Our goal for our public scholarship project “Building the Tools of Land Sovereignty: Aiding Lisjan Ohlone Networks in Building Governmental and Financial Tools” was to help our graduate students learn from and study the practices of local land sovereignty groups, and in turn to provide useful research tools for those groups.

We were inspired to do so because of the participants’ own ongoing engagement with Native groups and issues, and the growing number of students and faculty in the History Department studying Native American and Indigenous History. As we pursued our goal, thanks to funding from the Public Impact Research Initiative grant program in Summer 2021 from Public Scholarship and Engagement, we were inspired by the commitment and creativity of the Sogorea Te’ project and its potential to be a model for future work.

But before I share more about their experiences, as a historian myself, I feel compelled to give a little background for context:

About the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an innovative, community-based organization that works toward land sovereignty in the East Bay. Growing from the efforts of a number of Lisjan Ohlone leaders, including Corinna Gould and Johnella LaRose, the organizations has launched numerous programs, including Rematriate the Land— a women-led effort to gather lands for utilization by Lisjan Ohlone and other peoples in the East Bay. Rematriation thus refers to the process of the return of land to Lisjan Ohlone control and the development of women-led, inclusive methods for governing that land, as opposed to the gendered implications of repatriation. On lands they have access to, organizers (in non-pandemic times) run numerous programs including food banks, language and cultural instruction, festivals, and other efforts to sustain Ohlone culture and identity, and to build deeper relationships with the land. As part of their efforts, Sogorea Te’ launched the Shuumi Land Tax— a widely covered effort (including by KQED and the San Francisco Chronicle) to draw donations in the form of land tax that have engaged individuals and organizations in the region that seek to go beyond vague statements of acknowledgment and to move into directly engaged support. Sogorea Te’ is an independent, registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the state of California. Professor Beth Rose Middleton of UC Davis serves on their board of directors and helped us formulate this proposal.

Public Scholarship in the words of grad students 

Two current UC Davis history doctoral students spent part of the summer working with Sogorea Te’ on research and data analysis projects that aimed to help the organization develop its political capacity and its outreach to potential donors. Through this experience they learned just how instrumental and effective Sogorea Te’ is in their efforts to dismantle the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchal structures. Here’s what the students had to say about the experience:     

Brianna Tafolla Riviere, UC Davis Ph.D. candidate:

My summer working with the Sogorea Te’ land trust organization was one of the most rewarding experiences of my graduate career thus far. As a historian we usually are stuck in the past, but this internship allowed me to use my skills to look toward the present and future. By using my research skills and my passion for Indigenous issues I was able to work toward a more equitable future for the Ohlone People. Sogorea Te’ taught me how to transfer my skills to a non-profit organization that focuses on navigating often indifferent or even hostile political environments for Indigenous Peoples.

During this past summer, we worked on two separate projects. For our first project we created political rosters for local politicians in the Bay area. Overall, we worked on seven rosters that included rating city council members on how open they may be to Indigenous rematriation and land restoration. This project aimed to help Sogorea Te’ senior staff members seek political support and aid. This was a fascinating project that required our research skills as historians to scour city council minutes, newspapers, political websites, and even Twitter.

Our second project focused on visualizing Shuumi Land Tax data. The Shuumi Land Tax is a voluntary annual contribution that non-Indigenous people living on the Confederate Villages of the Lisjan’s territory can make to support the Ohlone people and the Sogorea Te organization. While my project partner, Chantal Walker, focused on creating maps that visualized who was paying the Shuumi Land Tax, I was tasked with creating charts and other helpful graphs to consider raw numbers and percentages for the Sorgorea Te staff. My graphs and charts were also attached to land, as I focused on Shuumi Land tax donations in Huchuin territory - now the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Emeryville, Albany, and Piedmont - and Lisjan or Ohlone territory – now Alameda, Contra Consta, Napa, Solano, and San Joaquin counties. It was an honor to work on visualizing the progress and impact of the Shuumi Land tax in the Bay area.

Chantal Walker, UC Davis Ph.D. student:

Working with the Sogorea Te land trust was a thoroughly insightful experience. I learned how instrumental Sogorea Te is in strategically working with San Francisco Bay area city council members that share similar visions with their non-profit’s goals and vision. Sogorea Te started in 2012 as an Indigenous women led urban land trust. My work with Sogorea Te contributed to my understanding that land back to Indigenous Peoples is a worthwhile goal.

My brief time with Sogorea Te this past summer taught me that despite the land trust’s unique vision, it takes a lot of time, foresight, and strategic planning to maintain its’ everyday functions. I shared the responsibility of researching city council members with my colleague, Brianna Tafolla Riviere. Together we worked on creating a metric scale to assess local Bay politicians through the lens of Sogorea Te’s vision and purpose of rematriation or providing land back to the Ohlone People. The research required analyzing certain city council members’ priorities and motivations, as well as considering their commitment to Indigenous political and social issues. This initial project was very challenging due to unincorporated cities, inaccessible data, and city policies that remained purposefully hidden.

Sogorea Te taught me new ways of understanding and visualizing geographic spaces.

Our second project focused on visualizing Shuumi Land Tax data for internal use. I worked on mapping out the data using Google Maps and then later the mapping software program, eSpatial. The software eSpatial allowed me to visualize the donor data from 2015 through 2020 from city to county maps. We also used Salsa Labs, a customer relationship management system to manage and calculate tax data. Salsa Labs allowed me to extract massive quantities of data from their donors into an Excel spreadsheet. The exported data from Salsa Labs allowed for various donor analytics, including the culmination of the mapping project. The mapping project displayed data by donor frequency and donor dollar amount across zip codes in the San Francisco Bay area.

My reflections

For me, as a faculty member, the experience of working with Sogorea Te’ helped me to connect a creative, powerful community organization with excellent graduate students. I myself had prior connections with Sogorea Te’ before this project and contribute to the Shuumi Land Tax as an individual. As a faculty member, the project helped our department expand the training and preparation we can offer and helped us demonstrate to our students that the training they receive in research and analysis can be part of making a more just world and of helping to support communities beyond academia.

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