The Archaeological Research Facility is located in Huichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Ohlone people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Ohlone ancestors and erased living Ohlone people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Ohlone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Background to ARF's Land acknowledgement:
An earlier version of this land acknowledgement, in use during the 2020-21 academic year, was modeled closely on that developed by the Native American Student Development office in partnership with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and aimed primarily to acknowledge the debt that the Archaeological Research Facility owes, and continues to accrue, to the Indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay simply by virtue of its location on their ancestral land. The current version was introduced to draw attention to the particular position of the Archaeological Research Facility, as an archaeological institution, with respect to Indigenous land claims and sovereignty, both as a self-conscious heir to a harmful legacy of extractive research and as an active organization seeking to repair those harms and to direct archaeological research toward the support of Indigenous sovereignty in the Bay Area and abroad. We hope that, by taking the opportunity to inscribe these dual forward- and backward-looking responsibilities in the repeated act of land acknowledgement at events and in spaces associated with the Archaeological Research Facility, we will be better able to maintain constant awareness of these responsibilities in our work and also to encourage community members both on and off campus to seek the engagement of the Archaeological Research Facility in matters pertaining to Indigenous sovereignty in general, and especially when such matters may benefit from the personnel and material resources of the Archaeological Research Facility as an archaeological research center.