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. 

➡️ SFPL Full Text Access Link

 

☑️ 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.

❇️ 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. 

 

➡️SFPL Full Text Access Link

 

☑️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.  

 

❇️ 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.

 

➡️SFPL Full Text Access Link  

 

☑️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, or you can create a free account on JSTOR to view the article

 

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

 

➡️ SFPL Full Text Link

☑️ 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. 

❇️ 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.

Flashback: October 1909 at the Park Branch

MNC Blog Editor Note: Please enjoy this guest post by Doreen Horstin, SFPL Park Branch Manager

Park Branch Library, located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, recently celebrated 115 years of service to the community at their annual Open House. Placed near the front door was an October 1909 bound volume of the San Francisco Call, a local newspaper that ran, under various names, from 1859 to 1959 and that was published by Charles M. Shortridge and John D. Spreckels. 

A bound volume of the San Francisco Call containing issues from 1909 invites browsing at the Park Branch Library Open House

 

What was happening in 1909? Theodore Roosevelt was President, followed by William Howard Taft in March of that year, the NAACP was founded on February 12th, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York City to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis, and in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, San Francisco Public Library Branch Number 5 – the Park Branch – opened to the public on October 29th. The Park Branch has operated continuously in the same building ever since.

This year, during the Park Branch Open House, patrons carefully flipped through the pages of the October 1909 San Francisco Call. Many news items are recognizable even today:

President Taft toured San Francisco's post-earthquake recovery, laying the cornerstone for the YMCA building at Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth, amongst other activities; Secretary of the Interior R. A. Ballinger visited Sacramento to weigh in on the Hetch Hetchy dam project, assuring the public that they would continue to have public access rights to Lake Tahoe; In Berkeley, local members of the SPCA met to discuss the treatment of animals held in shelters; in Manila, a local man was arrested for his role in smuggling opium; pickpockets continued to torment passengers on streetcars; and in baseball, the Philadelphia Athletics headed to San Francisco for a match against the Seals.

Many more eye-catching items are contained within the pages of the San Francisco Call and other archived newspapers. One can easily spend hours marveling at ads for shoes and clothes (such low prices!), chuckling at remedies for dandruff, eczema and varicose veins and gazing at the society pages. To see more, visit the friendly staff at the Magazine and Newspaper Center at the Main Library where this newspaper is available on microfilm. 

An advertisement for Sterling Furniture, $1 per yard of carpet and lace curtains for $0.35 each. October 2, 1909, the Morning Call

 

A political cartoon of President Taft on the eve of his visit to California, Daily Morning Call, October 2, 1909.

Page from October 5, 1909 Daily Morning Call reporting on the activities of Taft during his visit to California, including laying the cornerstone for the YMCA building at Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth in San Francisco.

100th Anniversary of the Legion of Honor

"It's art that keeps us thinking" - Virginia Ernster (San Francisco Fine Art Museums Docent) 

Rodin's Thinker, a crown jewel of the Legion of Honor

Happy 100 year anniversary to a fine art museum of San Francisco, the Legion of Honor, an edifice fashioned after the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris—one that stands at a Californian's edge of the world, Land's End at the Golden Gate rather than on the Seine—on the Western coast of the United States, looking out on the Marin Headlands and the Pacific Ocean. 

View from the Legion of Honor toward the Marin Headlands on a rainy April day

 

The museum was the passion project of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, nicknamed "the great grandmother of San Francisco" for the impact her philanthropy had on the development of the City's culture and environmental form. Her vision took hold when she beheld the French Pavilion at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which was fashioned as a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris at 3/4ths scale, and conceived of the plan to bring a building in that form to San Francisco permanently as an art museum. 

The French Pavilion at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, 1915

 

After a delay caused by the Great War, the museum went on to come to fruition and was dedicated on November 11, 1924, Armistice Day. Spreckels populated the museum with art from her own collection, and visited France many times over the years to further collect art, drawing on her friendship with Loie Fuller to meet new artists. It was Fuller who introduced Spreckels to the sculptor Rodin and encouraged her to purchase the famous piece the Thinker, which presides over the courtyard of the Legion of Honor to this day (although it did moonlight in Golden Gate Park for a spell, before the Museum opened). 

"Whatever cenotaph was unveiled or tribute paid yesterday to the heroic dead..."

"...no Armistice Day observance the world over was more impressive than that which attended the dedication of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor," according to the San Francisco Examiner, reporting on November 12, 1924 of the previous day's ceremony (page 17). The paper devoted most of the front page of a special section to covering the grand opening and other Armistice Day ceremonies throughout the City. It included a photograph of the courtyard of the Legion of Honor filled with attendees as well as a portrait of M. Alfred Tirman, Counsellor of the State of France [sic], Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, donor, and San Francisco Mayor James Rolph. 

View the November 12, 1924 issue of the San Francisco Examiner (SFPL card required) 

"The Monument... is dedicated to honor and country in memory of the heroes of the World war"

On November 12, the San Francisco Chronicle devoted about a half-page to covering the dedication of the new museum, reporting on the attendance of prominent people, the genesis of the idea for the museum from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the features of the building (like the Theater), and the attributes of the art collection. The article includes a composite portrait of William F. Humphrey, John D. Spreckels, Senator Samuel M. Shortridge, and Mrs. Alma De Bretteville Spreckels.   

View the November 12, 1924 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle (SFPL card required)

Find out more about the history of our "palace that will endure for centuries" by visiting the FAMSF's webpage, "Legion of Honor history," and check out the calendar of special events and free openings the museum will be running for the coming year. 

Additionally, SFPL will be hosting several upcoming programs related to the Legion of Honor at 100, talks delivered by the museum's wonderful docents.

Remember, here in the Magazines and Newspapers Center, we are able to offer the entire backfile of both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, so the historic research doesn't end with the centennial of the Legion of Honor!