As California faces an uncertain future in the face of climate change and natural disaster, leaders in the Land Back movement are cultivating community-led infrastructures for disaster preparedness. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which focuses on land rematriation in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spearheading their Himmetka initiative, constructing community resiliency centers on their land sites in preparation for natural and human-made disaster. Led by urban indigenous women, the organization is centered in Huchiun, the ancestral homeland of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, now known as the East Bay. Gabrielle Crowe, member of the coalition for a Climate Resilient LA who recently delivered a petition calling for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and City Councils to implement a fire recovery strategy rooted in Indigenous TEK (Tradtional Ecological Knowledge), sits down with members of Sogorea Te’ to talk about the relationship between Land Back, food sovereignty and disaster preparedness.
Gabrielle Crowe:
Miyiiha’ tehoovet tamet netwaanyan’e, Gabrielle Crowe. So hello and good day everyone. I’m the Co-Chair and the Secretary of Environmental Sciences for the Gabrielino-Shoshone Nation. I had the pleasure of visiting your headquarters a couple years ago in September of 2023 when I was in an indigenous land rematriation fellowship. I’m really excited to ask you some more questions on behalf of MOLD Magazine.
Cheyenne Zepeda:
Hi, my name is Cheyenne. I am a tribal member with the The Confederate Villages of Lisjan Nation. I also work as a land steward administrator and Himmetka coordinator for the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. I’ve been working with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust for about five years now.
Cerise Palmanteer:
My name is Cerise. I’m a Yakama and Colville tribal member and I’m a member of the land team with Sogorea Te’ and I’m excited to meet with you.
GC:
To familiarize MOLD’s audience members, maybe you can tell me a little bit about Sogorea Te’’s overarching mission and how your work fits into that ecosystem.
CZ:
I would just like to start off by saying that the land trust is the first woman-led land trust in the nation, and it is an urban, indigenous women-led land trust. What we stand for is justice, not only for native peoples, but also for the land. We work in land rematriation. Stewardship within indigenous hands can help rebuild a lot of the environmental impacts—all the different toxins and trash and general nastiness—that the world has had on the land . Through land rematriation, we place land into indigenous hands because we know how to really use our traditional ecological knowledge to bring that land back to life, to change the way that we are living. That means growing our own food, using natural resources for medicinal properties, definitely being more self-sufficient than having to rely on the heavy metals that are processed through a lot of the foods that we eat . It’s about a general togetherness and building what our future could be for the next seven generations.
GC:
Yeah, I really like that it’s more than just Land Back. It’s giving community power back through this process. Knowing this, what does a community resiliency center look like?
CZ:
I would answer your question with a question of my own, do you mean what we see community resiliency centers looking like now? Or what we imagine our community resiliency centers to look like in the future?
I would probably just start off with what I’ve seen in the community growing up. A center [definitely looks like] a resiliency hub or recreational space. I’ve seen where babies are being able to have their own special growing program—a lot of mommy-and-me programs and daddy-and-me, there’s also ones that I see where teenagers are able to learn about job placement programs. There are also computer access systems where adults are able to find help with enrolling in food programs, medical programs, even going back to school, things like that. So those are just kind of the ones that I’ve seen so far.
Tribally I feel, or even just in the Bay, there’s a bunch of different community members that come from a lot of different tribes, mainly because a lot of people have moved over here over the years, and then also the Relocation Act. We are embedded with a lot of different tribal needs here in the East Bay.
In terms of what we imagine the future of a community resiliency center, I would say a lot of it is food sovereignty, so maybe just a place where people can come pick up fresh food and have that support system. It is also a place where people can come and pick up emergency kits if needed, which I think everyone should have their own special emergency kit. This extends to the medicinal. Some tribes use tobacco with their medicine, or sage or sweetgrass. Ours uses Angelica root for its medicinal property.
Something else that should be included is someplace for people to gather, someplace for them to share a meal together. Community meals are very empowering for the community. So maybe someplace where people can just come and join in together for that. Resiliency also means what we do in emergency situations such as dealing with violence, domestic or other. I’m also thinking of what this resiliency looks like in the face of police brutality, which a lot of our community deals with, also with homelessness, someplace for them to come and either find resources or find like they are cared for in a sense.
GC:
That’s beautiful. I think that it’s really looking at what programs are already out there, and what can be tailored to the special needs of the tribal community. Our tribe is also surrounded by many, many different nations from around the United States that have been relocated to Los Angeles, too. So I totally understand the need for not only community space, but also for the medicine, and just being able to be connected back. So I appreciate that. What is your organization’s philosophy around disaster and disaster preparedness?
CZ:
Yeah, so we came up with this idea of finding a place where the community could come together if there was a man-made disaster or a natural disaster, and we named it the Himmetka project. Himmetka is a Chochenyo word, and Chochenyo is a language that I speak or I’m learning actually right now. In this language Himmetka means “In one place, together”. And so we use that as a sense of this is where we will come together and help each other out. We are surrounding each other with love and we’re surrounding each other with anything that you could possibly need in an emergency situation. So we definitely talk about the environmental impacts and what we would need in those situations. I think COVID, really the shutdown of COVID, put things into perspective of what we would need and what possibly could be a place of sanctuary for folks.
GC:
I feel like in many ways, the tribal communities are still recovering from COVID. We’re still coming out of that space, but we also have to prepare ourselves because we don’t know whether or not something like that will happen again. Why was community resiliency an important initiative for the organization to pursue?
CZ:
A lot of our land sites are located in underserved communities, and we definitely saw a need for these [community resiliency] services. We wanted to bridge that gap. One of our largest Himmetka sites is actually in East Oakland at the very end of a dead-end street, where nobody’s coming for help, basically. So we’ve had emergency situations where there’s a fire breaking out and the firetrucks or police can’t get to us or it takes an hour for them to get to us so that we ourselves have to find a way to put it out. And there’s been a lot of gun violence and a lot of domestic violence that have also happened around that area. And we’ve had to kind of take care of our community and make sure that it’s safe because when we call or if somebody else calls law enforcement, it takes them another hour or two to show up for emergency situations. So it’s kind of gotten to the point where, if nobody’s going to come and help or save us, we have to do that for ourselves.
GC:
Dealing with situations like that could be such a point of frustration—the fact that you feel like the help doesn’t come when needed. It also empowers and strengthens your communities to really look out for each other more. I know that what you’re doing too is not just benefiting the tribal community, but it’s also benefiting the greater community in the different rematriated land sites that you have. So that’s really amazing. With that, my next question is, how is land back a strategy for disaster preparedness?
CZ:
That’s a good one because we live in a territory where there are not a lot of lands that are available— everything is very, very expensive in the East Bay. Land Back is a tool that we are using for emergency preparedness as a way to grow food, a way to grow our medicines, a way to have a hub there in case somebody needs it, to come and pray if they need to. We’ll open the spaces for people, we’ve opened the spaces up for ceremonies, for people to come and join and be with us together. I feel like Land Back is a bigger movement. It’s bigger than all of us actually, because land and having the ancestral lands being a part of our traditional ways and part of our future, it makes us feel more secure in leaving it for the future generations to know that these lands and this way of life, of growing medicine, of being able to pick your own food, is needed now more than ever.
There are a lot of things happening in our society that are preventing us from reconnecting with our Mother Earth. And I feel like Land Back and this movement that we’re doing now it’s so important because—I’m sorry, I’m getting my words choked up because it’s so important to me—to think about the way that we use our land and how sacred it is to us and how it can really hold us. I feel like a lot of our ways have also been kind of muddled and pushed back to the side because we’re just trying to survive. We’re just trying to survive day to day.
GC:
I think even bringing it back to what we’ve been talking about, how these larger cities in California have become home to so many different relocated tribes—there’s also a lot of tribes that are in California that are not federally recognized. So for places like that, having land back is such an incredible gift because it not only puts the power and strength back into our communities, but it also helps the non-indigenous surrounding communities, to be able to learn about the practices you’re enacting through your land trust. But also for us to even have a community gathering space, a big thing is for people to feel prepared before something happens. So being able to make sure that they already know that there’s a space available to come to.
For us, when the fires happened down in Southern California there was a lot of misinformation. There was community, lots of volunteers, lots of people helping, but also people didn’t know exactly where to turn to. The systems that are in place that should normally be there weren’t really in place for people to have that information in real time. Your organization is amazing because the people in the surrounding communities already know that this is what your space has to offer on a regular basis and even more so on an emergency basis. So I think that’s really beautiful, and I think that having land back is the power to be able to really share with your community those different principles that are so ingrained in us.
CZ:
Right. Thank you.
GC:
And so with that, the last question I have is our food systems are majorly impacted by climate disaster. And so how does food sovereignty factor into your initiative?
CP:
I think food sovereignty plays a big role, especially playing off of what Cheyenne was just talking about: land back is tied really deeply to food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is indigenous people having the right and responsibility to define that relationship to our food systems and how we view food as medicine and how we’re able to maintain that relationship through our work on the land and that relationship being so deeply tied to those cultural values and traditional teachings and being able to rebuild over time and to reclaim those ancestral teachings and to have them be a foundation that we’re using to build for future generations. So yeah, it feels like a huge privilege and a huge responsibility to be engaging in that kind of work every day on the land.
GC:
And I think that Cheyenne also already touched on this too, that having food sovereignty is also a protection for our communities when inflation happens or our current political climate. Sometimes some people don’t know where the next meal is coming from. So for you to be able to provide that buffer in uncertain times is very phenomenal.
CP:
Yeah, for sure. I think just the other day I was on the land and I was getting lost in my own thoughts of what am I going to eat today? What am I going to feed my kid when I get home? Because it’s getting towards the end of the month and the pickings in the fridge were a little slim, and then we just looked around the land and there was food growing that we could take home and eat, and that was a direct result of the work that we’re doing every day.
