In 2020 in the shadow of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, a group of artists, ecologists, and community organizers in Davis came together to host the Sol Summer Camp (or Solidarity Summer Camp). The goal of this inter-generational gathering was to learn about racial and environmental justice from a local perspective, to draw attention to citizen-led campaigns in the region (such as the Wells Fargo boycott, and Davis Climate Strike), and to make and engage with social justice oriented art in Davis. It was in this context that the members of YoloSol started learning with Wintun/Maidu culture-bearer Diana Almendariz, and the seeds of the collective were sown.
Two years later, in 2022, the YoloSol Collective was officially established to cultivate place-based civic engagement and learning about issues of environmental and economic justice in Yolo County through storytelling, experiential arts, and creative nature-based cultural activities.
Wintun homeland is the historic epicenter of the California Gold Rush, and the regeneration of knowledge here is a challenging process, both in practical and emotional terms, that requires us to confront the scale of loss and theft. Therefore, one of the first items on our agenda was to develop a Memorandum of Understanding with Diana, which recognized the history of settler colonialism and the ongoing potential and tendency for harm, while seeking to forge collaborations toward a different future for collective thriving.
Over a period of three 2-hour sessions, collective members met with Diana to learn about her personal history and relationship to the knowledge that she was sharing with us, to generate a list of harmful and exploitative behaviors to be mindful of when working with Indigenous knowledge and culture-bearers, and to commit to the following values and actions, which allows us to approach this work with self-discipline. We return to this document on a biannual basis to reflect on the lessons and to readjust our actions and behaviors as necessary so that we can continue to meet our commitments.
In Winter 2026, YoloSol developed a guide for how other communities of practice can develop their own agreement for a just collaboration when working with Indigenous cultural knowledge and traditions. Please use this guide to inform your own process for building trust and developing commitments with the knowledge keepers you are collaborating with.
Special thanks to Imagining America: Artists + Scholars in Public Life for supporting the production and distribution of this guide. Imagining America (IA) envisions a world of expansive social imagination, constructed by multiple ways of knowing, where people work together to nurture healthy, vibrant, and joyful communities. The IA consortium brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues.
