July 2011
54 posts
“Look at Mt. Diablo and you’ll always know how to get back home.”
Across from Mission Sonoma is where the California Republic began, and as my mentor puts it, “this is where it began to go down” for Californian Indians as greed for gold came into our land. I’m sitting where that flag was raised right now.
In Coast Miwok land at Mission Sonoma in the Valley of the Moon.
Welcome back
Here you are where beach was
Where ancient pedestrians
Gathered oysters and acorns
Where tracks crossed shellmounds
Where hidden creekways and freeways flow.
Walking on top of my ancestors’ shellmound in Berkeley and saw sprawled on top of the freeway pillars a poem.
Bye bye fog see you later
Tell the egrets wait for me
Give my love to the shoreline breezes
So long ocean view
We’ll be back besides the bay
Sure as the tides and sunset.
Resistance
Yesterday I was cleaning my ancestors’ cemetery, picking up garbage, pine cones, moving logs, pulling weeds. I was thinking to myself after.. this a form of resistance?
I think so.
Resistance often conjures up images of bloodshed, riots, anger in the streets.
For me, I resist the current situation of ignorance, and people ignoring us and our struggle on a daily basis. I tell people of...
The sun is setting and I am on the train gazing at the massive hills of Huchiun, the place the colonizers named Oakland because there were once so many Oak trees here, our tree of life.
Today this place, gazing from BART, is a mess.. full of industry, litter, and beat up cars.
Pestles dropping in unison to crack acorns, women humming, men hunting.. I can only imagine how it was.
Me: Why do California Indians fight more than most other Indians
My cousin: Because we are good at it.
Lol
More Ohlone visiting Mission Dolores today!
The kids with them seemed overly excited to see the Tule house, and.how their ancestors lived.
We are brainstorming ways for Ohlone youth from different regions of the Bay Area to collaborate.
Why I say Indian
Growing up, my family always used the term Ohlone to describe ourselves. If anyone was confused about who the Ohlone are, which most people are, we would say we are Indians.
Not Native Americans.
Going to elementary school in the 1990s in the hyper liberal San Francisco Bay Area, I would always hear the term Native American and using the term Indian would be scoffed at, as some antiquated term...
Heading to Chatu-mu (Santa Cruz) to the kalle (beach)!
I wonder why more of our native placenames aren’t used. When I have kids, I’ll teach them to use native placenames first, conquest names second!
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Finally an end in sight to the struggle at Sogorea...
It seems a compromise is finally being made to resolve the repulsive idea of putting bathrooms on top of a 3,000 year old California Indian shellmound in Vallejo, as the city wants to work more with local tribal groups to determine the best way to ‘develop’ the land.
This whole ordeal has brought up some interesting reactions that I think are worthy to write about.
Many in my family...
Ohlone beads in the village of Chutchui (Mission District, SF) for nightlife. If anyone knew my connection to this place. This is contemporary Ohlone identity, never leaving and being systematically ignored.
I wear the beads because I want to show, whether at ceremony or out with friends, we never let go of our identity or homeland. Mak, Mak, Mak, this is ours.
A friend just texted me and told me that, scribbled on the wall in Berkeley, a message says “Long live the Ohlone Free State”
That’s graffiti I like.
Maybe our message is finally getting across… person by person.
Makkin mak Ohlone, ‘Akkoy mak-Warep, Manne mak hiswi
While heading to Sacramento to a California Indian store to buy a new abalone necklace, I stumbled upon my great-great-great-great-great grandmother’s village. Her name was Efrena Quennatole, and she was Patwin-Ohlone. She married Liberato in 1818 at Mission San Jose, the son of the two ancestors that I often mention who are buried at Mission Dolores, Jocbocme and Poylemja.
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thorned-deactivated20120107 asked: Isn't being a California Native just so awesome?
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One of the old oral histories that J.P. Harrington...
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Reflections on the Fourth of July
People change. Countries change. The theory is that the mindsets of people over time are supposed to evolve, and get better inching more and more towards fairness for every person despite race, gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on…
So is America today in 2011 dramatically different from when America took over California in 1848? Yes, of course it is. Knowing...
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WatchMy ancestors, Jocbocme and Poylemja (later baptized as Obulinda and Faustino), were at Mission Dolores when this mural was painted, so it is very likely they worked on it.
Half of the mural is still unknown. We can’t allow cameras can’t go all the way to the floor because there’s a chance it could damage the paint of the mural, something we do not want to risk, but it covers the...
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Chochenyo Ohlone words
This is what I hate/love about Tumblr. I sit down for five minutes to post a thing or two and… there goes my day.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls...”
– George Orwell, 1984
Native folks gotta be able to tell their own history, we can’t let others tell it on our behalf. Ever.
Downtown SF archaeology →
A pretty cool archaeological project I worked on. Downtown San Francisco in today’s SOMA district was an ancient Ohlone village called Sitlintac.
When construction started to occur for the central subway project, that will link the ballpark to Chinatown, archaeologists were called in to excavate the area. My job was a Native American Monitor, where I was basically monitoring the...
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“Don’t use the term “discovered” when talking about Europeans...”
– My mentor Andy Galvan discussing verbage when talking about history on one of his tours
thorned-deactivated20120107 asked: Why is it taboo for Ohlones to travel to Alcatraz?
“Maatoshum meene.”
– Who are you? 