12/13/2020 A crisis of invisibility: inside San Francisco's planned Native American cultural center | San Francisco | The Guardian

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San Francisco
A crisis of invisibility: inside San Francisco's
planned Native American cultural center
The Village will serve a range of needs in a region
grappling with a history of erasure: ‘There’s
nothing like it anywhere’

Peter Astrid Kane

Fri 11 Dec 2020 11.00 GMT

31

T
he Bay Area is among the most racially and ethnically diverse regions
in the US, but it is only slowly grappling with its self-understanding as
a home for significant populations of Native Americans. An ambitious
project is hoping to help address a challenge that the region’s Native

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population has grappled with since the occupation of Alcatraz Island in the
late 1960s and early 70s: a crisis of invisibility.

The Village, a multi-year project with funding from the philanthropic investor
Kat Taylor (who is married to Tom Steyer, the billionaire financier and brief
Democratic presidential hopeful), is intended to become a center of Native
culture and heritage. The effort is an outgrowth of the Mission District’s 57-
year-old Friendship House, which describes itself as “the longest-running
social-service organization in the United States run by and for American
Indians”.

People arrive during the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, in November 1969.
Photograph: RWK/AP

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“San Francisco and the population in general needs to know that Native
people are still here,” says the film-maker and advocate Peter Bratt, who lived
briefly on Alcatraz as a child and who served on Friendship House’s board for
more than 20 years. “What also comes with being invisible is you also become
a community that’s underserved.”

In creating a physical space that provides full medical services plus youth
services, elder services, a women’s lodge, and other elements, the Village will
have what Bratt calls “a cultural center where we can celebrate and thrive and
simply be indigenous”.

“This project, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing like it anywhere,” says Abby
Abinanti, chief judge of the Yurok tribe and the first Native American woman
admitted to the California state bar.

More than 70% of the US’s indigenous population resides in or

around cities, a legacy of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956.
Ostensibly an anti-poverty measure, it encouraged the
A Thanksgiving
bonfire at dawn: displacement of Native Americans into urban areas like San
celebrating Native
American Francisco, often from regions to which their forebears had
resistance on
Alcatraz already been forcibly removed decades before – a secondary
Read more
wave of dispossession that is frequently written out of US
history.

“Native Americans have lived here now for a generation or two – some of them
three generations from home – and this has become their home,” Abinanti
says. “Often, I have said if the situation were reversed and we were forcibly
relocated to some other state, I would hope that the people who live there
would reach out to us and say, ‘Welcome, my relatives. I’m sorry this
happened to you. What can we do to make this work for you? What do you
need?’”

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Judge Abby Abinanti. Photograph: Courtesy PapaLoDown Agency

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Kat Taylor believes in a redistribution of assets, so she is putting her money

towards a model of reparative justice that differs from previous eras of
philanthropy.

“I just don’t think we’re going to get to the good life for all if we don’t start
shifting wealth,” she says. Referring to the white Americans who bear much of
the responsibility, she adds: “We have to deeply reckon with our history. It
hasn’t been told accurately nor has it been acknowledged as driving current
societal outcomes.”

The Village is one of five projects to which she has given $100,000.

Indian country “We deeply respect their [Friendship House] process, which is
showed up to beat
Trump. How can very collective in nature, based on longstanding indigenous
you show up for
Indian country? ways,” Taylor says. “We’ll give them the resources and then
Read more get out of the way.”

Five years from now, the Village will have brought disparate organizations
from across the region under one roof. In doing so, it aims to be the crown
jewel of San Francisco’s newly formed American Indian Cultural District,

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which launched in March, just as Mayor London Breed ordered a shutdown in

the face of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sharaya Souza, the executive director, wants the nascent district to become
home to new generations of Native Americans. But she also wants people to
know that it already is.

Sharaya Souza. Photograph: Courtesy PapaLoDown Agency

This week, San Francisco ushered into law a land acknowledgment, to be read
at every meeting of the Board of Supervisors, that recognizes the city as the

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home of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. Still, “there’s folks who don’t know
we’re here”, Souza says. “I’ll be sitting in city meetings and people will say,
‘We’re glad they acknowledged the people that used to live here, the people
that were before us,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we’re still here. We’re still alive!’”

To remedy this, Souza wants to see the installation of flagpole banners,

murals, and statues. She’s also working on what she calls the “Indigenize
Project”, which will enable people to go on a walking tour of the neighborhood
and scan QR codes at various sites to learn their history. (Passions around
statues run stronger. On Juneteenth, protesters in Golden Gate Park removed a
century-old statue of Father Junipero Serra, the recently canonized 18th-
century Spanish priest who forcibly assimilated many Native Americans in
what would eventually become California.)
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Change is coming, if fitfully. This year, the state endured a horrific wildfire
season that hasn’t quite ended, and it is clear that California’s future is tied to
reviving indigenous ecological practices, including prescribed burns.

“Although I appreciate the superpower of being invisible, it might have been

not what I personally picked out. I don’t think that it is good in a society to
create pockets of invisible humans, because that isn’t a society that is a
together society,” Abinanti says. “We have to understand at this point in our
lives, we’re going to go forward together and survive together, or we’re all
going down.”

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