Palo Alto, page 80
Stanford does not need to wait for the U.S. federal government to recognize the Muwékma Ohlone’s sovereign claim. The university has already demonstrated that: In 1989, in what the New York Times called an “exceptional agreement,” Stanford worked with Cambra to return hundreds of Ohlone skeletons to the tribe for reburial.10 It was a voluntary move made under student-activist pressure—as well as the pressure of Cambra’s demonstrated ability to drive attention. The reaction from the settler academic community was almost pure condemnation. The officially neutral president of the American Anthropological Association, Roy Rappaport, told the Times that “everybody wants to satisfy the Indians, but we would like to find ways to make it possible for us to continue to learn what we can from the remains.” The consensus, however, has changed, and history already judges Stanford authorities ahead of their time on this count relative to their peer institutions. By recognizing the Muwékma Ohlone, the university set a precedent. But is recognition enough?
In his purposing of anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard criticizes the “largely rights-based/recognition orientation that has emerged as hegemonic over the last four decades” within indigenous politics, an attitude that harks back to the 1970s and the cultural path of Panther-inspired politics in the final quarter of the twentieth century.11 In its place, Coulthard calls for “a resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non-exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions.” This decolonization agenda is founded on, in the concise one-word sentence of Malcolm X: “Land.” Control over territory is necessary for that critical refashioning, which is a futuristic, forward-looking process. But here, the same Ohlone land, the territory that could provide a basis for the kind of practice and experimentation Coulthard lays out, has been the foundation for the rise of Stanford, the Palo Alto System, Silicon Valley, and the capitalist world built on top of it. It’s a high-stakes town.
I can’t know what it would be like in practice for Stanford to withdraw from Palo Alto, and I understand that at first it probably strikes many readers as a maximalist proposal, but in the context of the exhausting trends we’ve observed since the Anglo colonization of Alta California, returning the land strikes me as downright pragmatic. I assume that the Muwékma Ohlone’s moral-historical claim will not persuade the Stanford board of trustees to turn the 8,000-plus acres over, regardless of who is buried there. I don’t expect that the spiritual pain haunting the people who have settled in Palo Alto will be decisive, either, no matter how many of the community’s children destroy themselves and no matter how historically resonant their suicide method is. It’s obvious how Palo Alto won’t change.
For a moment, however, let’s say in theory that the board could be convinced by a reasoned argument that earth and the people who live here would be better off in important ways if Stanford—the largest landowner and leading organization in Palo Alto, at least—turned over the land it occupies and its other assets derived thereby to indigenous claimants. Let’s also assume the courts recognize that Leland and Jane Stanford’s injunction against transferring the land is less legitimate than the ancestral right of the people they took it from, and are willing to allow the move. With those modest suppositions in place, I don’t think it is a hard case to make. The Palo Alto System elevates few and subordinates many by design, and it uses up the land to do it. (Recall the wholesale destruction of half the North American continent required to finance this new California Harvard in the first place.) The rise of global capitalism has rapidly reduced the planet’s habitability in fewer than two centuries; does anyone seriously believe this place can survive that way for another two? If the creatures of the earth are to have a medium-term chance, then at the very least we need some space right now to develop, practice, and deploy new modes of production, distribution, and reproduction—social metabolism. As a fortuitously located, substantial piece of land to which hundreds of identified indigenous people have a specific claim and where, contrariwise, no individual settler holds a property deed, the acres known during the long twentieth century as Stanford present a unique opportunity for the human race. As that plot of land once nurtured the Silicon Valley extraction machine, by repurposing this tiny corner of what was taken from American Indians, it could be possible to draw a new path, away from exhaustion and toward recovery, repair, and renewal.
Palo Alto is a great place for an international indigenous hub; as the scholar Renya Ramirez writes in her apposite study, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond, it already has been one.12 Indian relocation sent a disproportionate number of tribal members from job-poor reservations around the country to the booming Bay Area during the postwar space settler years. Indians from Mexico and Central America came north during the century’s fourth quarter, driven by falling commodity prices, climate change, state terror, and capitalist gangsterism. Devastated by the changes to the coffee market, Mixtecos from the Mexican state of Oaxaca now comprise California’s largest indigenous community.13 As with Vietnamese immigration to the Bay Area after the war, violent proletarianization and displacement fed growth in Silicon Valley and the larger Cold War West. This drew indigenous people to the state from across the Pacific even; California has the world’s fifth-largest Hmong population, behind China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The Bay Area also has the country’s highest concentration of Pacific Islanders outside the Pacific Islands. As Renya Ramirez documents, these California international collisions haven’t always been friendly or productive, but she gives the reader a sense of problems being worked through, of something big coming together as Indians in the Americas work across colonial borders. Ramirez is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska as well as a Palo Altan. She grew up in town, the daughter of Anglo Stanford professor Robert Carver North and the indigenous activist, double Stanford graduate, and Palo Alto art teacher Woesha Cloud. Like Rosemary Cambra, Cloud joined the 1969 Alcatraz occupation, taking a long, strange commute to teach children’s art at the experimental school. They arrived at an exhausted shell of a prison in the middle of the bay and created a school, and they did it in the name of Indians of All Tribes.
Repairing the world is a lot to ask from any people, and though I expect the $37 billion-plus (at the time of this writing) in the Stanford endowment would help, restoring the biosphere to sustainable footing is the task of our time. Foisting that job on indigenous tribes after everything the U.S.-led global order has put them through is, in the late twentieth-century NorCal lingo with which I was raised, a dick move. And yet it is American indigenous internationalists who have been most eager to assume the burden. In 2020, indigenous Bolivians led the movement that stopped a capitalist coup and returned the socialist party to power. In Canada and the U.S., indigenous pipeline blockades have been the main obstacle to the further extension of fossil-fuel infrastructure. In British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have issued an eviction order to Coastal GasLink. The Dakota Access Pipeline blockade led by “water protectors” of the Standing Rock Sioux was a landmark act of resistance that I predict will have increasing significance as the century proceeds. And this is just a selection of examples. The Standing Rock sequence included what historians have called the continent’s largest gathering of indigenous people in a century, invigorating a new radical internationalism between tribes.14 It seems to me that the only way an institution like Stanford or a place like Palo Alto can truly invest in the twenty-first-century indigenous-led movement to protect the biosphere is to divest from the dynamics of colonialist exploitation that got us here in the first place. If we’re going to make it, owners will have to give up on existing oil and gas reserves, forgo profits and accept losses, and if that’s to happen without catastrophic violence, then it will require just the kind of renunciation I’m imagining for the Stanford lands. I can’t think of anything better for Palo Alto, any greater tribute to the memory of that dead young man, than to begin this process.
Looking to the radical internationalist indigenous movement for leadership at this historical moment is not about some false nostalgia for a time before colonization and the rise of world capitalism. It’s not even about some false nostalgia for the Panther-inspired militants of the 1960s and ’70s, the high point of postwar California anticapitalism. As the Kul Wicasa activist-scholar Nick Estes writes, the water-protection movement exemplified by the Standing Rock camp, “as much as it reaches into the past, is a future-oriented project”:
It forces some to confront their own unbelonging to the land and the river. How can settler society, which possesses no fundamental ethical relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premised on justice? There is no simple answer. But whatever the answer may be, Indigenous peoples must lead the way. Our history and long traditions of Indigenous resistance provide possibilities for futures premised on justice. After all, Indigenous resistance is animated by our ancestors’ refusal to be forgotten, and it is our resolute refusal to forget our ancestors and our history that animates our visions for liberation. Indigenous revolutionaries are the ancestors from the before and before and the already forthcoming.15
The future need not be synonymous with the exhaustion of earth, the liquidation of the organized working class, the full commoditization of our time and environment. What is the point of being a species with the dual gifts of analysis and invention if we can’t stop ourselves from despoiling the only home we’ve ever had? The forfeit of Stanford’s vast accumulated wealth is the biggest immediate step toward a habitable planet I believe we can take at such a low cost. Unlike the proposal to return the U.S. national parks to indigenous control, ceding Palo Alto would require immediate sacrifice from particular elements of the ruling class, but without taking anything that could be reasonably said to belong to any living settlers.16 Given nonprofit Stanford’s surprisingly significant role in producing profit, breaking up the community wouldn’t be painless for capital, but I see that as one of the proposal’s virtues. The return and critical refashioning of the LSJU lands is something like the minimum required action to preserve the possibility of a relatively peaceful transition to a sustainable world system; if such a modest move remains unspeakable this late in the ecological game, then reasonable deliberation doesn’t seem so reasonable after all. It can never be reasonable to destroy the planetary systems that preexist reason and provide its sole known foundation.
“Such planning and such action, however, will never be undertaken by a government run by and for the rich, as every capitalist government is and must be. To demand these things from a capitalist government is to demand that it cease to be capitalist.”17 Pauls Baran and Sweezy wrote these sentences in Monopoly Capital with regard to the democratic demand that the state improve working-class housing, and they seem even more applicable here. Unfortunately, I do not think the Stanford board of trustees (a capitalist government of sorts) will return the university lands. If they wanted to, I do not think the courts would allow them to. As has been demonstrated repeatedly over the course of Palo Alto’s history, profits protect themselves. Chairwoman Nijmeh puts it succinctly, sardonically: “The Bay Area’s real estate is too expensive to belong to the indigenous population.”18
Profits search for the necessary people, attitudes, and weapons to do what needs to be done, and profits find them. That is not just how capitalism works; that’s how it’s supposed to work. To the high priests of the ruling class in their literal Palo Alto tower that Herbert Hoover built, capitalism’s steel coldness elevates it above the species with our partiality, above the planet and its specificity. Like God’s, capital’s ways are no more escapable for being destructive, even ghastly. By reducing everything to returns, the profit system can understand and process it all. It’s a system of forces, not men, and if those forces only speak the language of cost, then so be it. Those of us devoted to the earth certainly can’t let it burn because we’re not willing to make ourselves understood.
Recall what the April Third Movement wrote about Stanford and Vietnam: “We are engaged in a conflict with the kind of men—and some of the very men—whose interests got us into Vietnam, and whose disenchantment with the rising costs of that conflict will eventually get us out.… The struggle at Stanford, then, is a microcosm: the trustees’ intransigence will not give way to moral persuasion or majority votes any more than our outcries have ended the war. If this view is correct, then the trustees will respond only to rising costs.” As the A3M found, it is possible by conscious force of will to remove one’s self from capitalism’s asset column and become a cost. Not easy, perhaps, but possible.
Eventually, capital will withdraw from Palo Alto. Given its druthers, capital will use the place up until it’s no longer worth the trouble. Since capitalists like living in the Bay Area, by the time they’re finished with it they’re likely to have exhausted much of the rest of the planet. Though our problems face the world and the human species as a whole—just ask a Silicon Valley techie who can’t go outside because there’s too much smoke in the air—the solutions are of a different order. “For the earth to live, capitalism must die,” Nick Estes concludes, and in retracing a materialist history of that system, it’s hard to disagree.19 And if, against the odds, the earth’s partisans win that battle, if through the rapid coordinated flapping of wings we butterflies bring this chilly display case to a shattering concrete end, we will have fought it in collective self-defense, as a last resort. That’s where we are now. The questions left, as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg political theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson lays them out, are “How?” and “With (and without) whom?”20 Even in Palo Alto, that belly of the capitalist beast, history suggests that those questions have specific answers, if not precisely what those answers are. We have no choice but to find them.
Footnotes
i This quote is repeated often—it’s a good one—but it is a little too good to be true. Hannah Arendt uses it to begin her 1945 essay, “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism,” crediting the biography of Rhodes by South African settler author Sarah Gertrude Millin. Millin cites W. T. Stead’s account in The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes. Stead was something like a press agent for Rhodes, and Millin allots the sidereal musing the credulity it deserves: “Such are the preposterous words Stead puts into Rhodes’ mouth (how patient is paper!). We are to believe Rhodes seriously spoke them…” Arendt’s omission robbed many readers of Millin’s critical lens in the decades since. Still, press agents are part of imperialism, too, and if Rhodes hadn’t been Rhodes someone else would have found value in his Stead. The quote then speaks for impersonal capital rather than a person in particular, which is all the better for our purposes. Sarah Gertrude Millin, Cecil Rhodes (Harper & Brothers, 1933), 158.
ii Sitting on top of the burial ground is the Stock Farm Road Children’s Center, an earlychildhood learning program affiliated with Stanford.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wife, Julia, and the rest of my family: Grace and Zach; Aija, Tia, and Zoë; Max and Will; my parents, Daniel and Ellen; and every one of my countless aunts, uncles, and cousins—both by blood and by chance.
To my editors and publishers, whose wise judgment allows me to write for a living.
To my agent, Chris, and my editor, Jean, as well as the whole LB team.
To everyone who helped me get out of Palo Alto in one piece: Nick and the Nordlingers, the Foxes and the Coxe/Canines, Robert and Harmony Bakery; Susan Charles, Melinda Mattes, and Woj; Mary, Yuki, Sam, Ariel, Sabrina, Elena, Kelsey, Salome, Rachel, Clare, Skye, Andrew, Kevin, Josh, Hilary, Martin, Zack, Brian, Aaron, Lee, Sara, Maddie, Mollie, Meghan, Elissa, Johanna, Matt, Chris, Karishma, Jon, and even my dickhead wrestling coaches.
To the friends I made as an adult, without whom I would be a different, lesser person: Bob, David, JB, Jo, Jon, Mary, Legba, Sam, Anne, Emily, Johnny, Carly, Katelyn, Jessie, Lily, Brandon, Katie, Robin, Erin, Dee, Sarah, Cecilia, Miranda, Laurie, L.e., Chip, Mike, Matt, Mitch.
To the New Inquiry: Rachel, Rob, Atossa, Sarah, Vicky, Tash, Monalisa, Aaron, Hannah, Ayesha, Sam, Jesse, Adrian, Emily, Nathan, Autumn, Olivia, Helena, Brian, Sarah Nicole, Michael, and JC.
To my academic friends, who are willing to overlook my missing credentials: Tim, Branden, Charles, Shalini, Zach, and Madeline.
To the Philly Childcare Collective and the rest of the InterGalactic Conspiracy of ChildCare Collectives.
To the farms and farmworkers who kept me fed while I wrote: Fruitwood, Spring Hollow, Small Potato, as well as Bonnie and the rest of the Vanilya bagel crew.
To the George Floyd Uprising, the defining event of the period of this writing.
To the Muwékma, to whom Palo Alto will be returned.
To the planet Earth, its people, and its preservation by any means necessary.
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