HERstory is Made
Updated: Mar 20
A 5,700 year old sacred burial ground is finally returned.
By tiny aka @povertyskola, daughter of Dee, mama of Tiburcio
Patriarchy Builds Parking Lots
Patriarchy builds Shopping Malls & everything Matriarchy Does NOT
Patriarchy drops bombs on Palestine
And builds Prisons instead of skools on Turtle Island
Patrarchy kills mamas while they hold their babies
Patrarhcy shoots children and when we fight back shoots us and calls us Crazy
Patrarchy is violent
But Matrarchy is a sacred, healing mama trident
Matriarchy weaves palabra and quilts, prayer smoke and warming gifts,
Matriarchy lifts Up love into sky spirit - calling down Grandmother Moon and Mama Ocean
Matriarchy begins with the womb -offerring life always even in the face of violent brutal strife
Matriarchy protects water, and ancestors and air
Matriarchy threads liberation into our hair
No colonizers you can’t define our herstories. We R RIGHT HERE
We will continue to come with un-ending prayer,
You can’t stop the mamas, the grandmommas, the babies, the uncles and the fathers
The liberation mamas and the LandBack Suns and daughters
MamaEarth Is NOT for SALE - in perpetuity
Steam rises from the broken concrete. Krapitalism buzzes in the distance. A train roars it’s approach. But here in a parking lot on 4th street in West Berkeley.. it is so quiet.Only the murmur of a wind…. And then if you listen very carefully. You hear it. A 5,700 hundred year old whisper. It swirls above the asphalt and the painted lines of metal and rubber and plastic. Sacred Shellmounds buried deep below click together in unison. If u listen carefully you hear the ancestors. They whisper together until it becomes a song #LandBack….LandBack…
“Over the last eight years thousands of people came together and said YES at the same time to the Lisjan ancestors. We collectively prayed, sang, danced and created art together. As the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation joined in a six year long legal battle alongside the City of Berkeley to protect a Shellmound and village site over 5800 years old, Ally’s and accomplices continued to show up and we have together set the Shellmound Free!!!” Said Tribal chair of the confederated villages of Lisjan Corrina Gould
This Houseless, half colonizer daughter of a disabled indigenous Houseless mama and all of our youth, adults and elders at Homefulness, POOR Magazine and Deecolonize Academy have had the blessing of standing with Corrina and her beautiful family and all the warriors who have fought prayed, called, showed up and marched for this precious moment of resistance to be Mamafested.
It is important to recognize that Corrina and all of us have been fighting for something that should have already happened. We have been praying, fighting, marching for something that is repair and return. Return and repair because something has been deeply broken. A centuries old sacred burial ground, that should have been revered and protected, loved and honored by all people. Not just the descendents of the ancestors there. Just like cemeteries and mortuaries are.
Instead it was a parking lot for a seafood restaurant. This is not an accident. This was not a mistake or an error in planning. This is violent colonization in a trajectory of other violent colonizaiton that deemed indigenous bodies inhuman and therefore not deserving of life, land or respect, muchless burial grounds, sacred spaces or lands of origin.
“I am so thrilled that i get to see this in my lifetime, we have all fought and worked for so long and this is truly beautiful,” said Ruth Orta, an 89 year old elder Ohlone mama and grandmomma and daughter of a survivor of the Colonial boarding schools.
Imagine the cemetery where your family is buried being turned into a parking lot.
“This was long past due, to correct this historic harm to Ohone peoples of the Bay….Let this be an example for other cities, other towns, and states across the country - to address the historic injustices that have been perpetrated against Native American People on our ancestral lands…” said Melissa K. Nelson, president of the Board of Sogorea Te Land Trust.
As Melissa spoke, the ancestors rose up, quietly, steadfastly, standing alongside the Youth and elder Ohlone/Lisjan family of warrior mamas and aunty’s and daughters and suns and uncles that lead the Sogorea Te Land Trust and the allies and accomplices that circled around them. They were right there. Heads held high into the healing smoke that rose into the morning.
“It was important for us to contribute and support Sogorea Te Land trust at the same scale that is commiserate with the hurt and harm that they have experienced for centuries It was also important for us to pay Shummi land tax as our organization and our staff is located in the bay and It’s not up to us to decide how the resources were used, but rather to be in solidarity with Sogorea Te Land Trust, trusting that they will use the funds in the way that is most impactful.” said Nwamaka, CEO of Kataly Foundation whose foundation radically redistributed 20 million dollars, which in addition to the 1. 7 million of the City of Berkeley made this HERstorical distribution possible.
This powerFULL moment of indigenous land return is the intersection of many things. It’s about the colonial violence of having to buy back your ancestors resting place, your sacred spaces where our ancestors are buried, which all humans deserve. It is about the violence of krapitalist greed and real-Esnakking and the lie of private property causing the casual (yet intentional) genocide of erasure, removal and desecration of not only a burial ground but a sacred site that is thousands of Gregorian years old. And finally the settler violence of greed, hoarding and accumulation that would put an insane, almost unimaginable “price” on Mama Earth and dane to charge the peoples whose lands of origins this land belongs to, whose lands we are all standing, sitting, dreaming, thinking, buying and selling billions of blood-stained colonial dollars just to get it back.
But this is our ancient to 21st Century reality. The unrecognized arrogance of settler colonial violence “charging” evicting, erasing, incarcerating and criminalizing lands and the people of those lands. Creating, perpetrating more extraction and removal of indigenous relatives and Mama Earth resources who are here now, so that you have settler towns like so-called Bellingham, Washington, Phoenix Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota and of course, Palestine, to name a few where the majority of houseless peoples are 1st Nations people. Homeless on their own lands.
This moment is also about the resistance moves of Kataly foundation which clearly overstands, like we poor and houseless peoples teach at PeopleSkool, that their immense wealth does not “belong” to them, but rather is also stolen, “made” on the broken backs of Black, Brown, Indigenous and 1st Nations peoples and lands. That this kraptialist system is built for extraction and the only solution is radical or what im now calling logical redistribution of these stolen resources and stolen land, rooted in love and repair, back into the thousands of places and spaces like this small part of Lisjan Land, in so-called West Berkeley, so we can all heal.
“We owe this victory to the ancestors and every single person who stood beside us in this fight, we did it!” said Deja Gould, mama, organizer/leader with Sogorea Te Land Trust and daughter of Corrina Gould.
This moment is about all of the settlers who stood, marched, prayed, screamed alongside Ohlone/Lisjan relatives. Knowing clearly that 1st peoples are not gone. That colonizaiton didnt work. That the human spirit is strong and together we can heal from this colonial hell with our voices, our humility and our actions.
And for all the CONfused settlers reading this, LandBack does not mean re-making the same settler violence that was perpetrated on 1st peoples of scarcity and removal and incarceration and death. This moment is a testament to the deep structures of ancestors who never believed mama earth was for sale. Who never saw her as a commodity to be extracted from and desecrated. Who never believed or would allow the violence of homelessness, who lived the values of what us houseless, pan-indigenous peoples at POOR Magazine call Homefulness. Who were never rooted in the violence of scarcity but rather the solutions of sharing and interdependence. Like indigenous peoples all over the world practice.. If one relative has a job or food to eat, everyone eats. If one person has water, everyone drinks.if one family has a roof, like we do at Homefulness, as many people as possible are housed for free. For life.
“We made Herstory today." said Cheyanne Zepeda, mama and auntie, Ohlone/Lisjan leader at Sogorea Te Land Trust and daughter of Corrina Gould.
"I'm so happy today, because this land is free!" Said Anniyah, Ohlone 9 year old youth povertySkola student from DeeColonize Academy and granddaughter of Corrina Gould
So please settlers as I often say, this is not a time to become scared or scarce. This is a calling in, not a calling out, we have all been lied to in krapitalism and we are all dying from it. As Melissa said, let this be an example. Let us all learn more and live into more radical return, logical redistribution and most important, love for Mama Earth and all of us, so we can all be ok. So we can all heal. Together.
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