Monday was Indigenous Peoples’ Day in California and the Bay Area recognized it in several ways.   

In an early celebration on Saturday, tribes from around the country gathered for a powwow celebration in Berkeley, site of the first Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992. The country was preparing that year to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Instead of a Quincentennial Jubilee, the city of Berkeley opted to recognize the contributions and legacy of those who lived here long before Columbus claimed to have discovered America.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.