Celebrating Native American Heritage Month

By Reno Franklin, Corporate Sustainability Principal, Tribal Liaison

To understand what Native American Heritage Month means to me, you have to go back to how I was raised.

I’m a member of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria. Our tribe is located along the coast in northwestern Sonoma County. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a public drinking water or wastewater system. We had outhouses on our reservation. I lived in dirt floor shacks, which were built by my great uncles and grandparents.

Our family eventually moved to Santa Rosa. We spent our time between the city and the reservation. Experiencing the differences in living conditions brought perspective to my life and an appreciation of the things we have compared to other people.

My tribe is very much a practitioner of our religion and culture. We’re protectors of our language and land. I only heard the Kashaya Pomo language in my grandparents’ house. I’ve heard the language throughout my life being spoken in prayers and conversation. We’re defined by the cultural law we follow and the religion we continue to practice.

While I have many fond memories of growing up on the reservation, I can’t forget the bad things that happened to our tribe. In the 1880s, the last mass murder of Kashia Pomo people took place in a small Sonoma County town called Plantation. Back then, Kashia Pomo men were hanged in public just for being Indian.

It’s easy for us to celebrate all of the good things and forget about the sacrifices that were made in the past for us. We will never forget the horrific things that were done to us. But we also can’t let those things define who we are moving forward.

Working with Denise Shemenski, PG&E’s deputy tribal liaison, the company is making sure tribal interests and tribal-related issues are considered up front when we’re doing our multi-year plans. For instance, how are tribal interests considered in our Wildfire Mitigation Plan? 

We’re on track for further inclusion of tribal concerns at every level of PG&E. I encourage more departments to take our tribal training so they can understand the tribes in our service area and how best to interact with them, and then take their concerns and move them forward.

We’ve had our senior leadership visit tribes. Recently, our CEO Patti Poppe went to Middletown Rancheria for the first-ever meeting of a PG&E CEO and tribal leaders on an Indian reservation. The relationship with tribes belongs to every coworker.

Something else that’s important are the “land backs.” This year, PG&E gave back two pieces of land in Shasta County consisting of more than 3,500 acres to the Pit River Tribe.

The land backs are a big part of the healing process. Tribal governments are regaining ownership of places sacred to us and have cultural sensitivity, places where we can take our children to teach them about that land and the things that grow on it. When land was forcibly taken away, it became detrimental for tribes to practice their cultures and traditions on land where they weren’t titleholders.

To help capture the importance of the land backs, just imagine where your parents or grandparents are buried. You always went there to pay your respects and all of a sudden, the memorial process gets interrupted, you’re told you can no longer access that site and it’s going to be dug up. The land backs help heal generational trauma. It’s a restorative process.

To Indian people, the healing process is sacred. To see PG&E involved in that while doing everything we can to give these pieces of land back in the best condition possible is something that makes me proud to work for this company.

My ask of everyone during Native American Heritage Month is this: Give thanks for being on this land and the places that are Native American and are sensitive and sacred to us. Many of us drive by them every day and you might be sleeping on one. It’s about recognizing the people who were here first and are still here.