Land Acknowledgement

We included as much of a land acknowledgement as we felt we could fit in the 3-minute project launch video and will close this request for funding on Experiment.com—a site for community engagement—with an acknowledgement properly modelled after Dr. Cutcha Rising Baldy's "What Good is a Land Acknowledgement?" This longer format includes extended learning and an opportunity for action. Our project includes six trees and three research hubs spread throughout California and we will acknowledge each location.

This month is Native American Heritage Month, today is Thanksgiving Day, and tomorrow is Native American Heritage Day. Meanwhile, any day is the right day to do the work of a land acknowledgement. This acknowledgement only represents individuals—not the University of California, its labs, or the Ancient Forest Society as institutions.

We acknowledge that we, the researchers, and the trees of this study live on lands of Indigenous peoples. We acknowledge the resilience of the trees, lands, and peoples. 

In the table below, we list where we and the trees live, along with pertinent information from the Indigenous peoples. We searched each location on native-land.ca, a website that provides maps of territories and links to the websites of tribal governments and auxiliary organizations that the territories contain.  The usage of words varies so here we specify that “people” indicates a group united by language, geography, families, or culture, usually for long periods of time; “territory” means the geography; and “tribe” refers to the government organization. Indigenous societies were complex and interwoven before European invasion and they have been taking new forms during the coalescing of settler colonial societies like the United States. In this complexity, peoples sometimes include multiple tribes, tribes multiple peoples, and territories mixtures of all. In compiling the table, we tried to err on the side of comprehensive to avoid erasing histories. Communities who had lived in ecosystems for millennia were sometimes displaced far and wide and we worked to include them. In the last column of the table, we post calls to action that anyone can join. We found these on the websites. With or without an action listed in that column, Indigenous peoples participate in local and global exchanges. Most of the websites elsewhere on the table promote campgrounds, casinos, and restaurants that support the local economy. They also offer opportunities for learning such as cultural centers and events open to the public. SESE means Sequoia sempervirens and SEGI Sequoiadendron giganteum.

To respect Indigenous sovereignty and survivance, we share some of the results of our search for a name of a nearby place and the species of tree in the original language. Including these names provides evidence to undermine the false tale that California was or is empty of Indigenous peoples: quite to the contrary of that tale, Indigenous peoples have a name for nearly every place and plant (Risling Baldy). We omitted this section from the table because names aren't always easy to find and although Risling-Baldy encourages sharing Indigenous place names, to protect the privacy of the trees we tried to pick places that don't reveal the trees' exact locations. We ultimately left out most placenames for these reasons. One of the Coast redwoods lives near a place called Chuelue in Yurok and Bald Hills by settlers. Coast Redwood, Sequoia smepervirens, is k'vsh-chu in Tolowa Dee-ni’, keehl in Yurok, and ká-sil in Northern Pomo. Many traditional homes are made of S. sempervirens planks. We encountered a harder time with Sequoiadendron giganteum and haven't yet found mentions of direct uses. Centuries of destruction carried out by Spanish colonizers that left Northern California relatively undisturbed might explain the paucity of publicly accessible dictionaries in the southern half of California: Spanish missions extended to just north of San Francisco Bay. We did find that, according to a Wikipedia article with difficult-to-track citation, members of the Tule River Tribe call Giant Redwoods toos-pung-ish and hea-mi-withic. Wašišiw Ɂítdeʔ name several tree species other than S. giganteum in a publicly accessible dictionary and make houses out of cedar bark. Waší∙šiw ɁitdéɁ means “the homelands of the Washoe People.” Even without easy public access to the name, it is clear from both ecological and social evidence that tribes purposefully tend S. giganteum as well as S. sempervirens:

My husband’s family talked about burning all the time. . . . They burned in areas where the giant sequoias grew. The trees were sacred. Burning helped the giant sequoia have a longer lasting life. It would also help the small sequoias. If there is an overgrowth of trees the sequoias don’t have root space. Fires burn off a lot of duff so it helps the trees to breathe. (Clara Charlie, Chukchansi/Choynumni, pers. comm. 1991, quoted in Anderson 2005 p. 388)

Anderson notes harvests of native strawberries under Giant Redwoods (p. 274).

California is one of the most botanically and socially diverse places in the world and home to myriad living relationships. California Indigenous peoples maintain important scientific, spiritual, and stewardship connections with their lands. Tribes, whether federally recognized or not, provide leadership in care for both species of Redwood, giving guidance to organizations like the University of California, California State University, and the U.S. Forest Service. The permits for this study complied with the nation-to-nation agreements that were in effect at the time; meanwhile, it is often unclear how civilian researchers can or should get more involved to respect indigenous sovereignty. An extended land acknowledgement on a community-supported scientific website seems appropriate. We urge you to take action to support better indigenous, settler, and ecological relationships in this context and beyond: you can follow the links provided in the table, reference native-land.ca for nearly anywhere in the world, and learn to craft a meaningful land acknowledgement for where you work.

Print reference: Anderson, Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. University of California Press, 2005.