CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Native or tribal sovereignty refers to the right of American Indians and Alaska Natives to govern themselves. In some definitions native or tribal sovereignty is an inherent right, whether the tribe is federally recognized or not. But what does native sovereignty mean to Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous peoples, governments, organizations, and beyond? 

Gregg Castro, Cultural Director for the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, has worked on preserving his Indigenous heritage for three decades as a writer-activist and by educating the broader world about the Ramaytush Ohlone—the Indigenous people of the land now called San Francisco. In this episode, Gregg is joined by Lazzuly Mello, licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Core Faculty in the Community Mental Health Program at CIIS, for an illuminating conversation exploring the complexities of native sovereignty from his perspective as a member and advocate for multiple California tribes.  

This episode was recorded during a live online event on September 22nd, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Gregg Castro: Greetings to everybody. Thank you for coming tonight, and I'm Gregg, and I'm going to start off in the way my elders taught me. Just as we say it in English, and start off things in a good way, and we're going to do this with the song, and I'm going to do the song and a prayer and give you a brief telling of what that all means. [singing and prayer] Creator, look after us and guide us on our work today. The song is a song that I had to borrow from my Rumsen Ohlone relatives, because the Ramaytush culture has been nearly eradicated, and we only have a very few words in a word list that have survived. So, we're going to be probably talking about that tonight. The short prayer I gave you was written in Salinan, which is my father's people, and there's more information about that. But that language, like all California native languages, are all in a state of repair, of a survival, of threatened extinction, but also revival, and trying to move from “survivence” and “thrivence”, as I call it. So, I share that in the hope that we're going to have a great conversation. The one we had last week with you, Lazzuly, was great. So, I hand it off to you, take it away. Lead us wherever we're going to go.  

Lazully Mello: Thank you Gregg. What an honor to be here with you. I feel both the grief and the joy in your song and in your presence. So, thank you for starting us off with that. So, to start, I think I want to start at the very beginning, right? What does it mean to you to be a native man? Right? How did you come into your subjectivity as a native person? What's been your journey to that, right? You talked about, like, all of this …  There's so many, so much colonial violence. Just, there's so much happening, right?  

Gregg: Yeah. 

Lazully: How did we get here? How is Gregg? Gregg, how did you become you?  

Gregg: Oh my God. The way you put it this time, which is a little bit different than our previous conversation, the subjectivity, right? That's an interesting way to put it, and it is subjective to us. I think in colonial, modern-day society, and I work in the technical field. And so, we're not allowed to be subjective; we're not allowed to have an opinion or feelings. We have to be objective, logical, strategic, bereft of emotion, and attachment. And that's not possible for needy people, if you know who you are. And I was fortunate, of the three lineages I have, I've always known that I was Salinan, which are my dad's people. He grew up in the Homeland, and raised by grandparents on the Homeland when he was very young, and later moved to San Jose, where our family became established, and I grew up and still live. And my mother's people are Rumsen Ohlone, which is from the modern-day Bay Area. And we've known both of those lineages all our life, but none of the culture, because as we'll talk about a lot tonight, the colonization process was highly successful. Way too successful, in many cases.  

And so, a lot of the knowledge was put to sleep or hidden. We sometimes use that word “lost” or “extinct”, but really, hidden and we've managed to bring it back, in a lot of cases, but depending on what survived is, what constitutes our, you know, culture that we can bring back. And so, that knowledge by itself, and along with that, my dad, as I was growing up, always took me and my older brothers back to the Homeland. We would hunt, fish, camp in areas of Monterey County and San Luis Obispo County, that are public lands, that are still recognizable by our ancestors 8,000 years ago. They haven't been too damaged yet by monetization, unlike places like Monterey and Salinas, or especially San Jose, where I live now- which is pretty much paved over. Those places, the ancestors would recognize it, and there is a way in that setting where you can reconnect and reawaken. And so, that's how I came to be over many years of going there with my father, and just soaking it in and letting it soak into me, that I reestablish that umbilical cord to my Homelands.  

Lazully: I need to think about the conversation we had last time. I would love to hear more about the creation story in your culture, around the way that the Earth, how you belong to the Earth and it to you, that sort of dynamic that you have.  

Gregg: Yeah, well, I learned many years ago, our creation story, and I got it through anthropological books. So, it was probably very long, and detailed, and emotional, and we got the Salinan to Spanish to English version of it in a, in a truncated form. But I think the essence is still there, that we can derive from, and for the Salinan people, the world came to be the way we see it now after a flood, which is very in a lot of the California origin stories. A lot of them talk about a flood, and the world was reformed and remade similar to what we see it now, after that flood. In our case, the place that that happened is a place that we still know of, and we call it [Salinan word]. The Spaniards came and renamed it Santa Lucia. Later on, it was renamed the “s word”, which we do not use, but it was named after the leader of the mission system. But it for 10 thousand years, it was known as [Salinan word] and it's in Los Padres National Forest. It's the highest mountain there and it stuck up above the waters when the flood came. And the remaining first people who survived the flood, that we use English names, like Eagle and Kingfisher, to describe those people. And the story talks about how they worked their powers, that were given to them by Creator, to form the world before the flood. They had to reform it and restore it after the flood, and they used those powers. And then after the world was restored and the waters receded, they proceeded to fulfill a prophecy given to them by Creator that there was going to be Two-Footers. And the Two-Footers are us.  

And what's powerful about that story, and again, that's a common element in a lot of the stories of California that I've learned, in my, one of my most important, influential Mentor Elders, Dr. Darryl Bay Wilson. Other people know them as Pitt River. He said that most of the stories that he knows of, that he learned, talk about people being the last. The Two-Footers, humans, being the last. And when you, if you've ever been in a family, and Im the youngest of three brothers, by the time I came along, my parents kind of knew about how to do parenting. And we had a house to live in and, you know, we were poor, but I didn't know that because it was a good life. And they provided for us, and we had food, and I had a yard to play in, and I had bigger brothers to annoy me but also take care of me. And life was good, because the family was set up and I came into it, blessed, because it was set up for me. And that's what the stories tell us. As humans, the world was a beautiful place. And those first people, the ones that we know: Eagle, Bear, Deer, Coyote, Kingfisher, all those people they were here before us, they, in turn, taught us those things that they learned about how to take care of the world. And all we had to do is just take care of it. It was already, kind of like, a done deal, just keep going.  

So that's where we, you know, got our original instructions, and learned that we were stewards and caretakers of the world, and that was our repayment to Creator and creation for giving us this gift of life in this beautiful world. And that's how we were raised. That's one of the prime tenets of our Native cultures is gratitude and humility for this gift. We didn't come along with that idea that it was owed to us, and promised to us, and everything. It wasn't something that we had to have. It was something that was gifted to us, that we could then, should be grateful for. And when you're grateful for something, you treat it with respect. And knowing it's a gift that we don't own, but that we pass along. That was passed to the first people, from Creator. Then, the first people passed it to us, and we passed it on to our descendants.  

Lazully: What's coming up for me, as you’re speaking, the sacred obligations to the land, right? This gratitude, this reciprocity, we've come so far from that as a human species. 

Gregg: Yeah.  

Lazully: As you're speaking, like, you know, we came into the world, the Two-Footers, we’re having this opportunity to come into a home that's already built. And look at the things that we're doing to our mother, to our planet. We've come, we've strayed so far away from the original instructions. 

Gregg: Yeah, yeah. And that is part of our trauma is that, you know, that responsibility, that sacred obligation, that sacred commitment was taken from us. And it's just, you know, we're in this period of time in our society, we’re looking at individuals and family. It's that and people are now starting after all these generations, to speak to those traumas that they grow up in as children, right? That they experienced, and we now have to raise it to the next level. Talk about it, as in community, and society in general has gone through trauma. That it's not facing. And we know about children, right? We know about, you know, people that have faced trauma. First turns inward. They blame themselves, and I think that's part of Native peoples’, you know, burden is that we have this obligation. We feel we have to, but we can't, you know? We don't have the tools. We don't have capabilities. We have been so traumatized. If you, you know, study the history, and if they allow you to study the history, wherever you're at, you realize that, you know, anywhere from 80 to 90, to 95% of the overall population of California was eradicated in a little over 100 years. After being here for over ten to fifteen thousand years, and all of a sudden, in just a short couple of generations, most of them are gone. And in some communities, it's 98%. In the case of the Ramaytush, only a handful survived to the earliest part of the 20th century, and according to the research that we've done, our, our tribal chair and executive director, John Cordero has done extensive research and we only can find one lineage through one person that has survived. It's expressed through the full family groups that form the Ramaytush people, today. One person. Other people have similar, where there's just a handful of people that survived for all kinds of reasons. How would people, how would people react when you have a family and you lose, you know, 7 people in a car crash and you're the only one left?  

Lazully: That brings up this idea of survivor’s guilt for me; that's sort of the thing I'm thinking of. But I'm also thinking of something else. You keep talking about, like, you had to discover your culture through these, like, anthropological texts. And I'm thinking, oh, that makes me mad. Like, I have to learn about myself. You said that it went from Salinan to Spanish, to English and it's gotten translated so many times. What's that like for you to have to look to someone else, to learn something about yourself? 

Gregg: It started out very, well, it started out, in, in somewhat as, almost a shock and a surprise because, like, you know, when, when I was raised up, you know, I was raised up with a little bit of knowledge: who I came, who I was, where I came from. We knew our village, our Homeland. So, you had some of this basic knowledge, and I had a view of the landscape that kind of kept me going. But you know, particular knowledge, cultural knowledge, it's very, very scarce and all of a sudden, we find out after being told by outsiders, we internalize that it's gone. Then we find out, well, it's not gone, it's hidden. It's asleep and people especially, I give so much respect to my cousin, Linda Yamani and she may be listening tonight, who started out in the late 80s I believe or early 80s, actually maybe in the late 70s kind of doing through genealogy she came across this other information, this culture information and started putting together, learned how to [non comprehensible]. We've probably learned how to [non comprehensible] in 150 or more years and she proved that not only is it still there, you can revive it and you can bring it back to life and you can bring it back to life in yourself and that was a really inspirational thing. But it took my father's passing in 1990 to shake me out of my complacency and really dive into it and I was just very lucky starting out as a sort of administrator and on the reconstituted Tribal Council of the early 1990s, in my dad's sites elimination. I happen to meet up with culture bearers who spoke the language. Who knew song and ceremony, not from Salinan country but from other communities and again I realized it's there, it's just a matter of finding it and it's been a long journey and then you dive into it and you have to read it in English. But you really develop the skill to unfilter the filtering that happened and it's a complicated thing. It's not just simply sitting down under a tree with a book and thinking it up. It doesn't work quite that simply. It's a very long process that I'm still feel like, I'm a student of in the middle of after almost 30 years, but as possible and with the help of a lot of people within our community and outside of it, I feel some joy that we haven't lost it all and it's still there. 

Lazully: Right. I'm thinking of it as a sort of intern process you had to go to. You said it was reported by your father's death. This sort of grieving that has to happen inside for you to connect to the outside, but it had to happen inside first, right?  

Gregg: Yes, you do.  

Lazully: Yeah, this reading of the text, it's like, you're reading it and you're filtering at that's so much work, that's so much grief, I'm thinking rage. How did you work through all of that? Who supported you in that?  

Gregg: We had a core group of people that did it together. You know, it's a community, it started out 15 thousand years ago as a community and that's the way to go about it. You have to form a community. I mean, my cousin Linda did it mostly by herself and it's amazing to me, but she had people from the outside, she was one of the founders of the company in Basket Weaver Association, so that’s part of it and through that because our the culture bearers that I've met in Indian country and I'm sure Linda would agree, they don't just do baskets. They don't just, you know, tell stories, that's just one aspect of it. But they have to bring it all together, right? As a basket weaver, you learn, you can't just learn the technical aspects in the mechanical aspects of basket weaving. It's a whole cultural process that includes, you know, religious and spiritual values, cultural values, ecological values because you tend the land. You don't go down to Kmart and pay for this material, you cultivate it, and you don't just cultivate it once from just wandering around in the old days at least and find a hidden treasure trunk of plants that you just pluck up and now here's a basket. You find a place, you talk to that place, you ask permission from that place, if it gives permission, you cultivate that place and in a couple of years, perhaps it's ready to give you with permission the things you need to do the cultural things like basket weaving or in a case of like elderberry. This elderberry stick, I used as a clapper stick to do the song you cultivate that elderberry bush, and you get the branch that you want, it's going to form that special elderberry stick. So, it's this building of a relationship with a place not just a culture, but with the place and it's a long process and that's part of the healing. I said earlier, you don't sit out under a tree and just let the spirit walk in and enrich you. That happens but that's not all to it, that's an important part of it and it's part of the healing and the medicine you get that keeps you from that rage, but you have to keep working on it. It's not just the one in done. It's a time process which includes doing ceremonies, finding those ceremonies and redoing those ceremonies on a regular basis and that's how you channel those feelings, good and bad, into their proper place in the world.  

Lazully: Yeah, I appreciate that we're talking on multiple levels. Sort of what does the individual have to do with it? How does that individual have to also do it within the community? So, as you know I'm a therapist working in Community Mental Health, people are always like, what's the community piece of this work? It's like when you leave the clinic the world that you're going out to is a violent, scary, cruel world. So how do you build these communities of reciprocity? People holding each other accountable, loving each other and going through this process. It's not just grief and joy, it's all of these things, right? But you have this fantasy of like the Native elder that sits under the tree and soaks up all the tree's knowledge and you're, like, course not. This is like real life stuff, right? So, all of this thinking about the idea of Native sovereignty, how does all of this cultural erasure displacement? You know, we're talking about historical intergenerational pain. How does all of that tie into Native sovereignty? What would it actually mean to you to be free?  

Gregg: Not necessarily sovereign, because it's different. Well, I'll start out by saying what Dr. Bay taught me early on about it and he said, jokingly as he often did but with a lot of intensity, intent to it, hard-won knowledge, perhaps through experience and he told me one time. Nobody understands sovereignty, especially Indians and it took me a while. I was kind of shocked. I laughed but I also was shocked when he said that, but I think what he was saying, and in our conversation last week, is the biggest hurdle we have as Native people today is English. Because English is a relatively, almost baby talk language, very young, very crude language. And if you talked to a linguist, and I've done a little bit of linguistic work in Salinan, you know, one Salinan word has to be explained in an entire paragraph or page of English to encompass all the concepts. And of course, if you talk to culture bearers and language people in Indian Country, they'll tell you. There's some words that just don't translate, right.  

That's probably true, sovereignty is one of those tricky words, because it has a particular meaning reinforced by the dictionary. If you look it up in a [non comprehensible] dictionary or Merriam-Webster, you'll see a certain meaning to it. Just recently here in the Bay Area, Burlingame they recently had a national conference called the Self-Tribal Self-Governance Conference. It's mostly recognized tribes, and there's hardly any recognized tribes in and there's none in the Bay Area. You have to go a little bit beyond the Bay Area to get into recognized tribes, like Grayton, or [non comprehensible] or some of the other ones, but in the Bay Area itself, the Ohlone tribes, there's no recognized tribes. Here we have this conclave meeting, a week long, you know, conference of recognized tribes across the country and a lot of what they talked about was in the context of what the American legal system, allows them to do, and of self-governance is sort of what they say is sovereignty, which means to in this context, what our rights are, what we are allowed to do, what we have the right to do and basically govern our own lives and community.  

I think what Dr. Babe was trying to tell me that, that's probably the wrong thing. If you're on a cult journey to think in those ways and after a long time with other culture bearers help, I realized that we don't think about it because rights is almost an individual thing. You know, you talk about my rights, right? It focuses on the individual and it may apply to a community and to society, but it's individuals, right? We still talk about if you say like, we have the right to vote and our entire country supposedly has the right to vote, but we're still thinking of an individua going into a voting booth with curtains around them and marking a ballot. It's still focused on the individual and that's not the way the elders taught me. They talked about it a lot more, there's not that many expressions for me, it's about what we, us, our community and sovereignty is not about what I have the right to do, it's about what we have the obligation, commitment and sacred duty to do to give back to our Creator and creation the gift that's given to us. That's really the focus of sovereignty in a culture sense. That's still a lesson I learn almost every day and that changes everything when you think in that way.  

Lazully: That’s super deep. I'm just like, yes, it completely flips this idea on its head. So, to go back to linguistics, It's not about me, how can I get free but how can my people? The way that I'm hearing you talk about your people It's also the land, right? The deer, elderberry, the hawk, the eagle. How can we all be in the right relationship with each other?  

Gregg: So, one aspect and you kind of touched on it there, it comes in steps. It comes in waves, this knowledge comes in layers and in fact, I was talking to Daryl one time and Dr. Bade and I realized, as he was going through the things that he went through and elders before him, that passed along the knowledge and he told me all the time, just like, I don't think this up. So, I'm sharing with you the way it was shared with me. I'm passing it along from the original instructions and you add your own little piece sometimes. But most of it is knowledge that's been passed along, you don't own it. It's a gift that keeps on giving and you use it and then you pass it along after you've cared for it and one of the things I realized, it's like an onion. [non comprehensible] you realize that it's not in nice little neat layers and as you go deeper, you think you get to the core and then there's another layer and sometimes you peel off that layer and sometimes you cry, and sometimes obscure, those are tears of joy and sometimes they're not they're pain, they're suffering, depending on what you're looking at.  

One of the things I learned, as I got deeper into that onion and I have no idea how close to the core am, probably not that close, but it was pretty deep and not only are the animals alive in a way, that's the same as us, our stories tell us. we're no different. Remember the coyote, eagle and others are the first people who brought us into the world. So, they're not lesser than us. They're at least our equal and they're honored elders, in our view, so they have that value. That's, you know, we're no better than them, certainly not higher than them in our traditional value system. Then the Earth itself gave birth to us, right? You know, like I said, the elderberry that made us in our origin story that was put together by coyote and the first people led by eagle danced around it all night, until the spirit came into it and enlivened that and we became humans. But the physical part was the elderberry that grew at the base of our sacred mountain style valley. So, we're made of the land, not just from the land or on the land, but of the land. So that's our mother and we see that it's alive. It's a living thing just like we are.  

And then I realized, you know, after being taught by other elders and one particular one, I like to mention is passed away not too long ago, Frank LaPeña, he helped us bring back one of our first traditional ceremonies about 25 years ago in the mid-90s. He said something that was really powerful and the more I think about it, it just excites me and makes me afraid because it's an incredible responsibility. He said about our traditions, that we had stopped, and we were prevented by law and in oppression from doing for generations, 150-200 years in some cases but he said, for a long time, we didn't do the ceremonies, but they continued, nonetheless. Now you've brought them back and you're giving them form and I'm just like elders do when they teach you this stuff that kind of drives you crazy because you're doing this? Huh? What? You know, that's how it comes out on Instagram. What?  

But what it taught me is that in the modern world of these things like this elderberry branch, this elderberry clapper stick, still think of it as a physical thing, that's a tool. It’s so much more than that, it's alive and the song that I sing with it is also alive. The ceremony is alive, they are actual entities that exist on their own and we join with them. So that's where I learned early on, we don't own ceremonies, we take care of them, we administer and restore them, we protect them, we teach them but not because they’re tools we can pass along like a old rifle or a knife or something, to our kids. They are living beings that we share with the next generation; they pass along because they outlive us hopefully, and they go on to the next generation in enlivening their lives and share themselves in the next generation. That's probably the deepest lesson I've ever learned and I'm still learning it; that these ceremonies, these songs, these stories, these cultural concepts are alive. That's the way I've been taught and when I talk to elders, you know, it's hard to talk about that in English terms because English just is too crude of a language to encompass that concept. 

Lazully: You know, when you're speaking, I'm thinking about a lot of things, when you're talking about how everything is alive, it's like what you're talking about is so contrary to capitalism. Here is an object that I can purchase that I can use for my own benefit. And so, I'm a sort of amateur herbalist, right? And in a lot of herbalist circles it's like I just want to buy all these plants that can make things and it's mine instead of seeing the plant as like a friend that we’re co-creating a relationship with and so I think what's- I'm sitting with what you're saying and I'm feeling very moved by it and I'm like this is so anti everything that I have learned growing up in this country where it's like everything is an object including other people that can be used for our benefits. 

Gregg: Of course, the Native experience of the last 250 years is exactly that here in California and over 500 years on this continent. That we were objects to be used, we were declared to be subhuman. So that eradicated any means or even rights that we had. So, they came in, took our land and did whatever they wanted to us and that's what they've been doing for the last 500 years and by doing that and forging up methodology to do that, right?  

So, we talked about here in coastal California, the mission system which is what impacted all of my lineage the most. It took away our life, both the physical life, but also our cultural life and for Native people, there isn't that much difference. When we talk about genocide, you know, people make those distinctions, physical genocide, cultural genocide and it's like it's genocide to us. If you take away our ceremonies, we're not the same people anymore, right? So, the mission system was designed exactly to do that, which later translated into the residential system that will kill the Indian to save the man. By taking our culture away, you take away the cohesive glue of the community that keep- binds us together as a unit as a community, makes us individual individuals, that can be easily manipulated, like a nail like a wrench, any tool, and then you can use and abuse them wherever you want. That's what we've experienced, you know, the last, you know, how many generations of 250 years of this oppression? Those of us that survived. You don't go through that, those who did survive and their descendants, without the huge effect that we still struggle with today.  

So that's part of this process you alluded to earlier of how do you do this without the rage? And some of us don't. So most have that rage and express that rage on each other on outsiders and the newcomers and the colonizers and on ourselves there's so much self-abuse in terms of drug abuse and other kinds of abuses from us. Mental health is a huge problem in Native country and the only thing that really works because we know people that have gone through the American system of mental health and it doesn't work for us the same way, because we have that spiritual memory still within us. Whether we consciously remember it or not, and your methodologies of modern psychology, won't penetrate that. It won't go there. And so, we have to find another way and lots of elders say there is a way, it's called ceremony. It's called a ritual. It's called going back to that land and not just practicing your culture though you always practice it, but you breathe it in. You live that culture as best as you can. 

Lazully: Well, I was just thinking about you talking about mental health issues and like Native communities and I feel like that was made by design, right, we're going to put these people on a certain area, we're going to deprive them of all of the of the land that they used to grow food. We're going to get the most arid, the most of the land that's already completely destroyed. Then we're going to have liquor stores, they are going to have really bad food. Of course, you're going to create all these situations, right, and we're going to give them a sort of a colonized version of healing, that doesn't make any sense to solve a problem that this other entity created. So, it's an opposition, it's almost like perpetual war that's what's happening in my head. I'm just thinking. It's just like this, not making sense. 

Gregg: It is a psychological war because, we know this nowadays with victims of abuse on the individual level, one of the aspects is, you convince the victim, it's their fault and that's what's happened to our community, you know, that's what happens. Now it is like we talk a lot of times when we talk about the fact that the history is not being taught and I've been working on this aspect, I'm not an educator per say, but I know a lot of educators, we've formed, you know, allyships and coalitions and efforts to correct the curriculum on the many levels and we're just barely scratching the surface still because a lot of people still grew up in a system that said we're extinct so why worry about it. But now when you bring up, no, not we're not extinct. We're standing right in front of you, and we want to tell you our story and our story isn't necessarily a Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, fairy tale with a happy ending and they don't want to hear it and then part of the denial process is well, I didn't do it. Maybe you did it, maybe it's your fault because you're not undoing it because you have all these tools, we live in a modern world, you drive a car, you have computers. How come you're not better, how come you don't get over it? I actually got told that, you need to get over it. You don't get over the fact that hundreds of thousands of your relatives, in California alone were eradicated by violent means with only a handful left, you don't just get over it as people have been to war, the silent generation of my father's people.  

He fought in World War Two. They came back and barely talked about it, but they went through tragedy. My dad was shot out of the air in a plane, they had to parachute in, they lost lives. He saw brutality on the war level, that's a modern version. Well, now imagine it at a higher level, right? Imagine the people right now, we're going we just supposedly are over a pandemic. What a laugh. I just got over Covid myself last week and I know the suffering. I know people who died, who crossed over, and you can't tell those people to get over it. That's just not going to work. But there's no mechanism of our society that really addresses that it's just drops in an ocean of medicine.  

Lazully: I’m just going to take a moment to just breathe in everything that you're saying. It's making me think of Gregg, something that we spoke about last week. So, you have, you know, these well-intentioned people that are like, oh my God, but I'm listening to you, I hear you, what can I do for you and that answers the land back in the chat, right? I want to give you this thing! And I know you have a really interesting critique of that. I think our listeners would love to hear this is sort of like a comment or question is what can I do? I'm out here, I want to sit with the pain. I want to move through it with you. I want to be your ally. I want to be in this fight with you, because everyone wants to know how can I help? So yeah, a little messy but that's sort of the idea.  

Gregg: Right and sort of the story we're going through, both as Native people and as general society are in denial and those that want allyship and want to help. I think the part of the undoing of it is, unfortunately, you do have to start at the individual level because you have to become aware enough and healed enough to at least start the process of building those relationships again, right? That's what I had to do. I mean, I have cousins and friends in the Ohlone community and over the years I've built friendships and personal relationships with people in other communities that are culture bearers, knowledge bearers, and just awesome incredible people that have helped me on my journey. But to get to a point where I could understand what they're telling me. I could listen. I could hear it. It goes through my ear. It's in my brain, I might even remember it, but to understand it to know, it is a different level of consumption if you want to put it that way, that takes longer and to do that you have to have a healthy relationship with that person with other people and with yourself.  

So, it does start at some level working on yourself and that's what I tell people when they say, what can I do? Well, you got to start with yourself and that is something that I learned from Native culture. When we have, let's say a relationship issue, whether it's marriage, family, another tribal person or member in your community, another community. We were taught years ago that one of the things you go through is you stop, and you think, you kind of check yourself, what did I do? Was it something bad or good or indifferent or something that contributed to this? You look in the mirror. That's not something American society wants to do, it avoids. It almost at all costs looking in the mirror, but that's how elders would talk to me, you got to look at your own self first, because control is an illusion, except maybe over you, and even that's kind of iffy, but certainly not over anything else in the universe, you might influence it but you can't control it. You can't make it do something, there has to be some level of compliance and so what even if it's enforced through brutality, there is still compliance and that's the victimization part that you have to work through like you know, what about my ancestors? How come they didn't take a couple bow and arrow, a knife and fight back? Some did. How come we can't fight back now? Well, some of us are in a more humane and more positive way that's going to enhance our thriving in the future.  

But it's still a struggle. It starts with the individual in a way that you heal enough, just enough to build these relationships and as you start growing these relationships, you know just like the basket weavers and other people, taking care of the land, you start cultivating and healing that land and you get to a point where it starts getting the hang of it on its own, you build a relationship within a community and that's what I've done on my Salinan side. I'm still in the process on my Ohlone side, but building a garden, a community of relationships and then you get reinforced because I don't have all the answers, but that person over there might have it. They share it with me. I will share it back. Now it gets amplified. That's the way you build up just like a building, you start at the ground level, and you work your way up and you make sure the foundation is as solid as you possibly can. You make sure the framework is installed as best as you can. You don't start off with, you know, putting furniture and lamps in a bare-bones building. You start off with the mechanics of the framework. In a sense, we have to do what we did at the beginning of the world, when we came in as elderberry sticks and sort of really do that except the knowledge is there and we just have to reawaken to it.  

Lazully: So, I want to add something from a psychological perspective, a Western colonial psychological perspective. So, when I talk to my students, some of my students just started their first weekend in graduate school last week. And I told them, you can take all the classes, get As in every class, read all the texts, but that does not make you a good therapist. [Gregg laughs gently] What makes you a good therapist is when you inside. When you go inside and you clean up shop because in order to really hear someone you have to have space inside of you to listen and hear, right? I think so many of us, like we want to help the Native cause, or we want to help the Palestinian cause or the Black cause there's always causes that we’re so passionate about. The immigrant cause right, the trans cause, but we’re- everything is just so full of stuff. We don't actually have the ability to create space to hear the suffering of the other, because to actually hear what you're saying Greg is very painful. [Gregg: Yes.] Right and I have to open myself to that pain and a lot of people can't because they're dealing with so much of their own shit, right? So, it actually makes me think of what we spoke about last week which I thought was so interesting. We were talking about this sort of way that is all of these institutions, at least in California, we are always talking about land acknowledgements for an opening and has become a sort of rote routine and you had some really interesting things to say about it. 

Gregg: Yeah, and I had to be schooled on it too because I think I didn't, you know, it started about four years ago, maybe a little more and they started rolling in and then of course, when the social justice movement came up, that was one of the first effects. It amplified those requests like 10 times and then the pandemic also was part of it because when everything closed down, everybody was home, there was a pause of about three weeks and then all of a sudden they realized hey, these computers can do stuff. Right? You can get online and do all the stuff remotely. You don't have to travel, you won't have to park, you know paying the parking lots, outrageous in San Francisco. You can just do this online and so things can happen quicker and so we were getting 20 a week at one point right? Amongst all the other emails we get, you know, and for a very short time, I was sort of writing, we had already had a standard framework and I would just customize and send it off and I was contributing to that. Yeah. Like because I was thinking of myself, I need to get this out of my inbox, right?  

Jonathan was the one who said no, you were doing this wrong. First of all, you shouldn’t be doing this work because you don't have time. You know if you have time for that I need you to do other stuff for me, but the other part was they need to do the work and he was pushing back and so one of the first things we did that was really successful, there are probably some of them out in the audience tonight is the Exploratorium. They spent a long time because they were shut down for a while and we have a great relationship and multiple projects with the Exploratorium, and they spent a considerable amount of time during the pandemic shut down internally talking about that and came up with this, they're on their own, this great big land acknowledgement which you can see on your website. And when they finally opened which was, I think July 31st or July 1st of 2021 that last year, they had a grand reopening and they had us come in the morning and we opened it up. We started with a land acknowledgement ceremony, and they had it on a fabric scroll on a rolling cart. I won't tell you that story. It's too long but that's what they have right now. We're working on something more substantial, but you know, it was heartfelt, and it felt true. And they folded it up, since then, with ongoing discussions, collaborations, and relationship building. That's what you need to do with a land acknowledgement, right? Because it does become rote and automatic and kind of like by the numbers and that's going to happen too, but we just focus on the ones that have taken it to heart, put some thought into it.  

I mean I haven't asked Jonathan lately but I know the San Francisco Ballet asked about a land acknowledgement, my first thought was what is the ballet going to do with a land acknowledgement other than saying you know the building we’re dancing in is on Yelamu Ramaytush territory? But we wanted him to go beyond that if you're a service organization what does that mean in terms of what you do for the community? You know, whether you're the Human Rights Commission of the San Francisco government, the Board of Supervisors themselves, both of which have done a land acknowledgement. The Board of Supervisors, you know one of the first and probably the biggest in the country to do it, many commissions, government agencies have done it and now it's gone into many organizations.  

You mentioned one at the beginning of our talk tonight. You know, CIIS has a land acknowledgment, but what does that not just make a statement about where your classroom is, but what does that do within the classroom context? What does it mean to be on Native land? Where people were removed in some, in most cases violent ways. What does that do to the land itself? What does that leave in the land, in the soil itself? How does that then permeate the building that's on that land? Those are things that as a Native person, when we build something like a house, a round house, we think those things, we consecrate the land, and we continue consecrating that land and sanctifying it to make sure it does good things. In a very crude way land acknowledgments should do that, in in some cases do, and need to do it more often. And at least my experience those who continue that relationship it doesn't become rote but percentagewise it's probably you know it’s probably less. Of course, the other part it is the fact that we were getting 20 a week at some point is a burden on us. It's a happy burden, it's one we asked for, but we certainly didn't expect 20 when we didn't even give two or three a year more than five years ago and then you get 20 a week, you know.  

Some of us have other employment to put food on the table. I work in Silly-con Valley, you know, in a tech job, 50 hours a week, and do this as a sideline if you want to put it that way, an extra-curricular, and get all these requests for my time. I would do it 80 hours a week. But you know, I need to put food on the table, support my family. So, there is a logistical administrative burden and a real social burden that goes with it so that it's always a package deal. When you deal with people, you can't just say can I have a land acknowledgement? There's a much bigger universe behind it that goes with it and that needs to be kind of thought about when you approach a Native community and what's the impact? When we first approached that plot of land, we want to cultivate for food, for basket material, whatever it happens to be, we in a positive sense are thinking of the consequences of how do we avoid negative consequences, how do we put positive consequences and outcomes into the work we do with the land. That's what we do with organizations too. You know we don't want just barge in the door. It's like how can we form a relationship that makes what you do better and makes what we do better? That's the way it's supposed to work.  

Lazully: I think this thing you're talking about, this burden, right? People think oh, we're doing a land acknowledgement. Let's reach out to a Native person and ask them but they don't think like, what does this person actually having going on? Like, it's not like Greg is devoted, you know, 100 hours of the day, or whatever, 24 hours to this cause obviously, you're living and breathing it constantly because this your being, right? [Gregg: Yeah.] So, I think it's really important to think about and then something you mentioned last time that I wonder if you might be able to speak to a little bit more, as something that really stuck with me, you said, a land acknowledgement is sort of like a prayer to the space that you're in, but it's also a type of grief, right? It's when you're acknowledging violence, that was done to a people to a place. There's something very intense about that, right? And a lot of times like, at the ballet, land acknowledgment! Okay, now, let's dance, right? It seems like a to use your word crude, like a crude transition, right? 

Gregg: Yeah, yeah. If you believe, well even if you don't believe it, if you believe this, the land is just a physical object, but it has a memory. And of course, from my viewpoint now, I understand it's a living being, and of course, it could be traumatized too as we see with climate change, but it's a living being that could be traumatized in a spiritual way and that doesn't get contained in a tight little ball that doesn't get out. If you put something there, it's going to permeate that thing, you put there whatever it is and any in the case of building a place of learning on the first of October, I'm going to be involved with other people. Lots of other people that did it started an event several years ago and included us. Now it's around Mission Dolores, it’s a community that's going to dance and song and other cultural expressions. But part of it is acknowledge what happened there. There's thousands of people buried in that soil, that's under concrete and asphalt and in the buildings and you have to acknowledge that because it's there. It reveals itself if you don't anyway. So, a land acknowledgment helps you in that process I think it's you acknowledge the positive aspects, hopefully growing out of the land acknowledgement. 

Lazully: So, Greg, we have about four more minutes, so I wanted to just give you the last few minutes to make any sort of closing remarks, maybe there's something- how could you sum up all the things that we talked about today?  

Gregg: One of the things we talked about is, yeah, I mean, the ongoing process of building this relationship, not on the individual level, but between communities. Native communities, and they're all separate autonomous now, even though we call ourselves by names that have been given to us from outsiders, like Ramaytush. That's not a name we called ourselves. That's actually another cultural expression and there was no Oholone before, there was no Ramaytush before, but that's a survival technique we have adopted somewhat from the outside world that allows us to function in the current world. We use that as a tool in a sense contrary to what we just talked about but we are forced to in a sense, but we want to talk about that aspect. You know, Ramaytush is not how we called ourselves, Ramaytush Association, that try is trying to take care of this combined home land that stretches, from the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, all the way down to Monterey, San Mateo County down towards Mountain View area. That's what we consider our Ramaytush Homeland made up of many, many villages that were autonomous in the pre-contact time. But now exist in this survival mode of the Ramaytush Ohlone community and in my opinion, personal opinion, that's how a lot of communities have survived today. They're not existing in their original village complexity and existence anymore, they're in survival mode. The few that are left so to speak.  

When you do something like land back, which is the next step beyond land acknowledgement. How can you give land back? In this context, when really, it doesn't happen like in a lot of cases and that just happened to my awesome relative Karina Gold across the bay, you know, you probably just read something recently, where the city of Oakland gave them land back, right? My understanding of it at a legal level though, is technically they still have to own it. What they have is a management agreement, a legal agreement that gives them cultural easements and management authority over the land. I know at the state level, I was just talking with a state parks person last week that said the state, you know, someone mentioned state in the state especially state parks, has all this land, just laying there, doing nothing and wanting to give it back. Well, they're legally prevented from, they can't just hand it back. They can't turn over the deed, they can do management agreements, like cultural easements. They can form consortiums and coalitions and collaboration projects.  

On our side, though, how can you give back your mother right? You don't own the land. Even though we sometimes use that term, and we say it's our land, but not in the sense that we ever owned it. But in the sense that we say, it's our land is our mother, right? You don't own your mother. Try telling that to your mom, next time you see her like at home mom, I own you. Oh yeah, so I brought you into this world, I'll take you out. That's probably what she’ll say, you know. So, you don't own it. Since we are obligated to it. We have this in an undying, indestructible relationship. If we survived as community, and people from the Holocaust and genocide, I should use the word genocide for California. It still have this bond with the land and this commitment that we recognize, you know. That means to me it's never going to die, and we have to acknowledge that, and society has to acknowledge that. Well, what do you do with that?  

Well, there have been instances and one in particular where we've been given land back and we had to turn it down in the end because it was just, we understood from our association’s intent to do work in our land. It was too big of a burden, and it would overwhelm us. It's like being a doctor in a hospital and you're the only doctor in the middle of a disaster, right? There's no way you can heal everybody. You have to make really hard decisions, and this was a hard decision. Yeah, you want to give it all back. All several million acres back, sure, I'll take it. But what is that going to do to us?  

We've had other instances, you know, I'm thinking of the people who took their sacred island back, but not only did it come with a history of a massacre that happened during a ceremony. But it also came with a modern trauma of pollution that they have to take care of now too. Of course, they're going to take it back and somehow because it's so important to their community. I certainly don't blame them, I would have taken it back also in that instance, but they're huge consequences to it when you give something back, when you share something with the Native community. When you give something to the community, when you ask something of them, it comes with consequences and burdens that you probably should consider along with it. That's always something because we're starting at such a little. Remember, we were almost wiped out and then later on, we were banned from doing our culture. We only got the Religious Freedom Act, which was only signed in 1978, it's not part of the Constitution. It had to be legally given back to us in 1978 and we're still fighting for it. So, this is an ongoing burden process that we're still having to work out as a society and as a Native community. 

Lazully: Greg, thank you so much. I mean, the words that I'm just going to use to wrap up this the conversation is like: complexity, community, ongoing. Yeah, I think I'll leave it at those three. 

Gregg: It's what keeps me up at night and I only get five hours of sleep.  

Lazully: Well Gregg, we are going to end here. [Gregg: Uh-Oh.] Uh-oh! So, I wanted to wish you a good evening.  

Gregg: Thank you so much for this opportunity. Last week, our private conversation, and tonight. I'm sure that my email box is going to start filling and Gregg, what the hell are you doing over there? What did you just say? Hopefully, I won't get phone calls from elders though, that's the one I fear. Hopefully, I didn't step on anything.  

Lazully: It was such a pleasure to be in a conversation with you.  

Gregg: Thank you so much. I appreciate this. Thank you for honoring my people by asking me to share a little bit and hopefully it's something that might enrich your life and maybe send it off in just a slightly different step in another direction.  

Lazully: Thank you. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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