The growing practice of acknowledging Indigenous land ancestry is a positive change, but tribal stewardship must be the end goal.
It is no coincidence that the Tribes whose land comprises highly urbanized, highly desirable places like Los Angeles, Orange County and the San Fernando Valley are the ones left out of federal recognition, despite them having petitioned for it for decades. We have no reservation and no federal recognition, precisely because our land is so valuable.
By Wallace Cleaves and Charles Sepulveda
August 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM PDT
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-12/native-land-stewardship-needs-to-follow-acknowledgment
It is almost certain that, if you are living in the U.S. (or in nearly any country with a history of colonization), you are living on land that settlers took by force from Indigenous people. You may not have taken it yourself, you may have paid for it, but you are still receiving stolen property. We wish to acknowledge the land of all the Indigenous peoples that has been taken from them/us, by theft, by forced treaty or sale, or by any other means.
Such recognitions have become known as land acknowledgments, and professors, administrators, nonprofit leaders and government workers have begun to invoke them frequently. At the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Cleaves is an associate professor of teaching and where Dr. Sepulveda earned his PhD, the administration now encourages presenters at public events to acknowledge that they and the audience are gathered on Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano land. Yet we have experienced this increase in the acknowledgment of traditional territories all while our own tribal nation remains landless and formally unrecognized by the U.S. We offer our commentary from that positionality: as proponents of and participants in land acknowledgements, as well as witnesses to their shortcomings.
Across North America, such acknowledgments gained momentum after the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015, particularly in response to the commission’s finding that the Indian residential school system was cultural genocide. After that, Indigenous-settler state relations shifted in Canada, with the government beginning to systematically acknowledge the existence of First Nations people, in an effort to right past wrongs. More recent horrific but unsurprising revelations about just how many First Nations children were murdered by that system make these actions all the more imperative, including in the U.S., which has been behind the curve in examining its treatment of Native people.
Land acknowledgments are critically important, especially for the roughly 245 Tribes that are still awaiting recognition by the federal government. This includes our own Tongva and our close relatives of the Acjachemen and Tataviam in southern California. We still struggle to even be recognized as continuing to exist by the current inhabitants of our lands, known to us as Tovaangar, which spans Los Angeles, and portions of the San Fernando Valley, Orange County and San Bernardino. Land acknowledgments put pressure on local, state and federal governments to include us in discussions about the land for which we are the true stewards.
“We need a place where we can gather and renew ourselves, our culture, and our community.”
But like all such expected rituals of contrition, acknowledgement runs the risk of becoming rote and performative. In the case of recognized cultural genocide, words are simply not enough. For the Tongva, our true goal is to be good stewards of our homelands again. This is the objective behind the “Land Back” movement, which simply seeks to return available land back to the Tribal communities from which it was taken.
Land Back is not a fantasy of colonial reversal, the removal of anyone of colonial descent. Rather, it is the wish to have some portion, some fractional piece of our once vast territories, back in our own hands. We need a place where we can perform our ceremonies. We need a place where we can gather our foods, medicines and sacred plants without having to fear the arbitrary restrictions of a land management system that has mismanaged the land so badly that it now burns without end. We need a place where we can gather and renew ourselves, our culture and our community. We need a place of our own.
How, and where, would this happen? There are now many examples to look to. Just last year, the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County reacquired 1,199 acres of their ancestral lands in a deal involving the state of California and the Western Rivers Conservancy, funded by a $60 million voter-approved bond in 2018 to transfer lands of natural, cultural and historical importance to the state’s Indigenous peoples. In 2019, the northern California city of Eureka voluntarily returned the 280-acre Duluwat Island to the Wiyot tribe, 159 years after a bloody massacre. In June, the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine bought back an island that colonialists took from them two centuries ago.
Returns should be happening on a grander scale. A recent article in The Atlantic outlined one vision for how that might occur, albeit one that highlights the limits of acknowledgement as well as recognition alone. In “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” the writer David Treuer suggests that a commission of Native Americans be given oversight of the parks, replacing the sometimes poor stewardship of the National Parks Service, an inherently colonial agency established to manage lands that were seized from Tribes by the federal government. He argues that this would potentially protect these lands from political power struggles as has happened at parks such as Bears Ears National Monument.
Most readers would read the headline of Treuer’s article as proposing “land back.” However, what Treuer is really proposing is much less radical, especially since he includes only federally recognized tribes in his proposed commission, leaving out the many Tribes that have been bereft of even the meager sovereignty that such recognition entails. For example, the Channel Islands National Park includes Santa Barbara Island, which was inhabited by our Tongva ancestors, and includes territory of our Chumash relatives. Following Treuer’s approach, relying on federal recognition, Tongva would still be denied stewardship of Santa Barbara Island.
It seems unconscionable that we would be excluded from discussions about our homeland’s future, but such is the danger of not being recognized. At the same time, it seems particularly odd that, in suggesting that the parks be wrested away from the control of a colonial government agency, Treuer uses the criteria of recognition by that very government as the benchmark for inclusion in co-management of lands that are our ancestral territory. That’s hardly decolonial and it certainly isn’t aimed at giving land back.
It is no coincidence that the Tribes whose land comprises highly urbanized, highly desirable places like Los Angeles, Orange County and the San Fernando Valley are the ones left out of federal recognition, despite them having petitioned for it for decades. We have no reservation and no federal recognition, precisely because our land is so valuable. The federal recognition process has been far more focused on creating barriers and on denying unrecognized Tribes access to even the limited sovereignty it allows, and the system seems largely arbitrary and punitive. In the same places, we are also losing members of our community who are being forced to move away from our traditional territory by the rising housing prices. It’s a cruel act of continued colonial practice that we are still being removed from our land by the expedient of pricing us off our homelands.
We return to our wish to acknowledge the land of all the Indigenous peoples that has been taken from them/us, by theft, by forced treaty or sale, or by any other means. Yet to be more than an empty signal, a performance of decolonization, such an acknowledgement must lead to the inclusion of our Indigenous communities in actual discussions of how the land can and should be used. Acknowledgement should be accompanied by resources, by both financial and participatory support from federal, state and local governments, from institutions and corporations, and from communities and individuals. Our communities need resources to support our elders, revitalize our cultural practices and to educate our next generation so that they too may fight and advocate for our people and our lands.
And we need land back, so we can remain in Tovaangar and be the stewards of this place — a place that allows us to collectively (re)imagine life beyond colonialism. For all that has been taken from us, our homes, our languages, our culture, our beliefs, and our very lives, this does not seem like too much to ask.
Wallace Cleaves (Tongva) is an associate professor of teaching, associate director of the University Writing Program, and director of the California Center for the Native Nations at University of California, Riverside.
Charles Sepulveda (Tongva and Acjachemen) is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Utah.