Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Have you ever heard of the Shumi land tax?
[00:00:02] Speaker B: If not, I can tell you what it is.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Well, if you live in the Bay Area, you are probably on top of Ohlone land. The Shumi land tax is something you should pay. But before you make your decision to pay or not, here is some information about the people that were here way before us.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Okay, quick rewind. Back in the days.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Ohlone people were here way before us. They were happy, and they did not have war. They did rituals, fun games. On this barrier land, the animals lived next to them. Even grizzly bears lived here. You might ask, where did they get their food? Well, my friends, they got plenty of food from the land and the earth. When they went fishing or hunting, they only took what they needed and used all the parts of the animal for mattresses, heating, clothing, and bones for tools.
After they would go fishing, they would put their shells in a pile and. And over time, the pile would get bigger and bigger and bigger. Then it would turn into a giant pile called a shell mound. There were once 425 shell mounds in the Bay Area, but this did not stay for long.
Sadly, people started coming from Spain in the 1500s and other places in Europe.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: And thought they were so great that they should have all the land.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: These people are called colonizers.
During this colonization, life for the Ohlone people was very hard.
When they came, they stole all of the Ohlone people's land. They also made Ohlone people build giant buildings for them called missions. They enslaved them.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Can you imagine living in a world like that?
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Then, a couple hundred years later, the gold rush started. In 1848, people came from all over the world to look for gold. But they did not care about the native people living here and all around California.
During the gold rush, the government paid people to kill Ohlone people. It was terrible. These were really hard times for the Ohlone people. They took down the shell mounds, and now they made a fake shell mound. They were like, oh, we can just put a fake shell mound there. The problem is solved. Yay. Not true. But there's still a real shell mound that is being protected.
It's called the West Berkeley Shell mound. If all these things make you frustrated or angry, sad or mad, there is something you can do.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Okay, back to the Shumi land tax.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: What is the Shumi land tax? It's a tax that you can pay a little money over a year that goes to Sogorate Land Trust. They will use the money to help buy back land for the Ohlone people that are still living here. Today.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: I mean, how would you feel if your home was taken from you? So why don't you join me and pay your Shimmy land tax?
[00:02:54] Speaker A: To learn more, go to sigortelandross.org.
