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.
☑️ 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.
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Read the San Francisco Chronicle with your SFPL card. The complete backfile from 1865 to the current day is available.
Hood, Charles. “Making Better Maps: The Case for Coyote Cartography.” News from Native California, vol. 37, no. 4, June 2024, pp. 10–15.
☑️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.
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Read News from Native California on Flipster, an eMagazine platform SFPL offers, in addition to several other library databases. You can also find it
in print at the Main Library or at the Eureka Valley Library
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.
☑️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.
Simons, Eric. “Land Back: Why Is It Hard to Return Land?” Bay Nature, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 20–26.
☑️ 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 unique challenges tribes face when trying to acquire lands from sellers, even when a seller wants the land protected the way a tribe can protect their ancestral homeland. 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 that 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, largely because of the acknowledgement that tribes do a better job preventing and controlling forest fires than the Park Service.
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Bay Nature is available through the SFPL database Academic Search Complete from 2002 to present, or you can see if your
local branch carries it in print.
Vulliamy, Ed. "Reclaiming Native Identity in California." New York Review of Books, 22
June 2023, p. 45-48.
➡️ SFPL Full Text Access link
☑️ In an update for 2023 on the topics explored by Reed and Simon, Vulliamy frames this piece around the people and activities of the California Truth and Healing Council. With a brush both broad and precise, Vulliamy covers the history of genocide, slavery, and land dispossession of indigenous Californians through a concise literature review on 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).
❇️ Read The New York Review of Books on Flipster, an eMagazine platform SFPL offers, in addition to several other library databases. You can also catch it in print at several library locations.
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Jehoiada
Calvin is a memory worker, writer, and zine-maker from Chicago.
Jehoiada is the Archives Assistant for the Johnson Publishing Company
Archive, helping to process the historic photograph collection for
Ebony, Jet, and other magazines and programs. Jehoiada is a fellow in
the University of Alabama’s Social Justice for Archivists Master of
Library and Information Studies program, focusing on memory work that
supports practices rooted in culture and politics outside of
institutional archives. Read his writings about Sleet and the JPC photo
archive at Sixty Inches from Center. 
