Good afternoon.
A few hundred steps from here lies the meeting of two life-sustaining rivers. We call them the American and the Sacramento, and they have both been tamed by mighty dams and miles of concrete levees, and dirtied by development.
They meet, but don’t merge, at a place we know now as Discovery Park, where colonizers “discovered” an abundant and carefully managed Delta watershed where you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon and shiny golden pebbles littered the shores. Those pebbles were worth much less than acorns or salmon, which you could actually eat, to the people who lived here then. But the newcomers valued them highly. Above lives, above the animals and the trees, above the very land itself, they valued those shiny golden pebbles.
The names of our places honor the unending greed of the San Francisco railroad barons like Stanford and Crocker. Our local lore glorifies the scrappy mountain men seeking their fortunes, the miners and the 49ers, the builders of a new society where once many peoples enjoyed the abundance of our rich soil and sparkling waters. Even our signature bridge pays its due with its hue to the glory of the golden pebbles, which you won’t find beneath it today.
The names of the Chinese laborers who built the railroads, the intrepid pioneer women, the Black families who rode the waves of the Great Migration, landing first in the Bay Area and later Sacramento, the Vietnamese boat people and the Afghan refugees are largely lost to memory. But their descendants weave together a rich multi hued tapestry of life here today.
This land has known many peoples.
For thousands of years before all this movement, one group of people lived, traded and thrived throughout the mountain areas we call Grass Valley, Nevada City, but also as far South as Elk Grove and East past the banks of these two rivers, walking lightly upon the Earth, grinding and rinsing bitter acorns along these rivers, sharing the bounty of salmon with majestic golden condors, and weaving intricately beautiful watertight baskets from pine needles.
They called themselves Nisenan (NEE-se-nahn).
The meaning is similar to the names many other historical human groups have themselves, generally meaning Ourselves or Us, ‘from among us, of our side’.
I grew up here in Sacramento, and in high school in the 90s we read the story of Ishi: the Last Wild Indian. We learned: there were Native Americans here in Northern California, but Ishi was the last one. He came down from the mountains, sick and hungry after all his people died, and the White Man put him on display in a museum, and then he died. Tragic.
End of story.
Except it wasn’t.
In July 2020, I attended a town hall where they offered a land acknowledgment and asked attendees to visit http://nativelands.ca and enter the name of the Indigenous people who stewarded and loved the land where they currently live. I was shocked to find the Nisenan, and flabbergasted to find that not only did they still exist, they are actively fighting to regain their status as a Federally protected tribe.
Today I begin our gathering by acknowledging the systematic, government sanctioned, ongoing erasure of the culture, language, history, and memory of the Nisenan people and many other Indigenous peoples worldwide.
A land acknowledgment is a start, and an important one. But more than simply acknowledging this beautiful, fertile land and remembering the people who stewarded it before us, I begin by inviting you to join me in supporting them with a monthly gift to their Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity program, which you’ll hear about later. For now, let’s watch UNamerican justice, and talk with the film director Rod Malloy and the Nisenan tribal spokesperson, Shelly Covert.
This film explores the intersection of land and the movement of people: Indigenous people who barely survived an onslaught of newcomers; Immigrants seeking a better life; Refugees fleeing disasters. People with differing relationships to the land that sustains us all.
And so I repeat, Good afternoon. Buenos Dias. And in the almost-extinct language of the Nisenan, Homa Kani. Welcome to UNamerican justice.