Healing on Our Own Terms: Returning Memory through Research and Ceremony

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

Abstract

As institutions across California begin to reckon with their roles in Native land dispossession and the erasure of Tribal histories, the RRR project offers a pathway grounded in Tribal sovereignty, intergenerational memory, and community repair. This final presentation weaves together insights from across campuses, methodologies, and Tribal partnerships to ask: What becomes possible when unforgetting is led by Native peoples and accountable to our homelands? Rather than positioning institutional change as the ultimate goal, RRR reframes transformation as a reciprocal process—one that must also cultivate healing within Tribal communities. Archival research, policy critique, and participatory inquiry are only as powerful as their ability to restore what was taken: memory, trust, relationship, and belonging. This work demands time, ceremony, and a refusal to rush what is sacred.

This presentation centers the labor of Tribal educators, students, and knowledge keepers who are not only unearthing hidden histories, but actively re-seeding futures. Their efforts—often unrecognized within systems that reward speed, compliance, and individual achievement—are foundational to the RRR project. Through their vision and care, unforgetting becomes not just a research activity, but a spiritual, cultural, and communal practice. Guided by a Native mental health practitioner and scholar, this presentation explores how research can foster not only structural change but also personal and collective healing. It explores the emotional and spiritual labor required to carry memory forward in ways that are reparative and relational. Ultimately, RRR asks us to measure education research not by metrics or recognition, but by what it returns to the people whose stories were mishandled or ignored. That return—rooted in love, justice, and relational repair—is the most meaningful form of transformation.

Author

• Magdalena Sunshine Serrano, Community Health Centers of the Central Coast