For things to change, we need to be in relationship with the land.”
—Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone), Bioneers, 2024We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.
—Nick Tilsen (Lakota), 2024, Civil Eats
It’s been over two years since Inherited Silence came out — my heartfelt account of land in the Napa Valley during colonization and genocide six generations back, and my ancestors, who took part and were the first to ever “buy” my family’s Napa place. That story did not end when I sent in the manuscript. It continued during the years that followed, bringing grief and loss — of key family members, of our access to the land, and of my vision that this special place could somehow be returned by us to its original caregivers.
On Earth Day 2022, four months before the book’s actual release, the land I’d listened to, loved, prayed with, and seen as sacred went on the real estate market. Whatever I’d wished for in the book, under the laws of the land this place was “property” governed by a legal system tracing back centuries to the Doctrine of Discovery and the English “Landlords’ Revolution” of the late Middle Ages. I was one of the land’s five “owners” — with others from the sixth and seventh generations of my family since California’s colonization. As a family, they hadn’t experienced the insights I’d gained from writing the book and felt they needed to sell as quickly as possible. I had to face it. No time to educate, fundraise or create the kind of non-profit that was evolving to make land once again available to its original caregivers.
Despite my dreams of land return, the sale went through shortly before the book’s publication, adding a sense of personal failure to the sorrow of separation from this beloved place. In this short time, we’d also lost my remaining sister and our Uncle John — the family member I saw as taking the first steps toward decolonization. It was all the sadder to move belongings, books, and keepsakes out of my parents’ house at “the ranch.”
The conservation easement we’d set up twenty years before had lowered market value and blocked most of what wealthy people want to do with land in the Napa Valley these days. This helped us find new owners who weren’t interested in development and wanted to care for the big live oaks and the hillside with its year-round creeks. As a friend noted sadly, the book’s timing was helpful. Inherited Silence could teach the new people about the full story of this land — including its soul-wounding history, which of course wasn’t mentioned in any of the title documents.
The real estate process, itself — its language and legal framework — was a painful reminder of that history and the deep separations our culture has fostered between the land and those who know, love, and take their meaning from it. Woven through months of disclosures, insurance problems, septic inspections, docu-signing, and escrow were enough stories for a second book on “the colonizer mind.” The story I tell here is just one of them: My wrenching experience with the system of land ownership, led to another dimension of “healing the colonizer mind” — the growing movement for reparation and land return. In those few years since Inherited Silence went to press, a wave of new awareness had begun to sweep through our region. And, thanks to having written the book, I was ready for it and in touch with like-minded allies, the people I’d met while seeking — too late — to pass the Napa land back into Indigenous hands.
The seeds of this movement were already there in the book. You’ll recall I’d returned to California to focus my attention on the Napa land after joining Native-led prayer walks exploring our colonizing history. In the mid-2000’s, we’d circled the San Francisco Bay, past sites where buried villages and ancestral remains lay hidden under shopping malls and self-storage. The walks were organized by Indigenous activists Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone) and Johnella Larose (Shoshone Bannock/Carrizo), who went on to found the now-legendary Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. We’d stopped at The West Berkeley Shellmound — then a parking lot near the railroad in the town where I grew up — and learned how this place had once been a beautiful grassy space with a creek running through to the waters of the bay. A place where you could see out to the far ocean through the gap where the Golden Gate Bridge is now. Here Corrina’s people had erected a huge monument of shells for burial of their ancestors, a sacred site of prayer that had been desecrated with settlement and was now owned by ambitious developers. The West Berkeley site reminded me that, as a settler-descendant, I had responsibilities — and resources to offer. That walk became a longer journey for me and also helped launch a changing settler consciousness of the Indigenous lands throughout our region.
My friends from the walk were my first California Native friends, and these friendships led to others over the years, including people from the tribe my ancestors had displaced in Napa, friends I’d made at the end, who had a name for the big live oak trees and could sing to them in the old language. Friends who belonged on that land and whose enduring traditional knowledge could protect it from climate disruption, species loss, the failing aquifer, catastrophic fire, and more.
These new friends and their allies met with me to vision and brainstorm in a short grace period my family allowed for finding alternatives to the open market. I appreciated their support and the vision we shared, but when plans didn’t work out, I lost sight of the big picture for a while and struggled for months with feelings of failure. The system of title-holding, regulation, taxation, brokerage, and ownership was so complex and impersonal. I knew it dated back to the European law in the 1400s. Generations of my colonizer ancestors had honed its legal infrastructure and made their livelihoods from it. Alternatives were emerging but took time, patience, and creativity to break from this past. Why had I thought I had the skills and connections to turn all that around quickly enough to meet my family’s needs?
It helped that, after escrow, there was money in my account. Not so much as some might have thought from the soaring real estate markets of Napa ‘s Wine Country. The conservation easement had severely limited market value, and taxes had taken a huge chunk of my share, but there was money to honor the land’s passing. I wrote donation checks to Indigenous projects, checks that were larger than I’d ever dreamed I could manage. Allowing generosity to flow — especially to projects of Native friends who’d helped in my learning journey — began to melt away some of the lifetime fear of scarcity that had shadowed my relationship with money. Like our colonizing history itself, money was considered impolite to discuss in the home where I was raised. My parents had come from unspoken privilege and had never been in want, but they didn’t see themselves as “wealthy,” and somehow passed on a mindset that left me worrying whether I could balance my checkbook each month. That same frugal thinking had kept the system of property ownership in place for centuries, and these were hard attitudes to outgrow, even with a deepened awareness of whiteness and its responsibilities.
I missed the land, but more than a year after the sale, the big Napa oaks woke me up one morning in my small city apartment. I was suddenly among them again – their big lateral branches reaching out to embrace me in the early morning light, just like so many mornings in my family’s house. This time they began to speak in their rustling, musical voices: “Dear one, we are still here. We still love you and will always be part of your life.” They paused so I could take in their words and feel my grief and failure melting away. “We know you never saw us as ‘property’ worth money to you. But right now, we ARE money, the money that’s still left from the sale. We are reaching out with instructions about this money.”
It was a joy to hear their voices, and I knew what they were talking about. That evening there was a fundraiser here in the city. Activists and allies were supporting a tribe to the north on the slopes of Mt. Shasta. A rare opportunity had arisen to buy back over 1,000 acres of their own sacred land that bordered the one small piece still in their hands. They were about to make a bid. If they could raise two million dollars, this land would again be theirs to care for. To make safe from wildfire, to restore habitat for lost plant foods and medicines, to revitalize a stream for sacred salmon relatives. To regain a true home for themselves in the land their sacred stories came from. I’d been planning to contribute: I’d met some of the Winnemem Wintu while working with other tribes over the years. Given their location. I’d speculated they were the ones my great, great grandfather, Nathan Coombs, had attacked in 1843 when entering California with the Lansford Hastings Party. Hastings says his group killed 20 “Indians” (others say 80.) Whatever had actually happened, the Winnemem had intersected with my lineage–with the very person who’d been the first to pay money for the Napa land in 1857. I knew that what I’d inherited from him should go to assist them now.
The trees knew too. “Do it tonight,” they whispered. “Go boldly to this fundraiser, open your mouth, tell your story to Chief Caleen Sisk — and to the entire group if she is willing. Then tell them you’re pledging one tenth of what they need to raise. Yes, it looks like a huge amount to you — but it isn’t really from “you.” This is a sacred gift from all of us. We are Hisho Hukashia in the old language — the strong, peaceful live oaks of the Napa hills. You are donating the good energy we generated with you in our long years together. We have a chance, now, to pass it to our friends the Winnemem Wintu so they can care for their sacred land again in these challenging times.”
As recently as 2021, a local author had complained that — despite much talk — actual return of land to Indigenous ownership in our nature-loving region was rare. “Why is it so hard to return stolen land?”, he’d asked. His critique made sense at the time, but a new consciousness has been growing since he wrote those words. Financed in various ways, land returns – large and small – are happening throughout our region. Sogorea Te’, is now a robust organization with a staff of twenty-seven supported by a voluntary Shuumi land tax paid by residents and some businesses on unceded Ohlone land. Their website lists seven returns as I write. And many less-known, federally unrecognized tribes in our area are also receiving land back. All of them are in places my family traveled to for recreation in my childhood — seventy years ago when we knew really nothing about the human history of the California we loved so much. I hope, dear readers, that you can feel the awe and joy that comes to me from exploring these links.
Alongside Sogorea Te’ projects are The Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin’s Huukuiko; The Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe’s 234 sacred acres; the Three Creeks sacred land of the Nuumu and Newe peoples (Owens Valley Indian Water Commission east of the Sierra Nevada mountains); and the amazing 1,100 acres returned to The Winnemem Wintu on October 9, 2023 with the blessing of the Napa oaks. There is also the Deep Medicine Circle on Ramaytush land plus hopeful developments for the Alliance for Felix Cove. And, a favorite of mine, Heron Shadow, a “biocultural oasis” that recently hosted a gathering to celebrate, understand and replicate land rematriation in our region. This is a project of the Indigenous-led Cultural Conservancy. Many more efforts are in the works, supporting each other and inviting the help of settler-citizens with new consciousness. And most of these projects require fundraising. As I write, the Winnemem Wintu now have a second remarkable opportunity for land return–an entire segment of their sacred McCloud River, where they will actually be able to restore salmon relatives above the obstruction of Shasta Dam. (Details about government grants applied for and how individuals can contribute are here.)
In fact, the entire ethos and vocabulary of land transition is changing. The Center for Ethical Land Transition is working to detoxify a system that recognizes land as “property” rather than teacher, refuge, friend, mother, community resource, or home. Other local organizations, Movement Generation, Movement Strategy, the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and many ardent volunteers, funding organizations, lawyers, and local politicians are cutting through red tape and lingering colonizer attitudes. There is no more inspiring example than the story that began my journey into our history, the latest episode of the West Berkeley Shellmound Story.
Who would have believed that, nearly twenty years after the first Prayer Walk with Corrina, Johnella, Wounded Knee, and the monks and nuns of a Japanese Buddhist peace order, the West Berkeley Shellmound has, at last, been returned to its original caregivers? I was awestruck hearing the news. With the support of the city and a foundation grant of well over two million, this two-plus acres – with ancestor burials beneath the asphalt – was bought from the developer and handed back to the Ohlone in a deed to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Sogorea Te’s plans include creek restoration, visitor education, reburial of ancestral remains from museums, and a sacred site for “ceremony and reflection for all.” At their Rematriation Ceremony in July 2024, many of us found our eyes filled with tears as we witnessed our hardworking Lisjan friends, for the first time in nearly 200 years, dancing barefoot on their sacred land with Pomo dancers from further north. I recalled the activism and lawsuits of the past decade and the near-twenty years I’d come to this site with prayers. I remembered the Buddhists who’d come on those walks. Their teacher had said our world would not see peace until the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island could regain their spiritual strength. The return of this sacred place of prayer has become a milestone in this journey.
To celebrate and continue the work, we must learn the full spectrum of the many hopeful stories of land return, not just here but across Turtle Island. What is the land calling for in the places we now call Nebraska, New York, and Massachusetts? In Oregon and the Dakotas? In Minnesota, New Mexico, and beyond?
With gratitude to the Mishewal Onastatis people, who can sing to the oak trees on their sacred lands–in what are now Napa, Lake, and Sonoma Counties. May they soon care for these lands again. With admiration and friendship for the Lisjan Ohlone people on whose land along the Bay I live, write, learn, and gratefully pay the Shuumi Tax
Louise Dunlap, author of Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind, is sixth generation Californian, twelfth generation on Turtle Island — working to heal the legacy of genocide, enslavement and extraction that still guides land use, national policy, and the minds of many.
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