Restorying the Land: Reframing Institutional Responsibility on Native Homelands

• In Event: Truth and Healing in California: Land, Education, and the Remembering, Restorying, Reclaiming Project

Abstract

At UCLA, the RRR project unfolded as a case study rooted in Tovaangar, the homeland of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. The project wove together archival records, university land histories, and Indigenous memory to trace the multi-layered histories of campus land acquisition, the erasure of Native presence in university planning, and the rise of symbolic gestures like land acknowledgments and public ceremony. These findings were shaped by grounded conversations with Tribal leaders and California Indian researchers whose insights reframed the university not simply as a site of extraction, but as one that could—and must—be reoriented toward relationship and repair.

Rather than stopping at critique, the research generated a future-facing framework for institutional responsibility that challenged treating land as metaphor, affirming that viewing land as kin requires accountability that is both ethical and material. Moreover, it modeled what becomes possible when research is co-created, Tribally directed, and rooted in long-term relational commitments. By centering sovereignty and community priorities, the case study reframed memory work as a form of Indigenous resurgence, offering a methodological and relational blueprint for universities across California. It calls on institutions to reckon with the historical conditions of their existence while co-creating pathways forward that are Tribally meaningful—not just institutionally palatable. In doing so, it embodies the broader vision of RRR: to generate practices of unforgetting that do not merely reform the university, but restore Indigenous presence, possibility, and futurity in the places our peoples have always called home

Author

• Theresa J. Stewart-Ambo, University of California - Los Angeles