Honoring Indigenous resistance & acknowledging the true history of Thanksgiving.

In light of November being Native American Heritage Month, Equity in Public Policy (EQUiPP) wanted to share resources to honor ongoing Indigenous resistance and acknowledge the true history of Thanksgiving. Thank you to Students of Color in Public Policy (SCiPP) and the Native American Student Development (NASD) office at Berkeley for providing some of these resources.

First and foremost, we offer this land acknowledgment from NASD: UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land, since the institution’s founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community, inclusion and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also, we recognize that the Muwekma Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today.

We hope this list encourages everyone to think about, discuss, and integrate our relationships to Native lands and peoples in our daily lives. Especially given that we are all scattered around the world, we have the collective opportunity to honor many Indigenous cultures through education and action this year.

Educate Yourself and Your Community:

• Learn about Stolen Land: 
  • Wherever we are in the world, we’re all connected to UC Berkeley, which is a land-grab university. This means the US government funded the university with expropriated Indigenous land, specifically 2,335 Indigenous land parcels in the US totaling 148,636 acres. Learn more at LandGrabU.org and from this podcast.
  • Look up whose land you are on, encourage your family members to do the same, and take some time to learn about the original stewards of the land with this map.
• Learn about Current Indigenous Movements, such as rising up to protect land and water and bring an end to violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit peoples. Here are a few examples to learn about and support: 
  • Kumeyaay Nation’s efforts to stop Trump’s border wall; Pueblo Action Alliance’s #WaterBack to reclaim all unsettled Indigenous water claims in the U.S. SouthWest; 1492 Landback Lane Haudenosaunee Land Defenders resisting private development on Six Nations Reserve; Warriors of the Sunrise's encampment in the Hamptons, Long Island, NY by a group of Indigenous women from the Shinnecock Nation.
• Listen to Indigenous Voices
  • Indigenous United podcast, a student-run podcast produced by the Native American Student Development at UC Berkeley that highlights Indigenous issues, events, and topics through interviews with artists, scholars, and activists from a multitude of Native communities.
  • This Land Podcast on the 2020 Supreme Court decision that resulted in the largest tribal land restoration in US history in Oklahoma 
  • East Bay Yesterday’s Podcast with Corrina Gould of Indian People Organizing for Change on Ohlone Ancestry 
  • https://therednation.org/
• Learn about Interconnected Struggles for Indigenous and Black Liberation from the Yellowhead Institute, which generates critical policy perspectives in support of First Nation jurisdiction in Canada.
• Learn to Speak Respectfully about and with Native peoples with using this guide created by IllumiNative, a Native-led initiative to challenge the negative narrative that surrounds Native communities.
• Attend the event “Rethinking Thanksgiving: Taking Action for Indigenous Land Defense” on 11/26 @ 12pm PT, which includes screening of the film “Invasion,” as well as a talk by Molly Wickham, spokesperson of Gitdumden Clan, on how to connect and take action together. This event is hosted by Indigenous Solidarity Network and SURJ.

Take Action

• Decolonize Thanksgiving (tips from Cafe Ohlone by mak-'amham’s blog):
  • Begin your Thanksgiving dinner with a land acknowledgment recognizing that you are on the land of the Ohlone people (if you live in Ohlone land).
  • Respectfully encourage those around you to use present-tense pronouns when talking about Ohlone people.
  • Learn and discuss contemporary Ohlone issues that affect the Ohlone community today.
  • After Thanksgiving is over, think of some actions to support living Indigenous people, including the Ohlones!
• Engage your friends and family in conversations on these topics using the Rethinking Thanksgiving Toolkit created specifically for white people by SURJ’s Indigenous Solidarity Network.
• Pay your Shuumi Land Tax to Sogorea Te' Land Trust, a community-based organization run by Ohlone and Indigenous women that is working to rematriate Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands back to its people. 
• Redistribute wealth to organizations supporting Indigenous communities:
  • Ma’amham
  • Native American Health Center
  • The Culture Conservancy
  • Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation
• Support NDN Collective’s #LANDBACK campaign to close Mount Rushmore and return that land and all public lands in Black Hills.
• Support Native-owned businesses.
• Sign up for the Native American Student Development weekly newsletter to stay up to date with what is happening in the Native community at Cal.
• Follow Indigenous activists on social media:
  • @lilnativeboy: Instagram & Twitter
  • Seeding Sovereignty: Instagram & Twitter
• Change your email signature to incorporate "Huichin Ohlone land - University of California, Berkeley."