Land Acknowledgement

horše ṭuuxi!

We recognize that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone peoples.

We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land, since the institution’s founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community, inclusion and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. We honor the approximately 9,000 ancestral remains and the 490,000 indigenous artifacts still held by UC Berkeley. We ask all attendees to reflect on their own institutions’ relationship with the Native peoples on whose land it occupies.

We also acknowledge our own responsibilities within our library communities to center indigenous voices in our work, in our collections, and in our approaches to access. How can we better engage with the communities whose unceded ancestral lands we operate on? This land acknowledgement is a call to action to revisit our own practices wherever we work.

As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also, we recognize that the Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today.

We would like to offer our conference attendees an active way to contribute to the Ohlone Tribe through the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.

Our conference committee members would like to encourage all who have the ability to contribute to do so by paying the Shuumi Land Tax. The Shuumi Land Tax is a voluntary contribution that non-Indigenous people living on traditional Lisjan Ohlone territory make to support the critical work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.