The East Bay 'Land Tax' That Supports an Indigenous Women-Led Trust

This article includes a correction.

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For the past two decades, since the Bay Street Mall was first built on ancestral burial ground in Emeryville, Corrina Gould and fellow Indigenous activists and community members have gathered there to pray the day after Thanksgiving — Black Friday.

This sacred site is the Emeryville Shellmound: one of hundreds of shellmounds around the Bay Area.

“Shellmounds are created by my ancestors as ceremonial places and as burial sites,” Gould told KQED in 2019.

UC Berkeley archeologist Nels Nelson estimates that in 1909 there were 425 such shellmounds around the Bay Area — and almost certainly many more that had been worn away by water, time and development.

Gould is the tribal spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone, which is one of the many indigenous groups in the Bay Area. She is also the co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust: an urban, woman-led land trust working to “rematriate” land by returning Indigenous land like the Emeryville Shellmound to Indigenous people.

Hundreds of people show up every year at the Black Friday action in Emeryville “for a peaceful prayer gathering and educating the public about the history of that land and the importance of it,” said Ariel Luckey, who works alongside Gould at the Land Trust. “It’s been a really beautiful and powerful gathering.”

This year, there will not be an official ceremony at the Emeryville Shellmound due to safety considerations during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Gould has been working for many years to educate young and old alike, in an effort to “come in right relationship” through Sogorea Te’, and provide a concrete way for non-Indigenous allies to support this work.

The organization says the land tax directly supports rematriation, establishing a cemetery to reinter stolen Ohlone ancestral remains and building spaces for current and future generations of Indigenous people.

“Part of it is a way to acknowledge the history and colonization of this land,” Luckey said. “It’s an opportunity to participate in the transformation and healing of history by supporting the work that Sogorea Te’ is doing now.”

While activists have been elevating conversations around Indigenous reparations and the “land back” movement for years, the issue has taken on a new urgency after Standing Rock — and the recent Black Lives Matter uprising this summer, which further amplified the national conversation on reparations and racial justice.

Acknowledging the past in a way that is “brutally honest,” as Luckey said, in regards to genocide and the colonization, slavery and the “cold-blooded murder that folks committed against Native people” is also an opportunity to highlight the work that Native people are leading in the community.

“Land acknowledgments are becoming popular, more Native leaders are becoming more visible,” Luckey affirms. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust owned land outright, however they are currently stewarding the land.