Wukchumni

Yeah, we, we love having a symbol to return to, to help guide the, the spirit of this work.

So yeah, Desiree, who's, who's with us, and, uh, Nayamin Martinez of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, and Darlene Franco, who's the chairwoman of the Wukchumni tribe, these three incredible women who are in their own right working to advance agroecological land management projects over the course of many years, are the people who are actually determining where these funds are going at this time.

Importantly, they have experience not just doing the land management work that is, is auspiced in their organizations, but they've helped build some of these entities in unincorporated communities from their kind of primordial state into being flourishing entities that are now drawing in philanthropic, public, and other capital to help move towards greater land access and equity in the Central Valley.

So they're, they're people who have some qualifications to be able to help nurture some of these other, uh, projects and biomimetically replicate some of these pr- these trajectories that they have helped initiate in different places and spaces and cultures, um, a-across th-this, uh, this beautiful and forgotten geography.

Wilcox was featured in several films and articles in her pursuit of, uh, preserving her people's language.

Wilcox was the last to speak fluent, uh, Wukchumni, but she made sure she wouldn't be the last when she goes, and she did die, uh, a couple years ago.

For over 10 years before her death, she created a dictionary for the language, and she made it to teach her people and her family her...

the language of, uh, Wukchumni.

Not only did she create a written document for it to be preserved, uh, but during her lifetime she taught a lot of classes throughout her community, making sure that it is, that it would keep going.

In 2014, she was documented by The New York Times, um, while she was doing her important work.