Reparations are proposed for Black Californians. What about Indigenous people?
LOS ANGELES — For Angela Mooney D'Arcy and other Indigenous Californians, a spirit of racial trauma hangs over some of the richest and most storied stretches of the Golden State.
California —like all of the Americas — is built on a stolen world, D'Arcy says.
The glamorous ocean-view houses of Malibu sit where the Chumash fished, hunted, played and performed rituals.
Every home run at Dodger Stadium soars over the ancestral grounds of "the people of the willow houses," as the Tongva were known.
The luxury subdivisions, country clubs and surfing havens of Orange County occupy the heartland of the Acjachemen people — including D'Arcy's ancestors — who believe their creator placed them at the edge of the Pacific at the dawn of time.
While countering repeated attempts to render them invisible, D'Arcy says, Indigenous people also felt a moral duty to look after the welfare of others within their reach. It's a principle that her Acjachemen elders in Orange County instilled in her.
"People ask why I do anti-racism work — why I want to combat anti-Blackness — and I always say that it is a cultural mandate," says D'Arcy, the founder of the nonprofit Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples in Los Angeles and an activist who
