Beyond Recognition: The Ohlone Way (2014) PDF

BEYOND RECOGNITION: WOMEN PRESERVING NATIVE CULTURE (2014)  Encountering the flaws and gaps in the in the federal tribal recognition process: “The onus is on tribes to establish historical continuity, cultural unity, and authenticity … [via] extensive documentation, much of which ha...

BEYOND RECOGNITION: WOMEN PRESERVING NATIVE CULTURE (2014)  Encountering the flaws and gaps in the in the federal tribal recognition process: “The onus is on tribes to establish historical continuity, cultural unity, and authenticity … [via] extensive documentation, much of which has been destroyed through colonization” (7:15). -- 374 tribes nationwide (81 in California) and an estimated 80,000 people are awaiting this recognition.  A different, complimentary model, rematriation: indigenous woman-led restoration of a people to their rightful place in sacred relationship with ancestral land.  A renovated tool, the land trust: non-profit org for land conservation; citizens tired of waiting for public support raise their own funds and purchase properties in order to protect them (17:10). In this case cultural and natural conservation/revitalization  A primarily urban patchwork of places that testify to and nurture present day Ohlone relationships to their ancestral land (language, food, medicine, ceremony)  An organization galvanized by the (failed?) attempt to save a sacred site from the City of Vallejo’s development plan: “I think that we won, just not in the material world. This land brought us together for a reason, to get a better idea of who we were as human beings. Sogorea Te’ was that pivotal point …” (15:30) “You can go to different places in the world, and you can touch those sacred places … You can go to Mexico and Egypt and you can touch those pyramids that are there. When you bring your family and your friends to the Bay Area, where are those monuments of the people that were once here? Do you take them to the mall?” (Corrina Gould, 10:28-50)  What natural landscapes and cultural achievements do we think to preserve, protect, and monumentalize? (Cronon)  What is a shellmound and how does it challenge dominant notions of what merits preservation (as nature OR culture)? An “earthwork” that appears to be a feature of the landscape/ground Gradual result of thousands of years of continuous habitation (Margolin – Ohlone stability) Co-presence of “waste”(shells), sacred burial sites, archeological remains of everyday life Callenbach on the integration of decomposition in production and creativity UPDATE, July 2024” Sogorea Te’ Land Trust & the City of Berkeley rematriate 2.2. acre West Berkeley Shellmound and Village site, (old Spenger’s parking lot, Fourth Street between University & Hearst) Alternative (Utopian?) OHLONE VISION FOR THE LAND presented in 2017:  against developers’ plans for retail, parking, and market-rate housing 40 ft high mound, covered in  an open-space memorial to thousands of years of inhabitation poppies and a spiral path; view across the bay  a living cultural space for the revitalization of song, language, and dance Arbor for dance/ ceremony Daylighting of Strawberry Creek Re-interment of expropriated ancestral remains, housed at UCB & SF State Memorial/education center inside “I really just see, like, little plots of “The land was taken, and that was such land, everywhere all over the Bay a deep, soul wound. When we talk Area … that is sacred space.” about this land trust, its healing for (Johnella LaRose, 16:30) everybody; it’s not just ‘oh, we’re native people, we’re close to the land, we have  Decentralization (Callenbach) this spiritual connection’ … Everybody  Overcoming the rural/urban binary and has a spiritual connection, but it’s been the wilderness notion of sacred land as lost. You’ll see these lots, or old, untouched and distant abandoned houses … you just can see the possibilities.” (La Rose, 21:40)  inclusiveness, intertribal, interracial, multicultural welcome, in spite of everything  The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area (1978)  The inspirational historical reality of an ecology of abundance, of a kind of plenitude in which human beings, along with an extraordinary variety of other beings, can flourish.  Not in Paradise, or a distant Golden Age, but right here in the pre-conquest Bay Area, as recently as the 1750s  The complexity, sophistication, technical ingenuity and expertise (indeed, scientific knowledge) of those classified as “hunter-gatherers”  California“wilderness” was carefully, knowledgeably managed and cultivated (49)  The correlation between ecological diversity and human cultural/linguistic diversity  The challenge that millennia-long cultural and ecological stability poses to History  The ethics and practice of “familiarity” with other-than-human beings  Reconstructing pre-contact Bay Area life is a speculative, imaginative act as well as a scholarly one. It is consciously and unconsciously Utopian. Contrary to “wilderness dualism” the bounteous, multispecies California landscape was knowledgeably managed: Thus the first explorers who so lyrically and enthusiastically described the ‘park- like’ forests and open meadows of the Bay Area had not stumbled upon a virgin wilderness untouched by human hands. Far from it. They had instead entered a landscape that had been consciously and dramatically altered for centuries. Amazingly, the splendid landscape and bountiful wildlife of the Bay Area existed not despite human presence, but (at least to some extent) because of it. (49)  Answering Cronon’s challenge of how to imagine human presence as constructive  See Thursday’s assignment, Anderson’s Tending the Wild Constructiveness/destructiveness: the ethics of kinship/“familiarity” with other-than-human beings “It is impossible to conceive of the number of whales with which we were surrounded, or their familiarity; they every half minute sprouted within half a pistol shot of the ships and made a prodigious stench in the air” (8).  Nearly every early European testament to the abundance of California wildlife involves shooting it (cf. pages 7-11)  “Familiar” : intimate, friendly, like family. Animals are not only abundant, but also unafraid and close, like (literal) kin: The animals of today do not behave the same way they did two centuries ago; for when the Europeans first arrived they found, much to their amazement, that the animals of the Bay Area were relatively unafraid of people. (9) For a few years the hunting was easy … But the advantages of the gun were short-lived. Within a few generations some birds and animals had been totally exterminated, while others survived by greatly increasing the distance between themselves and people. Today we are heirs of that distance, and we take it entirely for granted that animals are naturally secretive and afraid of our presence. (11)  Margolin’s language suggests a cultural shift among animals during colonization: “those that survived have (surprisingly enough) altered their habits and characters” (9) An ethics of “familiarity”: “Before the coming of the Europeans, for hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years, the Ohlones rose before dawn, stood in front of their tule houses, and facing east shouted words of greeting and encouragement to the rising sun.” (4)  Human beings have a role to play in the ongoingness of the natural world  Ritual/ceremony is necessary and consequential for ecological/geophysical processes (Kimmerer)  Other kinds of beings are, presumptively, persons, our relation to them is intrinsically moral/ethical/ civil (or uncivil), even political  Familiarity entails a kind of etiquette, politeness, respect vis à vis other kinds of beings “In fact the path itself has a name … As the mother turns now and then to talk with her daughter, she is careful to speak kindly about the path, lest it feel insulted and trip her.” (46)  Intimacy with the land to an almost unimaginable degree of detail  Contrary to attempted “neutrality,” “disinterestedness,” “distance,” ”objectivity” in the Western scientific study/observation of everything but humans  Which would condemn this mode of relation as “anthropomorphism” / “personification” Our difficulty reckoning with STABILITY as/in history -- “But while shellmounds do show evidence of change and growth, the change is surprisingly moderate. From what we know of the archaeology of other sites of similar antiquity—Grecian, Mesopotamian, or Meso-American—moderate growth over centuries is the last thing we would have expected. Where were the dramatic ‘horizons,’ the layers in the shellmounds that mark conquests, migrations, and other cataclysmic events? Such things are by and large absent in the Bay Area shellmounds. There is nothing here that cannot be explained in terms of the gradual development of the Bay Area people, or in some cases by a gently borrowing or absorption of customs and technologies from surrounding people. It is clear, concluded Alfred Kroeber in an early examination of the archaeological evidence, “that we are here confronted by a historical fact of extraordinary importance.” And indeed we are. We are confronted by the likelihood that the people found by the Spanish at the end of the eighteenth century were the direct descendents of people who had lived undisturbed on their land for centuries-–a bare minimum of 1,200 years … and probably for as long as 4,500 or 5,000 years.” What is a shellmound?  A monument to stability, to peace and “stable-state” (Callenbach) sustainability  A challenge to our very means of telling and celebrating human history For Margolin, reconstructing pre-contact Bay Area life is a speculative, imaginative act as well as a scholarly one. It is consciously and unconsciously Utopian: - 2014 “Preface,” 2003 “Afterword” and 1978 Introduction open about the need, risks, and benefits of speculation: “Who were these people? I had no clear idea. I distrusted the old stereotype of the ‘Diggers’—a dirty, impoverished people who ate mainly insects and roots and who lived without culture. On the other hand I also distrusted the modern (and equally dehumanizing) image of ‘noble savages,’ a faultless people who lived lives of idyllic peace and prosperity. I rejected both stereotypes, but I had nothing to put in their places.” (3) “I wanted to present Indian life not as a scholar might with an accumulation of facts, but through a fullness of being that went beyond limited certainties. And I was willing to accept the possibility that I might be wrong now and then, I might be projecting my own thoughts, I might make mistakes. I took responsibility for that, but I felt that I had avoided the greater mistake that others before me had made: the mistake of shallow portrayal, the mistake of presenting people as unemotional and robotic, the embedded lies one tells when afraid to present humanity in its totality. I needed full human beings if I was going to learn anything from them, and in the end I did learn much—about the Ohlones but also about humanity and in the end about myself.” (ix) “Finally, there are areas of Ohlone life into which there are no windows whatever. We search and we peer, but we find nothing … Because of the element of speculation, this book is not so much about what Ohlone life was like, but rather about what Ohlone life may have been like.” (4)  Apparent minimization of living Ohlone as sources, unconcern with his own positionality and the problem of cultural appropriation; gradually addressed as his career turns toward editing, publishing and elevating indigenous culture and cultural revitalization work (e.g. News from Native  “In short, Ohlone was not an ancient entity; it is merely a fiction that we have invented to deal with a human situation far more complex and far richer than anything our own politically and culturally simplified world has prepared us for.” (3) Reconstructing Ohlone life as consciously and unconsciously Utopian: Several years ago, in a totally different context, I was discussing with my friend Jim Quay what constituted a healthy society. I made a list that included the following criteria … … … When I finished writing it all down, I looked it over and was taken aback to discover that what I was listing reflected the way of life of the Ohlone for millennia, values and practices still embedded in Native people today. An image comes to mind. On those early Spanish expeditions into California … while they were close to starving, they were passing through villages where people were feasting, but they refused to try the Native foods. The foods that had nourished the Native populations weren’t what these Europeans were used to. Not much has changed. European-based cultures are clearly in trouble, starving for fresh ideas and deeper truths … When will we learn to reach out to those ideas, philosophical concepts, and social practices that were at the core of the healthy cultures of Native California? (xi) Might land back break the cycle of this periodic, ideal/idealizing yearning? The fate of U.C. Berkeley in Ecotopia: “Student unrest seems to be even more chronic in Ecotopian Universities than in ours. While I was visiting Berkeley, a college dean weas expelled through the combined votes of students and a few disaffected faculty in the college assembly—a sort of quarterly town meeting.” (130) “Any citizen may acquire an education in biology, engineering, musicology, or hundreds of other subjects by enrolling in video courses. Students on campus, however, are expected to develop the ability to participate in the whole range of intellectual and creative activities. Thus each student is supposed to develop competence in the mental processes proper to the humanities, the biological and physical sciences, and political thought.” (131) “Neither in Ecotopian universities nor in research institutes can one find professors of several once flourishing disciplines: political science, sociology, and psychology … they are considered as part of general citizenly concern and are not considered to have ‘scientific’ standing.” (130)  UC students’ competence in “political thought” that is not tied to formal academic study  The “sciences” of politics, of groups (sociology), of individual psychic development (psychology) are matters of “general citizenly concern” – subsumed into the thought and praxis of all people, not specialists  And gained, at U.C. through the practice of organizing an education together, not least via protest and “unrest” Rematriate: Indigenous women led work to restore sacred relationships between Indigenous people and their ancestral land. Honoring our matrilineal societies and lineage's ways of tending to the land, in opposition of patriarchal violence and dynamics. Regenerate: To restore, reform and recreate again what has been taken or lost: a spiritual rebirth Reparation: To make an amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise mitigating harm; the act of repair. Extraction: The action of taking out something, especially using effort or force; origins, legacy, or of a family line.