Ohlone people, including those of the Muwekma Tribe, the
Native Americans most closely associated with the East Bay, will gather at
Coyote Hills on Sunday, October 1. Visitors will see examples of baskets, traditional
dances, demonstrations of crafts, informational displays, and more. They will
also witness the veneration of a 10,000-year-old legacy by people whose
ancestors were stripped of the rights to their lands and the methodical
destruction to their cultural heritage beginning with the arrival of the
Spanish in the early eighteenth century.
The Spanish mission system imposed by Junipero Serra with the aid of military might relied heavily on Native American labor to harvest its crops, tend its animals, and provide domestic services. When the Missions were secularized in 1821, rights to the land were highly contested between the territorial government and ranchers. The lands they fought over, however, were ancestral lands wrested form the Ohlone, who, though technically entitled to at least a portion of the land, received no rights in it.
Until the rapid influx of white settlers in the wake of the
Gold Rush, Ohlone continued to work on the ranchos. Those native women who
married into the Spanish land-grant families gave birth to the generation of
Californios, people of mixed blood, the descendants of which are numbered among
the various remaining strains of Ohlone, particularly the Muwekma of the East
Bay. Ohlone descendants, by the early twentieth century, bore names like
Guzman, Arellano, and Juarez.
Ohlone assimilated and made lives in the East Bay, but their
cultural heritage had been so far decimated by the mid-1920s that the
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber declared the tribe extinct in 1925, a
pronouncement that only abetted the federal government’s termination of its
relationship with the tribe. At one time, nearly 500 shell mounds dominated the
Bay area. These funerary sites held great importance for the Ohlone, but were
destroyed in the decades-long expansion of European and white American
settlers. Moreover, those pockets of Ohlone descendants inhabiting the
California interior were forcefully and often bloodily removed as the grab for
gold and other natural resources forced clashes between whites and the native
populations.
The Ohlone lost the vast majority of their population
between 1780 and 1850 because of an abysmal birth rate, high infant mortality
rate, diseases, and social upheaval associated with European immigration into
California. By all estimates, the Ohlone were reduced to less than ten percent
of their original pre-mission era population. By 1852 the Ohlone population had
shrunk to about 900, and was continuing to decline. By the early 1880s, the
northern Ohlone were virtually extinct, and the southern Ohlone people were
severely impacted and largely displaced from their communal land grant in the
Carmel Valley. To call attention to the plight of the California Indians,
Indian Agent, reformer, and popular novelist Helen Hunt Jackson published
accounts of her travels among the Mission Indians of California in 1883.
As Ohlone languages (there were originally more than 50
tribes before European contact, many with their own languages), traditional
ways of life, sacred sites, and legal rights to participate in treaties with
the federal government disappeared, in one sense, Kroeber’s pronouncement of
“extinction” was fulfilled.
In the early 1980s, however, with ties kept alive through
shared community and a reverence for their past, Ohlone descendants formed the
Muwekma Tribal Council and began applying for tribal recognition in 1989. In
1996, the Bureau of Indian Affairs conceded that the federal government had in
fact recognized the Verona Band of Alameda County as the Muwekma ancestors as
late as 1927. Enough genealogical evidence existed to support the kinship
relation between contemporary Ohlone and the Verona, and it seemed as though
their status as a Federally Recognized Tribe was as sure as complete.
The truth, however, is that the tribe was on a waiting list
that in practice promised to take more than two decades to move through, a situation
unacceptable to the Muwekma. In 1999 the Tribal Council sued the Bureau of
Indian Affairs (BIA), and a federal judge ordered the BIA to expedite the recognition
process. To this day, however, the Tribe is struggling with the BIA’s Branch of
Acknowledgement and Research (BAR) for a positive ruling. Even with the support
of numerous local, state, and federal lawmakers, the Muwekma are still seeking
recognition as a Federally Recognized Tribe.
Recreating Identity
In mid-1992, the construction of the 85 freeway in Santa
Clara county unearthed several 2000-year-old Ohlone graves (the Kaphan Unux or Three
Wolves site, named for the burial of wolves near the graves). For perhaps the
first time in American history, Ohlone people, through the Ohlone Families
Consulting services (OFCS, the archaeological firm of the Muwekma Tribe), found
themselves in the position of being their own ethnographers.
When one considers the power white academics have historically
held to control access to the cultural history of native peoples, this was
nothing less than extraordinary. In partnership with San Jose State University,
Muwekma tribal council members and elders filed for and received the permits
and funding to do the anthropology at the site. Two major outcomes followed
from the project. First, the Muwekma gained first-hand experience with their
ancestors, a circumstance that strengthened community ties; second, government
agencies, by granting the permissions and access to tribal authorities, lent credence
to the Muwekma claim of legitimacy.
The excavated remains were returned to the ground near the
completed freeway around 1996. What could not buried, however, was the renewed
energy that the Kaphan Unux project lent the movement for recognition. It is
true that much Muwekma cultural history has been lost, stolen, defaced, or
destroyed. Kroeber based his assessment of extinction upon just such losses,
the majority of which were out of Ohlone hands to remedy. What has been
retained, however, is a sacred nucleus of shared ancestry and a love of
community around which modern Muwekma Ohlone are reweaving their culture, and
for which they seek the official recognition due them.
Ohlone Gathering
Sunday, Oct 1, 2017
10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Coyote Hills Regional Park
(510) 544-3220
For more information: https://www.active.com/fremont-ca/classes/gathering-of-ohlone-peoples-2017?int=72-3-A8
Free (no registration required)
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