The oldest & largest Ohlone village on SF Bay is the proposed site for a five-story West Berkeley apartment and retail complex. Ohlone descendants and Berkeley residents are calling instead for a two-acre memorial park honoring Ohlone history and culture.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l expertly celebrating bay area in Harris. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today I'm interviewing Corina Google lead organizer and cofounder of Indian people organizing for change. And Chris Oaks, native American activists and Oakland resident. They'll be talking about their innovative quest to stop development on the west Berkeley Shell Mountain alone, the village side [00:00:30] and the birthplace of human settlement on the San Francisco Bay. Come to the program, Chris and Terrina. Uh, you guys have been very involved recently,
Speaker 2:the shell mound Aloni village site controversy. And I want to talk about your innovative solutions to your opposition to the development there. What's going on over there? Well, thank you for having us on. We've been working on the shell mound issue I guess since about March of last year [00:01:00] when the developer first took it to the zoning board and there was a few of us, a handful of us that showed up to that first initial meeting in March and the opposition already to the plan. So the plan is to develop the fourth streets. It's 1904th street. What's Bangor's parking lot, right? Spangler is parking lot right across the street. And you know, a lot of people say, well, why? You know, it's not even there anymore, but the [inaudible] is way deeper inside of there and it's way bigger [00:01:30] than um, this bangers parking lot. That's 2.2 acres. It actually goes, um, to second and Hearst.
Speaker 2:It goes under the railroad tracks under trued and white Anders bangers and out underneath the overpass. So as a huge area of my ancestors, it's over 5,700 years old. It is the first place that people ever lived in the entire bay. It is the oldest of 425 plus shell mounds or burial sites of my ancestors that once rank [00:02:00] the entire bay area. So many have been covered up. Emeryville is a, was a big shell. Male Emeryville was the largest of the 425. It was over 60 feet high and 350 feet in diameter. Um, it was both the uh, west Berkeley showmen and the memory real Shama was on a 1852 coast survey map. So coming into the bay you could use them as points of reference. So these um, shell mounds were really instrumental for us also as Aloni people to be able [00:02:30] to see out our relatives that were around the bay to have ceremony on top of them to be able to light fire so people can send signals to one another about different things.
Speaker 2:So these were, I'm absolutely are monuments to the ancestors but are also sacred sites to the alone of people that exist here in the bay area today. Okay. So you're talking about the unique and significant points about this, the earliest settlement on the bay ceremonial side, a burial ground, and you mentioned some other things. You say that [00:03:00] it's listed on the national registry of historic sites now it qualifies. It is a landmark in the city of Berkeley and it's also a state historic landmark and it qualifies for a national historic landmark. And the development is going to be what, what is it that they're proposing? They're proposing a five story mixed use building with parking, housing, restaurants and stores. It's a pretty big structure compared to what's there right now. Yeah, it's [00:03:30] the local businesses and residents think about this development
Speaker 3:at the public comment period. Um, one of the main developers for fourth street came by and he actually has hired an attorney who testified as well. Um, because they are against the development for a variety of reasons. One of which is that parking in that area as anybody knows who goes down there, it's horrible. But then the other one is it's just completely out of size for the area. So they brought up a bunch of concerns about the height of other buildings around it cause [00:04:00] it's going to be a few stories taller than any other building near there, chewed in white. They also came to the last zoning board public comment and they were also concerned about congestion and traffic in the area, which is also something that the zoning board members pretty much unanimously in their comments had mentioned was going to be one of the major issues to this project. Purely from a city planning perspective. The area pretty much has been overdeveloped and so there isn't enough parking. Traffic is horrible and the intersections there are bad [00:04:30] and they're just going to get worse and there's real no remedy for it because it's a kind of secluded little pocket of a neighborhood.
Speaker 2:So the draft environmental impact report came out during the holiday season and what happens with a lot of drafty IRAs that come out around the holiday season is that people in the general public don't know about them and don't have time or energy to actually submit comments to the draft EIR. So we were able to actually do a lot of work. There's a committee of us that have been working together closely meeting [00:05:00] on a weekly basis, trying to figure out how to get the word out and to get people to come to the meetings. So they've been having public commenting both at the Zoning Adjustment Board and at the landmarks preservation commission. We've been able to successfully get lots of people to both of those meetings. The last public commenting period at the landmarks preservation commission at the north Berkeley Senior Center. And so getting folks to come out there and speak in opposition and to show people have come out with signs and um, have [00:05:30] stood there in the background and if stayed until one 30, two o'clock in the morning to give public testimony about why they're in opposition to this site has been really great to get public backing of for us to oppose this particular site.
Speaker 2:So we've been working on it I guess since they, they released it in November, they gave it to extensions. Um, the last extension they gave we'll go until February 9th. What are you recommending since today is the deadline? What time is the, is the last time can comment and how do they go about doing that? 5:00 PM [00:06:00] is the end of the commenting period and if you don't have time to get it in the mail today, you can go onto the west Berkeley show Mt. Facebook page or the Indian people organizing for change website. You can find and download a copy of the letters that have been pre created that have bullet points of different issues that are in the EIR that we'd like for people to comment too, and you can send that to Shannon Allen at city planning and Berkeley. What [00:06:30] are your major challenges for this project?
Speaker 2:I guess the major challenges have been educating people about this place because when you look at the, at Berkeley itself, Berkeley is a small city that's grown over the last 150 so years, but they don't have a lot of history around show mounts. There's some stuff about Aloni people in the past. They see I have a park there underneath the overpass. There's pictures of Baloney people dressed in regalia in the past and stuff, but I think that that's [00:07:00] the problem is that we're always viewed as somebody from the past, right. So to realize that Aloni people still exist here in our own territory. To bring people together to talk about what that looks like, to reimagine the bay area, to bring folks together on a loony territory with Aloni presence. Still here is something that's been a little challenging, but I think that because we've done the work over the last 20 years that it hasn't been as challenging as it could have been at school.
Speaker 2:Children learn about the settlements. It's required [00:07:30] in the state of California. I think one of the most important things for just like barrier residents in general is that this is the first place that human beings ever lived on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. This is a place that we, as everybody who lives currently in the bay area, it should be a place that they're proud of. This is a place that's going to turn into another building. We have enough buildings around. We don't have sites like this. This is the first one. It's the oldest one. It also happens to be a burial ground where thousands and thousands of people were buried for over 5,000 years. [00:08:00] It should be a a historic landmark for the bay area. Everybody should know about it. What are you proposing instead? We're proposing we're working with a group that's going to create a plan that's an alternative plan.
Speaker 2:That's one of the problems with the draftee I are that there is no alternative plan except to say that we could make it a smaller building maybe and so that's just not okay to demolish something. This sacred, this beautiful, this, this meaningful, illogical side with the museum over it. [00:08:30] It should have something there that instead of just a plaque saying that allone people were here at one time and we wiped them out and they're not here anymore. Cause that's basically what we get. We need to show folks that this is a living culture. People have been coming to the shell mound. My still take my family there. We still prayed there and recently we've taken people there and had interfaith prayer circles. They're over 200 people come every time to pray there together that this is a place that is supposed to be saved. This is a sacred place.
Speaker 2:It's a place [00:09:00] that that shouldn't be destroyed. And so what we're doing is we're looking at how can we show this in a way that people can understand all of these other monuments that have been destroyed. Nobody can really wrap their head around what a shell man looks like. [inaudible] isn't there something from the 18 hundreds that I've seen pictures. There are maps that are, that were created. There are pictures of remanence of the shell man, both in Berkeley, west Berkeley and uh, Emeryville. And these [00:09:30] mounds are created by thousands of years of people living in the same place. So it's not like we are wandering around that we had these settlements that were, that people lived at. We were fishermen, so we lived on the water. The Bay actually came up closer. So imagine going into this space and keeping it green. Imagine opening up the Strawberry Creek where my, my ancestors lived next to so that people could see it again today. Imagine having our, uh, uh, structured there in Arbor where we had our ceremonial dances at and having [00:10:00] a mound built there and having structures of what the houses looked like so that children, not only from Berkeley but all over the bay area could come here and actually see that as you said, they, they have to study this stuff. The train tracks are right there and can bring people here to Berkeley. So
Speaker 4:proposed a plan for something like that?
Speaker 2:Yes. So we have had the archeologists, there's some archeologists that have been involved. Uh, not so much in the planning of the, of what we're envisioning. We have some folks that do landscape architecture [00:10:30] that are actually creating plans for us right now. We are hoping to submit that um, we'll be submitting that along with our comments for the draft EIR. Those things will happen so that zoning board could actually see that this could actually be something different. We either open it up to green space and we say as the city of Berkeley that this is what needs to happen. That we don't need any more buildings down there that we actually are going to respect the Aloni people in the culture and that it's an ongoing thing and yes, we want to help the Aloni people to actually [00:11:00] share their culture and beliefs here in the bay area and at the, and at the very least, leave it alone and leave it as a parking area not to build on it ever.
Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness weekly public affairs show on k a l expertly celebrating bay area innovators. Today I'm interviewing Corina Ghoul and Chris oaks about the Berkeley Shell Mound Aloni village site. [00:11:30] You were the main figure, one of the main figures in a film.
Speaker 4:Great documentary beyond recognition. And in that film you created a land trust to solve a similar issue. Can you talk about what that was and I understand also that you are trying to create a land trust here. Sure.
Speaker 2:Michelle Steinberg created the film beyond recognition because we were also involved in takeover of our re reoccupying, one of our sacred sites that had two shell mounds on it and [inaudible] Tay [00:12:00] where Glen Cove Leho is right now in 2011, hundreds of people came out and supported us in protecting that sacred site at that including Chris who was on our legal team at the time. We stood there for 109 days taking over that space again and praying and hoping that it would be protected for all eternity. And for the most part that that's what really happened. There was a federally recognized tribe that is from farther up north. Um, it's not their territory, but they stepped in and created a cultural [00:12:30] easement with the park district and the city, which is the first that's ever happened to cultural easement, allows those three entities to have the same rights on that piece of land.
Speaker 2:So it will be protected. It would not have happened had we not been there for 109 days, pushing the envelope to make sure that something came through and happened. What we realized while we were there. If we had had a land trust at the time, we could have created that cultural easement ourselves. And so Beth Rose Middleton, who was a professor at UC Berkeley, wrote land for [00:13:00] trust, actually invited me to a native American meeting for native people that had land trusts. And I couldn't understand at the time why I was going to the meeting until I got them begin to hear their stories. And I said, wait a minute, we should do that. So we have decided, a group of us came together and we're creating the first urban native women land trust ever created because Aloni people's land is all urban now just about. Um, but also it's all native indigenous women's Land Trust, not just Aloni land trust because so many native [00:13:30] women have been brought into the bay area on relocation measures during the fifties and sixties has raised their children here.
Speaker 2:Their children have children now. And so it's really about giving a place, a space and we're really having to buy our own land back. And that's what the land trust is about. So right now we have done the articles of incorporation. We're working on kind of completing the nonprofit status so that we can go forward and begin to raise money to actually do the purchasing of our land, but land is expensive. Here in the bay area, [00:14:00] the 2.2 acres of land that's across from spankers is going for $17 million. My ancestors, the first place that they ever lived, the first place that Aloni babies were born in this area. The first place of laughter is going for $17 million and if they put this building on top of that, that means that there is not going to be a place that my grandchildren who are laughing and being born on our land can go and pray with their ancestors.
Speaker 2:I think that society has come a bit farther than that, [00:14:30] that we can actually say we can actually share this with the first people that tended to this land. What needs to happen before you get your nonprofit status? What remains to be done? We are in the midst. We have our bylaws that were just completed. We are vetting it through the lawyer and the last paperwork needs to be submitted and then it's all good. We actually have a website that's online right now. It's called a Segora Tay Land Trust. You'd better spell that. Yeah. Www dot [inaudible] [00:15:00] s o g o r e a t e hyphen land trust.org and folks can go on it could learn about history in the bay area, can learn about why we created the land trust. There's also something on there called the Sh. Let me tax and Sh Leumi in Aloni language though, Aloni language from this area [inaudible] it means a gift and so it allows people to go on there and to actually help us in finding ways to raise money if they're a renter or an owner, how many bedrooms [00:15:30] they have, how much land tax they could actually pay to help us to begin that process of purchasing land back.
Speaker 2:So it's a way for people to be involved. I encourage people in the [inaudible]
Speaker 4:and to see that great documentary that you feature so prominently in. Yes, which is called beyond recognition. Definitely check that out. It's a good one. I wanted to ask you if you felt like standing rock and all the historic precedent that said, although right now it might be under siege with our, our new president, but do you feel that that has invigorated [00:16:00] this cause?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say that I'm, in the last 20 years we've been working on [inaudible] issues in the bay area. We've done walks to show mounds, we've done the occupation, we go to the Emeryville on the day after Thanksgiving for the last 19 years asking people to come and help us give out information to ask people not to shop there. And I think that when people began to see standing rock and social media has been such a great wonder and helping people to see this, see what was happening out there and to actually [00:16:30] follow along. So many people, activists from the bay area have gone out to standing rock. And one of the beautiful things that has happened was that the elders out in standing rock actually gave a directive to young people that were coming out there. And going back home was to get involved with your own local issues. This is our standing rock right now in the bay area. This is our front line. And so young people, allies and accomplices have come together, have helped us to try to figure out how they could do work to help us [00:17:00] to get fundraisers for the lawyer that we've had to hire, have done fundraisers to get information out, have created events pages so that folks will know about it. So it's been a wonderful coupling of between us.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's not over yet. Of course. It's not over yet. It has really kind of lit some fires I think. Yeah, it's been great. You've been at this for 20 some years. How did you
Speaker 2:no, you were Aloni how did this all come about? Right. I grew up in the bay area, went to, uh, went to public [00:17:30] schools. My mom always told us that we were Aloni we, she knew that we came from mission San Jose. That's where we were enslaved at. My great grandfather, Jose Guzman was the last one of the last speakers of the [inaudible] language. Can you speak? No, I can't speak it. I can say a few words inside of [inaudible]. My daughter, um, it was her dream since she was about 14 to begin the language and she's starting to do that now and she's teaching my grandchildren as well. So it's a wonderful thing that that's, and it's my hope that I will [00:18:00] learn enough so that I can pray in my own language. So we've always known who we are, but it's not that long ago that California Indians, it was against the law for them to even be here.
Speaker 2:It wasn't that long ago that California Indian kids were taken out of their homes and put into boarding schools like my mom and my aunties and uncles. So it was very scary boarding one of the boarding schools. And so for us it's been a real, it's a resilience, a way for people to say Aloni people are bringing back language and [00:18:30] culture and dance and song because our ancestors put those things away though because our ancestors gave those things to people to hold onto until we were able to grab them again until it was an, it was safe for us to come out. And I think that that's really important that Nels Nelson, for whatever reason, created this map with 425 shell mounds way before I was here in 1909 he wrote that map down. But today we were able to use that in order to find out where all of our sites were.
Speaker 2:[00:19:00] JP Harrington recorded my great grandfather on wax cylinder and it's in the Smithsonian so we could reclaim our language again. So there's these people that put these things away for us because our ancestors whispered in their ear and told them to do that so that we could come back again and share this with our children and our grandchildren. So it's our responsibility. We are the stewards of this land. We were put here because this was the place we were supposed to take care of in this part of the world, and so I really believe that that's our, [00:19:30] that's what we're supposed to do. Bringing back language and song and all of that is part of the dream part of that, about the importance of that language and culture and why is this important? It's important for the healing of this land. It's important for the healing of the people that live on this land, not just the loaning people.
Speaker 2:When you say healing village, are you talking about environmental degradation? I'm talking about racism. I'm talking about the slavery. I'm talking about environmental, I'm talking about the invisibility of Aloni people. I'm talking about all of the [00:20:00] horrific things of the happened since the genocide that was created on this land that needs to be taken care of. I'm talking about the thousands of ancestral remains at UC Berkeley that need to be put back into the ground. I'm talking about all of those kinds of things that need to be fixed here so that we could all become more human with each other. Again, it starts here. It starts with US fixing it with the first people of this land. There was at one point the United States government [00:20:30] had a government to government relationship with, with our tribe. And then there was a point in history where the person that was in charge of the bureau of Indian affairs wrote something that basically got rid of us. He wrote a line that said for all intensive purposes, no money was needed in order to purchase
Speaker 3:land for the homeless Indians in the area. Now that takes an act of Congress to actually wipe out a tribe and that never happened, but there has not been any government to government relationships [00:21:00] since then. So it's really difficult to talk to the general public about these kinds of things because the general public doesn't even learn what sovereignty means, what an Indian tribe and federal recognition means in high school. And most kids, like we talk about a kids learn about Aloni people in third and fourth grade, but they learn about us in the past like we don't exist anymore. Well, you have the Indians around here used to do this and they used to do that, but what about the Indian people here today that drive cars and have cell phones and go to Raiders Games? It's always about [00:21:30] the Indians that were dressed up in feathers a long time ago and people didn't dress in feathers everyday.
Speaker 3:Those were regalia that we use for certain ceremony, so we have to break those ideas in people's mind, but we also have to do a better job educating people that go to public schools about what does this, what is the responsibility of the federal government to the nations. Many different nations, hundreds of different nations that lived here in the, in the United States before it was the United States and we do a really bad [00:22:00] job in the education system doing that. Part of the history of how Indian tribes were recognized by the federal government comes from the fact that we have a several hundred year history of being Indian people in the United States. One of the issues that we get, especially out in California, is that the westward expansion in the United States followed several hundred years of congress changing their minds. So under the Supreme Court decision of John Marshall, the, he said that Indian nations were what they call domestic dependent nations, which means they're under [00:22:30] federal government control just legally.
Speaker 3:And so part of that was that George Washington and the Delaware people, they were talking in the late 17 hundreds and as they traveled west, as the, as United States grew, they had different policies and different agreements with all of the Indian tribes going one by one. We've got about 430 recognized Indian tribes. Each one had their own agreements. And part of that was reflected in what year it was. Who is in Congress? Who was president? Was it, um, Andrew Jackson [00:23:00] who is known as the Indian killer or was it president Washington who in fact was fighting for independence from a foreign nation and all the way until the war of 1812 Indians were a strong part of the United States military or the British military or the French military. Depending on who they were aligned with. So a lot of the east coast tribes have a completely different history because they were actually allies of these emerging governments.
Speaker 3:And then when you get past the Mississippi, you had the policies of a few hundred years of Indian [00:23:30] wars, which is why, for instance, the Lakota people and the boots Apache people in Geronimo and sitting bull. And you get these Indian leaders for about a hundred years that were known for the Indian wars because that's when the west was expanding rapidly and they were killing Indians to do it. But the little known American history that we don't know as much is what happened when not the Mexican or the Spanish government got to California, but was when the United States government got to California. So we're talking in the 1850s so that was, [00:24:00] you know, 150 years of Indian policy that had been used by the United States and by Congress. And so you had a completely different idea of how to deal with Indian people by the time you got here. So what happened was that they were keen to recognize as many tribes as possible on the east coast because they were allies.
Speaker 3:They were keen to run through all the tribes in the middle of America, from North Dakota, all the way down to Texas and all the way out to Colorado. And by the time they got here, they were purely motivated [00:24:30] by taking the land and they saw the Indian people as a burden on the west coast and California specifically because it was one of the last states. This is where Congress made it a policy to not recognize the tribes in California because they saw them as a burden because of 150 years of us policy with Indian tribe. Chris, what is your background here? What are you doing in this movement? My mom is from England and my father's from the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma. The reason we're the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma's, [00:25:00] cause Andrew Jackson relocated us in the 1830s from the state of Mississippi, which is our actual true home.
Speaker 3:That's where our origin stories come from. The Choctaw people were pivotal in fighting in the war of 1812 against other Indian nations. For instance, to Coosa, uh, who is like a famous Indian leader who was very anti-American because he was on the British side. My tribe fought for the, for the United States. We were part of the war of 1812 where a large part of the victory of the war of 18, 12. The reason that we don't have any reservation in the state of Oklahoma [00:25:30] is because we picked the wrong side of the war for the civil war. So that's just a little brief history of how our tribe has been affected over in the state of Mississippi, in Oklahoma, by United States policy, United States Indian policy has changed depending on who's president, who's in Congress, what were were fighting. And where we are. Part of me here is that my dad, his family was born in Oklahoma since it became a state.
Speaker 3:My great-great-grandmother arrived in Oklahoma the day it became a state as a settler. She was on the Non Indian [00:26:00] side and my dad's family has been born in the state of Oklahoma since we were relocated there in the 1830s he moved out here because of the air force. My granddad was relocated here as part of the air force. They came to California. So the reason why, for instance, inter-tribal friendship houses, the oldest Pan Indian meeting center in the United States, which is right here in Oakland on the west coast, is because Indians have been relocated to California specifically to the industrial areas like Oakland, [00:26:30] Los Angeles, which is where some of the largest Indian populations are in the United States is because of relocation. Sometimes that happened from what they call the relocation programs to the United States. Sometimes it comes because Indians have overwhelmingly been some of the most active volunteers for the United States military.
Speaker 3:Uh, my dad went to cal Berkeley and so that's how my family got here. He actually wanted to fly my mom to Oklahoma to have me and my brother born there because we were the, the first generations [00:27:00] not born in Oklahoma since we were relocated there as a tribe. I went to school at California State University, East Bay and created a degree in American Indian pre-law because I knew that Indian law was what I wanted to do with my life. I remember ever since I was a kid, I would learn about the Indian policy. I would learn about sacred sites and it was something that would oftentimes have moved me to tears. And I knew it was something that I was passionate about. And when I started getting involved with Karena, one of the first sacred sites that I really sat down and worked for was in Cigar Tay, which was in Vallejo in 2011.
Speaker 3:[00:27:30] And ever since then, it's been kind of hard to, to not follow my responsibilities, uh, to not follow the privileges that I've been given in this life, whether it be economic privileges of where I was born, but also my history of how my people got here to California, whether it be the Indian side or the English side, taking a step back from the Indian ancestry. For me, just as somebody who was born in Oakland, we need to look around and see the sacred sites that are around us. We need to know the history people lived here for [00:28:00] thousands of years before us and they're still here. And so part of that is acknowledging sacred sites and is knowing where these places are and what they mean. Our generation, I feel overwhelmingly has realized we're now coming to grips with our colonized history as colonizers, as people who participated in the colonization of North America and who also participated in the colonization of California. And we're realizing that we're on stolen land and some people call it guilt. That's one way of thinking about it, but it's [00:28:30] that we have to be more conscious. We have to think and we have to respect the people who are here now and the people here before us. And when you think about how long Berkeley has been a city compared to the 5,700 years that the west Berkeley Shell mound has been there, it's just a drop in the bucket.
Speaker 2:So anyone listening today, I'm going to encourage people to go onto the Facebook page, west Berkeley show mouth, um, and to download the letters and to email it and to Shannon Allen's at the city planning, but not only for them to do it. I need them to get [00:29:00] five to 10 people, other people to do it. So if you're sitting at your office, you're listening to this, you have your coworkers, you have your mom, your dad, whoever it is that you know that's close to you and say, this is the right thing to do. As citizens of Berkeley, as citizens in the United States, that the Aloni people deserve to have this place saved. And that we can also ask the zoning board to actually change the zoning of that particular site, even though it's private property to make it a place that's actually open [00:29:30] space. If you want to make that a comment, ask the zoning board to make it a place that doesn't ever get built upon, that it stays open space and that they could rezone that particular lot to do. Just that.
Speaker 1:Stop what you're doing. Grab a pen, get involved. I appreciate your energy today, so thank you Trina. Google. Thank you, Chris. Thank you so much. Thank you. You've been listening to method to the madness. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes university. [00:30:00] Tune in again next Friday at noon. [inaudible].
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