We need to listen to the sound of history.
“when the strongest winds blow, the skulls
will rattle wildly, bone against metal,
a crack and chatter of bone against metal,
the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.”
(Jim Harrison, 2019)[1]
A land acknowledgement is especially important for the University of California. It’s an important first step in coming to terms with a tragic past, the sound of metal striking bone.
It should be an important ritual at the beginning of every new class and every campus event, in the same way that our syllabus routinely informs students about wellness and mental health resources. It should become as familiar as “stumbling stones” in Germany are an everyday reminder of the Nazi holocaust.
We have a responsibility to express this acknowledgement because California and its institutions in particular do such a poor job of doing so.
Most people on campus have no idea about the racist foundations of the University, that it was born in bloodshed, genocide, and war in the 1860s and 1870s.
Most people on campus do not know that we are home to one of the largest, unsanctified, and desecrated cemeteries of ancestors in the country.
In addition to land grabs, there are many actions, omissions, and misanthropic ideas that the University needs to acknowledge:
How the University’s initial development relied on investments derived from ownership of 150,000 acres that had been stolen from tribes in the Central Valley and given to the state of California via the federal 1862 Morrill Act. In 1889, for example, more than 30 percent of the University’s operating expenses were derived from Morrill Act income.[2] This needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How, in 1873, when the University opened its campus on land that is now known as Berkeley, it moved here because of the importance of Strawberry Canyon and Strawberry Creek that once was an important flowing body of fresh water that ran from the Berkeley hills to the Bay. Its link to the Sacramento River and its proximity to high ground and a deep-water estuary below made it ideal for long-term habitation. Here, there were abundant deer, elk, bear, and mountain lions in the hills, and salmon and trout were available in the creek. The waterway nourished tens of Ohlone settlements that flourished here for maybe as long as five thousand years. Here on campus, beginning in 1879, the University reported finding Native artifacts. It cannot plead ignorance. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How from the late 19th century through the 1960s, the University primarily through its Anthropology department and museum, but with the active support and participation of many Berkeley faculty and the University administration, excavated hundreds of Native village sites and plundered at least 10,000 graves and ancestors, and hundreds of thousands of cultural artifacts throughout the state without permission, without consent, without dignity, thus adding immense sorrow to the desperate lives of the survivors of genocide. And how it proudly showed off its plunder of body parts to Life magazine in 1948. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How leading academics at Berkeley played an important role in developing racist theories of human societies: reinforcing the prejudice that California Indians were an inferior racial stock that had “disappeared” naturally; promoting the myth that California Indians had failed to resist and had actively collaborated in their own demise; and contributing to public amnesia about the genocide that decimated Native communities in the second half of the 19th century. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How today, thirty years after passage of NAGPRA, the University has only repatriated ten percent of 10,000 Native remains and has stonewalled Tribes seeking repatriation of their ancestors. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How today, the University continues to minimize the living presence of Ohlone peoples and fails to engage in consultation with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
How the University has buried its sorrowful past in meticulous forgetting that contributes to a hostile racial environment that persists today. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.
The University’s acknowledgment of its responsibility for the true sound of history, this metal striking bone, would be an important first step.
Then, and only then, will we be able to move on to the next step: how to do justice to the truth.
* Talk given on October 12, 2020, Indigenous Peoples Day, at forum at Berkeley, organized by Native American Law Students Association. My thanks to NASLA for inviting me to participate.
[1] Jim Harrison, “The Brand New Statue of Liberty,” in Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems, edited by Joseph Bednarik, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019, 118. Thanks to Peter Nabokov for bringing this poem to my attention.
[2] Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News 52, 4, April 2020, 32-45, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/print_view.