250 Years of What?
On June 29, 1776, five days before Philadelphia’s Declaration was signed, a different founding took place three thousand miles west, on the shore of a California lagoon. Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars said the first Mass beside a creek they named Arroyo de los Dolores, the Creek of Sorrows. Within months they had raised a fort near the Golden Gate and a mission a few miles inland—the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asís, later known by the name of that creek: Mission Dolores. And the labor for these projects was largely coerced from people whose ancestors had inhabited the land for countless generations.
The people known today as the Ohlone were actually some forty or so autonomous tribelets, each with its own territory, leadership, and law. Ohlone people had built more than four hundred shellmounds along the bay, some rising sixty feet, structures that were at once home, cemetery, and land claim. They moved by season through a landscape they actively cultivated—burning grassland to keep it productive, harvesting acorns, shellfish, salmon, and waterfowl in cycles refined over centuries—sustaining one of the densest Indigenous populations found anywhere north of Mexico. Their relationship to this land had never required ratification—there was no separation between land and people. The Mission and the Presidio projects forced people who knew no other home to build temples to institutions determined to erase them.
In exchange for their life, an Ohlone person was baptized, becoming a neophyte, and was bound to the mission, forbidden to leave without permission, punished for infractions as small as missing Mass. Their forced labor built the mission itself: making and stacking tens of thousands of adobe bricks, tending thousands of sheep and cattle, working looms that turned wool into cloth, and breaking the land into parcels for an imposed agriculture from a different place. Disease did even more damage than coercion: measles moved through the mission’s population in repeated waves; birth rates fell far below death rates; the cemetery behind Mission Dolores today holds roughly five thousand unmarked Indigenous graves—a population lost within the span of a single lifetime.
The conviction of the Catholic Church that their goals and methods were universal and ageless, (justifying all means of human cruelty), were not strong enough to sustain the mission system when the Spanish Empire withdrew their sponsorship. In 1834, just 58 years after the founding of Mission Dolores, (the span of one lifetime), the mission as an institution ended, while returning nothing to the people who had built it.
California’s statehood in 1850 made things worse: a second wave of violence during the Gold Rush, the Californian genocide, arrived alongside eighteen treaties negotiated with California tribes and then never ratified by the U.S. Senate. The Muwekma Ohlone, whose homeland spans the East Bay, remain without federal recognition to this day, despite a documented, unbroken lineage—acknowledged by history and by their own persistent community, but absent from the one federal category that would formally recognize either.
Cause For Celebration
Despite the cruel realities of forced separation of a people from the systems that sustained them for millennia, the spirit of the people of this place did not break. In 2011, Ohlone organizers occupied a construction site in Vallejo for a hundred and nine days to stop development on Sogorea Te’, an ancestral village and burial ground. The occupation was successful in a real sense: the land was transferred to a federally recognized tribe, (albeit one with no connection to the site—because no local Ohlone group has received the Federal recognition that would grant them entitlement—another chapter in the long history of erasure that began in1776).
Rather than wait on a system built to keep failing them, the organizers founded the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust the following year around a mechanism that doesn’t depend on federal recognition at all: the Shuumi Land Tax, a voluntary annual gift from non-Indigenous residents of Lisjan Ohlone territory, moving resources by relationship instead of by law. The trust now stewards more than a dozen sites across the Bay, including ground reclaimed from an eighty-year parking lot in West Berkeley that sits on the same shellmound lineage this history began with. It has raised the first ceremonial arbor built in the region in over two hundred fifty years, and it is developing a cemetery to properly reinter ancestral remains still displaced since the mission era—a direct answer to the unmarked graves still lying behind Mission Dolores.
Two nations mark two hundred fifty years on this stretch of coast this year. One does it with fanfare, with a holiday, and a dream of equality that was never written to include everyone. The other has spent the same two hundred fifty years proving that survival doesn’t require a declaration at all—only language kept alive in secret when it couldn’t be kept alive in the open, land bought back one parcel at a time when it couldn’t be returned outright, and innovative ways around the systems imposed on them from outside.
Join me in celebrating 250 years of Ohlone pride.
