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STANDING IN BRIGHT sunlight on a cloudless Los Angeles morning, we faced the four directions and remembered those who have gone before us. Cleansed by sage and ochre, we sang and mourned the dead. A familiar experience to some, but these people were not recently deceased, they were part of a reburial ceremony taking place on a small piece of land where hundreds of people had already been reburied, bordered by a waterway that had displaced many of them and the housing development that displaced the rest. Breathing deep the sage smoke and dust, we stood together, once again, to rebury our dead.
Working as a cultural resource monitor on sacred and cultural sites in Southern California is complicated. You are placed in a scenario not because of your education or experience but because of who you are-your identity, heritage, and culture. So every moment you feel despised for being there, it strikes deep and close to your heart. Sometimes these sites are purely cultural areas with artifacts but more often they are burial sites, and as soon as ancestral remains are discovered a heavy burden falls. Often you are seen as a nuisance, as your whole goal is to protect your people and your culture and that often means slowing down the process. To developers, this means spending more money and that is not what they want.
You feel complicit in the development because you're there, the development needs you in order to move forward. More than anything, you'd like the remains not to be disturbed; however, you've also seen what happens when the monitors are only there for the money and they don't lift a finger to make the process dignified. And so in the end you continue on because you want your culture to be treated with respect and dignity and you won't just be paid off to look the other way.
I've watched my father, who has done this work for decades, struggle with this over and over again, and I see the burden that he carries because of it. He always tries to do the right thing for the ancestors. One thing he has said to me and those he works with, over and over again, is,
"Just remember this...