By Jackie Krentzman
Growing up in Humboldt County, Martina Mapatis—who is Mojave, Hualapai, and Yavapai (tribes from the Southwest)—felt embraced by her local Native community, surrounded by members of the Yurok and Karuk peoples of Northern California. When the fifth year Cal student first set foot on the UC Berkeley campus, she was nervous to see if she would find a similar, welcoming community there.
The fears of this self-described introvert immediately vanished.
“The Native American Community Center became my home, and it is where I met most of my friends and began learning so much about our people and developed my activism,” Mapatis says.
Mapatis’s educational grounding and activism was in large part buttressed by the work of the Native American Thriving Initiatives (NATI), which established the theoretical and action framework for institutional transformation to make UC Berkeley a more supportive environment for students, faculty, and staff.
“For the university to be a safe, welcoming space for Native Americans, it needs to better understand its history and its responsibilities,” Mapatis says. “NATI does a great job making the university recognize that it's not just that we need spaces for Native students, but that we need to know there is a visible, public pathway for change.”
NATI grew out of concerted efforts of campus faculty and staff to build a campus environment that is respectful, resourced, and supportive for Native American people. In 2017, Native American Student Development (NASD), American Cultures and the Division of Equity and Inclusion sponsored a Tribal Forum where it invited local tribal representatives to campus to explore what being a good partner could look like. Historically, Native people and tribes have been the subject of study, rather than partners in bridging understanding between cultural and societal differences, the Tribal Forum sought to shift that. It was the first time the campus had invited tribal representatives to such a convening. Phenocia Bauerle (Apsáalooke), the director of NASD, which offers an array of programs and services for Native American students, helped steward the effort to help administrators hear a multitude of Native American voices and perspectives around Berkeley’s history with tribes, as well as the institution’s practices that can continue to harm their communities. Following that convening, campus focused efforts on repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), to address the thousands of Native American remains and artifacts held at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
“We are a land-grant institution, and that has some specific implications,” says Bauerle, who today serves as the director of both NATI and NASD. “If we don't talk about what our responsibilities are as a land-grant institution that benefited from the dispossession of Native land, including the university’s extractive research, then how can Native students, faculty, and staff thrive here, and even more, how can we say we're trying to do better for Native people?”
But as NAGPRA became almost the sole focus of UC Berkeley’s efforts around Native issues, it was eclipsing other essential issues that needed attention on campus, she says, such as Native student retention, recognizing and honoring the East Bay Ohlone presence and bringing it back to campus, and providing opportunities for students to engage with California tribes and tribal projects in meaningful ways.
In order for Cal to be a welcoming and inclusive place for not only Native American students, faculty, and staff, but also for local tribes on whose land the campus sits, Bauerle and others realized the university needed a conceptual framework for comprehensive institutional transformation that would raise visibility of the issues impacting Native American communities, and lead to action steps. A series of working groups drafted memos to the Chancellor’s office, paving the way for the creation of the Office of Tribal Relations and the Tribal Liaison position, as well as the Chancellor’s Native American Advisory Council. Bauerle was appointed to a steering committee with professors Seth Davis and Beth Piatote (Niimi:pu:), and Kristin Theis-Alvarez (Cherokee Nation).
In her memo to the steering committee regarding the development of an initiative, Chancellor Carol Christ wrote:
“My vision for the Native American Initiative is for the University of California, Berkeley, as a public land-grant institution on unceded Ohlone land, to uphold its responsibility to acknowledge past wrongs, work to build lasting, positive relationships with Native Peoples, and to provide educational and professional opportunities so that Native students, staff, and faculty members can thrive within our community.”
The steering committee created a four-pronged framework for NATI, centered around four aspects: knowing (acknowledge and assess), visioning (improve and imagine), relating (build, sustain), and acting (redress and building trust). The framework is designed to keep efforts to support the Native community on campus anchored to the varied and not always positive history of the university and Native communities, as well as laying hopeful pathways forward for institutional transformation. In 2022, NATI joined the Thriving Initiatives, along with the African American Thriving Initiatives, Asian American and Pacific Islander Thriving Initiatives, and the Latinx Thriving Initiatives.
The foundation and the soul
Merri Lopez-Keifer (San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians), director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Indigenous Law & Justice, calls NATI the “soul” that guides all the Native-centered programs, initiatives, and services on campus. For example, she says, NATI has made possible her new center’s mission of weaving tribal law and federal Indian law into the core courses at Berkeley Law School, as well as co-sponsoring last fall’s Navajo Nation Supreme Court oral argument event.
“The framework it created was so important because a lot of these voices had no platform to be heard,” says López-Kiefer. “Up until NATI, the people and their contributions to the university hadn't been seen and appropriately recognized. We needed a tool to raise awareness about who we are and what we’re doing and how Cal benefits.”
One of the early steps in NATI’s foundation was launching a data project that examined outreach, recruitment, and enrollment practices to understand how to better reach and serve, Native American students in California applying to UC Berkeley — Native students make up less than 1% of UC Berkeley’s enrollment. Looking at data, the hope is to help the Office of Undergraduate Admissions create a data informed outreach plan to understand the landscape of Native California. Mapatis, an interdisciplinary studies major with an emphasis on data science, joined that project and still works on it today.
The ‘ottoy Initiative is an obvious collaboration and leader for NATI efforts. ‘ottoy means “repair” in the Chochenyo, the first language of the East Bay. Headquartered at the Lawrence Hall of Science, ‘ottoy is a cultural project that is a partnership between founders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino and UC Berkeley. The initiative aims to repair the relationship between the university and Ohlone people and build a representative and sustained presence for the greater Ohlone community on campus.
The ‘ottoy Initiative engages through the senses. There are interactive exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of science curated from an Ohlone perspective. Visitors can watch take in “Traditions of the Sky” a planetarium show focusing on Ohlone cosmology, or take in the fragrant gardens outside that invite learning about landscape, plant knowledge and the Chochenyo language, and get hungry, you can enjoy the new ‘ammatka Cafe, showcasing the tremendous variety and complexity of traditional Ohlone foods and cooking.
But the ‘ottoy Initiative is about much more than food. It works with Ohlone youth, guided by their elders, to create exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of Science explaining the impact of the Ohlone people. In partnership with NATI, the Initiative is creating a garden of traditional Ohlone plantings in front of the campus Native American Center, and at the Oxford Tract, where it will grow produce for the 'ottoy's culinary education program. They are also co-sponsoring together an East Bay Ohlone Landscape Walking Tour on campus and a website lifting the language and understanding of the Ohlone territory that Berkeley sits on: xučyun.
“The food has a way of teaching about the sophistication and the elegance in how our Ohlone people have always eaten, how directly tending and stewarding to the land leads to constant regeneration of these foods, and grounds us in relationship with this place that has always provided for our Ohlone people,” Medina says.
Medina envisions the ‘ottoy Initiative as a model, that working with NATI, can expand campuswide to integrate Ohlone culture into every aspect of campus life in a way that fully honors the Ohlone people whose land the university is situated, redresses past inequities and harm, centers the Native American student experience, and critically, creates a pathway for institutional change.
Bauerle believes that with NATI becoming established, UC Berkeley is on that path.
With the establishment of the Chancellor’s Native American Advisory Council, comprised of campus community members (students, staff, faculty, alumni, and individuals who hold expertise on Native American issues), that provide formal recommendations and advise the chancellor as well as NATI and the Office of Tribal Relations campus is opening to Native voices. While institutional transformation will take time, creating a framework for just change is a key to sustainable and meaningful progress.
“Our hope is that that by laying the groundwork through public education, NATI will support a vast array of actions that go well beyond land acknowledgement,” she says. “It will lead to the understanding that the Ohlone people are thriving on their homeland, with an active, living culture. This is a critical beginning step for NATI, because we must start with place-based understandings, that we are in people's homelands, and those people did not disappear or vanish — they remain. In the process, NATI will work to build a campus that Native student, faculty, and staff feel like not only do they belong, but knowing that their contributions are critical to the success of the university.”
To learn more about land grant institutions and Berkeley’s land grant history visit uclandgrab.berkeley.edu
