• Contemporary Ohlone History, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust
• Un-Settling Settler Desires, Scott Morgensen
• How to Support Standing Rock and confront what it means to live on stolen land, Berkley Carnine and Liza Minno Bloom (although more specific to an earlier political moment, the end section acknowledging how different racial and social justice movements can work to dismantle settler colonialism is of particular interest)
• Decolonization is not a Metaphor, Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang (this is a long and academic text, and a powerful part of decolonial studies and struggles)

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

• desire to make a home on stolen land, to feel rooted and connected
• recognizing a pattern of not prioritizing opportunities to get involved in indigenous sovereignty movements locally in Bay – where does this pattern come from and what makes it okay?
• nihilism and perfectionism
• decolonization as concrete action – if I can’t do those things, if I can’t make full reparations, then where am I in this process?
• how does this nihilism compare with what I see when I do racial justice work with white people and they feel like there is nothing to be done?
• recognizing my own identity as a Jew, whose ancestors have experienced repeated displacement
• feel deep shame about how little I know about this in a real way
• freaks me out how little I know this stuff
• native appropriations has been so icky that I’m afraid of recreating appropriative dynamics in supporting indigenous struggles – my way of dealing with that is by not being a part of it
• Jewish holiday marking destruction of temples and everything bad that has happened in Jewish history is assigned to this day; spent a lot of time thinking about settler colonialism in Israel
• role of religion and the way that it gave a mandate to white settlers that they had the blessing of god to take this land
• possibilities that existed for indigenous people, white indentured servants, black indentured servants, black slaves, and people who didn’t even live here – people did join together and saw their lot being the same; how literal white privilege came to be
• most of us are purposefully ignorant and don’t know any of this history
• Gaza under such siege, the legacy is so poisonous
• the people who came here were already traumatized when they got here
• think about this a lot, and also avoid thinking about this a lot
• binary: either I’m evil or I go back to Europe
• don’t have a place to claim in Europe
• see myself in a place of bargaining;  how much Ohlone land tax do I have to pay, and how much do I have to donate to this event, am I doing enough so that I can not think about it?
• reckoning with a capitalist notion of at what point am I doing enough to not have to worry about being a settler?
• experience of visiting Navaho reservation in Southern Colorado
• sense of rootedness as basic human need, part of what has inspired people to colonize and steal
• where does my need for rooting take any precedence over any other need?
• engaging partner, partner’s parents around appropriative dynamics
• Jewish land ownership in Israel affected racial structure in the US, particularly in the 1960s after the Six Day War, both in constructing a notion of whiteness in the US that included Jews, and in separating Jewish people from POC solidarity movements
• preamble to events where we mention “we are on stolen land” – feel weird about it
• having a relationship with land and place is something that is valued, and also liberatory in some ways – queer land projects
• what is the difference between a shopping mall and a commune on indigenous land?
• once land became privatized and turned into real estate, everything changed
• colonists were coming after being displaced from communal lands; fundamental question of how do you justify taking this land?  by making the indigenous people less than human
• ability to rationalize genocide – how can we do this?
• there is no back to go to
• there is a lot that can be done if you are willing to support an issue in an ongoing way and hang in there
• I just assume nothing will ever be enough, there is no enough; you grab hold
• not necessarily helpful to be feeling super ashamed of where we are at
• immense amounts of trauma from people being displaced from their indigeneity, when you no longer feel you can fight back to reclaim the commons, you move forward and push that violence forward
• if going back isn’t the answer, how do we reclaim what it means to be where we are without pushing forward our cycles of violence
• it isn’t like we will go back to Europe and be indigenous there, that can’t happen
• good/bad narrative also around indigeneity
• is it possible to be against colonialism and not be anti-state?
• a lot of what we are talking about is individual decisions, but these dynamics are so much bigger than our individual decisions
• the level of the conversation we are having currently is a different level than if we were talking about anti-blackness: it feels very 101, which is okay, there isn’t a hierarchy of knowledge
• three pillars of white supremacy: colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia; and how they relate and uphold white supremacy
• of course, in a settler colonial educational system we are not going to know the whole truth about settler colonialism
• it is very revealing how ignorant we are, there is a lot of work to do and we can do it
• is there more of a murkiness of what it means to be a settler than what it means to be white? it is hard to have nuance in both of these conversations?
• why do we find ourselves more versed in conversations of anti-blackness than settler colonialism?
• want to create space for people to come to conversation with curiosity, even if they don’t come with knowledge
• what do the indigenous folks whose land has been stolen want to be doing with this land?
• should I move back in with my mom?  should I try to live in the smallest bento box that I can fit in?
• idea of taking up space being problematic is so gendered
• back to the land movement – romanticism but also desire to create the world we want to live in
• what will support some effort of resistance if we take certain action?
• actions that absolve us of individual feelings of guilt might not benefit resistance movements
• Standing Rock and Idle No More – struggles against oil companies, yet so many of us drive cars and support oil industry in so many ways
• what are the ways that we are going to take care of the land that we are on when we meet – could be guidelines about the food that is brought, brings up questions about class, time and money
• West Berkeley shellmound fight feels like a very explicit ask, why are we not showing up for that and instead grappling with questions about if we should own land, etc.
• One of big challenges for Ohlone is that they are not federally recognized
• West Berkeley shellmound movement is building
• if movement is powerful, it does call into question my sense of being here, about belonging
• desire to ignore it and be able to feel like I can just be here
• element of hopelessness to it? is this part of why we don’t engage fully?
• logics of capitalism: blackness needs to be visibilized in order to be criminalized, whereas indigeneity needs to be invisibilized  
• kind inquiry
• learn native language of our people; de-stigmatize use of violence for social change
• narratives of non-violence lead to oppression of all of us and to state oppression: how non-violence protects the state
• there are tribes that have declared war on the United States
• when you use violence against the most violence state, the result of that is usually repression
• how whiteness shields us from so much violence, and how that in itself is violent
• what is the legacy of settler colonialism in the violence we see now?
• what about the question of the masters tools will not dismantle the masters house?  how does this relate to violence?
• cultural appropriation – recognizing the hole that it is trying to fill
• part of this is triggering a real response about belonging and home; my sense of belonging is something I have an investment in regardless of historical deservedness
• stakes that the state creates when you try to fight it on a real level; privilege is very seductive
• even though the oil is flowing in DAPL, so much leadership was developed and so many young people had the chance to come together, we won’t know the true legacy of this for long time to come
• exploring where fear of cultural appropriation intersects with not taking action
• take conversations back to collective house
• Zine: Stuck in Place #2: Genocidal Desires – On death, spirit, land and colonization