By Mohit Mookim, Alejandra Cruz, and Tia Taruc-Myers

In 2024, the Law Center emerged with a new and expanded team of land justice legal workers. As four new staff attorneys were onboarded in mid-2023 — all of whom are passionate about land return work — our team created space to collectively and individually reflect on our land work through a six-month discussion series titled “Becoming the Land.” In that space, and in our regular “Land Eagles” meetings (where we surface strategic and high-level questions about our land work), one theme consistently emerged: the relationship between law and decolonization.

The Law Center strives towards decolonization. We use law to support movements for decolonization, moving with deep respect. But we also aspire to decolonize law itself. How do you decolonize law? Isn't "law" as we know it inextricably linked with colonization? Good questions...

The Law Center’s Land Work

We support our Indigenous partners to reunite with their ancestral lands and practice land return and rematriation. Our land justice “clients” are more like partners, collaborators, or co-conspirators, and we are honored to be in relationship with them. We try to come correct to the work by engaging in political study with resources produced by our partners or by inspiring movement leaders.

What does legal support for rematriation look like exactly? As Indigenous-led groups move with intention down a spiritual path, with guidance from the ancestors, we are there listening, learning, and helping to remove obstacles. Many of these obstacles involve sorting through contract language, filling out paperwork, contacting the relevant government agencies, the list goes on. Our role is often to get the paperwork out of the way: Choosing an entity recognized by the colonial legal system that can “properly” hold land, assisting with land “purchase” (which is again a colonial fiction), and assisting with ongoing land stewardship legal needs like property tax exemption. We have come to learn how disruptive the legal system can be to groups practicing land rematriation.

One of our first endeavors to that end was to help Shelterwood, a BIPOC and LGBTQ-led forest community and education center, apply for status as a tax-exempt non-profit. We supported them in developing their governance structure and compliant employment practices, acquiring and paying ransom on 990 acres of land, and securing property tax exemption for that sacred land. Moreover, we have worked for over four years to develop trust, deep understanding, and a fine-tuned working relationship with representatives from the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. We helped them conceptualize and form an entity structure for Sawalmem — a land holding entity that is a California unincorporated association with church status through the IRS.  We supported them in reuniting with 1,100 plus acres of their ancestral land, and we helped them navigate everything from zoning and property tax to developing business practices for their Indigenous art enterprise.

We have been meeting with partners like Shelterwood, the Winnemem Wintu, and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust regularly for the past four years. We usually bring along a group of lawyers, legal workers, and interns to support whatever is alive for our clients. We do our very best to meet their needs, and when we need more expertise in various subject areas including intellectual property, employment law, trusts and estates, we call on our righteous and brilliant network of volunteer attorneys! (Shout out and THANK YOU!)

Most of our long term partners and clients are in California, but we offer consultations for groups across the so-called United States to support the broader land return movement. Our Resilient Communities Legal Cafe is our long-standing, donation-based legal advice clinic, open to Radical Real Estate projects of all stripes. And more recently, we have held a series of Sacred Legal Circles in which we’ve spoken with 33 Black and Indigenous land projects around the country seeking to return to a sacred relationship with land.

Within this work, we want to take a moment to recognize our limitations. We have attorneys and legal workers on staff that identify as mestiza or Chicanx, and we honor their Indigenous ancestors from Turtle Island. We also have team members who are Black. We don’t, however, have a critical mass of Black and Indigenous staff members. It has been a steep learning curve for many of us to bring culturally affirming practices to our work. And we are learning and bringing deep humility to that practice every day. Our work with Black-led land projects, fighting for food justice and land reparations, are central to our work, and we look forward to building this area of our practice and sharing more with you about what we’ve accomplished.

One barrier to representation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in the practice of law is the institutions of legal (mis)education and accompanying debt that serve as gatekeepers to those who would excel in this field of practice. In that vein, we support the democratization of legal knowledge with the Radical Real Estate Law School — making free, cartoon-filled legal resources about decommodifying land and training housing justice activists and land stewards to become licensed attorneys.

The Values that Anchor Our Work

In the eyes of the state, having a team of lawyers in your corner can serve to legitimize and lend credibility to your work. Unfortunately, a client asserting their rights to their local conservative lawmakers doesn’t have the same impact as the same letter signed by a (group of) California licensed attorney(s). We often feel torn tipping the balance in this way, because there ain’t no power like the power of the people and some of us wonder if we’re doing a disservice to movement building by circumventing people power in this way. We would never want to disempower our clients and their communities by speaking for them, so a lot of our work is walking that delicate balance between speaking for our clients and having their backs in a consistent, reliable, and respectful way.

RESONANCE

We value resonance, respect, and reciprocity. We honor and uplift the role of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women. Change is made at all the intersections. We honor the role of queer, trans, and two spirit leadership. And we know that without leadership from people from poor and working class communities, our work would lack the direction that is needed to truly disrupt the status quo. If our visions and our values are in alignment, we can flow like water to nourish ourselves and our communities.

RESPECT

In being systematically devalued, dominated, and abused, many of us feel a deep connection to the land. We understand on a somatic level that our dignity and peace is inextricably linked to the land and all beings. We are here to lift each other up, no longer fawning to those with more power to gain favor, but asserting our needs and our right to be treated with respect. If you grew up receiving social services, or if your close friends and family still rely on these services, you know the difference between a service provider that has respect and honors your humanity and someone who either sees you as a means to feed their egoic needs or sees you as less than human. The remedy is spiritual and systemic.

RECIPROCITY

As attorneys whose work is overvalued by capitalist society, we don’t use that to assert “power-over.” Instead, we engage in deep reciprocity. Choosing to dedicate time and energy to providing high quality, creative legal support to clients who would otherwise not be able to engage a skilled and culturally affirming legal team is key. Choosing to engage from a place of deep reciprocity, honoring what we receive from our clients, is a daily choice, and we cannot take for granted that simply because we hold this value ideologically that we are always going to practice it.

How We Do the Work

The Law Center has a 30 hour work week, because we recognize that a shorter work week has many positive impacts on the economy, planet, and human well-being. We don’t overvalue our work as attorneys, and we believe that when people have time to pursue activities outside of their paid work, they are more likely to invest time in activities such as cooking, caring for family and community members, taking public transportation, and reconnecting with the land. Moreover, we believe that radical activism, organizing, and mutual aid work in the community should be done on Law Center hours — countering the dynamic of nonprofit professionals getting so consumed by project work plans and funder deliverables that they’re unable to show up for poor people’s emergent organizing and community support efforts. 

Decentering our 9-to-5 work as attorneys is a practice that can move us towards decolonization by creating space for us to be in deeper reciprocity with our community. One of us, Tia, takes advantage of SELC’s 30 hour work week policy by organizing with the Community Democracy Project (CDP), a volunteer-run campaign working to put the entire city budget in the hands of Oakland residents. In a time of growing police states, genocidal empires, climate disasters, and political leaders who deprioritize the safety and wellbeing of our families and neighbors, CDP refuses to ask permission from the state to exercise power. Instead, we’re using the ballot initiative process to invite our community to join us in taking power over the Town’s $2 billion annual budget. If CDP’s ballot initiative passes, every resident in Oakland 16 years old and older, regardless of immigration status, would be eligible to participate in the annual budget vote.

Towards Decolonizing Law

The Community Democracy Project offers one pathway to decolonize law: changing our relationship to communal resources by rejecting our current political structures and replacing them with systems that uplift the voices of everyone — including our youth, our undocumented and non-US citizen neighbors, our Indigenous leaders and land stewards, and you, and me. With more than a decade of experience in door-knocking and street outreach, CDP knows that if given the opportunity to decide our city’s budget priorities, our neighbors would nurture each other and the land we live on. For example, their budget surveys found that Oakland residents generally agreed that paying millions of dollars to the Shuumi Land Tax and increasing funding to racial justice programs were good uses of our city’s resources.

Within the Law Center, we have been asking what it would mean to decolonize law in a completely non-metaphorical sense. If decolonization means rejecting colonial authority over Indigenous lands, then decolonizing the law means rejecting the sovereignty of the U.S. colonial legal system. This is the ultimate potential of our solidarity economy and land rematriation practices: to render U.S. colonial institutions obsolete. We can learn to take care of each other and our non-human relatives without the oppressive, extractive systems that comprise the United States. How can we strategically get there?

As we support our Black and Indigenous partners to build alternative sovereignties, we are contesting U.S. hegemony. Still, our partners must practice land liberation in a way sanctioned by the U.S. legal system — or otherwise face the consequences. In most cases, our partners try to take (colonial) title to land in order to liberate or unite with it. But we can also support our partners in arguing against the U.S. legal system.

For example, we have done this in our work with POOR Magazine, a poor and Indigenous person-led grassroots organization building self-determination among houseless and landless peoples with programs like People Skool and Homefulness. In a press release compiled by POOR Magazine, we explained that we were not surprised by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing houselessness to be criminalized, since the U.S. legal system is working as designed — protecting private property at all costs and upholding the system of racial capitalism. We stood with them in declining to accept the Supreme Court decision: “When our communities, livelihoods, and very existence are deemed illegal and subject to violence, we respond: the U.S. is illegal,” echoing calls from Canada’s No One Is Illegal movement. 

From the standpoint of a legal organization, our goal has always been to support communities in creating abundance and systems of care despite the violent U.S. legal system. Our goal in democratizing access to law — especially for land stewards — is one step towards deprofessionalizing law and getting power out of the lawyer monopoly. However, we yearn towards more radical imaginations, where our skills for self governance can surpass our dependency on U.S. colonial systems.