“The Ohlone shellmounds, village sites and burial grounds, were ‘destroyed in a parallel way to how women have been treated at the hands of men.’ One of them lies under the Bay Street shopping center in Emeryville, where ancestral remains were disturbed during construction. By the logic of improvement, a cemetery became more valuable once it became a mall. [Corrina] Gould's response is not a counter-development plan. ‘They need songs and prayers,’ she says. ‘What rematriation asks of land is ongoing obligation, the kind of tending that produces nothing to sell’.”

Katie Wilberding, a 2L law student enrolled in “Liberation Lawyering,” a course taught by Law Center staff attorney Veryl Pow at Northeastern University School of Law, wrote this introspective blog post as a way to integrate the unit on decolonization and rematriation in the course. The unit featured a deep dive into the work of our client, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (and Corrina Gould, one of its cofounders). Katie weaves in her own analysis on women’s bodies and motherhood with the broader work of land rematriation. In the end, this post reminds us that rematriating land against settled notions of property is work to dismantle patriarchy.  

🎉 LUCI leader released from San Quentin 🎉

Kelton O’Connor, incarcerated leader with the Let Us Contribute Initiative and core Law Center partner on the Community Reinvestment Bill was released from San Quentin on November 5th after 17 years inside.  He continues to work full time on LUCI and be a tireless advocate for environmental justice and for his incarcerated comrades.  He’s asking for support during this transition period - any amount helps!

Liberating Roots with Rootbound Film Project

How do we disentangle our roots from cramped narrative and living spaces afforded by this society? How do we liberate our storied roots to truly thrive? The Rootbound Film Project, a fiscally sponsored project of the Law Center, has been asking these questions of themselves for the past three years as they collectively wrote a screenplay inspired by the extraordinary wave of land stewardship gains in the Bay Area and greater California. 

Through a participatory narrative building process, sitting with the Bay, Sonoma, Mendocino, city, woods, coast, farmland, Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo and Kashia territories, and envisioning 100 years of land justice, the script writing circle completed their narrative feature film script.  Now they’re reflecting on the first phase of this huge project in this guest blog post, to share the bounty of experience and learnings they’re harvesting as they transition to the next phase.