Groundworks

- [Narrator] Major funding for Groundworks was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Additional funding was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

(singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - What does Land Back to Indigenous Peoples truly mean?

What does it mean to restore a right relationship of Indigenous land stewardship, management and acknowledging the Indigenous pedagogies of place-based knowledge?

(singing in language continues) - The Groundworks project was really about sharing their stories.

What are the things that are exciting to them to share?

And I think that's a different perspective than a lot of people approach Native peoples.

(music) - My biggest thing is when we get these things back from museums or however we acquire them, it's one thing to have them on a display, but it's another thing to actually put these back into use.

(singing in language) - Everyone talks about, you know, we must rise, we must rise.

We have risen.

You know, it's not we must.

We have and now what are we gonna do about it?

(music) (music continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) - [Kanyon] My grandmother and my mother believe that when song, ceremony and dance stop so does this earth.

(birds chirping) (birds chirping continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - We are in Indian Canyon.

Mutsun-Ohlone territory.

This is the homeland of my family and my ancestors.

Being daughter of tribal chairwoman Ann-Marie Sayers of the Indian Canyon Mutsun Band of Costanoan Ohlone people, it's a beautiful time.

My mother has always said now is the best time as a California Native to be alive since contact.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Indian Canyon is the only federally recognized Indian Country between Sonoma and Santa Barbara along central coastal California.

That being said, we are not tribally recognized as a group.

However, we have Indian Country as a land base, which is very unique in the Bay Area.

We are in the south South Bay so still considered parts of Silicon Valley.

And we, between San Francisco and Monterey, we call this area Ohlone territory and in some documents, Costanoan.

Now both these words are misnomers and I also identify as an Ohlone individual.

It is due to colonization that those terms exist and Indian Canyon is a safe haven and land base where my mother opened up a trust allotment for all Indigenous people in need of land for ceremony.

That being said, this was a trust allotment to my great-great-grandfather and it is just a small little area.

The trust allotment is about 150 acres and my mother had to fight to reattain this land and it is now my responsibility and my mother and myself are caretakers of this land.

(singing in language) This place is home and I recognize my privilege being raised on the land of my ancestors.

Indian Canyon served as a safe haven for Indigenous Peoples even during times of the mission period.

In the 1700 and 1800s, my ancestors, my elders, who did not like the constraints of the missions fled and Cienega Valley is known as swamp lands.

In my upbringing it wasn't that swampy because water was dwindling, but it's known as swamp lands and you have to be very intimate with the environment and to traverse that land and to get away and so many relatives came back to the Canyon for protection.

And that's why it got called Indian Canyon, Indian Gulch where the Indians are.

One time a rattlesnake, a pair, came right into the middle of the road, had their breeding dance right in front of my mom and they were paired and she's like I'll just let them be.

And so she's like, so anytime we pass by here, Ladder Canyon Road, I always like to point out, yep, they just cross, hang out.

But yeah, Ladder Canyon is where a waterfall is.

And I just took a hike up and I found where the trust land touches the deed land that I have to maintain so.

- Is it marked physically or you just know?

- Physically.

No guess what?

Our neighbor came up, and I wanted to learn about the trust land and the other areas so I physically went hiking, found the markers, found the markers and I was on the tipity top of this mountain side, found the markers so Native American Indian Country is all right here.

- The original GPS.

- Oh yeah.

(singing in language) - What does Land Back to Indigenous Peoples truly mean?

What does it mean to a restore right relationship of Indigenous land stewardship, management and acknowledging the Indigenous pedagogies of place-based knowledge?

Land Back is so much more than handing over a deed.

It means restoring and acknowledging and, well, voicing layers of accountability of how it is we got here and how we could correct and amend ways of going forward.

When I think about Land Back, the biggest part is honoring our culture, cultural resources, stewarding the land, harvesting and being in right relationship to our environment.

Our relatives need us.

Oak trees need human interaction because think about Sudden Oak Death.

Sudden Oak Death, we have scientists, scientists and Western science constantly trying to find the issue to then create the antidote.

And it's not a pill or a spray or an injection to fix a problem.

It's an ecological environmental issue.

We need to steward the land like we always traditionally have.

And the oak is our relative.

The Native Peoples need to be in charge of the decisions that are transpiring on their homelands.

They should be the ones who say what should or shouldn't happen to these waters, to these lands because so many people who have not been brought up with accountable, responsible methodologies are devastating the area, polluting the area, prioritizing capitalism and they're negligent.

And there are devastating effects that are happening from that.

(crowd murmurs) As I've been brought up in the Bay Area, by acknowledging Indigenous protocol, I hold a space that's in between.

I am acknowledged as being an Ohlone individual and people invite me to spaces to offer my voice to sing and to collaborate with many artistic projects and to offer my perspective.

And I also recognize that I'm a visitor in other territories and I attempt to walk with that understanding of I could speak for my family, I can speak for my community and I also need to respect and be humble in other territories and respect the ancestors of whose land I'm on.

I have a unique lived experience as an Indigenous California Native Two-Spirit community member in the Bay Area.

And the work that I do gives me opportunity to connect to so many beings so I'm blessed to collaborate with organizations like Dancing Earth.

I'm blessed to connect with Global Climate Action Summit and Bioneers and all these wonderful names that have given me a chance to witness different communities focusing on protecting the environment, language revitalization, artistic collaboration and integral relationship building, community building, culture sharing.

And this work inspires me.

We are talking about fire mimicry as well as prescribed burns and fire safety and ways that we can go about it in an, well just an integral fashion, both accountable to recognizing we are on Native land and there are Indigenous teachings around land management with fire and of course there are what I'll call post-colonial measures of safety standards and community standards that are good to know.

Some of our community members are curbing and shifting how they talk about referencing Indigenous Peoples in the past tense like Native Peoples are here today who are doing this.

And when we speak about historically, some of these areas have not been tended in a traditional fashion since contact and so there isn't a way of erasing like oh, the Natives don't do this anymore.

Or the Natives haven't done this.

It's like things were in the way that hindered Indigenous Peoples from doing this.

When Indigenous Peoples come together, we continue honoring truth in history.

And I recognize that in my lived experience growing up in the Bay, from the occupation of Alcatraz where it was Indians of All Tribes and Indigenous Peoples who were relocated and forced away from their land, some willingly came and traveled so we have a mixed community of many nations and then California Indigenous Peoples have always been here.

And when we come together, it is important that we celebrate our indigeneity.

And now as we come into the 21st century, we should be celebrating our diversity.

So this is the work that I do.

So I love to be an in between.

I love to collaborate.

I love to work with artistic groups.

I always celebrate some of the work that I've done with Dancing Earth.

And so my work with Groundworks has been inspiring to me because Groundworks being a project that came together by acknowledging a few California Indigenous community members just motivated to honor truth in history to celebrate their culture, to voice accountability to who we are in community, but also to fight for Land Back, to fight for cultural revitalization, to restore and remember our sacred obligation.

(music) (music continues) (music continues) - We're here at Alcatraz, San Francisco Bay Area.

San Francisco, that side.

Oakland on that side.

Yelamu or Muwekma or Mutsun and Yelamu Ramaytush on that side and Lisjan on that side, Ohlone territories here.

We're with our brother Eloy here who's been a longtime advocate here of the sunrise gathering here at Alcatraz and one of the original folks on the island to reclaim it.

- I came out here and they said, "You had a bunch of guys out here."

I go "What's happening?"

And he says, "We're gonna paint the tower."

And I said, "Who's gonna paint the tower?'

And the guy says, "Oh, we got this company from the other side of the bay, Bohemian company to paint the tower."

And I said And he looked at me and he said, "What?"

And I said it again.

I told him, "You can't be painting our stuff.

"What's wrong with you, man?"

So anyway they gave me like 10 days.

I told him, I said, "No, you can't.

That's our stuff and you can't be putting that back."

I told him, "Your mission statement when you guys took over the park is supposed to stay the way it was in its last inception and we were the last ones here so you can't mess with our stuff."

But they kept calling this all graffiti, Every time they talked about it, it was always graffiti and that's not graffiti, man.

It's all political statements so now they call political statements.

After 10 years, it's taken them that long to make them call it that.

Say excuses or that blame game (music) - (speaking in language) We're over here in Makamo Mahilikawna territory, Kashia territory here in Northern California Sonoma County and it's one hour north of the Bay Area.

And yeah, it's Pomo territory.

Our lands, we call them in our language, Makamo Mahilikawna Chuuch or Ashokawna Chuuch is the East River here and then coming down this way, the other river, Eesi Bidapte is the Bidapte is the river known in English as the Russian River.

I'm representing Dry Creek Band of Pomo which is based in Geyserville.

Makamo Mahilikawna and then Kashia Stewarts Point or Kashia Rancheria and then Point Arena-Manchester Ha Bida, So yeah welcome to the territory.

Breathe - On this side near the lakes is the Miwuk territory over here on this side.

And then on this side is the Onatsatis territory over here.

So this is kind of a general marker for Indigenous Peoples in this region.

We're all kind of like okay, this is our territory based around this mountain marker.

When we get up here, we can kinda see, you know, our orientation to where our mountains are at and where our head waters for our water comes from.

And then the reservation system started.

That was the big thing was removal, removal of the peoples and the Miwuks and the Wailakies and the Yukis and the Pomo that were forcibly removed and marched to Round Valley which is on the other side of the hill there on that side, kind of the California Native version of Trail of Tears for the California Native Peoples, peoples that were marched over there on that side.

A lot of them, when they got there, they went up to the top of the hill and they could see the top of the hill and they could see like oh, yeah, over there.

There goes Makamo Mahilikawna.

Let's walk home, you know?

And so that's how they were able to navigate back home 'cause they were taken on this Trail of Tears through the winter, harsh winter, blindfolded and tied up.

But a lot of them remembered their way home from looking at the mountains from this kind of viewpoint.

But yeah, this is sacred place for a lot of the tribes here.

Ya whi oh.

- So we're here at The NEST Community Arts Center here in Forestville, California.

Our community art center here was established in 2012.

I purchased this lot with money I got from inheritance when my grandmother passed away and have been able to kinda steer this in the direction of a community project.

Started as a Native youth magazine, SNAG Magazine, that kind of evolved into an arts and culture hub and magazine for the Bay Area.

And, you know, was music, compilation CD and full color mag, you know, featuring Native art throughout the years.

And the NEST Community Arts Center is kind of the physical space for that work to be carried forward.

We decided to put the first structure here, it's a two-story cob visual arts studio, that we built with our community and I led the projects from the ground up so it was my first natural building project.

But I think that's the model is creating things that we're gonna leave behind that are beautiful and that are natural and that are made with local materials and that are made with love.

But then they'll also go back to the earth and that's kind of like the traditional teachings from our people is that, you know, our traditional homes, like, yeah, they're built out of bark.

Yeah, they're built out of straw.

Yeah, they're built out of, some of them are earth lodges, some of them are round houses, some of them.

But eventually those structures are all natural.

They go back to the earth and they don't leave a trace usually.

They maybe find some arrowheads or some other things.

They're like oh, some people used to live here.

Yeah, a lot of people view that as oh, that civilization was weak.

Like they didn't leave their mark on humanity.

They didn't, But we view it as like yeah, we didn't leave our mark on the earth.

That's the point, you know.

The long-term vision is to, you know, have these spaces where artists can come create and build and, you know, create this art, this art that's gonna, you know, change the world.

Our long-term vision for our community and for the tribes in this area is that they have a model that they can see an Indigenous-led sustainably built model.

I quickly realized as a young person as I was leaving high school, I realized that a lot of the art and all the music stuff was happening in the Bay, like in San Francisco and Oakland and so I was like, you know, made a decision as a young person that I'm getting out and I'm going to the Bay Area right away.

Dreams are amplified beyond the power of our purpose That's a revolution When our lives are led by women of color And we restore the matriarchy Our past intertwined with our mother's breath And led by our mother's steps That is a solution Our vision guided by the power of the stars By the sky watching and blessing us But we can change if you want to It's all one struggle The modern seats to father Free tomorrow, free today, free the child Now while I can see the smile and the teeth is pride When I speak the crowds I'm gonna spread the feeling And the kid the check points to settle the building Break it down the part-time walls of oppression But the machine just repeat As far as what I would like to create, document, be a part of, anything that deals with expression and preservation of arts and culture and all medium forms, kind of what we're building here at The NEST.

We're here inside of the visual arts studio right now and this is our first level of the visual arts studio.

There'll be a loft upstairs.

Our vision for this space is for it to be a residential community.

Residents come in and out and create new work and then move on and, you know, maybe display their work here or have their work displayed in local galleries or just have exhibits and teach young people here.

And then we're planning on creating a place for music as well, music production and, or audio production, whatever that looks like for film for, for performance.

And then also a place for dance, traditional dance and healing arts as well.

And through dance and through performance, I think Dancing Earth is really trying to highlight that and highlight those stories and that's also, I feel like a really important part of why I wanna do more work with projects like this is to be able to utilize the different forms of expression to create and document those stories.

We have a lot of things to teach I think from an ecological perspective, from a traditional knowledge perspective.

We have a lot of history in this area and the languages are really similar within and people are all kind of married in within those cultures and so we have a lot of relatives from different parts of those areas.

And so it's kinda like a web of this interconnectivity of family and through that web, you know, there's life.

Groundworks project was really about California Native Peoples sharing their stories from the perspective of them, like what are the things that they wanna share, what are the things that are exciting to them to share?

And I think that's a different perspective than a lot of people approach Native Peoples.

I get a lot of times people approach me and they'll say, you know, we have 15 minutes to do this thing.

We want you to just come and acknowledge the land.

You got 15 minutes and I'm like why don't you ask me what I wanna do?

Like you're inviting me to your space.

Why don't you ask me what I wanna do in your space and if I wanna be a part of it first and foremost, you know, and I think that that's what Groundworks was, was it was literally, you know, Dancing Earth asking the tribes what do you wanna do, what stories do you wanna tell.

(music) (music continues) (music continues) - And my biggest thing is when we get these things back from museums or however we acquire them, it's one thing to have them on a display, but it's another thing to actually put these back into use.

And I think the ancestors that see us doing this and, you know, they live I think in these things.

You know, the woman that used this for years and years and years to put so much time into these things, her spirit is still in these, you know, and I think when we use them and reawaken that, it will bless us in ways that we haven't yet been able to experience.

My name is Bernadette Smith and I'm from the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians.

I'm from California.

We're a little tribe located in Mendocino County which is in Northern California.

We're about a mile away off the coast and shore of California.

The territory is surrounded with redwood trees and tanoak trees.

We are known for our acorn there which is from the tanoak tree.

The location geographically traditional name for the river that divides my reservation is called the P'da Hau River.

Bokeya is the region of my people so our small reservation are the Bokeya people.

I believe that's people from the ocean.

So we're two small separate reservations.

We're divided by the river, but conjunctively, we are still one people.

There are a few reservations that are close by.

One is Kashia.

That's about I'd say 30 miles south from us.

And then we have to go inland to find other tribes closer to a city called Ukiah.

But regionally we are all one people known as the Pomo People.

- Pomos and Miwuk People, we gonna go ahead and do what we call Toto ko' oh In my language it means a Feather Dance.

It's a very sacred dance for our people.

This is only one dance that we allow to come into public and share with you.

- Oh.

- [All] Oh.

(singing and chanting) (singing and chanting continues) - I'm a traditional dancer.

I've been born and raised in our culture.

My father, his name is David Smith.

He was a cultural leader as far as revitalizing the dances and keeping them, the traditions alive for all these years.

Back then there was maybe I'd say maybe three or four different Pomo dance groups.

Today you'll see maybe about 15 to 20 different dance groups throughout Pomo country which is beautiful.

You know, we all share songs and dances and everybody's wanting to learn more, you know, bringing back older ways and having access to archives through Berkeley and songs and, you know, people feeling safe enough now to pass down through oral tradition songs that maybe they are remembering in their older age and not afraid to share anymore.

So that's a beautiful thing.

My dad was asked to speak on a panel about contemporary Indigenous dance and what his thoughts were on how maybe that could be brought into university without appropriating anybody's culture specifically.

I was able to attend with him and I seen one girl tell a story about basket weaving from her grandmother taught her, you know, a story she was sharing through dance, a narrative about her experience with gathering materials and how she found perfect materials and it was something that I had never seen before.

That was so beautiful.

And I felt like I would be able to, you know, telling our story about not just processing the acorn, but about our struggle and fight with the forestry companies and seeing the forest destruction and decline of our trees.

So I started my journey working with acorn.

About six years ago, I read a small article about a process that was happening in my local area about a redwood company that was coming in and destroying and killing off tanoaks which is traditionally a spiritual tree, a tree that our people hold very sacred because of what it gives us which is the acorn, a food that sustained my people for thousands of years.

Yeah, I started looking into it and I found out about all these different things.

Sudden Oak Death was one thing.

That's a disease that's plaguing California oaks, but specifically the tanoak tree.

It is estimated that 100% of the tanoak tree will be extinct over a number of years because there's no cure for this disease.

We also have these redwood companies that are coming in, forestry companies, not just redwood tree companies, that are coming in and purposely killing the trees by injecting them with herbicides that not only destroy the living plants around it, but that tree itself will die from the inside out.

We have them coming in and doing this at massive amounts, massive rates.

They're also tracking in Sudden Oak Death from other projects, other forestry projects.

We didn't have much access to tanoak trees.

My reservation is very small.

We're located not very far from the ocean so the elevation in comparison to where the trees thrive is very low so we don't have any, maybe one or two that grow on our reservation and that's within two parts of a reservation.

So when I did find out and actually visit the land that these forestry companies were doing these horrendous practices on, I did come across some of the biggest tanoak trees that I had ever seen in my life.

I personally hadn't known that the tanoak trees grow to be that big because wherever we had them around, they were not growing.

They were very, very young.

We wanted to kind of gain interest from my community on how we can step in and maybe have a voice in protecting the tanoak tree.

There have been measures like Measure V which was an ordinance trying to put in for them to stop using this process of frilling which is them killing trees.

I'd say three years since that measure has been approved, yet the forestry companies continue to use this practice.

You know, if they continue to do it, there's no consequences.

Other tribes don't use tanoak as much as, you know, the coastal Pomo do and we're just two very small tribes.

We're very limited to our resources throughout our small reservation.

And as many of you know, they put reservations on rural areas where, you know, we are very limited on what we can do.

Like for example, our river, the P'da Hau River that runs right through both our reservations.

We're not allowed to pull a net there, we're not allowed to fish for salmon off our own river.

It's against the law.

So when it comes to the tanoak tree, we did find a area that had plenty of it on there.

It's up top of mountain called Eureka Hill Road.

While traveling up there, we noticed that we came across an old shutdown air base that had been closed for after research being done for over 40 years.

The gates were wide open, surrounded by tanoak trees, surrounded by acorns.

So many acorns it looked like they were tiling the floor and it was beautiful.

And we went and gathered there just to later find out that they closed the gates down and locked us out.

We asked why, you know, what was the problem?

They said it was a active air base, you know, after it hadn't been active for many years, anybody in the whole town could tell you that it hadn't been.

Except when we decided to come up there, it became an issue.

The acorn festival was an idea that isn't mine.

It's a traditional celebration that's been happening since, you know, I guess the first acorn fell.

It's just something that our tribe hadn't done in a long time.

So my father, I believe he's 71 years old, he hadn't seen an acorn festival happen in Point Arena since ever and we decided to go ahead with permission from elders to go ahead and try to revive that ceremony.

That was just an effort to gain access to the land of the air base in Point Arena, an effort to not only gain access to the land, but kinda restore that relationship to the land there from our people 'cause we had been blocked off for so many years.

The one my dad said that he used to come gather off is right over there.

So we were able to gain access to the air base, the Air Force after much communication.

And it was a big process trying to get them to allow us back onto the property.

We were able to have the acorn festival.

So with that we were able to kinda bring everybody back to the land, getting people interested in collecting the acorns, letting them see the destruction and you'd see all these beautiful trees and acorns all surrounding this Air Force base.

Teaching myself and the children from my tribe how to gather the acorns, you know, was a very slow process, myself not knowing or having a teacher to sit me down and show me.

We kinda had to learn the process on our own watching, you know, old Berkeley videos of how to and how our elders did it which unfortunately we didn't have as much access to areas as they did.

So just having access to even these cultural foods, traditional foods was very hard to get and it was discouraging at times, but you know, we were able to develop those relationships with people so that we now can have full access to some areas which is a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately those trees are dying.

Unfortunately every year that we go back, the trees have become more sick.

The wood has split.

Their bark has split.

There's red ooze coming out from inside of them because they are infected with Sudden Oak Death.

These are trees that I could just imagine that my great-great-great-grandparents gathered from.

Last year I was gifted two mortars and pestles from somebody whose property we were gathering on that they found right under a tree as somebody was excavating dirt.

So, you know, this kinda just proves to me what we already knew.

This was a place where my people stayed, where we gathered, where we processed this acorn and it's an honor to be there every year gathering what we can until that day comes when they may not produce anymore.

So it's very important to my people to establish a place that we can put these seeds back in the ground and grow trees from those grandmother trees, you know, before it's too late, before they don't produce anymore.

So with that being said, the air base that hasn't been used in 40 years, that has plenty of space and is a perfect place and for the acorn to grow, for the tanoak trees to thrive, we are pursuing that property in hopes that we can develop a nursery and a place to plant these acorn trees back into the ground and make a grove that our people and children can gather from in a protected area for years to come, for generations to come so we don't have to live in fear that this disease might take our trees out, that these forestry companies might take our trees out.

This has been a very important part of my life.

Being able to share this with my kids and teach my own daughter the importance of this traditional food and not just the traditional food with its nutritional value and things like that, but the whole process that it surrounds itself around, the time it takes, the patience.

There's many virtues that come out from having just doing this process of acorn gathering and processing to anything from the time it takes to find the tree, to bend down and get those acorns, you know, to crack them, to dry them, to churn them, to skin them, to leach it, to eat it, all these things, this process takes a lot of time.

It's not something we can just do in a day, you know, and that process alone has really helped me to ground myself and kinda be one back with the earth when I didn't really know that that was an option for me anymore.

I thought that was just something that was from the past, that maybe my ancestors were only able to have that connection.

Being able to work with other California Indigenous people in a creative work that I thought of, you know, was amazing with working with Rulan and having her bring in other Indigenous dancers in and having them perform and tell the story of the tanoak was such an amazing thing to see.

And my whole family came out and my whole family was there to support and finally see what I had been working on.

It was so, I was so honored.

People were talking about it.

I had elders come up to me afterwards and that were there and tell me that it was beautiful.

It brought tears to their eyes, you know, hearing that story and they couldn't believe how, you know, how we made something like that come to life.

And I was very, very honored to be there and be part of that special day.

(singing in language) - I said before that I'm extinct or our people are considered extinct and what that means is a great deal.

It crosses everything.

Every time you try to take a step towards your culture, it means that it's a struggle and there's nobody to embrace you or deny you when you get there.

(speaking in language) L. Frank, (speaking in language) That's how I identify myself.

I'm only able to say that recently so I'm so happy.

I identify as Tongva, but I'm actually from the village of Kuukaamonga.

Therefore I go by the, we use the name Kuukaamovet, meaning person from Kuukaamonga which is now Rancho Kuukaamonga and our sacred mountain is Yoat just above us, Mount Baldy.

And we're close to the Pine people, which explains my unusual love for pine nuts, my voracious need for pine nuts in the shell.

Photos when I was nine, but before that it was just pen and rulers and I like geometric things.

But at just before I was nine, my stepfather, he had like a Leica with a Zeiss lens, you know, and it was a range finder, but he just started letting me shoot with it.

And after that I never put it down.

And then they gave me for Christmas, a pink Hawkeye Brownie camera.

Yeah, I was a little sad.

A, it was pink.

B, it wasn't a Leica, you know, it was a Brownie Hawkeye.

And then I realized that it didn't matter, that as long as I took the photo, it didn't matter what the camera was.

I still am a Nikon snob now, but yeah, it didn't matter.

And so I just started shooting.

God, I shot everything.

Silver work too.

I like painting.

I started out water coloring because of Immaculate Heart 'cause coyote often is the reason stars are where they are.

And in Hollywood, you know, there's always maps to the stars homes.

But you see to the left there, there's a little SOLO cup and some Cheetos and little barf in the street, you know, it's real.

This is the Milky Way 100,000 years ago.

This is what it looks like now.

In 100,000 years, it'll look like this.

These are the stars to the Milky Way, the spirits.

This is the figure that ties us to the sky when we pass on.

And that one I painted.

It's called "Sacred Indian Doings."

It's because somebody crept into Chaw'se one year and they snuck a microphone down the smoke hole to record everything and they got caught.

So I painted that like come on, let's go.

Let's go do things in the sacred place that these people hold sacred.

I identify as Native, California Native even before I knew I was California Native.

It just fit.

I ruined a whole play in the fourth grade because I realized then I was California Native.

So fourth grade you study when the Spaniards came, which was as I was saying earlier, Sebastien Manriquez came with Portola on the expedition.

So here I am in Palos Verdes.

John Rodriguez and I are the only brown kids in the whole school.

So where are they done in the don and the doa of the house And there's a whole thing in all the classes and my grandmother, the seamstress, makes me a many tiered dress which was awful 'cause I hate dresses anyway and I was supposed to sit and fan myself as the little peons come up and give me gifts.

Well, we had practiced many times, many times and dress rehearsal, but somehow in front of everybody, this struck me, the little peons came up, but they were all my little friends with blonde hair and blue eyes.

But wearing those black wigs and the white clothes and they came up with gifts and they were groveling and suddenly genetic memory pops in and I stopped my fan and I thought oh, something is going on here.

And I stopped and I hear the teacher whisper my line.

I didn't forget my line.

I remembered something else.

You know and I ruined, I refused to go on because it was so enormous, that so enormous of a moment that I realized who I was, you know, and then it took me till I was 17, 18, almost 20 something before I realized and found exactly my tribe where I fit and that these are my homelands.

Where I played, I played all by myself, but where I played and I laid down, there were over 600 bodies there.

I didn't know it at the time.

600 of my people and there were 400 of them were women and those are the people that talked to me.

That's how I learned things and even before I was born, but those are the people that for a long time would talk to me right below Loyola Marymount where the tennis courts are now.

Yeah.

A big L. It was only Loyola at the time.

And I thought it's where the Catholic Lord lived whom I never accepted either so yeah.

But so I knew who I was forever.

Forever.

The land is everything to me.

I don't live there.

I always feel the tourist here.

I've lived here over 20 years.

But now when I see it with the tennis courts on it and all the condominiums, my heart just breaks.

I can take only so much, but that was the last straw.

That was the dirt with the bones of the people and they talk to me and talked about me, ignored me.

You know, I'm just very attached to place.

Yeah.

(cheering) - Is that us?

Is that for us?

- [Announcer] Tongva.

California.

Tongva.

(water splashing) - Keep cheering, you guys.

Take us a while.

(laughing) Oh my God, I can't be all crying.

Cheeyaakeway, they just yelled our name.

- [Announcer] Tongva.

Tongva.

- This is Ii'tar.

Yes, it is the one that was last time.

This is Chayote.

She's stripped down of color and we've just re-caulked her outside so now we have to do that on the inside.

But winter came and our tule pith rotted so we have to find more tule pith and tule pith is what gets shoved into the seams and then this goes into that.

This is the second canoe in 200 and something years.

The teeny one we're gonna make, her name is One Otter.

She'll be the third.

This, Noxi will be the fourth.

And then for the grant, we're gonna be building a fifth and a fifth in several hundred years, almost 300 now.

When you look at it, you can see that that they're planks.

But what it is is it's sewn, glued and steamed wood in order to make canoe.

So it takes a little bit of finesse and a lot of math.

Like I made the first large cooking pot by someone in my tribe in like 200 years and I dreamt that.

I never dream my art.

I never made a stone bowl before either, but I dreamt it.

I saw it and so it's not just me participating.

It's ancestors, you know, and I'm from L.A., you know, what do you mean it's ancestors?

So part of me struggles with the other part, you know, and the Indian part always wins, but it's like what are you talking about?

Well this can't be explained.

Well I want it explained.

Well no, you don't have to know everything.

Well, you know, so sometimes that's the battle is just, you know, it's very real.

Especially the Natives around here 'cause the redwoods around here, they talk about information coming from creation, creator through the sky, down through the tallest trees and disseminating down through the earth, you know.

So we used to get redwood trees that would come down the current.

Then we'd make them into planks.

So there's all kinds of ancestral information being thrown around.

And the more we learn language, the more we can hear this other stuff.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

- [Speaker] Yes.

(laughing) - So this right here is an N combo, a linguistic NG.

So with the Spanish that's Tongva and they say to practice that you say sing, sing, sing, ing, ing, ing to get that nasal, but when you put it in context, Tongva, Tongva, Tongva.

That's a, that's that nasal, that throws people.

I was just in a museum where in L.A.

I did not realize they had wooden planks from a ti'at from the before time from pre-contamination.

I just photographed that.

I'll show you the photos.

And it's just a little piece of plank.

And it validated a lot of my guesses about how you make this canoe because there's ideas that people have, but there's not a way to make these.

There's always an urgency and I think the urgency is so I can have tribe, but I went out there and I realized well all of us feel that way.

We all want tribe.

We all want our language.

We all want our homes.

We all want this.

And that made things easier, but it made the urgency much more.

It's just huge.

Just huge because I understand.

You don't have to be from California to understand how much your language and your culture means, how it feeds everything about you.

(music) Every pebble a planet - For that one, about everything's the planet and universe.

I had thrown some sand across the porch and then I was laying down.

My dog came and I had written, she laid in some chalk work that I had just laid down there and I was looking at her and then the sunlight hit them and they looked, the little teeny, teeny pebbles and it looked like the solar systems.

And it's really about the L.A. River, but that's what I was thinking about at the time.

But it's about our place in the L.A. River.

(singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - In the sixties, it was Alcatraz that motivated a whole group of Natives and then Standing Rock came along and again, that same bitter, winter cold magic, but that same magic happened and pushed people again.

And that's where we're at and I think we ought to celebrate it.

When Alcatraz was happening, I was in high school and me and my Indian friends got caught several times trying to run away to get to Alcatraz.

So my connection there was, as I had mentioned earlier, there's Alcatraz and then there's Standing Rock, that Alcatraz deeply affected my life and the direction of my life.

And I had never known people like us to stand up and to, you know, to demand things, you know, to demand what is ours.

And that was the huge catalyst for me, that moment.

Everyone talks about, you know, we must rise, we must rise.

We have risen.

You know, it's not, we must.

We have.

And now what are we gonna do about it?

(singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - [All] Oh.

- [Announcer] Good morning, this is Morning Star Gali [Crowd Member] Oh.

- [Announcer] I want to say thank you and welcome to everyone for making it onto the boat this morning on behalf of the International Indian Treaty Council as we head over to the Sacred Rock.

(singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - To keep in us sync with the roots of our hair and long reach, everything you need is here and millenniums of certainty living in your mirror Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do Hey, hey Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) (no audio) (music) (music continues) (singing in language) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) (singing in language continues) - [Narrator] Major funding for Groundworks was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Additional funding was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

(upbeat music)