The Role of Rural Areas in California Reparations
Marisa Raya, University of California - Davis
Keywords: Postcolonial, Reparations, Land, Climate
Native, Black, Asian, and Latin Americans played significant roles developing California’s early and ongoing agricultural economy as workers, farmers, and land managers. All had White settlers dispossess their farms and timber holdings and constrain their land rights, with support from the State:1. Native genocide policies cleared land for homesteading; violent threats, sundown laws, and denied loans and infrastructure prevented Black farmers from growing their landholdings, and the Alien Exclusion Act, Bracero program, and Executive Order 9066 to intern Japanese-Americans all prevented the state’s founding farm laborers from holding on to the land they cultivated. So when the State of California launched two significant reparations policy processes in 2020, to advance a public consensus on the history of Native Californians and the descendents of enslaved African Americans, and to shape recommendations for repairs, it should not be a surprise that a great deal of the public testimonials told stories of rural land.
Measuring racial disparities and setting equity goals is a common practice in Californian governments, but land access disparities add additional complications around sovereignty. By engaging thousands of participants across Californian geographies, the Reparations Task Force and the Truth and Healing Council created a valuable public data set on land access, land relationships, harms, and solutions that can and should inform all land use and land investment policies. The public measures land not just economically but in kinship networks, community responsibility, and spiritual significance, and the ability to decide what happens on land is a key component of its value. The statewide reparations conversations meet this scale of sovereignty. The meetings hold dense and diverse claims within each group, and their overall content suggests replacing some of the State’s role of enforcing sovereignty through exclusion and the policing of boundaries with an Indigenous form of sovereignty based on kinship relations, including land relations (Byrd 2011).
Grounding in Public Testimony
Public speakers in both reparations processes are concerned with both rural and urban areas, but find themselves working against a State politics that associates tribes geographically with rural areas and reservations and African-American communities with formerly redlined urban areas. Many Truth and Healing Council meetings do occur in remote rural areas controlled by tribes, and land is always a primary topic. People desire material access to places for ceremony, water and traditional foods, but speak up even more for the restoration of relationships to land and places. California Executive Order N-15-19 mandates returning “natural” lands to tribes, but speakers want to rebuild local economies in these places, and the majority of California’s Native population is urban. Native Californian participants also steward and claim relationships to urban places.2 Reparations Task Force meetings, on the other hand, exclusively took place in California’s large cities. They focused on the legacy of redlining and urban divestment, resulting in dozens of housing related recommendations. Speakers at those meetings, however, also described underinvestment and harms in rural areas and sought justice for those policies. They described how the State dispossessed or limited Black land through eminent domain, flooding, incorporation, and sundown laws. Expert witness the late Professor Terrance Dean, Denison University, testified on the founding of the thriving Black agricultural community of Allensworth, the backlash it experienced for its success from the railroad company, and the denial of wells promised that would have facilitated its continued growth. The late Lawrence Lucas, USDA Minority Employees leader, testified on the inadequacy of the USDA’s settlements to Black farmers for years of discrimination. Emerging reparative policy recommendations for rural land access, including Native land returns and investment in Black foodways and recreation, still need supplementary interpretation in rural areas, where spaces of self-determination (Scott Lewis 2024) have been made less legible.
How do we talk about rural areas in reparative economic justice?
Over the last decade, growing attention and scholarship on urban gentrification and displacement changed how many planners and municipalities think about community investment. More Californians are aware of redlining: Richard Rothstein’s 2017 The Color of Law was a popular philanthropic book club read, and this led civic-community partnerships to re-organize infrastructure and housing grants from the ground up. Many civic administrations made efforts to change their processes to connect with on-the-ground community visions and follow local leadership. An exemplary program is the State’s Transforming Climate Communities grant, which requires an MOU with local community organizations. Rural areas do not yet have a similar psychosocial shorthand for racially-motivated exclusion, beyond the return of ancestral Indigenous lands. Native land returns are significant reasons to celebrate, but they also teach us where communities are still constrained, as this Truth and Healing Council participant describes:
“What we want - we need - is our land base, we need something. Nations cannot develop without that land base. You cannot have your culture and your language. You can have those things but without a place to practice them, it's so hard. It's so hard. I get to go back to my homeland maybe once a year, twice a year, because I have to live down in the valley. It's like a three, four hour drive. And we don't have the money for gas to get up there all the time. And we can't gather up there, we can only go certain times of the year and by the time we get up there during that time of the year, you know, it's too late to gather anything, or it's frost, or it's too hot. And my elders, they can't make it up there no more.” - Truth and Healing Council Speaker, Fresno Quarterly Meeting, February 2023.
The Truth and Healing Council has postponed the release of its recommendations and documentary—originally planned for this year to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the State’s founding—until 2026. Californian legislators are re-introducing bills to establish the California Freedmen’s agency and get to work on evaluating potential land returns to descendents of enslaved African Americans. Regardless of the political successes or failures of the reparations processes, the State maintains equity goals for the billions of dollars invested each year into carbon sequestration and climate smart agriculture. Despite a requirement that 25% of California’s Climate Investments go to disadvantaged communities, many of these investments continue to support current farm and landowners in large rural zip codes, the vast majority of whom are white. Equity policies that use a standard of parity,3 as the USDA does, erase centuries of dispossession that forced their ancestors to give up their land. Just as homesteading established white farming families on Californian land and land grant universities supplemented their skills, new investments in sustainable agriculture and climate-smart land management must have reparative equity goals, not parity. In rural California these climate ethics around land use also meet reparations ethics around sovereignty.
For further information:
Reparative Geographies of California (ArcGIS StoryMap)
On and Of Land: Statewide Tribal and Native Views on Land Access
Footnotes
1.see, e.g. Woods 2017 on the land dispossession experience of African Americans, Bauer 2009 on Native Americans, Chan 1987 on Asian Americans, Mitchell 1996 and Fox and Delgado 2004 on Mexican Americans, and the legacy of constrained land ownership continues to propagate poverty and disparities to this day despite the death of some racial stereotypes.
2.includes many Native Americans with tribal affiliations outside the state. Cause of migration includes the Urban Relocation Act, which promised sustainable employment but often tracked women into domestic work and men into low wage jobs.
3.Parity means that if 3% of the current farmers in a County are Black, Native, or any other race, that group should receive 3% of the available funds.
References
Bauer, William. “We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here:” Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941. University of North Carolina Press., 2009.
Byrd, Jodi. “Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There” Cherokee Freedmen, Internal Colonialism, and the Racialization of Citizenship. Chapter in The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Chan, Sucheng. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Fox, Jonathan and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Editors. Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States. La Jolla, California: University of California, San Diego, 2004.
Lewis, Jovan Scott. “Black Life beyond Injury: Relational Repair and the Reparative Conjuncture.” Political Geography 108 (January 1, 2024): 102963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102963.
Hill, Shoun, Director. “I’m Just a Layman in Pursuit of Justice", 2020. https://blackfarmersinsearchofjusticefilm.com/.
Mitchell, Don. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liverlight, 2017.
— Marisa Raya
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