A member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe from the East Bay, Medina (pictured above, at left) was trying to change the narrative schoolchildren heard about the Ohlone people indigenous to the area, who the conquerors enslaved in the missions. But when Medina started to feel locked in at his job at the Mission, he left and started working in the produce department at the popular East Bay grocery store, Berkeley Bowl.

“It was so fun to be able to work with these beautiful peaches and apples instead of having to think about slavery,” he said. “I just remember how much I enjoyed being around the food.”

Working at the grocery, Medina began thinking about serving the food native to the area, an idea he talked about with his partner, Louis Trevino (pictured above, right), a member of the Rumsen Ohlone tribe, which originated in the Monterey Bay area.

Now the two run Café Ohlone by Mak-’amham—meaning “our food” in Chochenyo, one of several native Ohlone dialects—where they serve up traditional foods such as acorn soup, chia seed pudding, venison meatballs, and acorn-flour brownies.

Located outdoors in the backyard of University Press Books in Berkeley, the tribe’s aesthetic runs throughout the café. “Ohlone Land” spans the fence in capital letters, tribal baskets decorate shelves, bay laurel—important medicinally and in food—hangs from the balcony, and the space features a large table made from a fallen redwood. The café uses a pop-up model, opening one or two afternoons a week and the occasional evening—announcing all the dates and times beforehand on social media.

Louis Trevino (left) and Vincent Medina (right) cooking at Café Ohlone by mak’amham. (Photo © Emily Wilson)

Trevino and Medina are among a number of Indigenous chefs around the country working to preserve and celebrate their heritage in hopes of keeping their culture alive and vital.

“For both of us, the café is bringing something to our people we’ve been lacking for too long,” Medina said of Café Ohlone. “Growing up, both Louis and I wanted to go to a place outside of our homes and see our culture, especially in our homeland. The café space is helping repair damages from colonization.”

Grounding the Work in the Ohlone Culture

Trevino and Medina met at the University of California, Berkeley, at a conference for Breath of Life, an organization that works with California Indians to strengthen and revive their languages. Reading old documents from their tribes, they found stories, history, and jokes—as well as loving descriptions of the foods their ancestors ate, such as venison and acorns.

Ohlone territory covers about 120 miles—from Vallejo in the east to Big Sur to the southwest, roughly—and Medina guesses the tribe has about 6,000 members. While many remember stories from their families or old dances, Medina said, the Ohlone people were hit hard by colonization—with the Spanish coming first, followed by the Mexicans and Americans—so they couldn’t keep their culture intact.

Before opening the café, Medina and Trevino held an event for their families and other Ohlone. For two nights, they camped out in a secluded area in the East Bay hills, where they practiced language lessons, traditional gaming, and tribal bingo. They had books printed for everyone there with old stories translated to Chochenyo and English, as well as family histories and tribal heroes to make their culture more accessible.

Then they shared stories around the fire and had a feast of traditional foods—venison, mushrooms, native berries, acorn soup, and acorn brownies. The next morning, they served acorn flour pancakes with honey, blackberries, and hazelnut butter.

Because of the cultural loss due to colonization, tasting foods of their tribes meant a lot to participants. “Whether an elder or a young person, when they ate the acorn for the first time, there was this look people had: of feeling proud, of being able to eat that and to know it was something familiar, even if it was their first taste of it,” Medina said.

A sign at Café Ohlone by Mak’amham reads “Ohlone Land” (Photo © Emily Wilson)

The goal, he added, was to “center the work on returning our food and our culture back to ourselves and our families and recognize the sacrifices of people before us” with the eventual hope of “making sure the future is brighter for [Ohlone] people to come.”

Dispelling Stereotypes with Conversation

Trevino and Medina forage in the hills of the East Bay for ingredients for their café—gathering herbs, seeds, and tea in the same place Medina’s ancestors did. During the meals, they talk with their guests about their Ohlone history and culture.

“We’re making people responsible for what they know and where they live and what they’re implicated in by their presence here,” Trevino said. “We’re dispelling stereotypes, and it’s a very powerful way to do it—in conversation.”

One of the most persistent stereotypes is that the Ohlone no longer exist. Sita Bhaumik, who was eating at Café Ohlone on a recent afternoon, says the food reminds her to think of Indigenous people in the present and future tense, rather than in the past.

A co-founder of the People’s Kitchen Collective, Bhaumik teaches a class, “A Taste of Resistance,” at California College of the Arts; Trevino and Medina have spoken to her students about their work. She’s been inspired by the thought-provoking way the two speak about the food they’re serving.

“In their presentation, [they say that] flavor is really active—you can’t say, ‘This is what Ohlone people were like, if you’re tasting food in your mouth at that moment,” she said. “That is something colonialism has really done over time—to say either, ‘These people don’t exist,’ or ‘They were here,’ in the past tense.”

Passing Forgotten Traditions to the Younger Generation

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Crystal Wahpehpah runs a catering business, Wahpehpah’s Kitchen, at which she cooks traditional Kickapoo food from her ancestors in Oklahoma. Like Medina and Trevino, Wahpehpah loves cooking her native foods; it connects her to her family and their traditions, as well as knowledge and experience she wants to pass on to the younger generation.

Chef Crystal Wahpepah’s Kickapoo Chili.

While Wahpepah grew up in Oakland, she’d go every summer to Oklahoma, where she and her aunts and grandma would cook foods traditional to their Kickapoo tribe, like sweet corn.

“It was one of the special moments I had with my grandmother and aunties of harvesting sweet corn and drying it and having it in winter,” she said. “We would go back in the summertime and harvest it and have family dinners. I thought that was the most beautiful thing, and when we’d come back to the city, I always wondered why we never had indigenous food at a restaurant.”

The first Native American chef to be featured on Food Network’s “Chopped” TV show, Wahpepah started her own catering business, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, in 2012, cooking those foods.

At the time, Wahpepah was attending Cordon Bleu, a cooking school in San Francisco, when a friend told her about La Cocina, the San Francisco-based organization that helps low-income people, mostly women, start food businesses. La Cocina supported her in building her brand, Wahpepah said.

When she first started, Wahpepah went to the Oakland library to read about Indigenous food. Now she travels all over the country meeting Indigenous chefs and talking about reviving the cuisine. In the fall, Wahpepah appeared at an event at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, “Keeping the Seed,” along with Trevino and Medina, where she served her food and discussed her mission to make people aware of Native American cuisines as a means of cultural preservation.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t get to see Indigenous chefs or our food in stores,” Wahpepah said. “I take pride in knowing I’m building the foundation for youth to see our foods all over.”

Wahpepah wants to keep meeting other Indigenous chefs and one day, to have her own restaurant and write a combination cookbook and memoir. Like Medina and Trevino, she wants everyone to know Indigenous people and their culture are still alive.

Eating Indigenous food opens people up to hearing about the culture, Trevino says. “The foods are just inherently delicious—it’s completely inarguable—and as they’re eating these delicious things, and we talk about our truths, they’re extremely receptive,” he said. “They’re walking away with a really strong memory.”

“It’s true,” Medina added. “How could people who create such delicious foods be lying about anything?”

Top photos: Vincent Medina (right) and Louis Trevino (left), founders of Café Ohlone by Mak’amham. Courtesy ofCafé Ohlone.

The post Indigenous California Chefs are Reviving and Preserving Native Cuisines appeared first on Civil Eats.

Ko has an autoimmune disease called Antiphospholipid syndrome, which at the time was so debilitating it regularly sent her to the hospital with blood clots and joint pain. She was desperate to do something to improve her life.

“I couldn’t eat grains or dairy or nightshades,” she told the audience. “I was either going to eat kale for my birthday or try and make myself a cake.”

Ko used acorn flour and cacao and sweetened the cake with honey. “It was the most decadent thing I’d eaten in years,” she said. “It felt powerful to take the agency to feed myself.”

Photo courtesy of Pei-Ru Ko

The event at the Museum was called Food as Healing—something Ko has thought a lot about—and spotlighted Ko and the nonprofit she founded in 2015, Real Food Real Stories (RFRS), a community gathering Ko designed to connect people to the food system through sharing personal stories. During a follow-up conversation, Ko explained more about the connection between food and health, and why she started RFRS.

The organization, which has its roots in her own food and health journey, allows “eaters to deeply connect with those actively stewarding our land, sea and overall food system,” Ko said, explaining that she first learned to feel better while studying nutrition and culinary arts at Bauman College in Berkeley in 2011.

“It helped me have an understanding of the role food can play,” she said. “But so much of it is reclaiming that sense of agency, knowing how to feed yourself specifically when your body is needing support—that felt really powerful versus [leaving] everything in the hands of practitioners.”

To that end, Ko completely restructured her diet, getting to know her own body and its needs—paying attention most of all to where the food she ate came from, and not eating anything with hormones. Today, Ko’s health has improved and she is able to eat a broader range of foods, but she still pays close attention to what she puts in her body.

Seeds for Gatherings and Stories

In the same way that Ko took charge of her health, she also had strong ideas about her education. At 13 she lobbied her Taiwanese parents to send her to boarding school in the U.S., thinking she could get a better education. When she arrived, determined to get the most out of it, she didn’t socialize with other Chinese-speaking students, preferring instead to immerse herself in the English language and American culture.

Sylvie Charles (at the microphone) telling her story at a RFRS gathering. (Photo courtesy of RFRS)

It was at Williams College in Massachusetts that Ko began to see storytelling as a way to build community, but found it hard to connect more deeply. She intended to transfer, but the vice president of campus life challenged her to instead create a way for people to get to know one another. In response, she organized a Sunday afternoon group she called Let Me Tell You a Story. She recruited a group of people she felt would be empathetic listeners, inviting others to come tell a story about something important in their life. Already seeing the importance of food at gatherings, Ko baked the storyteller’s favorite cookie.

Learning about her peers’ diverse backgrounds transformed her experience at college, Ko says. “I saw the power of storytelling, of community, and of people from different backgrounds coming together.”

She continued to develop this passion for storytelling when she moved to San Francisco in 2011. She volunteered with Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project and with 18 Reasons. Every weekend, she went to several farmers’ markets to buy good food and meet the people growing it.

Meeting the hardworking people at the markets and through her volunteer work, Ko developed the vision for RFRS as an organization attempting to humanize the food movement. A friend who worked in sustainable seafood encouraged her to start the organization, and she said she would—if he would be the first storyteller.

Ko started RFRS with friends in the food world who volunteered their time. People found out about their events—and still do—mainly through word of mouth. Volunteers continue to play a big role, but RFRS now employs one full-time and two part-time employees in addition to Ko, and is funded by grants and donations.

For its first three years, RFRS events convened attendees, who paid a sliding-scale ticket price of $15-60 to share a meal and hear a live, in-person story from a farmer, a restaurant owner, a writer, or someone Ko identified as a changemaker in the sustainable food movement. Speakers at past events include urban-farming educator Kelly D Carlisle; Reem Assil, the chef behind the renowned Arab bakery Reem’s in Oakland; and Joann Lo of Food Chain Workers Alliance. (Civil Eats’ editor-in-chief, Naomi Starkman, was an early storyteller.)

Michelle Tam presents at StorySlam 2018. (Photo © Kristen Murakoshi Photography)

RFRS attendees come from all walks of life, Ko says. Some work in the food world, but most just want to hear the stories behind the people who provide their food.

“Some industry people come who say it gives them the juice to do their work, but the majority are what I call ‘curious eaters,’” Ko said. “It’s a way to connect with the food community. There’s a hunger for sharing and conversation and authenticity.”

The Ongoing Connection Impact

One of the first people to take part in RFRS was Michelle Pusateri, the founder of Nana Joe’s Granola. Ko met Pusateri at the farmers’ market and bought her handmade, gluten-free, vegan granola on a regular basis. Pusateri had gotten sober and thrown everything into her granola company when her father died. When a doctor told Ko she could no longer eat grains, she went to see Pusateri to let her know she wouldn’t be coming to get her granola anymore.

Pusateri was having none of that.

“She said, ‘Oh no, honey, come to my kitchen in Dogpatch on Wednesday. I’ll make you my trail mix with no oats in it,’” Ko recalls. “I was like, ‘You don’t even know me—why are you doing this for me? And if you’re doing this for me what else are you doing above and beyond for other people?’”

As she got to know people who worked in food, Ko says she realized how committed they were to feeding people and to sustainable agriculture. She wanted others to understand this, too, and to hear stories like Pusateri’s.

Aware that most consumers opt for mass-produced products simply because they cost less, Ko hopes to help convince people to invest in small-scale foods made by artisans like Pusateri, who produce high-quality goods that also carry a higher price tag. “That’s what the food movement needs to fight for. We need to let everyone know why it’s worth it. And it’s not just a marketing pitch,” says Ko.

Pusateri thinks telling her story—and letting people know why she charges $8.99 for her granola—has made a huge difference, and increased sales. She credits Ko.

The crowd at Sylvie Charles’s RFRS gathering. (Photo courtesy of RFRS)

“She’s giving us a voice to explain why they’re paying more,” Pusateri says. “She made me more comfortable to tell my story, and having 50 people listen and tell their friends really increased sales.”

Karen Leibowitz runs The Perennial with her husband Anthony Myint. Leibowitz likes telling stories in front of people, but Ko helped her change her approach—she coaches speakers to be as authentic and personal as possible. Since speaking at RFRS, Leibowitz says she now speaks more personally when she tells stories, and she finds that people are more responsive.

“Sometimes this feels like a lonely journey,” she says. “I’m surprised people don’t hear [our story] and think, ‘Oh, a solution to climate change, let’s get on it.’ It was good for me to think about my community as not only customers, but people who were also invested in a movement.”

Food writer and photographer Nik Sharma was surprised not only by the audience response to a story he told, but by his own response. Sharma, the author of the new cookbook Season, went to an event where participants told stories about something difficult they’d been through. He chose to talk about the racism he’d experienced when starting out in the food world.

“I thought this was all in the past and I was fine,” Sharma says, “but it was an emotional experience. I did not expect to start sobbing onstage but once the waterworks started, I couldn’t stop.”

The experience was cathartic, Sharma says, adding that he was heartened by how deep members of the audience encouraged him to go. The next day he got more than 100 messages of support on email and social media.

“The work Pei-Ru is doing is great,” he says. “It connects a lot of people. I’ve never seen anything like it, really.”

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt presents at StorySlam 2018. (Photo © Kristen Murakoshi Photography)

Support for RFRS is on the rise as well. At the end of September, RFRS hosted its second StorySlam, which included sharing dinner and a series of shorter stories from multiple storytellers. At that event, Ko announced RFRS is planning to make all of its events free of charge, thanks to grant support.

The first free gathering featured Sharma in October, and the next event takes place tonight at Thumbtack in San Francisco, featuring Sadie Scheffer of Bread SRSLY, a gluten-free sourdough bread company. The organization is also launching a podcast, The Curious Eater, early next year.

In the coming years, Ko hopes to expand this model beyond the Bay Area. “Our eyes are set on honing our model and offering it to organizers around the country,” she said. “Our vision is an alive, connected food community around the nation.”

Top photo: Pei-Ru Ko presents at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. (Photo courtesy of RFRS)

The post The Personal Storytelling That is Putting a Human Face on the Food Movement appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fox, endlessly curious and inventive, is something of a legend among cotton growers and organic farmers. Since she was a child, she has been committed to protecting the environment, refusing to use synthetic dyes that pollute the land, water, and human bodies. Her dedication to biodynamic farming is similarly absolute: Her Viriditas farm is home to a stunning number of innovative, sustainable practices. In addition to raising heritage sheep and growing heirloom wheat, she produces organic, non-GMO, naturally colored cotton that boasts rich, earthy tones.

Brown cotton growing at Viriditas Farm. (Photo © Sally Fox)

Fox spent years experimenting with breeding cotton in the early 1980s, until she developed a variety that could be commercially spun and picked by machine. Today, she continues to research greater color ranges and further ways to make colored cotton easier to spin, while also seeking out ecological methods to expand plant color and designing yarns for specific industries.

Fox plants about 70 acres of cotton “wherever it makes sense, in terms of irrigation equipment and crop rotations.” She does the same with the wheat, rotating the two crops and letting the sheep graze on the remaining 100 acres or so of land.

The sheep were an unplanned addition to the farm, but after 20 years, she says, “I’m totally attached to them! And they have built the soil carbon up hugely.”

That underscores another of Fox’s passions: Everything she does on the farm is in service of sequestering carbon, building up the organic matter in her soil and preventing it from being released into the atmosphere. And it’s working, she learned last year after Stanford students came out to do elaborate soil tests at Viriditas.

“My test results corresponded with the historical records of the farm of 1 percent soil organic matter when I bought the place, and now it’s at 2.6 percent—that’s a big difference,” she said, referring to a collaboration between the Gaudin Lab at UC Davis and Fibershed’s Citizen Science initiative that measured the soil carbon on her farm. “Why is organic farming called organic farming? Because it’s all about increasing the soil organic matter! They don’t say ‘chemical-free.’ They don’t say ‘pesticide-free.’ They say organic.”

Building a Market for Colored Cotton

Fox, who grew up in the Bay Area, started spinning when she was just 11. In high school, she set up a business in a dog-grooming facility, spinning people’s dog hair into yarn that she used to knit socks, hats, or scarves—or whatever they wanted.

She wasn’t planning to attend college, but she had always been interested in the environment, and after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when she was 12, decided she wanted to work to eliminate toxic pesticides. One of her high school teachers convinced her to study entomology so she could do just that. So Fox went to the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), where she studied biology, and then to the University of California at Davis, where she earned a graduate degree in entomology.

At Cal Poly, where Fox was teaching hand spinning classes, a conversation with one of her students set her on the course she’s followed ever since. The woman’s daughter had been a high school craft teacher and had lost most of her brain function from years-long exposure to commercial dyes. Fox, who describes herself as a bit of a fanatic, went to the library to look up who made most commercial dyes.

“It’s the same companies that make pesticides, the exact same ones,” she said. “The chemical dyes are highly toxic. I don’t believe they’re toxic when you’re wearing them necessarily, but they’re certainly toxic in the manufacturing. And that’s how it was that I became fixated. I would never spin or weave anything dyed, only natural colors.”

This discovery led Fox to a life-long pursuit to secure natural fibers, wherever they came from—whether it was dogs from the grooming station or musk-ox hair she used to gather from the San Francisco Zoo.

Years later, after getting her Masters of Science degree in Integrated Pest Management at U.C. Riverside, Fox worked for a man who bred tomatoes and cotton. She found some brown cotton seeds in a drawer while cleaning out the greenhouse one day, and in her excitement, she tried to convince him to improve the fiber, which she says was coarse and weak and not good for spinning. He told her there was no market for colored cotton.

“He was in his 70s, and I was my 20s, and I said, ‘Why don’t we make a market?’” Fox said. “He starts laughing, and he says, ‘Why don’t you make a market?’”

And so, with her customary zeal, Fox spent years working on the colored cotton, trying to make it stronger, longer and higher-yielding, by breeding it with cotton that already had those qualities.

Green cotton growing at Viriditas Farm. (Photo © Sally Fox)

Though she worked as an entomologist, she spent all her weekends and vacations in the field, discovering a variety of green cotton along the way. When she had developed cotton strong enough to be machine-spun, she quit her entomology day job, and, with her siblings’ help, in the mid-1980s bought her first farm, in Southern California’s Kern County, where she stayed for eight years.

In 1993, white cotton growers’ fears of cross-pollination led San Joaquin County officials to outlaw colored cotton, so Fox moved on to Arizona, where the hot climate was better for growing the crop and where there were no restrictions on growing colored cotton.

The colors in Fox’s cotton got darker rather than fading with time, and some people were willing to pay a lot for beautiful colors that didn’t come from harmful dyes. Fox’s built a stable of customers, including Levi’s and L.L. Bean, she earned awards and recognition for her contributions to organic agriculture, and her business made millions of dollars—everything seemed great.

Until it didn’t. In the pursuit of profit margins, starting around 1996 U.S retailers began ditching their long-term U.S. suppliers in favor of cheaper sources in India and China. In the United States, mills closed, decimating the textile industry. Fox had grown cotton she couldn’t sell, and now the Arizona farmers, like the ones in Southern California, said they were worried about pollen from her cotton drifting over to their white cotton and tainting the color of their crop.

In response, Fox moved her farm in 1998 to its current location, Yolo County’s Capay Valley, northwest of Sacramento, an area where organic farms thrived and her ideas were welcomed.

A New Operation in California

Shortly after moving back to California, Fox began working with sheep. She needed the animals to get rid of starthistle—a noxious weed that displaces other vegetation—and she had dreams of producing a machine-washable mixture of cotton and wool.

She found a source to buy Merino sheep, intending to bring home six at $300 each. But when she drove her truck and trailer over to the farm, she found that the farm’s new management planned to slaughter any unsold sheep the next day. So she loaded 30 into her trailer and took them home. Three days later, those sheep were having lambs. Now, 20 years later, she maintains a flock of about 140 Merino sheep.

Some of Sally Fox’s Merino sheep. (Photo © Sally Fox)

The sheep have played a central role in Fox’s education about carbon farming. By managing the rotation of sheep and crops, she is learning how best to build up the soil and increase its organic matter. As with spinning and weaving, using naturally colored cotton, and taking on doomed sheep, she throws her whole self into it.

The same pattern holds true for the Sonora wheat she grows. Its long roots also help sequester carbon, she says, which is why she decided to plant it—but she also loved the taste. Fox learned about the heirloom wheat from Monica Spiller, a microbiologist and the founder of Whole Grain Connection in Mountain View, California, whom Fox admires for her fanaticism. Fox, who had never been a big fan of wheat, tasted the Sonora and loved it.

“I kind of became Sonora’s champion. I bought seeds from her and grew three acres, and then I grew 10 acres, and then I grew 27 acres,” she said. “I was becoming this evangelical Sonora wheat person and going around telling everyone they should grow it and how much better it was.”

Modern wheat doesn’t have strong roots or stems because farmers use fertilizers to meet all its needs, Fox says, so it doesn’t build up its roots to seek out nutrients. In contrast, the heirloom Sonora wheat has long roots that add nitrogen to the soil, and since all the energy goes into the grain, rather than the stem, making it more flavorful.

For 10 years, Fox sold her wheat to Anson Mills, a national seller of heirloom grains. But after they told Fox they didn’t feel right taking her entire supply and she should try and sell it locally, she expanded her customer base to include the Davis Food Co-op, the San Francisco bakery Josey Baker Bread, several California farmers, and the restaurant at Napa Valley resort Meadowood.

Sally Fox with her sheep in the field. Photo © Paige Green

Fox has been through it all—she has had to move farms, encountered hostility from other breeders, and built up a successful business to have crash down due to globalism. Now she is dealing with California’s recent weather patterns that have brought historic wetness and dryness to the farm. Her wheat got flooded, and she says she was lucky to have a crop at all. The wheat did fine in the drought due to its long roots, but she didn’t plant cotton at all, worried about her well going out. The recent historic fires in California have taken a toll as well, forcing Fox to evacuate her farm for a week.

What she wants to do, Fox says—and what she’s good at—is research and development. Fox hopes to create a nonprofit, so foundations can support her work. But that takes time, and she hasn’t found that time yet, what with shearing the sheep, grinding the wheat, walking the fields and irrigating—as well as driving back and forth to the apartment she keeps in Davis so her 16-year-old daughter can attend high school in the city.

“I’m doing way too much,” she said. “I should be training young people to do my work. This farm has been carefully tended, and I’ve improved it so much. My work should be supported. I don’t know quite yet how to get from here to where it should be, but it will happen.”

Top photo © Paige Green.

The post Meet the ‘Fanatic’ Breeding Colored Cotton, Growing Heirloom Wheat, and Building Soil Carbon appeared first on Civil Eats.

On this day the green space is especially tranquil. A group of young men are holding a drum circle. Near the entrance, workers and volunteers are sitting around crates of avocados, removing the pits to plant. Soon, a quarter-acre of this lot will belong to the the Sogorea Tè Land Trust. The land, said Planting Justice in a recent announcement, will be an “indigenous cultural site with a traditional arbor, a place for ceremony, and a place to remain true to the original teachings and pass them onto the next generations.”

The effort is the product of a partnership between Planting Justice and the Sogorea Tè Land Trust—an urban, women-led effort that’s rare in a landscape of mostly rural, male-organized efforts—to facilitate the return of Ohlone land back to Native stewardship.

For thousands of years, the Ohlone people lived in the area between the San Francisco Bay and the Monterey Bay. When the Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1700s, they brought smallpox and other deadly diseases with them and enslaved and murdered Native communities. By the early 1880s, the northern Ohlone were reduced to around 1,000 people. Dozens of tribes in the state, including the Ohlone, were never federally recognized, so they were powerless to stop their sacred sites from being paved over.

A lot of the hardship in today’s Native communities is tied to their lack of land, say Corrina Gould and Johnella LaRose, founders of the Sogorea Tè Land Trust, which was started in 2012, specifically as a way to return Ohlone land. LaRose is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, and Gould is Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone.

Over 330,000 Native American people live in the state today, and many suffer from heart disease, diabetes and other diet-related illnesses. According to a recent public health survey on Native children and their families in Alameda, “Native Americans face a myriad of maladies and unhealthy behaviors known as Historical Trauma Response.” For this reason and others, Native people need a place to express cultural pride as one antidote to intergenerational trauma.

“It’s important for all human beings to have a connection to the land,” says Gould, who has seen shellmounds sacred to the Ohlone covered by apartment buildings, bars, malls, and parking lots. With this in mind, she and LaRose are “working on creating places of healing and a space that young people can be on, so they’re not covered in concrete all the time.”

When asked how she and Gould came up with the ambitious plan to buy back tribal land, LaRose laughed. “Oh, you know,” she said. “You fall asleep and you do some dreaming.”

But she and Gould are doing more than dreaming. As the co-founders of Indian People Organizing for Change, they joined organizer Norman “Wounded Knee” DeOcampo, another organizer for indigenous tribes, to protect a sacred burial site in Vallejo just northeast of Oakland in 2011. They occupied the land there for more than three months, ending with a cultural easement between the City of Vallejo, the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, and two federally recognized tribes.

This struggle inspired LaRose and Gould to start thinking about what they might do to regain sacred Ohlone sites. Gould was invited to southern California to an indigenous land trust meeting and out of that came Sogorea Tè Land Trust.

Soon, LaRose and Gould set to find ways to either buy back traditional Ohlone land and to create cultural easements on their sacred sites. After they created the land trust, they started hosting gatherings for people to talk about land. In 2014, they held three gatherings—one for indigenous people, one for all people of color, and one for everyone.

“We asked ‘What does land mean to you? What is sacred? What happens when you grow up without land?’” said LaRose. “People made art and wrote poems, and we talked about how you can benefit from land that’s open, where you can breathe and relax.”

With a creek that Gould’s ancestors knew as Lisjan running nearby, the Planting Justice lot fits the bill. “It’s quite beautiful even though we’re surrounded by the city,” she said.

Gavin Raders, co-founder of Planting Justice, says once the land is paid off (he thinks it will take about five years), the organization plans to donate the full two-acre lot to the land trust, so that Ohlone and others in the Native American community can grow food there. Meanwhile, the quarter acre will be for ceremonial practices and should belong to the land trust in about six months.

“There’s been a disconnection from land and sacred practices with the genocide of indigenous people,” said Raders. “It’s our duty to see that the land stays in Native stewardship forever.”

Chris Tittle, director of organizational resilience at the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, also sees Native land ownership as an ethical issue. “There’s this narrative that Native people are gone, but they’re still here and organizing,” said Tittle. “Even symbolic acts—and this is more than symbolic—to acknowledge and to take steps to heal and repair what was done to them is a massive act of reparations.”

Diane Williams, health educator for Planting Justice, and a longtime friend of Gould and Larosa, says the time she has spent time working with former inmates who are re-entering the general population and organizing drum circles at the urban farm has strengthened her belief that indigenous people need their own land.

“The drum is the heartbeat of our community, and as Native people we’re really clear on that,” says Williams, who is a Native Alaskan. But finding a place to host drum circles hasn’t been easy. “We have to go sit in someone’s church or we have to go sit at a park,” she said. Having a dedicated space will make a big difference when it comes to healing the community.

Gould and LaRose have been focused on finding the land, but they hope that young Native Americans will help shape the space. Gould also has one thing she’d like to see. “One of the only dreams I have is to create a roundhouse that’s on our territory again,” she said.

Roundhouses were once common meeting paces for tribes all over California. “That would be a place for our spiritual wellness,” Gould said. “It would reengage our young people in their songs and dances, land, and be healing not just for Ohlone people but for everybody who now lives in our territory.”

All photos by He-Myong Wu.

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