Cátedra Salceek

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Importante: La realización de este examen implica que Ud ha leído y acepta las

condiciones estipuladas en el Reglamento de Examen de la Cátedra Salceek.

‘This land was stolen’: Behind the fight to recover sacred

Indigenous lands in the Bay Area
Julian Brave NoiseCat

Corrina Gould stood on the corner of Shellmound Street and Ohlone Way in Emeryville,
California. This was the 20th Black Friday in a row that Gould, a squat and resolute Ohlone
matriarch, had led a protest urging residents not to shop at Emeryville Bay Street, a mall
on the eastern shoreline of San Francisco Bay. Local Indigenous residents have taken to
calling Bay Street the “Dead Mall” because it’s built atop a sacred burial ground. “We
gather here to remember that these spiritual places still exist,” said Gould. “They need
songs and prayers.”

Gould is the spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, a subgroup of the
Ohlone whose territory comprised the East Bay cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and San
Leandro. Alongside Johnella LaRose, an urban Indian from the Shoshone-Bannock and
Carrizo tribes, which now live on reservations in Idaho and Texas, Gould has led
campaigns, protests, prayer walks, and occupations to protect and reclaim Ohlone land in
the Bay Area since the 1990s. In the process, the two women founded two organizations to
drive these efforts: Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC), as well as the Sogorea Te’
Land Trust, a legal structure they are using to reclaim and steward Ohlone land.

“These shellmounds are our places — our village sites, our cemeteries — where people
gathered along the shores for thousands and thousands of years, from time immemorial,”
Gould explained. “It’s a part of our cosmology that when our people pass away and as we’re
having a ceremony for them here at the shellmound, that our ancestors would sit on
Alcatraz Island and wait,” she said, gesturing toward San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the
Pacific Ocean. “When the ceremony was complete, their spirits would go through our
western gate, which is now the Golden Gate Bridge.”

In the late 1800s, a popular amusement park was built atop the shellmound. It operated
until Prohibition in the 1920s. After that, the shellmound was partially leveled to make way
for steel manufacturing plants and trucking terminals. Some of the material excavated
from the site — including human remains — was processed into the concrete that paved
the streets of Berkeley and Emeryville. Plundering California Native cemeteries became a
kind of anthropological niche at the University of California, Berkeley, and its facilities still
hold lockers and boxes containing the corpses and belongings of more than 9,600 first
peoples. During the construction of the Dead Mall in 1999, workers discovered large
portions of the shellmound still intact beneath layers of bubbling acid and dirt streaked
white with arsenic. Skeletons, buried side by side, were unearthed under what is now
Victoria Secret and Forever 21. Adults were curled in the fetal position beside their canine
companions. Couples had been laid to rest in embrace. Some women were interred with
their babies. These resting ancestors, some of the last still in the ground, were taken too.

In 2016, Gould and a group of Ohlone visited their ancestors’ remains at UC Berkeley for
the first time. The basement’s low ceiling was lined with racks of remains and belongings,
alphabetized H through K. They walked the rows, singing and praying. Outside, the group
put down an offering of tobacco. And then Gould went home, curled up into a ball, and did
not leave her house for three days. To restore justice and balance to this place, Gould has
made it her life’s work to return her ancestors’ remains to the land. “There’s a reason for
them to go back,” she told me. “I believe that the Bay Area is a magic place. And I believe
that those are the prayers of my ancestors who prayed that magic into this land. That
magic has to go back, to return balance to this land.”

Before the arrival of European colonists, the Bay Area was a place of plenty for the Ohlone,
who fished, hunted, and gathered in the region’s wetlands, plains, and hills. Marshlands
lined the shores. On the savannahs, native bunch grasses stood almost as tall as an adult.
Farther inland, forests filled with oak trees and towering redwoods covered much of the
coastal range that separates the Bay from the Central Valley. Today, San Francisco Bay has
been dredged, and the Sacramento River delta, which feeds into it from the north, has been
reshaped by levees. The marshlands have been filled, making the structures on top of them
more vulnerable to the San Andreas Fault, which lies beneath. The flatlands and hills have
been paved and overlaid with freeways designed to transport goods from the ports to
consumers further inland.

California was the only part of the United States to be declared terra nullius, a legal term
meaning “nobody’s land.” A few land cession treaties were negotiated with California
tribes, but not the Ohlone. The Senate rejected the treaties that had been drawn up and
signed, and imposed an injunction of secrecy on the documents. Tribes who had been
promised recompense and reservations received neither. Up and down the Golden State,
Native communities were left without title to their lands.

Since the 1970s, however, Ohlone people have worked with elders and scholars to revitalize
language and culture as they reassert rights to ancestral lands. “We made it cool to be
Ohlone again in the Bay Area,” laughed Gould. Back in 1999, the tribe, one of hundreds
that are not recognized by the federal government, wasn’t even eligible to repatriate
artifacts and ancestral remains through the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act. When Bay Street opened for business in the new millennium, Gould
could not file to reclaim her ancestors’ remains. And even if she could, she had no land into
which they could be returned. All she could do was honor their memory.

In 2005 IPOC organized a procession to the shellmounds from Vallejo, north of the Bay
Area, all the way to San Jose in the south, along a circuitous 300-mile route. They marched
as much as 18 miles every day, stopping to pray at many of the unmarked mounds buried
beneath Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, streets, and elder homes. They repeated the walk
again in 2006, 2007, and 2008. On the fifth year, the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act was expanded, allowing non-federally recognized tribes like the
Ohlone to repatriate the remains of their ancestors. That year, Gould, LaRose, and their
supporters walked the route in reverse, beginning at an Ohlone village site in the
marshlands of the Alviso neighborhood of San Jose and tracing the footsteps of Ohlone
ancestors back to Mission San Jose de Guadalupe in present-day Fremont.

In 2011, IPOC began an occupation of Glen Cove, a sacred gathering place and burial
ground in the Carquinez Strait known as Sogorea Te’ in the Karkin Ohlone language, which
had been slated for redevelopment. Hundreds of people, including many who had
participated in the shellmound walks, showed up in support. After 109 days, the city of
Vallejo acquiesced to the pressure and negotiated a cultural easement with the federally
recognized Yocha Dehe and Kletsel Dehe bands of Wintun, which gave them the right to
oversee the sacred ancestral sites. The agreement was the first cultural easement signed in
an American city, but Gould and the Ohlone were cut out of the deal because, according to
Gould, they were perceived to be too radical, and, unlike the Wintun, they are not federally
recognized.

After the occupation, Beth Rose Middleton, a professor at the University of California,
Davis, and author of Trust in the Land, invited Gould to a meeting about Native American
land trusts. Land trusts were originally developed to conserve private land, but in recent
years, tribes from California to Alaska have utilized the model to reclaim and protect
territory and sacred sites. At the meeting, Gould saw that many Native land trust leaders
came from federally recognized tribes — and that most were men. She recognized that her
job was not to repatriate the land, culture, language, and remains of her ancestors, but to
re-matriate them. “The land has been raped and taken advantage of and destroyed in a
parallel way to how women have been treated at the hands of men,” she said, reflecting on
the history of the colonization and development of Ohlone territory in the Bay. “That’s part
of re-matriation — women’s work, women’s jobs to bring life through midwifery and to
sing our relatives out, to return them to their final resting place through song.”

Gould and LaRose founded the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in 2012 to re-matriate Ohlone land.
Nonprofits, community-based organizations, faith groups, LGBTQ groups, and affluent
citizens are now lending support through the Shuumi Land Tax that Gould and LaRose
created for residents of Ohlone territory — shuumi means “gift” in Ohlone, and the tax-
deductible donations are an anti-colonial twist on 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit
organizations. In January 2018, the food-justice organization Planting Justice, which helps
formerly incarcerated people get back on their feet by learning how to farm, gifted a
quarter-acre of land in East Oakland to Sogorea Te’ — its first plot of land.

Four generations of Ohlone shared prayers and songs in a ceremony attended by about 100
community members. Gould and LaRose lit a sacred fire, the first on free Ohlone land in
over 100 years. “It may not look like much or look like it means much, but it’s so important
to us,” said LaRose. “Even if it’s a postage stamp, it doesn’t matter. We are getting the land
back. It’s our responsibility to take care of this place. But taking care of this place is not
just for us to do. There are thousands of people that live in our lands now, and so now that
you live in our lands, it is also your responsibility. Because this land also takes care of you.
Those prayers that our ancestors put down for thousands of years also take care of you and
your family.”

Rows of fruit trees, beds of kale, vines strung with ripe tomatoes and other fruits and
vegetables filled out the rest of the plot. There are plans to build a walking and biking trail
that would run the length of Lisjan Creek from East Oakland to San Leandro Bay.
Eventually, Gould will invite neighboring California tribes to dance in the arbor, and ask
UC Berkeley to return the bones of her ancestors to the ground in a new shellmound to be
built on lands re-matriated from the university.

So much of the history of the Bay Area and the world has been dominated by white men.
And even where Indigenous peoples have succeeded at repatriating land and cultural
patrimony, it has been Indigenous men who have led and benefited most from these small
acts of decolonization. Under the auspices of colonial power and patriarchy, the land,
climate, and ecology of the Bay Area have been exploited. The Bay and its first peoples
have suffered. Perhaps there is another way — a more feminine way — to relate to this land
that could help return the Bay to the place of wild plenty it once was for the Ohlone. This
idea, more than any other, is the subject of Gould’s prayers and strivings.

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