Take Down the Land Acknowledgment
The school district's public statement is harmful. We can do better.
My kids attend school in Marin County, California. In 2024, the school district published a land acknowledgment on its website declaring that the district stands on unceded stolen land.
The publication of a land acknowledgment by a local government entity in a deep blue county may surprise no one, but we should talk about it. It is harmful and does not serve the Coast Miwok. The school district should take it down. If it must make a statement, then a far better alternative is available.
Some may argue that now is not the time for addressing local land acknowledgments and that the critical energy expended here should be redirected towards more pressing issues. A lawless and corrupt president has now committed the United States to a war of unimaginable cost. The Republican Party and its voters enabled and abetted and caused this crisis. Why pause for even a moment to criticize the blue school district when a red political party is running riot?
Here’s why: the careless anti-Americanism of this land acknowledgment and others has persuaded too many people that Democrats are fundamentally not on their side. I realize this rationale opens up a very challenging debate about why people looked at a convicted felon with immoral character and chose him and his enablers. I won’t try to solve that puzzle, but I will argue that the school’s existing land acknowledgment contributes to an us-versus-them mentality and places Democrats in the “them” camp. When Republicans argued in 2024 that Democrats are for “them,” that message had resonance that went far beyond mere pronouns.
I would not argue that the school district should take down or change its land acknowledgment merely to appease Republican voters. The problem with the land acknowledgment is that it is wrong. The school district should take it down, or at least change it, as a matter of civic leadership and educational standards. No further justification is needed.
I. Learning about the school district’s land acknowledgment
Let’s start with the Tam Union High School District’s land acknowledgment.
Here it is:
Over the last year, I asked people in the community about the school district’s public statement.
Public records request
The school district published this land acknowledgment on its website in May 2024. About one year later, I submitted a public records request to the district, asking for all records relating to the land acknowledgment. The school district responded that it had no records and did not know when the land acknowledgment was posted to the website.
QR Code
After receiving no information from the school, I followed the QR Code “to support the Coast Miwok projects” on the land acknowledgment page, which led to a gofundme page for “Coast Miwok of Southern Marin Project” (the link is now broken). Links on the gofundme page led to the Coast Miwok of Southern Marin Project, which listed contact information for Lucina Vidauri, Olompali Elder. I asked Ms. Vidauri whether she had authored the land acknowledgment and she replied that she had not. She suggested that perhaps the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin was involved. Later, when I asked the Tribal Council if one of its members authored or advised on the land acknowledgment, its representative replied that no one currently serving on the Tribal Council had been involved or consulted on the land acknowledgment.
Lead by Learning
The first line of the acknowledgement and the footer both reference a group called Lead by Learning, which is part of Mills College. A Lead by Learning representative informed me that the land acknowledgment currently posted on the school district’s website is a photo/screenshot of a slide from a retreat that Lead by Learning and the school district hosted in 2022. Lead by Learning stated that it did not produce the land acknowledgment; rather, the district did. It recommended that I reach out to Assistant Superintendent Kelly Lara and a teacher who led the land acknowledgment at the retreat to learn more.
At last, I apparently had found the administrator who apparently directed the school district to post the land acknowledgment on its website. I asked Ms. Lara if she could speak with me about the acknowledgment. She replied and asked what questions I had, but then declined to respond to my questions.
School district board members
As a last stop, I emailed the five elected school district board members to ask for their comments on the land acknowledgment and a prior version of this post. Four of the five did not respond. One of them, Kevin Saavedra, asked whether I had any Native American ancestry and, when I replied that I did not think so, he told me that this topic “should not be appropriated by someone like you with no Native American ancestry.” When I asked him why it was appropriate for the school district to comment on this issue but not appropriate for me to do so, he replied:
Land acknowledgments are hollow gestures, performative. They accomplish nothing substantive while doing actual harm to the objective of educating people about the history of native peoples and their experience in this country starting with colonization.
When I asked Mr. Saavedra if he was open to taking down the existing land acknowledgement on the school district website, he did not answer. That said, he was the only person who corresponded or shared any substantive views with me, so while he was adversarial and critical, I appreciated his willingness to communicate.
To summarize, I did not find anyone who would defend the land acknowledgment or admit authorship. The school district said it had no records. School officials declined to answer questions. The person to whom the land acknowledgment linked via QR Code (Lucina Vidauri) was not involved. Neither was the Tribal Council. The school board mostly declined to comment, except for one board member who strongly denounced all land acknowledgments, albeit for reasons that are very different from mine.
II. Reasons to take down the land acknowledgment
The school district should take down its land acknowledgment for many reasons. It is badly written and extremely vague and therefore hard to understand. And what it does manage to convey is harmful: it asserts that the existing political order is fundamentally illegitimate because it rests on stolen land. It is openly hostile to the United States.
Going right to the key political claim, the acknowledgment’s text begins: “Tamalpais Union High School District and Lead by Learning acknowledge that we are on unceded stolen ancestral land of Coast Miwok people.” And the next line states, “TUHSD stands on what are the stolen lands of the Coast Miwok people who have inhabited and been the stewards of the Marin and Sonoma areas for more than 13,000 years.”
When the land acknowledgment speaks of “stolen lands” and the “stewards of the Marin and Sonoma areas,” it is not talking about a discrete property crime, but instead the loss of self-governance by an ethnic group. At its core, the land acknowledgment claims that an ethnic group has a right to govern that persists into the present day, which is why the lands remain “unceded” and “stolen.” It is not any individual’s right to live in Marin County that has been lost or any specific lot, but instead one ethnic group’s governance or control over an entire two-county region. The descendants of the Coast Miwok live and work in Marin and Sonoma today, and in that sense, they enjoy the land today just as others do. What has disappeared – what has been “stolen” – is the Coast Miwok’s historic sovereignty.
Put another way, the land acknowledgment is not about who owns or lives on certain parcels of land in the sense of a dispute between property owners or claimants under one government. Rather, it references a dispute between rival nations or political factions about which government is legitimate. Claims that a government stands on stolen land are ultimately claims about who has the right to assert sovereignty. Surprisingly, the public school district has declared itself to be illegitimate—a foreign occupier of stolen lands—on the ground that its public property lies within Marin County.
Does the school district really believe that it has no lawful right to exist or act on behalf of the government in Marin County, i.e., that is a foreign occupier of unceded stolen territory? Probably not! This explains why board member Saavedra describes all land acknowledgments, which must include his own district’s public statement, as “hollow” and “performative.” The wanton insincerity of the district’s proclamation is a reason to take it down. And if it is sincere, that is even worse, because the district would be calling its own right to exist into question. The district either stole the land or it didn’t.
People who proclaim that a government stands on “stolen land” fail to confront their own rhetoric. If school district stole the land as a matter of property law, then the rightful owner should go to court and get it back. But that’s not what they mean. The “stolen land” proponents, if they are sincere, are telling us that the government is not legitimate and forever tarnished. They are advancing the view that a person’s legitimacy and worth in the community flows from the number of years that his or her ancestors lived on specific lands, not from our values or ideas or our shared commitments or law. That blood-and-soil ethos is anti-American. America aspires to be a place where every citizen is equal, regardless of race or heritage, and ethnic ancestry neither diminishes nor enhances one’s rights or claims.
III. A better way to acknowledge historical wrongs
While the school district should take down the land acknowledgment, if it must make a public statement about the Coast Miwok, then it should replace the existing version. The school district can acknowledge historical wrongs without asserting that the school stands on stolen land, which, again, is effectively the same thing as declaring that the school should not be there at all. Here is another way (but not the only way) to tell the story:
The Coast Miwok have lived in what is now Marin County for thousands of years. They lost their land and way of life in the 1700s, when Spanish missionaries arrived forced them to live in mission compounds in San Francisco and San Rafael. Although the Coast Miwok survived, missionization caused them to suffer wrongful servitude, widespread disease, and severe cultural disruption. Although this historic wrong cannot be undone, the District recognizes that acquiring land in Marin County may help the Coast Miwok to preserve and promote their culture and heritage. The District encourages residents to contribute financially to the Coast Miwok’s efforts to reclaim their ancestral lands.
For those who want more detailed history, I put it in this endnote.1
The proposed statement is better than the existing land acknowledgment because it eliminates the description of the school district as the foreign occupier of unceded stolen lands, and replaces it with a statement that seeks to acknowledge and honor the Coast Miwok within the existing political order. It also replaces the unexplained and opaque reference to “cultural genocide” with a more detailed description of missionization. In this way, the proposed statement delivers what the existing land acknowledgment demands but fails to do: it shares Coast Miwok’s history.
The proposed statement eliminates the reference to “piracy tactics of the English,” which is unexplained and inaccurate. No evidence shows that English piracy caused “cultural genocide.” The reference to the English presumably refers to Sir Francis Drake’s landing at Tomales Bay in 1579, where he encountered the Coast Miwok. The contemporaneous and detailed written account of that encounter reflects that it was peaceful. The website hosted by the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin tells a “somewhat different story” but affirms that the Coast Miwok survived and commemorated their understanding of the encounter with ceremonies and songs. Therefore, the English written account and the Tribal Council’s website both contradict the land acknowledgment’s assertion that English piracy obliterated the Coast Miwok’s culture.
Finally, the proposed statement replaces the land acknowledgment’s call to share history and recognize indigenous backgrounds with a call to contribute money for the Coast Miwok’s land acquisition projects. The political goal of every land acknowledgment, I would think, should be to enable the descendants of native peoples to gather on land where their ancestors lived, and should propose a concrete step for achieving that goal. The existing land acknowledgment fails in this regard; it calls for history-sharing and gratitude. If people need land, then they need money to buy land, not a statement that the school district stands on stolen land.
IV. The only thing we have to fear …
I’ve offered some opinions here. I think they are right, but even more than that, I think that we should be able to discuss this subject. This is an article about a public school district’s statement. Voters in our community elect board members to run the school district, and these board members are ultimately responsible for the school district’s public statements. This year, in the 2026 midterm elections, voters will elect two members of the five-member board. Do we want a school district that proclaims itself to be the illegitimate occupier of stolen land, or would we rather not make that statement? Voters can weigh in on this issue.
I also have to mention a certain fear that attaches to issues like this one. The fear is that vocal proponents of land acknowledgments will misconstrue everything that I’ve written here and attack me from the left. I have written article after article about the horrors of the Trump administration. Where I live, those are all fine and welcome and low risk. But when I turn to Democratic or left-leaning politics and policy (Republicans do not publish land acknowledgment like the one discussed here), that’s when people start to express concerns. They will say, “I agree with everything you say, but are you sure you want talk about this kind of thing in public?”
I understand that concern. If I express a viewpoint that is arguably “Republican-coded,” then people may fly off the handle and assume that I must secretly harbor other Republican views. Polarization runs deep, the most polarized are the most vocal, and straying outside the party line may be a sin. I want to push back against the polarized mindset, which elevates putting people in categories over listening to arguments. Here, if you want, listen to the land acknowledgment and the arguments, and without assuming anything about identity or motivations, just ask:
Should we take it down?
California’s first settlers came from Asia thousands of years ago, crossing the Bering Straits into Alaska, and then traveling south along the coast. Some of them lived in small bands in Marin County, where they hunted salmon and deer and gathered acorns for food. Their cultural tradition had its own mythology, art, and dances. Before the 1700s, these people—those who eventually became known as the Coast Miwok—had little contact with Europeans. In the 1770s, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Coast Miwok lived in the area now known as Marin and Sonoma.
In the late 1700s, Spanish missionaries traveled north from Mexico and established missions in the San Francisco Bay Area. They sought to convert the native inhabitants to Christianity. The missionaries forced the native inhabitants to live in missions such as Mission San Francisco de Asis and Mission San Rafael, where conversion involved learning Spanish and the tenets of Christianity. Because of forced missionization, the Coast Miwok were unable to practice and thus lost some of their cultural traditions.
In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain and sought to end the mission system. In 1834, Mexico freed the Coast Miwok from the Spanish missions, but it did not help them to return to their former way of life. Some were enslaved. Many died of smallpox and other diseases. Mexico granted the lands of Marin County to Mexican and Spanish settlers and their descendants, not the Coast Miwok, with two significant exceptions.
The Mexican government granted Rancho Olompali, consisting of around 8,900 acres to Camillo Ynitia, who had been the headman of his village. In 1852, Ynitia sold most of the land to James Black, retaining 1,480 acres for himself, which his daughter later sold. The State of California eventually purchased 700 acres of the Olompali lands in 1977, and the area is now Olompali State Historic Park, near Novato.
The Mexican government granted Rancho Nicasio, consisting of around 80,000 acres, to a group of around 500 Coast Miwok. But it did not honor the grant. In 1844, it granted much of the same property to Spanish officials. In 1846, American settlers in Sonoma County declared that California was an independent republic in the Bear Flag Revolt. In the Mexican-American war, the Sonoma rebels joined the United States in battles against Mexican troops. In 1847, troops from Iowa and New York arrived in California to find that the war was over.
After California joined the union in 1850, the new state established a commission to hear claims about who owned land. In 1855, the Public Lands Commission rejected a claim by Coast Miwok claimants that they owned Rancho Nicasio, siding instead with the claimants of Spanish descent. By 1880, only about 60 Coast Miwok lived in Marin County.
Today, two tribes represent the Coast Miwok in Marin County—the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin. In the 2000s, the Graton Rancheria purchased 254 acres of land for its reservation near Rohnert Park. In 2023, the Tribal Council of Marin purchased 26 acres of land in Nicasio, with the assistance of donors.
Sources:
Coast Miwok of Southern Marin Project
Coastal Miwok Tribal Council of Marin
Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria
Library of Congress, Early California History: An Overview
Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin
Olompali State Historic Park - Heritage
Randall Milliken, Ethnohistory and Ethnogeography of the Coast Miwok and Their Neighbors, 1783-1840 (June 2009), available at https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/upload/2009-Final-Coast-Miwok-Report.pdf
The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake [excerpt available at https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text5/drake.pdf]