A crisis of invisibility: inside San Francisco's planned Native American cultural center
The Bay Area is among the most racially and ethnically diverse regions in the US, but it is only slowly grappling with its self-understanding as a home for significant populations of Native Americans. An ambitious project is hoping to help address a challenge that the region’s Native population has grappled with since the occupation of Alcatraz Island in the late 1960s and early 70s: a crisis of invisibility.
The Village, a multi-year project with funding from the philanthropic investor Kat Taylor (who is married to Tom Steyer, the billionaire financier and brief Democratic presidential hopeful), is intended to become a center of Native culture and heritage. The effort is an outgrowth of the Mission District’s 57-year-old Friendship House, which describes itself as “the longest-running social-service organization in the United States run by and for American Indians”.
“San Francisco and the population in general needs to know that Native people are still here,” says the filmmaker and advocate Peter Bratt, who lived briefly on Alcatraz as a child and who served on Friendship House’s board for more than 20 years. “What also comes with being invisible is you also become a community that’s underserved.”
In creating a physical space that provides full medical services plus youth services, elder services, a women’s lodge, and other elements, the Village will have what Bratt calls “a cultural center where we can celebrate and thrive and simply be indigenous”.
“This project, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing like it anywhere,” says Abby Abinanti, chief judge of the Yurok tribe and the first Native American woman admitted to the California state bar.
More than 70% of the US’s indigenous population resides in or around cities, a legacy of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. Ostensibly an anti-poverty measure, it encouraged the displacement of Native Americansinto urban areas like San Francisco, often from regions to which their forebears had already been forcibly removed decades before – a secondary wave of dispossession that is frequently written out of US history.
“Native Americans have lived here now for a generation or two – some of them three generations from home – and this has become their home,” Abinanti says. “Often, I have said if the situation were reversed and we were forcibly relocated to some other state, I would hope that the people who live there would reach out to us and say, ‘Welcome, my relatives. I’m sorry this happened to you. What can we do to make this work for you? What do you need?’”
Kat Taylor believes in a redistribution of assets, so she is putting her money towards a model of reparative justice that differs from previous eras of philanthropy.
“I just don’t think we’re going to get to the good life for all if we don’t start shifting wealth,” she says. Referring to the white Americans who bear much of the responsibility, she adds: “We have to deeply reckon with our history. It hasn’t been told accurately nor has it been acknowledged as driving current societal outcomes.”
The Village is one of five projects to which she has given $100,000.
“We deeply respect their [Friendship House] process, which is very collective in nature, based on longstanding indigenous ways,” Taylor says. “We’ll give them the resources and then get out of the way.”
Five years from now, the Village will have brought disparate organizations from across the region under one roof. In doing so, it aims to be the crown jewel of San Francisco’s newly formed American Indian Cultural District, which launched in March, just as Mayor London Breed ordered a shutdown in the face of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sharaya Souza, the executive director, wants the nascent district to become home to new generations of Native Americans. But she also wants people to know that it already is.
This week, San Francisco ushered into law a land acknowledgment, to be read at every meeting of the board of supervisors, that recognizes the city as the home of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. Still, “there’s folks who don’t know we’re here”, Souza says. “I’ll be sitting in city meetings and people will say, ‘We’re glad they acknowledged the people that used to live here, the people that were before us,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we’re still here. We’re still alive!’”
To remedy this, Souza wants to see the installation of flagpole banners, murals and statues. She’s also working on what she calls the “Indigenize Project”, which will enable people to go on a walking tour of the neighborhood and scan QR codes at various sites to learn their history. (Passions around statues run stronger. On Juneteenth, protesters in Golden Gate Park removed a century-old statue of Father Junipero Serra, the recently canonized 18th-century Spanish priest who forcibly assimilated many Native Americans in what would eventually become California.)
Change is coming, if fitfully. This year, the state endured a horrific wildfire season that hasn’t quite ended, and it is clear that California’s future is tied to reviving indigenous ecological practices, including prescribed burns.
“Although I appreciate the superpower of being invisible, it might have been not what I personally picked out. I don’t think that it is good in a society to create pockets of invisible humans, because that isn’t a society that is a together society,” Abinanti says. “We have to understand at this point in our lives, we’re going to go forward together and survive together, or we’re all going down.”