Help Carry This Work Forward

The Noyo Bida Truth Project brings Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members together to reckon honestly with the history of this place, strengthen relationships with the Native peoples whose homelands we inhabit, and create opportunities for education, cultural exchange, community gathering, healing, and repair.

Our work begins with truth—but it does not end there.  

We are working toward a future in which Indigenous languages once again identify places of cultural significance throughout our natural environment; the histories of California Tribal communities are truthfully represented in our public spaces and schools; Indigenous peoples are supported in reclaiming land, culture, and relationship; and the people who live here understand the history of the place we call home.

The ecological richness of the Mendocino Coast and its human history cannot be separated.

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have lived in relationship with these lands and waters. Yet many of the names, monuments, signs, and histories that surround us today obscure or erase that presence.

Fort Bragg itself carries the name of Braxton Bragg, a U.S. Army officer who later became a Confederate general. The military post bearing his name was associated with the Mendocino Indian Reservation and a period in which California Tribal communities endured forced removal, violence, dispossession, and acts of genocide.

Changing our relationship with this history requires more than acknowledging what happened. It asks us to consider what repair can look like now.

The Noyo Bida Truth Project is working toward tangible, lasting changes in our community, including:

• Creating truthful historical signage throughout our community
• Improving the teaching of California and local Indigenous history in our schools
• Addressing public places and institutions that continue to carry the name of Confederate General Braxton Bragg
• Returning Indigenous languages to places of cultural and ecological significance
• Holding healing ceremonies and community gatherings
• Supporting Indigenous-led Land Back initiatives
• Creating a memorial honoring the victims of the Mendocino Indian Reservation
• Working toward the establishment of an Indigenous cultural center
• Supporting Native artists, culture bearers, educators, and community organizations
• Creating opportunities for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to build relationships grounded in truth, respect, and reciprocity

These are not simply projects. Together, they represent a movement from erasure toward visibility, from incomplete history toward truth, and from acknowledgment toward repair.

Many of us live, work, raise our families, build businesses, and find belonging on lands that have sustained Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.

Learning the history of this place is important. But relationship asks something more of us.

It asks how we participate now.

A contribution to the Noyo Bida Truth Project is one way to put that relationship into practice.

Your donation helps us educate, gather, research, advocate, create public programs, support Indigenous artists and culture bearers, build partnerships, and continue working toward the larger changes our community needs.

Noyo Bida is grassroots work.

We depend on people who believe that knowing the truth of where we live—and allowing that truth to change how we relate to this land and to one another—matters.

Every contribution, large or small, gives us greater capacity to bring people together, amplify Indigenous voices, restore Indigenous presence to the public story of this place, and turn understanding into meaningful action.

If you believe our community is ready to move from acknowledgment toward relationship and repair, please help us carry this work forward.