Land Back in California: A Brief Annotated Bibliography for the 2020s

November is First Person, SFPL's celebration of Native American heritage and culture. From our reading list at the Magazines and Newspapers Center, here are five articles we recommend on the status of the Land Back movement and indigenous land ownership attitudes in California. Along with some annotations to guide your engagement with these articles, we provide access notes so you can get the most out of your library card and follow these publications year round. Thanks to Gregory Hom, program manager of the Environmental Center at the Main Library, for help putting together this bibliography.   

Flores, Jessica. "Local Indigenous Groups Get Land Grants." San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 2024, A9.

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☑️Our local newspaper reports on indigenous leaders Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone and co-founder of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, based in Oakland) and Quirina Geary (Tamien Nation, based in San Jose) receiving monetary awards from the state of California to further their tribes' land back endeavors. The ultimate goal of the land grant program is to fight climate change by returning California land to the stewardship of native peoples. In the article, Gould and Geary share their plans for the use of the funds. Read more about the Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program from the California Natural Resources Agency website. https://resources.ca.gov/Tribal-Nature-Based-Solutions-Program. 

📖Read the San Francisco Chronicle with your SFPL card. The complete backfile from 1865 to the current day is available. https://sfpl.org/research-learn/elibrary/emagazines-enews

 

Hood, Charles. “Making Better Maps: The Case for Coyote Cartography.” News from Native California, vol. 37, no. 4, June 2024, pp. 10–15. 

➡️SFPL Full Text Access Link https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=8501bc04-7fab-3a1a-8e9f-7387a099476a.

 

☑️We can basically recommend everything News from Native California publishes, but this piece about The Friends of the Antelope Valley Indian Museum commissioning a two-feet-by-two-feet map of the Antelope Valley's tribes without borders is particularly fascinating. It gets to the heart of what Indigenous mapping and map making can mean in the 21st century in that it depicts the Paiute, Kawaiisu, Kitanemuk, Tataviam, Serrano, Vanyume, and Chemehuevi cohabitating a topographical depiction of the valley, true to the way the features of the land indicate tribal areas more than any hard boundary.  

 

📖News from Native California is available through many databases provided by SFPL but we recommend reading it on Flipster https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://flipster.ebsco.com/c/gswfel/results?limiters=&q=HJ%201U9&db=eon or reading it in print at the Main Library or Eureka Valley http://sflib1.sfpl.org/record=b1833850~S1

Reed, Kaitlin. “We Are a Part of the Land and the Land Is Us: Settler Colonialism, Genocide & Healing in California.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, no. 42, 2020, pp. 27–49. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26932594. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.

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☑️Writing from 2020, shortly after California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged and apologized for the genocide of Native Peoples in the state but before the establishment of the Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program, Dr. Kaitlin Reed academically deals with the denial and historical facts of the genocide of California Indians that went hand-in-hand with establishing California as a state. She also supposes the way forward to healing, which connects back to land reparations because "theft of land was an important component of genocide and therefore the restitution of lands must be an important component of healing from genocide" (30). It would be interesting to hear Dr. Reed's attitude about the grant program. 

📖Humboldt Journal of Social Relations is available full text in SFPL's JSTOR package https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26932594, or you can create a free account on JSTOR to view the article https://www.jstor.org/stable/26932594

Simons, Eric. “Land Back: Why Is It Hard to Return Land?” Bay Nature, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 20–26. 

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☑️This thorough piece not only catalogs the majority, if not all, examples of Indigenous tribes receiving repatriated land in the San Francisco Bay Area/Santa Cruz Mountains through late 2020, it explains the reasons why repatriating land to Native groups that an owner wants protected as a natural resource is difficult. The narrative drive of the article starts in Big Sur with the story of the Adler Ranch acquisition, originally planned to be sold to the U.S. Park Service through the land trust Western Rivers Conservancy, but instead was deeded to the Esselen people. Simons writes, "Settlers and displaced natives, a generation of resource extraction, a land trust, and then an end in government ownership: that's how land conservation stories in California usually go" (20), but the Adler Ranch is one example that bucks that trend. 

📖Bay Nature is available through the SFPL database Academic Search Complete from 2002 to present https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=aebce98a-efd2-3128-a9d9-3285b156b3c5, or you can see if your local branch carries it in print http://sflib1.sfpl.org/record=b1843742~S1 .

Vulliamy, Ed. "Reclaiming Native Identity in California." New York Review of Books, 22 June 2023, p. 45-7. 

➡️This rich, information-packed piece connects to and fills out the main points of the Reed article in the Humboldt journal and the Simon article in Bay Nature by framing the topics of genocide and land back with the activities of the California Truth and Healing Council. In the process, Vulliamy gives the reader a crash course in the history of genocide, slavery, and land dispossession of indigenous Californians through a concise literature review of monographs on the topic. The blockquote from Abby Abinanti at the end sums it up well: "We can't go back to the villages, because the world is too different, but we can go back to the values of the village... We can evoke the practices of the village, to create new practices, based on those value systems" (48).

☑️SFPL Full Text Access link: https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://flipster.ebsco.com/c/gswfel/reader/3619272?callbackUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fflipster.ebsco.com%2Fc%2Fgswfel%2Fdetails%2F4081998%3FbackTo%3D%252Fc%252Fgswfel%252Fresults%253Fq%253Dnew%252Byork%252Breview%2526fieldCode%253D%2526sortBy%253Drelevance%2526initiatedBy%253Dtyped-in%2526backTo%253D%25252Fc%25252Fgswfel%25253Fauth-callid%25253D76d6d94a-f9ec-9771-8224-ae906d131d11&accessionNumber=3619272&pageSet=22&page=0

📖The New York Review of Books is available from SFPL several ways, but we recommend Flipster https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://flipster.ebsco.com/c/gswfel/details/4081998?backTo=%2Fc%2Fgswfel%2Fresults%3Flimiters%3D%26q%3DHJ%2520NRB%26db%3Deon or catching a print copy http://sflib1.sfpl.org/record=b1831841~S1