The Bay Area is Ohlone Land, Berkeley is on Ohlone Land
This workshop is taking place online, as well as at the University of California, Berkeley which is on Ohlone land.
As organizers of this workshop, we are providing this territorial acknowledgement page with the hope of unsettling and disrupting our settler comfort and complacency and bringing participant attention to the historical and ongoing violences of colonialism. As âpihtawikosisân writes:
“If we think of territorial acknowledgments as sites of potential disruption, they can be transformative acts that to some extent undo Indigenous erasure. I believe this is true as long as these acknowledgments discomfit both those speaking and hearing the words. The fact of Indigenous presence should force non-Indigenous peoples to confront their own place on these lands.”
In this spirit we want to inform participants in the workshop, who do not already know, that some of us are not guests on this land, or visitors, but invaders, and settlers. We are invaders and settlers on this land and also on the other lands, and waters, crossed by the infrastructure of internet connections that make this virtual conference possible.
We encourage every participant and viewer to consider their responsibilities to the people and land, both here and elsewhere. And to take action to stand in solidarity with Native, Indigenous, and First Nations people, and their sovereignty, politics, land claims, landscapes, cultural heritage, and lives. And to actively disrupt institutions, practices, and all structures of oppression that reproduce ongoing colonial relations of violence and power.
Please read the following for more information:
Decolonization is not a metaphor.
The Ohlone People Were Forced Out of San Francisco. Now They Want Part of Their Land Back.
Ohlone Tribe Protests Proposed West Berkeley Housing Development
Living On Ohlone Land — What We Learned From Indigenous Women Leaders
