Reclaiming the land
Indigenous women form trust to buy urban plots for Ohlone use
Off 105th Avenue in Oakland, right before the road meets San Leandro Creek, past the raised gardens of a nonprofit called Planting Justice, is a mostly empty piece of land, save for patchy grass and some red-andyellow-tipped weeds pushing out of the earth. Interstate 880 cuts right behind it, all rusted metal and rumbling as trucks drive over.
Many people — maybe even most — wouldn’t see much here. Corrina Gould and Johnella LaRose, however, see a beginning. Early next year, this slip of land, a little more than half an acre in all, will become the first physical piece of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, a project they’ve been working on since 2014 to return indigenous land — specifically Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone land — to indigenous stewardship.
The two women envision a “checkerboard” of spaces throughout the East Bay: “small plots of land all over
“I can hope play one in open day my creeks grandchildren again. And that we can have a roundhouse that they can dance in. And that there’s a living culture that people see and it’s not just something that’s in the past.” Corrina Gould, co-founder of the Sogorea Te Land Trust
the place,” Gould says. That’s the simplest explanation for what the two hope to do, but to describe the Sogorea Te Land Trust strictly in terms of ownership or property rights doesn’t tell the whole story.
“I hope one day my grandchildren can play in open creeks again,” says Gould, who is Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone. “And that we can have a roundhouse that they can dance in. And that there’s a living culture that people see and it’s not just something that’s in the past.”
This land trust is, at its core, intended as a remedy. It’s a chance to undo, at least in part, centuries of colonization and erasure. There is a general story told about Manifest Destiny, about the United States pushing its way westward, about the relocation and killing of American Indians and the suppression of their many cultures.
Indigenous Californians experienced all of this — and other unique hardships. First came the Spanish mission system in 1769, sweeping up the coast from San Diego and into the Bay Area. After that was the Gold Rush, when glittering metal made people greedy and the state of California funded militias to kill native Californians for their land. “Those are some of the first laws on our books,” says Melissa Nelson, the president of the Cultural Conservancy, an organization in San Francisco that works to protect and restore indigenous cultures.
At the same time, as other tribes throughout the U.S. found some recourse in treaties with the U.S. government, none of the original 18 treaties negotiated between the government and California tribes was ratified, says Nelson, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and an indigenous scholar at San Francisco State University. “So they lost their land illegally. It was outright stolen.”
All of this has left dozens of California tribes, including the Ohlone, without federal recognition, which, in turn, left them without standing to stop contractors as they pave over their sacred sites.
The Ohlone need only go to the Emeryville mall to feel this history. For years, members of the tribe have spent the Friday after Thanksgiving protesting there, telling shoppers about the sacred shellmound that was paved over to make way for a parking lot.
Seven years ago, a piece of waterfront on the Carquinez Strait was facing a similar fate. The property called Glen Cove Park had been the site of an Ohlone village thousands of years before. LaRose and Gould were part of an occupation that set up camp there to protect it. LaRose remembers articles referring to them as “a group of Indians and their ragtag hippie friends.”
“We were proud of that,” says LaRose, who is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes. Ultimately the occupation was successful. Development was halted, and the land was put into a cultural easement. But it did not return to Ohlone stewardship. That’s when Gould realized that if the Ohlone had a land trust — a legal mechanism to collectively own property — they might have been able to get the easement themselves.
She and LaRose also noticed that while land trusts have been used by American Indians for decades, none of them were led by women. “Not just to say that they’re led by men,” LaRose says, “but to say that, as women, we have an obligation to protect the land and care for the land in a way I think men maybe might not quite understand.”
Gould and LaRose drew up a map of some 200 properties throughout Oakland, either owned by the city, abandoned or neglected or under a lien. “We just sort of penciled them out and said, ‘What if there’s a way we could secure these pieces of land?’ ” LaRose says. And so the Sogorea Te Land Trust was created — a land trust on Ohlone territory, to buy back Ohlone territory, but one that is led by women and open to all indigenous people.
“To have it women-led and urban-centered is really unique, innovative and pretty revolutionary,” Nelson says. The Cultural Conservancy has been helping indigenous people use the trust system since the ’90s. “It’s still a limited tool. It’s really unjust that a lot of tribes have to buy back their own land. … But it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”
To help fund the project, Gould and LaRose also created something they call the Shuumi Land Tax — a way for nonnatives to pay a due of sorts to the original owners of the land they live on.
This first piece of the trust, the one out on 105th Avenue, is, for now, an easement. It will give the trust access to a piece of unused land owned by Planting Justice. They plan to build an arbor there, a place for ceremony and conversation.
That’s just the beginning. Gould imagines spaces where medicine plants grow, where indigenous people can pray and dance, where the Ohlone can bury their ancestors’ bones, where native languages are taught and cultures are shared, where others learn about the place they’ve come to call home.
“There are all these conversations that need to happen and should happen,” Gould says. “That’s what these land bases are going to create: safe spaces where native people and people of color and people from other backgrounds can come and sit and talk and relax and really dig deep into these conversations and get in touch with the land again.”
And then there are the uses they haven’t even thought of yet.
“Younger people are going to come up with those ideas,” LaRose says. “I don’t yet have all those ideas. I think my job and Corrina’s job is to secure the land, and then let younger people decide afterward what to do with it.”