have to prove a connection between the descendants today and the ancestors in the past. You have to prove a relationship to a particular piece of land because if you're unrecognized, you don't have land. And it's a difficult long process. And that process takes money. It takes expertise. It takes patience. It takes building political allies. And those tribes in California that are federally recognized like the Europe, which is the largest tribe in California, not the wealthiest, but certainly the largest in terms of membership. If you're a federally recognized, then you get certain federal money. You have certain federal officers. Every federally recognized tribe, for example, has a cultural officer that deals with these kinds of issues, who's paid by the federal government and so on. And you have certain rights and you have an economic system that puts you, not wealthy, not well off by any means, but puts you in a much better position to fight for your sovereignty and your rights than other tribes. So I think that's gonna be a long and difficult battle. And it makes it easier then for institutions like Hastings Law or the University of California or Berkeley to not to have to negotiate with tribes because they're not federally recognized. It's a way for them to not have to deal with that. And I think this is gonna be a difficult and necessary process. Reaching out to our physical audience, it's actually present in the building. One or if there are any questions that people would like to lift up. Let's just sort of, let's just go one, two, three. Can we do that? Do we have time? Yeah, the West Berkeley Shell Mound. The question is, am I following what's been happening with the West Berkeley Shell Mound? So for those of you that live in Berkeley or visit Berkeley or know Berkeley, you're now down on 4th Street in Berkeley which has been made sort of the consuming commercial center of Berkeley. They've had troubles with developing downtown into a commercial center. So it's now on 4th Street, which is right in the area where there were shell mounds. So to understand the shell mounds as I think I now begin to understand it, you have to really start in the Berkeley Hills. The Berkeley Hills is an incredible source of water. And for those of you that were in Berkeley after the massive storm of a few weeks ago, I went on campus the day after the storm. What is Strawberry Canyon or Strawberry Creek, as it's now called? That was a lifeblood of water that came all the way from the Berkeley Hills, all the way down to the estuary and the bay. And so there's no question there were settlements throughout the East Bay, particularly close to water. It's the same reason why the Berkeley campus ended up where it is, because of that water that came through the town. And you could just imagine that. You see what's left of that. It's been so degraded and environmentally destroyed. But that was a place where people could fish. You could fish on where the Berkeley campus is now. All kinds of fish. You had acorns, you had, I mean you had all the things on which communities could survive. So that went all the way down to the East Bay and the shell mounds. They're called the shell mounds, the village sites, because that's where people would keep their refuse, where native communities would keep their refuse and also would build their, would also bury their ancestors there. This is true of human communities throughout most of history, that people buried their ancestors where they lived and they did that for two reasons. One, to protect them after death and to be able to have ceremonies and rituals around them. And the other two, to honor them, to make them a part of the living communities. So shell mounds, whenever you find a village site or a village settlement, they're all over the place in the Bay Area. The Berkeley anthropologists documented dozens and dozens of them, which suggests there was an incredibly flourishing life of communities here. And that wherever the shell mounds are, then you can say there was a long history here. So what's been happening down on 4th Street is native groups in particular have been fighting to try to preserve a piece of land there, which is in the old, in front of the old Spangas, the fish restaurant that used to be there. There's a huge parking lot there. And what's clear is that parking lot and that whole area, the whole area really of 4th Street was a flourishing set of native communities. But there's been a campaign to try to get that land of the parking lot developed as a memorial, as a park and as a memorial as an educational place, which would be fantastic. And against that, there were developers that want to put in new housing in Berkeley. And Berkeley City Council, to its credit, sided with the tribes that want to protect the land by saying this is a historical site and it should be protected. And that's now wound its way up through the courts and the courts have now sided at this point with the developers. Say there's no proof that this was a site or that this was an actual burial ground and so on. So right now it's lost. It's not totally finished, it's legal campaign and there's a chance it could win. But there's huge pressure in Berkeley to build more housing and that area is, developers really want to develop that area. So I think that's a summary of the current situation. There's a lot of organizations working on that. There's been a lot of efforts to educate people about that. But in a sense, you could take that battle and I could tell you there's 20 places in Berkeley where we should be doing that too and where I know that there were village sites and burial grounds and so on. So including the Berkeley campus. But that's, it's an important stand to take there. There's a new development going on in Berkeley next to the Eshree, the City Council. I think it's Bayer Aspirin that's gonna be having a big development there. A part of the agreement with the development there is there's gonna be housing. But there's also supposed to be a memorial park and there's supposed to be educational programs about the native history of the region. That'll be very good if it happens. So I'm just gonna do a quick process check and now we've got two questions. Do we have time or do we have a hard stop at seven? Great, thanks. So let's go Connie and then Spencer. So the question from Connie here is to what extent is California unique in what's happened in terms of what I described? Has this happened in other parts of the country and world and so on? So this is a global phenomenon. So let me give you a couple of, I'll give you one quick example. So when Germany had colonial conquests in Southern Africa in what is now Namibia and conquered that country and destroyed the livelihoods of tribes that had lived there for generations and extracted wealth from it and so on, they also brought back artifacts and human remains back to Germany. The British Museum did it all the time. So when there were British naval expeditions that came up the California coast in the 18th century, they had on board of the naval expeditions. People whose job it was was to get artifacts and in some cases human remains and take them back to Britain and the British Museum. So when I was doing the research for this book, I went to museums in Spain, in France and in London to find how some of the trade from California ended up there. This was a global trade. What happened in California then, as I mentioned about the University of California, it was playing catch up and that catch up wouldn't have been possible without the enormous fortune that came from the Hearst family and other families that wanted Berkeley to be like Stanford. It wanted it to be not just a agricultural university but a world-class university. And if you're a world-class university, you had to have a museum and you had to have all this stuff. So the money then came into Berkeley to do that. And in some ways, California was different from anywhere, everywhere else because the genocide in California after the gold rush, the missions and then the genocide and the dispossession of land and the criminalization of the survivors of being vagrants, a lot like what happened in the South after the defeat of Reconstruction, all of that sort of cleared the land so that when Berkeley and other places, and there were people coming to California from the Smithsonian and other universities, when they went out to do these expeditions and digs, all they had to do was to get the permission of the owners of the land, the new owners of the land that weren't native. If there were owners, if it was state land, they didn't need to do that. That's all they did and then they could go in and dig and extract and bring things back. So California in some ways was like a lot of other colonial, imperial powers that did this all over the place. And in some ways it was different because it had very fast and easy access to extracting and bringing back to the campus. So Spencer, you get the last question. That's a long answer to this. The question is like, why haven't we been more exposed to this history here in a settler colonial part of the world? I think it speaks to the success of that regime, the success of colonizing this region of the world and settling it and moving very, very quickly to capitalist economic development, one of the fastest capitalist developments in the world comparable to Australia and other places. And then California also being a center of war. California was founded in war. It came on the heels of the Civil War. There were survivors of the Civil War from the Confederate side who got distinguished professorships at Berkeley. You had the genocide. You then had the war in the Philippines and California was a launching ground for that war. So war and militarism is a very, very important part of California history and the University of California which not many people know from its very beginning was a military base. It was like the university had a battalion. It wasn't till the early 60s that students were exempted from military service. So there's a long military history to Berkeley as well and a sort of memorialization and commemoration of military victories, which are a very important part of that history. So I think the answer to your question in brief is speaks to the success of that regime and the challenges it's gonna take to try to turn that around. I wanna thank you too for being here. I wanna thank you for being here. I understand in Zoom, the chat was lively, as I understood. I also know we had more questions that were coming in. So I know this is a topic and these are issues that I was gonna say the Bay Area is interested in probably the country but here at our library we're interested in. I know heyday books. I know we have an audience for this. I'm happy you are here to do this. We're proud to support programming like this. Thank you all virtually and thank you for being here as well. Like you in person make me smile. I'm gonna smile the rest of the night. So thank you all. Thanks to the friends of the San Francisco Public Library who support our programming and wonderful authors, community members, activists who come out and do this work. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.