Indigenous Life on the Mendocino Coast
speaking at the May 17, 2024 Change Our Name Teach-in
I'm U’ilani Wesley. I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much for listening. And I thank so many of you in this room for coming to talk and ask questions. I am a guest here. I started off as an uninvited guest, and I became ohana [family] here.
So I have family here, but I want you for a moment, I want everybody just take a moment, and really dig deep within yourself. Where do you come from? Where did your ancestors come from? What did they eat? What did they survive?
What did they hold sacred? What did they sing sacred? I think a lot of people don't know or understand the complexity of the indigenous people of this land because they don't know their own. It's hard to know the sacredness of sacred songs, of sacred dance, of sacred ceremony, if you don't practice it yourself. It's been a long journey for me here.
I am Kanakamoa [an Indigenous Hawaiian], practicing my practices here on Northern Pomo land. I've had to do a lot of learning and I've had to learn a lot of humility, and [develop] a lot of hard skin… as well because there's a lot of trauma here.… I have a beautiful, diverse family, but the journey has not been easy.
I also used to live in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That journey was about the same. It was a tough journey, especially when you don't look like most people in that area. It comes with a lot of issues. A lot of issues and a lot of things that are unsaid; which is that there's a lot of toxicity still within the soil and the air of this land that we all have a responsibility to fix.
And changing a name, to me, is just a small way of creating some deep healing that needs to happen. And, I wasn't going to speak here unless I could come with a person of this land, with a Pomo. Because how can I say anything about their land without them being here? So I don't wanna take up a whole bunch of time [before she speaks], but I just wanted to tell you a little bit about our journey, my journey here.
What I saw online was not what I saw here immediately when I arrived. It was hard to get a job. There was a lot of tension with my children growing up. I'll tell you about this one instance in town, but I won't mention the store name at this time. When my husband applied, and he's sitting in the audience here. He's a beautiful, amazing, talented black man, and he applied at a company.
And the woman told him, “I'm sorry. We're not taking any more applications. And something just didn't sit right within my belly, so I applied. He has more expertise in working in retail than I do, and he didn't get the job. So when I applied, I got the job on the spot.
And it wasn't because of my charm, because I wasn't very nice. But I think it was this, the color of my skin. So I said to her, “That's funny. I have to tell you a story. My husband, was just in here, yesterday and you said, you're no longer taking any applications.”
“Oh, really? I don't know why I would have said that. Oh, somebody else would have.” I said, “No. It was you.”
And she was very stoic looking. Then I realized, you know, there was a deeper problem here. There was a problem that a lot of people didn't see because they didn't have the skin my ohana had. They didn't have the skin, the skin color, the kinky hair. He wasn't the crazy Hawaiian who wanted to come and call everybody out on their bs, or their own kindness, but I also would hug you just as quick as anybody could do.
I would love to be so hard that I could talk very brash and honestly to you about the undue toxicity that some folks carried. I saw it very clearly in the school district in how my children were treated. But in the cracks, I saw beautiful people. Beautiful, amazing people that I have deep connections with. Deep safety connections with, that I know that they would have my family, including a few teachers who have my children, who looked after my children, protected my children, spoke up for my children.
But it wasn't as many as I would have hoped to have. So the journey was hard, but not as hard as it was for the people of this land. That was a very little itty bitty hardship for me and my ohana to experience compared to the atrocities the people of this land, continue to experience, continue to be burdened with. And they're very humbled, beautiful, amazing human beings that are so resilient.
[At Xa Kako Dile] we have a 6 acre indigenous woman led farm. It is 6 acres at Fortunate Farm, and we lease it to grow food for our tribal relatives here, primarily. [We] grow medicine for our tribal relatives here, but also for our underserved communities here, our underserved community members here.