MYTHOLOGIES OF THE MUWEKMA OHLONE TRIBE

The Ohlone Indians, named Costanoan by early Spanish colonists, are a linguistic family who lived on the coast of central California. They originally lived in an area stretching from the San Francisco Bay southward to the lower Salinas Valley. They traditionally lived in more than 50 independently organized villages and did not view themselves as a distinct group. However, due to their similar languages, they often interacted freely with one another. They survived by hunting, fishing, and gathering acorns and seeds. They lived in round houses made of a framework of poles covered with grass, tule reeds, or ferns. They traveled the water in boats made of balsa wood or on rafts of tules. Their clothing was scant, with the men going naked.

Ten thousand years before before the Spanish set their sights on the lush bay of San Francisco, the first Native American peoples were living off the marshland. For at least 5,000 years, they existed in organized tribal societies, landscaping the wide brush with oaks, setting traps for shellfish and burying their dead together with the remains of mussel shells in towering pyramid-like mounds called shellmounds. Each shellmound was a monument to their craft, their food and the reverent burial of their dead that would grow throughout their lives. “Ohlone” and “Costanoan” (Spanish for “coastal”) are catch-all terms for the various indigenous tribes that lived between San Francisco and Monterey, while the Muwekma Ohlone is the self-coined tribal name of those Native American descendants living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the American status quo is the constant ignorance about the people who lived in North America before western settlers crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The native tribes that inhabited America before Europeans were incredibly diverse and included the Muwekma Ohlone people who were the original residents of the Bay Area.

The history of the Indigenous peoples of California is a complicated one, including a story of colonialism and disenfranchisement. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans the Ohlone peoples included a number of cultures that spoke similar languages and “occupied a large area, bounded by the Carquinez Strait (Southeast of Vallejo) and the Golden Gate to the north, Big Sur (Coastal Monterey County) and Soledad (South end of the Salinas Valley) to the south” (Leventhal, et al. 1995, 297). This coastal region was their land where the Ohlone history and culture existed. As previously stated, the Ohlone tribes tended to be very loosely connected to their neighbors via trade and marriage, but an organized confederation was not the structure (Marigold 1978,1). After the arrival of the Spanish explorers the indigenous peoples where driven to live under the protection of the mission system founded by the Spanish missionaries. This environment, as well as the “ranchero system developed by the Mexican settlers combined with the genocide conducted by the Euro-American settlers during the California gold rush, greatly reduced the population of the Ohlone peoples. Of course, this also resulted in the taking of the Ohlone land as well.

Versions of an Ohlone origin story are told, that the world became entirely covered in water, except for a single peak. That peak changes according to which group is telling the story. It’s either Pico Blanco near Big Sur, or Mount Diablo near Walnut Creek. Coyote was all alone surrounded by water, until he saw a feather on the water, which turned into an Eagle. They were soon joined by Hummingbird. The waters continued to rise, so Eagle spread his wings and carried them to a higher peak. Each had a power. Eagle’s wings could produced thunder, causing creation and destruction. Coyote became the Father of Humanity, who shares all his virtues and failings. And Hummingbird was the tiny spirit of Truth, that can be man-handled, yet never killed. The Ohlone name for the Santa Cruz Mountains is “Mak-sah-re-jah,” a range they may have envisioned as the Eagle with lifted wings, and it’s head as Loma Prieta, carrying Hummingbird and Coyote on each shoulder. The name’s Ohlone root words appear to be: Mak (from either “mako” for knife-edge; or “mak” for people-of); Sahre as in “siri” or “sheree” for Eagle; and -ha a contraction of “huya” or “hya,” for mountain. Thus it may mean the Sharp Ridged Mountain of the Eagle, or the People of the Eagle Mountain. Northwest of Loma Prieta is Mount Umanhum, using the Ohlone word for Hummingbird. Southeast of Loma Prieta is Nibbs Knob in Uvas Canyon County Park, which in Ohlone times may have been “Mount Maiyan” meaning Coyote. These are the three highest peaks that watch over Santa Cruz.

The Ohlone fished, hunted, and gathered, practiced game management, and used controlled burns to increase rather than deplete their resources. Because of this, they are sometimes referred to as quasi-agricultural. About 150 of the 300 native plant species in the Presidio area of San Francisco were utilized by the Ohlone: some for the construction of conical pole-and-reed huts and balsas (canoes), some for tool manufacture or medicine, and others as food sources, including seeds, berries, roots, and particularly Coast Live Oak acorns. The Ohlone diet also included fish, mussels, oysters, and seals from the Bay, as well as rabbits, antelope, reptiles, waterfowl, and insects. Both men and women fished and participated in rabbit drives, but the majority of the hunting was done by men with chert or obsidian tipped arrows and darts or knives. Weaving was fundamental to the Ohlone, since rope was necessary for fishing nets and basketry traps, and twined basketry was utilized in food processing, cooking, fishing, storage, and the collection of mussels (including abalone). The Ohlone, along with other native Californians, are reputed as having the highest quality and most diverse basketry in the world. Sweat lodges and dance houses (tupenak) were constructed as semi-subterranean ceremonial structures. Ritual clothing included feathers and abalone and Olivella shell ornaments and beaded reed dance skirts and headdresses, as well as the pelts of rabbits, deer, elk, antelope, bears, wildcats, sea otters, and lions. Everyday summer clothing was mainly worn only by women, who wore plant fiber and deerskin skirts. The Ohlone considered their cemeteries sacred; some of these burial grounds included several thousand remains.

We Are Muwekma Ohlone

HorŠe Tuuxi! = (hor-sheh troo-hee)

Welcome to the Official Website of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. The present-day Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is comprised of all of the known surviving American Indian lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay region who trace their ancestry through the Missions Dolores, Santa Clara, and San Jose; and who were also members of the historic Federally Recognized Verona Band of Alameda County. The aboriginal homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe includes the following counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, most of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, and portions of Napa, Santa Cruz, Solano and San Joaquin. This large contiguous geographical area, which historically crosscuts aboriginal linguistic and tribal boundaries, fell under the sphere of influence of the aforementioned three missions between 1776 and 1836. The missionization policies deployed by the Catholic Church and militarily supported by the Hispanic Empire, brought many distantly related, and in some cases, already inter-married tribal groups together at the missions.

Native American Medicine – A Disappearing Science

Through mission records the enrolled Muwekma lineages have been traced back respectively to the Seunen and Alson Ohlone tribal groups of the southern East Bay region which includes the Fremont Plain to the Livermore Valley, the Chupcan Bay Miwok speaking tribal groups and the Tamcan, Passasimi and Yathikumne North Valley Yokut speaking tribal groups of the interior valleys including the Mt. Diablo, Byron, San Joaquin Delta and Stockton regions, the Jalquin Ohlone (Chocheño) speaking tribal group of the San Leandro/San Lorenzo/Hayward/Oakland region of the East Bay; the Salcan Bay Miwok speaking tribal group from the area east of Oakland including the inland valleys around the Lafayette and Walnut Creek region; and the Napian/Karquin Ohlone tribal group of the Carquinez Straits of the North Bay.

Ohlone Myths

Now Coyote gave the people the carrying net. He gave them bow and arrows to kill rabbits. He said: ‘You will have acorn mush for your food. You will gather acorns and you will have acorn bread to eat. Go down to the ocean and gather seaweed that you may eat it and your acorn mush and the acorn bread. Gather it when the tide is high, and kill rabbits, and at low tide pick abalone and mussels to eat. When you can find nothing else, gather buckeyes for food. If the acorns are bitter, wash them out; and gather ‘wild oat’ seeds for pinole, carrying them on your back in a basket. Look at these things of which I have told you. I have shown you what is good. Now I will leave you. You have learned. I have shown you how to gather food, and even though it rains a long time people will not die of hunger. Now I am getting old. I cannot walk. Alas for me! Now I go.”

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is comprised of descendants of the survivors of the Spanish mission system. They were once federally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but that recognition has been revoked, seemingly due to a technicality. They are now embroiled in a lengthy legal battle to recover their official recognition. Some people refer to the San Francisco Bay Area as the Occupied Ohlone Bay. There was a native man who used to run around spraypainting “STOLEN LAND” and “OHLONE LAND” on sidewalks, garage doors, cars, bridges, and just about anything he could get his hands on. He treated it like a full-time job. I spoke with The Shaman, a member of First They Came For The Homeless, a white man who had been educated by a native teacher, and I mentioned “stolen land” to him. He said, “Land can’t be stolen.” I didn’t understand him at the time. To this day, I’m still puzzled by his words. But it caused me to reflect that, from the perspective of international law, the Ohlone people still hold all the rights to the places where they once lived. Palo Alto, for example (featuring the headquarters of HP, Palantir, Tesla, and Xerox), actually belongs to the Lamchin tribe. Berkeley and Oakland belong to the Huchiun and Jalquin, while San Francisco belongs to the Shalson.