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INTRODUCTION BY TERRIA SMITH
I had a friend in college who was consistently pointing out that the root word of ignorance is ignore. Thus, she believed that someone was making the choice to ignore something. I agree. This is something I see all the time in the work that I do. People claim their ignorance is unintentional when actually it is a thin excuse to ignore the existence of tribal people in California. It’s certainly a conscious act. I am convinced of that. Tribes in this state have a lot of physical visibility.
Everywhere.
If you drive across the state, on almost all of our major highways you’ll see clearly visible signs that mark where tribal reservations are. In the north there are signs for Table Bluff Reservation, Big Lagoon Rancheria, the Yurok Tribe, and many others along 101. In the south, along I-10 from Los Angeles to Phoenix, you will find the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians. The I-8 is officially named the Kumeyaay Highway and goes through Campo Kumeyaay Nation, the Viejas Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, and Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe in Winterhaven. Also along Highway 101, you have signs for Pinoleville, Coyote Valley, Round Valley, and Robinson Rancheria.
There are cities, towns, and parks all up and down the state with names derived from California tribal languages, including (but certainly not limited to): Aguanga, Azusa, Cahuenga, Petaluma, Point Mugu, Ojai, Rancho Cucamonga, Sisquoc, Tehachapi, Yucaipa, and Yosemite.
In the city of Palm Springs (half of which is the Agua Caliente reservation), you have several streets named after Cahuilla families: Andreas, Arenas, Belardo, and Vista Chino.
I could go on with contemporary geography alone to make this case for physical visibility. But the bottom line is this: when there are well over one hundred federal tribal reservations, and when there are also more than fifty tribes that are unrecognized (many in some of the state’s largest urban areas), there is going to be a presence absolutely everywhere. No matter where you turn, there is no denying that there are tribal nations all over California.
Yet still there are people—both those who are not Native American as well as people who were relocated from tribes in other parts of the country—who react in surprise when I introduce myself as Desert Cahuilla, a Native person from a tribe in California indigenous to the Coachella Valley, where there are five reservations. There are people who act like they don’t know we are here. And a lot of these folks should know better because it’s their job to.
Before I came to be the Heyday Berkeley Roundhouse director, I used to work in television. Specifically, I worked for an Indigenous-focused television network in Southern California. (That’s how a lot of tribal folks still remember and identify me.) One time, I went out to a powwow and I interviewed a young Kumeyaay man who was an alum of San Diego State University. He talked about how while he was a student, instead of spending all his time learning, he had to teach his own history professors about local tribes. I find this particularly unacceptable because San Diego County is home to more reservations than any other county in the United States. California itself is home to more tribes than any other state in the country, with more than six hundred thousand Native Americans living here (according to the 2020 US Census).
The persistence of this ignorance has many adverse ramifications. I remember when the 2016 movement was going on in Standing Rock, North Dakota, against the construction of the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. Though the movement had support from Native people here in California, there were also a number of people who said things like “Where was all of this attention when we were trying to get the dams off of the Klamath River?” and “Where was everybody when we were trying to protect our sacred sites when the 101 bypass was being built?” And I wondered why there wasn’t this type of attention when I reported on the water being polluted on my reservation in Torres Martinez. (It has been about eight years since I produced a story about this environmental harm, and the water remains polluted to this day.)
Some issues—including land reclamation in the redwoods, protection of burial sites, and indigenous language revitalization—have received attention in international news media, including publications and websites like Al Jazeera, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
These issues should be at the forefront of the California collective consciousness. They impact everyone. But for some reason, most of the time if the public knows anything it’s usually related to tribal gaming. And rightly so. Tribal gaming has been responsible for the economic growth and prosperity of many California regions. I remember as a young person how Palm Springs was basically turning into a ghost town before the Spa Casino opened. People used to call Temecula a “cow town,” and now folks are practically falling over each other to try to raise their families there.
I personally associate the places I go to in California with the tribes that are from there. There is nowhere you can go in the state where there is not a reservation, rancheria, or tribal headquarters nearby. To be fair, California is filled with people with lineages from all over the world, and even culturally attentive people overlook tribes in the midst of the country’s most populous state. But for those who still say they are unfamiliar with these lands and their people, there are resources—such as the Native Land app—that anyone with an smartphone can access. Knowledge is accessible, and ignorance is no longer an excuse.
Anyone who has been to Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington, or Alaska has experienced the region’s tribal cultures all around them. This is something that is embraced and part of the identity of those states. A lot of people travel to these places specifically to interact with tribal communities and cultures. I am one of those people. As a Native person, I really appreciate going to places like Arizona—which is only a couple of hours from my reservation—and seeing tribal people nearly everywhere: at the gas station, in the grocery store. Some of these folks are even my friends. It’s an incredible feeling to be a part of a visible population.
There is one region in California I have been to that is similar: the northwest. In places like Humboldt County, 111 facial tattoos are common, women wear basket hats, and parents carry their babies in baskets to the mall. This is where I went for my undergraduate education. When I was there I admired the young Native women I went to school with. While a lot of students were coming to class in their pajamas and sweatpants as though they had just rolled out of bed, across campus these young ladies wore their beautiful long hair tied in elk bone and adorned themselves with regal abalone necklaces. The beauty of the culture itself was resistance.
In my line of work I have learned that resistance takes many different forms. It does not always look like activism, but it can and sometimes does. At times we have to go into the streets to take a stand against injustice, protect our environment, and defend sacred sites. Language teachers fight the pervasive narrative of impending doom projected onto us, a false claim that our tribal tongues are “dying.” Tribal historians look into archives in search of our true stories. Some of us even venture outside of our homelands to find solidarity and commonality with other oppressed peoples.
This book takes a look at all of these types of resistance. The California Native people who have authored these essays and who have been featured in these interviews are themselves activists, attorneys, cultural teachers, historians, scholars, students, tribal leaders, and university professors who have thorough understandings of where they come from. The writings were previously featured in past issues of News from Native California magazine or come from books published by Heyday over the past twenty-five years.
The title of this book, Know We Are Here, is derived from one of Esselen/Chumash author Deborah Miranda’s essays featured here. The cover image of Tongva artist Weshoyot Alvitre was taken by Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero. It was part of a billboard campaign to make visible the first peoples of Los Angeles.
Ac’ama to everyone who has contributed. I am so proud that this book will join several others in this era when so many other books have been written in recent years by California Native peoples, rather than by outsiders who have written about California Native peoples. Universitystudents in California can now quite possibly have their entire Native American studies curriculum presented to them with books that are all written by California Native authors. In that same respect, my hope is that others will come across this book and learn about California’s first people from some of our best and brightest.
