HTNM Indigenous Technologies Event Transcript Now Online: Corrina Gould

25 Nov, 2020

Transcript: A Conversation with the Sogorea Te' Land Trust

This past fall, we began our Indigenous Technologies lecture series with a conversation with Corrina Gould, the co-founder of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust and and important leader in indigenous land rematriation. The event was held the day after those of us in the Bay Area woke up to an orange sky that stayed with us the whole day, and the connections between the wildfires, the sky, the climate crisis, and what BCNM Director Gail De Kosnik called capitalism's oppressive modalities felt unavoidable. Corrina named Huichin, the land that those of us in the East Bay stand on, and offered a vision of what the Bay Area looked like 200 years ago -- a place of abundance, with fresh water and food for everyone. It is possible, she said, for us to shift the way we relate to the land.

My ancestors left a very small footprint on the Earth, and today as we are looking at climate chaos and disaster, we are always talking about leaving a smaller footprint here, leaving a smaller place for less things. But my ancestors actually only left a few things, most of them were mortars and pestles, and few of the items we created and our Shellmounds. Everything else we had, our boats, our homes, our baskets that we cooked with, were all biodegradable. And we are looking at that today and talking about how can we create biodegradable things? And our ancestors, if we go back, were looking at technology, right. If we look back at the way we lived not that long ago, many of our ancestors were living closer to the Earth and had these technologies in order to survive for thousands and thousands of years.

Many thanks to Corrina Gould, the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, Indigenous Technologies Coordinator and event moderator Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, and BCNM Director Gail De Kosnik.

The full transcript is avaiable here.