Native American ‘land taxes:’ a step on the roadmap for reparations – By Maanvi Singh (The Guardian) / Dec 31 2019
In the San Francisco Bay Area, local residents and businesses can pay to help restore Indigenous land to Indigenous stewardship
The two-acre plot deep within east Oakland is a bright green oasis surrounded by urban sprawl. The creek that runs through it has been sealed with cement, and an interstate highway has been built overhead. But for Corrina Gould, this piece of land represents justice for Native Californians.
It is the first parcel promised to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an intertribal, women-led organization that Gould co-founded in order to restore Indigenous land in the Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship.
“This is where my people – the Lisjan people – come from,” said Gould, a spokeswoman for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and a community organizer. She often imagines her grandparents’ grandparents sitting by the creek back when salmon still swam through it.
To help the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust rework the land, populate it with native fruits and herbs, transform into a community and to restore even more land to California’s Indigenous community, local residents and businesses can pay the organization a Shuumi land tax.
“Shuumi in our language means gift,” Gould explained. Non-Native residents can choose to pay the tax as a way to show support and gratitude for the Native people hosting them on their ancestral lands.
Over the past year politicians and presidential candidates have expressed an increasing desire to right historical wrongs against Indigenous people and black Americans. Scholars of Indigenous law and policy say the issue of how best to deliver justice to Native Americans is exceedingly complex – and the use of the word reparations in this context is often fraught. But grassroots programs in the Bay Area and around the country can provide insight into what form these types of social justice efforts could take.
For Gould, the Shuumi land tax is a way to begin undoing centuries of erasure. When she first began her work as an activist for Indigenous sovereignty two decades ago, she said, “most people thought that we were dead. That we no longer existed.”
Continue to article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/native-american-land-taxes-reparations
