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View transcript- Hi, good evening. Welcome to the Exploratorium. On behalf of Public Programs, I would like to say thank you so much for coming to AfterDark. My name is Herbie, and I'm really excited for this next presentation. Before we get started, though, I want to do an acknowledgment of where we are. So, we are in Ohlone territory. The Ohlone people have been, are still, and continue to be in the future the custodians of this land. They protect and look after this land and we thank them for that. And tonight, we're talking about culture expressed through food. Tonight's theme is You Are What You Eat, and our presenters here in this space are some folks from the Ohlone Cafe, Louis and Vincent. We are very honored to be having them here this evening to talk about the story of the past, present, and future of Ohlone culture and Ohlone food. So, without any further ado, please put your hands together for them tonight. - Wonderful. So, hello to you all. Vincent Medina. Louis Trevino. My name is Vincent Medina, and I'm joined here by my partner, Louis Trevino, And we are Ohlone people. We're here right now in a very specific area. And I must add, though, that before the Exploratorium has ever been here, this area has long been under water actually, and so there wasn't a village here, per se. But we know that our ancestors would dock their tule boats not far from where we're at right now. We know that not far from where we're at right now is an old Ohlone village, called Sitlintaj, which is where present day Yerba Buena Gardens is at, in that area. And we know that people have been living in this area since too many generations to ever count. This area, the language of this area is the Ramaytush Ohlone language. That's the original language of this place. And today, this area, it's still a deeply respected space. I'd like to start, though, by acknowledging that my family and my tribe, that we're just east of this space. My family comes from the East Bay. That's where our home is, where every generation of our family has always lived. And my partner, Louis, his family is from the Carmel Valley, the Rumsen Ohlone. I'm part of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. And today, we're gonna be speaking about our culture, about our history, about where we're at today, but also the things that we know are going to happen in the future as well. Before we start, though, I'd also like to give gratitude to the Exploratorium and also to Herbie here for making all of this happen, for being so respectful to us. And often we joke about Ohlones in unexpected places. And so, being here at the Exploratorium, as a place that I grew up going to when it was at the Palace of Fine Arts, it's definitely a very fun and powerful feeling to be here sharing our culture in this space. I'd also like to acknowledge Allison Shiozaki who's here and Dierja Green, our administrator, part of the Cafe Ohlone family as well, and Malcolm Margolin, who wrote The Ohlone Way that started to change popular consciousness about Ohlone people here in the Bay area. But before we start this presentation, just so you can see with your own eyes some of what we're doing at Cafe Ohlone and what contemporary Ohlone culture looks like, I'm going to start by sharing a ... a short video that shows the cafe, and then we're going to go into this work, this presentation, and we're going to pair each one of these presentations with either a tea or a small bite. So, we'll get started right now with this piece that was part of an episode that we worked on to bring visibility to our communities. - It's exciting through mak-'amham to bring Ohlone foods to the public here. Every other culture is represented in their cuisine here in the Bay Area. It's important that Ohlone foods are also in that space. By having Ohlone foods here today, it makes it inarguable that we are here. - There's a contemporary phrase that we have, which is : "The ground turned to stone, but the world is still alive." You know, we're in the midst of all this urbanity. We've gotta make sense of our world. And it is urban, the ground is stone, and no matter what, you know, you can never separate us from this place either. We're doing what we can with what we have available. So, sometimes that means creating a cafe space in the back of a bookstore. Just so everybody knows what our menu is today, to start off, we have a rose hip tea and an elderberry tea, a native green salad, and a dressing of walnut oil and blackberry juice. We have soft-boiled quail eggs, acorn soup, one of them with wildflower honey, one of them is left unsweetened, acorn flour brownies. We have venison that's currently being smoked with bay laurel and bay salt from San Francisco Bay shoreline. So, , welcome. Now let's eat. - Cafe Ohlone by mak-'amham is in this tucked away back patio here at University Press Bookstore. We're across the street from UC Berkley, surrounded by all of this activity. - Louis and myself started mak-'amham, which is Chochenyo language, it means "our food." - It's an organization that we started in order to return our traditional Ohlone foods to our families who haven't experienced them in at least two generations. - This very place right here could be where our direct ancestors gathered 400 or 500 years ago. And when we're gathering these plants again, it's just getting back into that groove of how our people have always done it. This is bay laurel. In our language, we call this . In Rumsen ... So right here, this is the in Chochenyo, in Rumsen, which is the Yerba Buena. This is a herb that we make into a tea. It's that quintessential taste of home. When I started working there at Mission Dolores, I really did the most that I could to talk about our strength, our survival, our perseverance, and our continuity as well. Eventually, it just reached a boiling point for me where I realized, you know, my time here on earth can be spent reversing what the mission has done to us. And instead of just talking about those things, this work that we're doing, it's like defying gravity, because we're moving against what was supposed to happen. We live in this society right now that's always getting things in an instant, you know, getting food in an instant, you know, whatever we need. And in this fast food world that we're living in, slow foods is trying to buck that trend, and that means eating seasonally. People, I don't think, understand how decadent and how rich our diet is, you know? We always say that our food in inherently bougie, you know, because it, just the ingredients on their own. This is a blackberry Yerba Buena bay laurel dipping sauce, and we will add a little bit of acorn flour to this to thicken it. This is the bay laurel we gathered yesterday. These are quail eggs, in our language. These are going to be soft-boiled for three minutes. And we're going to have roasted venison back strap that's wrapped in Yerba Buena. We're going to have Louis's acorn flour brownies. - Which are something that we made to introduce acorn to our young people. We adapted a brownie recipe to include acorn flour and to use coconut oil rather than butter. - You know, for me, I think that our contemporary foods that we're making are foods that our people would recognize, because they're rooted in everything that's traditional. We don't cook with anything that wasn't here in those pre-contact days. There is always room for creativity, but we also know that there's rules that we are to follow too. With those rules, that means that, you know, we have to be steadfast and making sure that we don't change things too much, because otherwise that changes the nature of what our food is. Okay, so that was a lot of fun to be part of that episode. One of the most difficult parts of it, though, was remembering that the microphone on was on all the time. And often, when they asked us to do one scene over and over and over again, it became difficult to remember that it was hard to complain about that with the microphone attached. But it was a lot of fun, and we're so grateful for their work on that, because it was a successful piece, and we're happy we can share with you what some of our foods look like. And today, we're going to be speaking in four different segments about Ohlone culture, both of the past and the old days, before contact. And what we mean "before contact", before other people started to come, before things began to change, before we see the contemporary Bay area that we see today, the traditional world. We're going to also talk about some of the difficulties that our people experienced. That will be the second part of this presentation. And also the ways, more importantly, that our people survived those difficulties, and including the genocide that was waged against our people. We'll then talk in the third segment about the revival that's happening right now and the reawakening of our culture to see the things that we know our ancestors have always cherished come back home to us a second time. And then, finally, for the fourth part, we're going to talk about what we know is certain in the future for our community with this work that's being done to instill a shining future for Ohlone people. But I'd like to start off with just a few facts. The first thing is, in spite of whatever's out there, whatever you heard, the Ohlone people, we are not extinct. Ohlone people are, in fact, doing quite well today. There's been incredible hardships that our people have experienced in our history, but in spite of that, we're still right here. And our family, for my family in the East Bay, has never left that place. Every generation of our family, from those ancient times to today, has been born right there, and that's including myself. For Louis's family in Carmel, those deep cultural ties were never lost either. And we wanna start by showing a face of somebody who's a hero to me. This is my great grandmother, Mary Archuletta. My great grandmother, she was born on the old Pleasanton rancherilla, which was a sovereign piece of Indian land in the East Bay, and my great grandmother, she worked her entire life to keep our culture strong. She spoke our language, she gathered these foods that we serve at Cafe Ohlone with our families, she carried on our jewelry making, worked to protect our land, our sacred sites, and she's very much a hero to me. And I wanna start by acknowledging who I come from. That's Mary Archuletta. She was born on the Pleasanton rancherilla. She saw our tribe's recognition be taken from us, but she still found ways to keep everything alive, and she passed that on to all of our family, including myself. So, this is a real person, a real hero in our community, and that's my great grandmother. So we're gonna start off with . That means before. Before others came. Before things started to change. These are some facts I'd like to share with you right here. So since beginning times, and we believe this quite literally, our elders, they tell us that we were created in the East Bay, on the peaks of Tushtok, the place that many people call Mount Diablo. And we know that, for too many generations to ever count, that our people have lived there, and they lived there well. They lived there well, and the original teachings that were taught to us is that the earth would provide everything that we've ever needed. But there was also balance that needed to be upheld as well. Our ancestors would pray for the foods before they gathered them, never taking more than they needed. They stewarded the land through controlled burns, nurturing crops that they wanted to come up, oak groves that they wanted to come up, food sources, also clearing out the dangerous overgrowth that allows these terrible fires that we're seeing today come to be. We know that, since those beginning times, our people lived well in the East Bay, and for Louis's family, in the Carmel Valley. Our people lived settled and settled villages, dotting the East Bay, dotting the San Francisco peninsula for some other families, going all the way down to Monterey. And if you look at this map that's right here, you see a series of names. And each one of those name's that's there is a modern day, is a traditional nation, if you wanna think like a small micro state. And each one of these nations were all very interconnected through trade, through marriage, through being able to interact with each other in dances and celebration, and ceremony. My family, specifically, comes from an area that I'm going to move right here, called Jalquin Irgin. This is where my great great great great great great grandmother was born. That's also where I was born as well, as well as my father and all those generations before him. But to know where we come from, to be able to have that connection to place, means that we love that place more than words can ever fully describe. We know that we descend from basket weavers, fishermen, herbalist, orators, singers and doctors, religious leaders, people who built shell mounds taller than we can ever imagine along the bay shore, captains and dreamers, and much much much much more. And I write these things because I wanna humanize the people that we come from. Often, out there, there's been dangerous misconceptions about Ohlone people, things that often still are painful for us to read even today, but we want to humanize those people to speak about the dignity that we know that they had and that we still see in our elders even today and in our family today, as well. So right here are some of the earliest images of , our people, and if you look to the left right there, you're gonna see Ohlone people on a tule boat. This was painted in the early 1800s, in 1815. The tule boat, which we call a walle, is the traditional transportation from the East Bay over to the peninsula. And I'll tell you, today when we're on the Bay Bridge often, I often think, and I know for a fact, it would be a lot faster on a tule boat than getting stuck in that traffic. And the reason why are these tule boats, they glided on the bay like a feather. The Spanish, when they first came here in the late 1700s, they remarked on how well-built these boats were, how beautiful they were, and how they would out-sail all of the Spanish ships when they caught the wind. You see things that we still recognize in our community even today, like in the back of that tule boat, which is right there in San Francisco Bay, you see the Marin Headlands in the back. The back of that tule boat, you see basketry, beautiful Ohlone basketry that's one of our finest forms of art. These baskets that took years to make were all plant-based and from feathers and from olivella shell and clam shell beads, added 'til they made these beautiful baskets that are some of the finest works of art that we know our people created. You see right there people taking care of an elder in the center. That's something that we still recognize, that love that we have, and that caring that we have for our elders, making sure that we always protect them. And I also gotta add too, from a traditional diet, you see how well-built these people are on the boat, as well. And that all comes from eating those traditional foods, venison and salmon, eating the berries that come up during summertime, having acorn soup, this protein-filled food, hazelnuts, having all of these foods that we know that our ancestors, that they nourished them, and that our people would pray over, to gather, as well. To the other side of this, you see images of our people in full regalia. That's what we call what people wear during dance time, during ceremony time. And these images that you see here, the crow feather skirts, the top knots that you see on their head, the orange headband, that's called a flicker feather headband, the body paints that you see. These things are still practiced by our community even today. When Ohlone people, or other California Indian people will go to dance, you'll see people wearing things that are exactly like this. And over 240 years later, we're still seeing these exact same traditions be carried on. Did you want to share? Okay. So, we're gonna stop this right now and start serving our first tea, which is going to be , which is a rose hip tea, our initial tea for this evening. And something that we wanna share with you is each one of these teas that we're going to gather this evening, or, excuse me, that we're going to serve this evening, are teas that are gathered in the East Bay. When we gather these foods, we gather them from the same areas that we know our ancestors have always gathered these teas from. We gather them with gratitude and with prayer. And Allison, who's back here, is our gatherer and chief, so she's often gathering our teas for Cafe Ohlone. This tea that you're going to drink, it's a tea that traditionally is used as a face wash also. And again, just to share with you some of the humanity of our people, Ohlone people have always cared about looking good, and this rose hip tea that's here, it's a face wash which builds collagen. So traditionally, Ohlone people would make a concentrated face wash with rose hip and wash their faces with this, looking good and looking fresh. And so, after you drink this tea, hopefully you feel more beautiful also. This tea, it's something that's delicious, and it's something that we enjoy at home and we celebrate often. We serve at Cafe Ohlone as well. The next tea that we're going to have is going to be ... Is it a next tea, or is that ... - It's a ... tea. - The ... - [Louis] I think it's the artemesia. - The artemesia tea is going to be the next tea, which is followed by hazelnut flour brownies, which is a contemporary Ohlone dish with salt that we gather from San Francisco Bay, as well as ... as well as crushed walnuts. And they're gluten free, but they're not vegan, for those who are. There's a little bit of duck egg that's in there as well. And our final tea will be ... a black sage tea, excuse me. We got a lot of teas tonight. A black sage tea that was gathered in the East Bay hills. So as you're drinking this tea, we'd open this up for any Q and A before we move into our next segment. - Hi. I was wondering about the continuity of this traditions. It sounds very labor-intensitive. And I'm wondering about the challenges of convincing generation after generation to continue to invest in the culture, as opposed to ... not spending the time to connect with it? I'm just wondering if that's been a challenge over time? - Definitely. Thank you for asking. So, we're very proud that we have a community of people. Our tribe today and the extended Ohlone community is like this, where there's a series of lineages that make up the contemporary Ohlone community. And those lineages come from a core group of survivors, a people who survived the worst parts of colonization, and these lineages, the people who came out of these difficulties, came out incredibly, incredibly, incredibly proud of our culture. And that pride has been carried on to all of those different lineages, and so, with our grandparents, we only have to, as long as we listen to our grandparents and our great grandparents, they're always willing to share as much as they know about those stories with us. And unless you're just not a good person, you're always gonna respect your grandparents, right, and want to make them happy and proud and all of those things. And so, with us, it becomes very personal, because we see those people who care about these things. And because we wanna make them happy, we want to carry on in those footsteps. You know, it's not a problem to get people engaged. It's just about finding ways to connect people so that they have the best ways to be able to carry our culture on forward. Thank you for asking that though. But, one thing that we do, though, that helps to stay relevant as well, is not shying away from ... from change, knowing that change is also happening all around us, and we're also ... we're also products of the contemporary Bay area as well, and so, with that, we embrace technology. There's no problem having our language lessons over FaceTime, or being able to create hashtags in Chochenyo, or in orthography where we text each other in our language. That's all part of our living identity. So it's also just embracing change as it comes along and knowing that we'll be part of that story as well. Well, thank you all for sticking around. So, the next stage of this that we're going to talk about is mak-muwekma ya-wattin, which means "our people keep going." And this segment is specifically talking about invasion and survival. And for those who also want to leave or who want to come back later, don't feel pressured. We're happy that you're here, but we don't want you to feel like you have to stay here, or we're gonna give you mean looks if you walk out or anything like that, okay? Not the case. But this portion that we're in right now, this portion is going to be focused on ways that our community has survived many difficulties that we've experienced. And we also want to applaud all of you for coming to this really fun event and taking the time to learn about some of these challenges in the past. But what we say is that, knowing these things creates healing for all of us. Everybody who lives in the Bay Area, but especially for Ohlone people. For so long, the horrors and the sadness that our people experienced was often entirely ignored or just written off altogether. And if you could imagine how difficult that would be to not be able to have anybody understand how difficult those things were and to not often seem like they even care about how difficult those things were, those things weigh very heavy on us. So we thank you all for staying for this part, and this part might be a little bit difficult for some people, and I just wanna give you an advisory of that. But even though it's difficult, it's important that we talk about this. So, the image I shared with you earlier was an image that was painted by a man named Louis Choris, who was a French ... artist who sailed around and ... and drew portraits of indigenous people all around the world. And the image previously to this was showing people in that pre-contact world before they were affected by the Missions, by colonization. But this image right here was painted by the same person, and it shows a very different stage just a few years after those initial images were taken, or were painted. And right here, it's , when the others came. And right here you see an image that's not far from here. It's at the Presidio in San Francisco today. And you see our people being treated and under very different circumstances. Right here, you see the Presidio building where the Officer's Club is at. There's a fancy restaurant there. It's called Arguello today. There's like a, it's a big museum that's there. And right here you see the Spanish soldiers that are there with their lances, their swords. Right here, you see Ohlone people under very different circumstances, being forced to work against their will. There's the Morin Headlands right there where the Golden Gate Bridge is at today. A ship's sailing out of it. And this began the very first wave of invasion and genocide here in our homeland, here in the Bay Area. And we have endured and survived many, many, many hardships in our history, and I'm just gonna walk you through many of these, as soon as colonization came, But just, very first, I gotta add that colonization here, in the Bay Area, it's not that far away. Like, my great grandmother's great grandfather was born in a pre-contact village, meaning that he wasn't impacted by colonization. However, when it came here, and this was just over 200 years ago, it came very, very, very quickly, like a rapid succession of one thing after another. And it started in the late 1700s. Here, in the Bay area, it started in 1776. The Spanish government, they attempted to missionize our ancestors. So what that meant was they came here into the Bay area, and they forced people into these very deadly places called the California Missions. Did any of you grow up in California? Okay, did any of you have to do that mission project when you were a kid? Some of you? Okay, I had to do that also, Louis too, and it sucked. It was terrible to have to do that. And I remember when I had to do that, I was told things that were completely unfair. I was told when the Spanish came to California, the friendly, faithful, peaceful Indians were so happy that they arrived. They were so happy that the Spanish brought them food and culture and civilization. And as a fourth grader, I remember hearing that and just thinking, like, "What the heck is this lady talking about?" And I knew it wasn't true, because what I saw at home was my family not really like the missions system, but they still went there, because they knew that their ancestors were there, and they would go there to pray for them. But our family never went to the missions just for fun, you know? It wasn't a place that people went just to go sightseeing or something like that. But the truth is, when the Spanish came here, they attempted to force our people into those places, because they were attempting to suppress everything that was indigenous to the Bay Area. So, in the missions, and there's one here in San Francisco, some of you might know of Mission Dolores, and that's where mine and Louis's ancestors directly also were at. Our six great grandparents were there at Mission Dolores. And at Mission Dolores, the Spanish, they attempted to suppress our language, our stories. They would whip people if they spoke their language. They would forbid people from going out and gathering their traditional foods. They forbade people from practicing our traditional religion. People were forced to practice Catholicism. And in that place, people suffered greatly. They couldn't go back home. If they tried to go back home, the Spanish would send the military out for them, forcing them back into the Missions, where they would be severely punished. In the Missions, the Spanish, they attempted to take away peoples' names. And I used to work at Mission Dolores in San Francisco. I worked there for seven years, where I was trying to change that narrative to focus on our strength, our survival. And I would often tell the kids who would come, the fourth graders, I would say, "Imagine one day you're just sitting at home, "minding your own business, "and people come in your house, "and they say, 'This is mine now.' "'Can't speak your language anymore. "'Can't eat your food, can't practice your religion, "'Can't do any of those things. "'Gotta do it all my way." I asked them what they would do. They would say fight back. And I say, "That's what any normal person would do." For Ohlone people, our ancestors launched a fierce resistance here in the Bay Area, fighting back against the Spanish trying to take our culture away from us. So, people weren't just accepting these things. But the Spanish had much stronger weapons than our people did. Our people had bows and arrows, and obsidian blades. The Spanish had cannons and guns and these metal swords. And during that time, our people couldn't be able to defend ourselves in the same way against them. However, we know that when the Spanish came, change happened very quickly. However, they weren't here for that long. We're talking from the ... 1770s up until just 1821. And after they came, and after they were here, a different flag was raised over California. Some of you might know that California, for a brief time, was part of Mexico. However, it wasn't the Mexico that we think of today. It was very much an extension of the Spanish Empire, just an independent one. And during that time, our people, who became very forced into the Missions, became very much accustomed, for better or worse, not happy there, but they were in the Missions, and during that time, the Mexican government told our people that our people had to leave those places. It wasn't suddenly because they cared about our people, but it was because they were trying to sell off all of the resources of the Mission churches, 'cause the government was bankrupt at that time. So they were trying to sell the silver, the gold, the cattle, the crops, in order to have more resources after this long war. During that time, they told our people to leave the Missions, and our people tried to find ways to make do. They tried to go back to where those old villages were. But during that time, they were on very private land holder's properties, and they didn't want Indian people around them. So, during that time, our people didn't have many places to go. Our ancestors had to find a way to make do, and they did. So they hid out in these canyons over in Sunol, which is in the mountains just ... about 40 miles south of Berkley. And in Sunol, our traditional culture began to thrive again when it was safe. Our language became spoken again. It became stronger. The traditional political structure of having a male and a female leader was reinstated. The traditional religion was reestablished back there, well, was strengthened back there. It never went away. And even our people went out and reconverted people from the Catholic ways back into our traditional religion. And during that time, our people were allowed to live together as a community. However, things became much difficult again after Americans came in. And that's the current period that we're in right now. So, in the 1840s, some of you might have heard of the Gold Rush before. It's very prominent all here around San Francisco. However, for us, the Gold Rush was a nightmare for California Indian people. During this time, when Americans first came in, there were decrees that were placed where it became legal to kill Ohlone people and all other Indian people in California. The very first governor of California, some of you might know this name, but most of you, I'm guessing, don't, 'cause it's not out there. His name is Peter Burnett. And Peter Burnett said in his first address to the state government that it's inevitable, but there has to be a war of extermination against the California Indian race until the race becomes extinct. So during that time, bounties were placed on the heads of our ancestors, and it became physically unsafe to be indigenous. Our ancestors had to find ways to make do, and they did. They continued to live on the Sunol rancherilla. That's where my great grandmother was born, about two miles north of there when it moved to Pleasanton. And on that rancherilla, our family, then, for a very brief time, was able to negotiate federal recognition, meaning that they were seen as being a sovereign people, a sovereign nation within the United States, like a nation within a nation. And our tribe, our family was able to get that recognition. However, in 1925, there was a man named Alfred Kroeber at UC Berkeley. And he visited our people, and none of our people could remember a time before colonization at that point. This is in the 1920s. And so, instead of Alfred Kroeber acknowledging that, he said that the Ohlones, for all practical purposes, are extinct. And after that happened, two years after, an Indian agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs took our tribe off the list of recognized tribes without ever visiting the conditions our people were living under, without ever stopping to see the poverty and the difficulties that people were experiencing. And during that time, there was huge anti-Indian bias all around the Bay Area. During that time, when our people were forced to leave that land base, our people had to find ways to make do. But during that time, people wouldn't rent to Indian people, they wouldn't hire Indian people to work for them, they didn't want to be around Indian people at all. People had to find every way that they could just to survive, and our family did. The ways that our family did this was they kept their families close. They never let those other things that people said to them seep in too much. They kept their head up highs, and they worked as hard as they could to provide for their families, for their children, for their cousins, for their aunties, their brothers, making sure that they looked after one another. That's what our elders tell us today. They worked hard. My great grandmother and Louis's great grandparents worked in orchards, working on ... My great grandmother worked gathering prunes. That was one of the only jobs available back then to our people, but they came out of that. They came out of that, and they never lost their dignity, and it's important to know that, during this time, these traditions, in spite of being suppressed for so long, they still continued on. Do you want to talk about your grandmother, about putting them away and then them coming back out? - So, for my family from the Carmel Valley, when the Missions were over, my family moved north from Mission Carmel to around the place where the mouth of the Salinas River is. I have family born there who are still remembered by living elders. Those people went north to Mission Santa Cruz and then further north to Mission San Jose, where we probably stayed with Vince's family in Alisal. And then our family moved south to Mission San Gabriel. And our family today tells us that they were just trying to find ways to stay together and ways to survive. They were making these large moves during this very dangerous time that Vince was describing. And the way that they survived was by keeping things close and keeping one another close. There's an elder in my family, Gloria Castro. She's in her upper 80s, and she remembers hearing our language as a young girl. She remembers all of these things. And they treated each other with such care, she says, that they only talked to each other with care. She was called horrible things as a child by the people around them, and that happened to all of our family. And yet, her grandfather always called her a princess. He always, like, they always lifted each other up, and that was how they made it through those difficult times. But our language stopped being spoken during that time, and our food stopped being eaten in the same way. And my grandmother says that what my family did was to put these things away, so that we can keep ourselves safe, but by putting those things away, we also kept those things safe. We didn't throw them away. We put them away and we kept them. And now, what we're experiencing now and what we'll talk about in a little bit, is bringing those things back out to celebrate them. - Thank you. So, these are some of those difficulties. And I know that this is a sad place to leave this portion, but we're going to talk about more hopeful things that are going to come out of this, that have come out of this. But even though these facts can be very sad and can be very difficult to hear. And for me and Louis, personally, they can even be difficult to talk about. We know that these things have to be talked about in order for true healing to happen and for us to be able to move on. We need to address those horrors that happened, the sadness that happened, that was unfair, that was unjust, that our people never should've experienced, that came from greed and colonization. However, we know, in spite of that, our people have survived. But we also wanna acknowledge that many people didn't as well. This affected so many people that, at a time in our communities, there was just a core group of survivors that today make up the contemporary Ohlone community today. But at a time, in our communities, they were just down to like 150 people at one point. We're talking coming from thousands and thousands of people, 25,000 people. At one point, the entire Ohlone community was about 870 people that were alive. And so, to go from those numbers to the drop, that's evidence of how hard the genocide and these practices affected our community as well. But again, important to know that people did survive this. But we also want to acknowledge those who didn't as well. I'd like to open this up now for any more questions, or Q and A's, and then work-- Our next tea is going to be an artemesia tea that I'll talk about in just a moment. - Thank you so much for what you are sharing. And I wondered, for all of those people who aren't here this evening, the video that we saw earlier, is that ... are we able to find that video online, and are there any other pieces that you've created that are educational, that we could share with others? - Absolutely, thank you for asking that. And one of the really wonderful things about this work right now at Cafe Ohlone and the contemporary revival that we're seeing happening is that we're able to have our voices amplified right now in a way that hasn't happened in generations, if ever, since colonization. And so, it makes us feel proud to see new media coming out that reflects our community. But this is available online, and if you just google a show called Tending Nature, and then just add Ohlone to it, it will come right up. And there's also other resources that are there, and we'll give you our administrator's email, and we're happy to share those with you as well. Her email, do you mind if I share that, Dee? Okay, well I already said it, huh? Her email is dee, D-E-E, at makamham, M-A-K-A-M-H-A-M, dot com. And if you just send her an email, we can get you some resources your way as well. Does that answer your question? Before I take anymore, I just quickly wanna talk about this tea. This next tea is an artemesia tea. And if you see little bits of sediment in there, that's just from the natural tea drying. Don't worry, it's not dirt or anything like that. But this tea, it's an especially important tea to me. My great grandmother, who I mentioned earlier, this is a tea that she would gather when she was younger. And when I drink this tea, I always think of her. All of these teas that we drink and the foods that we eat and we serve at Cafe Ohlone, they are so rich in story. And during a time in our history, it was very difficult for our family to go up and gather those same foods that they wanted. And it wasn't because they stopped caring about them, but it was because of that violence that existed all around our people. But my great grandmother, she often would find places to gather these foods. And I think about how courageous she was for going up and gathering, even in those difficult times. So, this tea right here, it reminds me of her quite a lot, and I want to share that. So if there's any more questions, I'm happy ... - I had a question. I was raised in Canada, where there's another history of similar genocides and problems, but we were sort of taught to use the term "first nations" and celebrate cultural diversity and cultural mosaic, and I'm wondering about how to use terminology in a modern way: indigenous people, Native Americans, or you were using the word Indian. I'm trying to figure out how to use terminology in a way that's respectful and celebrates culture, instead of denigrating. - Thank you. We appreciate you asking that, because it's terms addressing indigenous communities, Indian communities, however they're addressed, they're always changing all the time. And one thing that's always been consistent for us is we've always used our tribal identity as something that's been our preference. So, before anything else, I always just like to be known as Vince, the Ohlone guy, you know, and not Vince, the Indian, or something like that, you know? But Indian has been something that has been an adopted term in our community for generations and generations. And so, many people in our community today still use Indian with a lot of pride, in spite of what's been imposed on it often with very racist notions and this whole thing with Columbus coming here and that whole narrative. But often what happens is Native American, aboriginal, indigenous, they're all used interchangeably, and it just depends on people's preference. So I'm also not up here speaking for what other peoples' preference is either. So we just always ask that you ask people, "What do you like to be identified as?" In our community, as Ohlone people, most people identify themselves as Indian people. Do you wanna add anything to that? Yeah, and that's how our grandparents also identify themselves as well. - [Audience Member] Hi, what is the religion of Ohlone people, and do you practice it now? - Yes, thank you for asking. So, our religion of Ohlone people. So, our traditional religion is centered on the round house, which is a partially subterranean dance hall in a big circle with one entrance in, one entrance out. And it's open, so there's a fire in the center, and smoke goes out the center. It's slightly conical, so it goes at a very ... It's very ... how would you describe it? Yeah, conical. Okay, I'm trying to think of how else, but just conical. And it fits huge amounts of people in there. 200, 300, 400 people can fit inside of a round house. And those are our traditional dance halls. And traditionally, for Ohlone people, it's about, we believe ... We believe, like, there's an old, old, old religion that's there called Kuksu, which is centered on being able to pray to certain spirits that are out there, but also believing that there's a creator God, a grandfather or a great being that's there as well. And when we pray, we're praying to these ... beings, and when we pray, it means that there's prayer that's given to them, but also believing everything around us, as well, has life and giving prayer to those things as well, because they're all interconnected. Like, there's not the separation of being ... going into the round house, and then all of a sudden that's your religious obligations for the week, or the month, or the year, or anything like that. But every single process of Ohlone traditional life is spiritual. So an example of this is when we're gathering our foods. Prayer goes into that, because we're gathering from the land that we believe birthed us. When we're preparing for these foods, we can't think, or we're not supposed to think or say anything bad as we're cooking these foods, because we believe that that spirit also can go into those foods. When we're serving those foods, we always make a plate for our ancestors, because we want them to be well fed, we want them to eat. And we always make sure that we give gratitude to our creator and also to those spirits for the food that's going to eat. There's a process to all of these things, and they're all interconnected. But we believe that, in the roundhouse, that those prayers that are individual prayers become amplified and much stronger when they're together, and that's why it's a communal thing as well. But that traditional religion, it's still strong. And both Louis and myself practice roundhouse religion. That's something that we're very proud of. And we believe that we're very blessed as well and that these blessings continue to live, that this traditional religion, it's still alive as well, and we're grateful for that, very grateful. Okay, I think we're just about to get started on our next session. For those who are just joining us right now for the first time, we are... I am Vincent Medina and this is my partner, Louis Trevino, and we're the founders of Cafe Ohlone in mak-'amham. And we're sharing different experiences of Ohlone culture, from the traditional days before colonization. We just shared some of the struggles that our people experienced when colonization came, including the genocide that was waged against our community. But right now, we're going to talk about the revival that's occurring right now for Ohlone people, what we're seeing happen right now in spite of the odds that our people have experienced, to be able to see our traditional ways come back home again, to see ways that we know our great grandparents and our ancestors have always loved be able to be strengthened. And I'd like to start off by saying that many of the things that we're able to continue on don't have to necessarily be revived. As I shared previously, and for those who weren't here earlier, there's no generation of our people that have ever left the East Bay, so our people have always consistently lived in that place, lived in that place that our people have lived since creation times. There's been this continuity in our identity, in our food traditions, in knowing the places and the people that we come from. However, when colonization came, it quickly worked to suppress every aspect of our traditional culture. As I was sharing earlier, our food, our languages, our stories, our songs, our dances, our religion, even our traditional names were taken from our people. But in spite of this, our people found ways to keep these things alive, and these are some facts I'd like to share with you right here. Our people have never left home. The vast majority of our tribal members in the Muwekma Ohlone tribe live right in the East Bay, where our family has always lived since our creation times. We keep our families strong, and we keep what was passed down to us close to our hearts. So not everything needs to be revived, but we're able to keep things going from our grandparents' memories as well. For those things that were affected by colonization, we work to revive them, so that we have them back again in our lives, and that generations of Ohlone people in the future can grow up with these things just as they were intended to, once again. And again, we continue to fight for our federal reaffirmation being recognized as a sovereign people by the United States government, which we once were. And we continue to care for and tend to the land that we come from. So that has never been lost, and those responsibilities to be good to the land that birthed us have never been lost either. But on this image right here, right to the left, you're going to see some handwritten notes, and this is an example of the handwritten notes that were left for us, that were recorded in the 1920s and the 1930s by people in our community. They left these notes for us, because they knew that one day things would get better. And as I shared previously about those struggles that we experienced, that our ancestors experienced, they knew that those things wouldn't last forever. They knew that one day things would change, and that there would still be Ohlone people that are here today, and that we would need to heal the things that have happened, that damage that's been done, to see our traditional ways come back in the world a second time. And our ancestors, they left us thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of ethnographic notes that look just like this, handwritten notes, and they teach us how to revive our language, which we've done successfully, and now generations of Ohlone people are growing up with our language again, just like how it was intended. They teach us where to find our foods, so that we could be able to have access to those traditional foods again, how to pray over them, how to gather them in the right way so you're not disturbing the plants, so it can be able to replenish itself and revive the next year. They teach us the recipes of the foods that they remembered, about how much they loved these foods, and they teach us with their own words about how to make these foods again. At Cafe Ohlone today, we're serving many of these exact foods that are left for us in these old archives. And we know that they were left for us for a reason. During this time in our history, it was unsafe for our community to sit down with people from outside of our community because of the violence that people were experiencing. But they found the courage to sit down and record with people from Washington, D.C., might I add, record thousands and thousands of pages, having the foresight to know that things would be better one day for Ohlone people. And today, things are better, and we do need to revive certain things. And because of that, we turn to these notes regularly. And I'll give you an example of this. When I was a child, I didn't grow up speaking my language or knowing much about many of these foods. And it wasn't because my family didn't care about our language or these foods, but it was because of how hard they were hit by colonization, the fact that our people could often be physically whipped or punished just for speaking our language during those times. However, when I asked my grandma, I asked her about our language, she said that I should go and learn about it, because she knew that there were archives that existed. But there wasn't much beyond a few words that our family could share with us when I was a kid, and I know when Louis was a child also. But we turned to these archives right here. And these archives, our ancestors directly teach us how to revive these traditions. They teach us how to have our sentences come back again, how to have the sentence structure, how to be able to revive words, how to be able to borrow from neighboring languages if we're lacking a word. They teach us the foods that our people ate, and word by word how to make them, and would you like to share a little bit about Isabel Meadows and acorn bread? - So, Isabel Meadows was born in the Carmel Valley in our homeland, and in the 1930s, she moved to Washington, D.C. to live across the street from the Smithsonian Institute to be recorded in the same way. She spent the last five years of her life, until she passed, there doing that. From the moment she woke up until the evening time, she was recorded. A man named Harrington wrote down everything that she had to say, and she left some 80,000 pages of notes for us to look through. And in those notes, she talks about every memory that she can recall, including about food. And those food notes are some of the notes where she sort of brightens up in the notes. She's talking about specific women that she remembered in the 1850s and 1860s, the ways in which they prepared those foods, who added a little too much salt, who did it right, whose was better than whose. And she loved those people. Those people had passed away mostly in the 1880s, but she was remembering them in the 1930s. And she remembered our acorn bread, our pullum. It's a creating time food for us. And she remembered who made it right and who made it delicious. And she talks about it in great length about how she saw it being made. And at the end of that note, she talks about how much she wishes she could have it again there, and she actually wishes that Harrington could try it too, 'cause it was so delicious. But we know that she didn't have access to those acorns, and she didn't have those people around to make it for her anymore. And so, when you spend just hundreds of hours with these notes, reading what these people have to say, all of their life experiences, you care about them very much. They are our family. And often times they're talking about our direct family in these notes. A lot of times they're telling us a lot about ourselves. And you start to develop a real care for what they care about, and you want to make the things strong that they wanted to see strong one day. So when she describes this desire for that acorn bread, like, your impulse, if she was in the room, would be to make it for her and feed her. And that was the impulse that we kept having when we went through these food notes. And what we realized that we can do is to prepare those foods today and feed our families those foods, to feed our elders who are living, who remember hearing about some of these things, and to make sure that our young people today know these things, that they can taste them, and so that they can stay with our families in the future too. This is what the people who were recorded, this is what they wanted. - Thank you. And it's important, also, just to understand that Ohlone people, because I know many people don't have exposure to Ohlones or who we are, what we look like, what our contemporary culture looks like as well, but Ohlone people, like I said, we never left, and so it means that the Bay Area, the contemporary Bay Area has grown up around us, so we're also products of this urban place as well. And with this revival that we're seeing happen right now, is we, to a certain degree, will embrace change as a part of this revival, meaning technology, meaning not shying away from being able to see our people have language lessons over FaceTime, or being able to see Chochenyo hashtags come out, or being able to see in orthography that we can all text in. These are ways that we're also trying to stay with technology, so that we can also keep our culture moving into the 21st century as well. And one of the challenges that's out there that's in popular consciousness is people will often lock us into one time period. It was like, there's the Ohlones before the Spanish came here in the Bay Area, and then it almost seems like we just disappeared. But our people have been here for every other generation of that, every other era as well. And we also are fully part of this modern time that we're in, as well, too. And I'd like to share with you some of the people from our community that keep these cultural traditions strong. Right here, this is an image of my Aunt Dottie. She's in her 80s. She's one of the matriarchs of our community. And my Aunt Dottie, she's somebody, right there she's holding up .. she's holding up the way that our people hold scarves traditionally during certain times that are customary for us. And she remembers hearing our language spoken when she was a young girl. She remembers going up into hills and gathering the foods that we serve today at Cafe Ohlone. She'll often give us tips on how to serve them the best way, like when we have our rose hip tea, like we had previously, she tells us to serve it iced, which is the most delicious, which it actually really is. She teaches us about our old value system, reminds us to always be proud of who we come from, never be afraid to identify ourselves as being Ohlone, just like how our great grandparents tell us. And Aunt Dottie, she's there. She's one of these faces of the people that interacted with those old timers, that help us link together those generations, so that what we're reviving right now, that it's centered on what's specific to us. We often will ask our elders to go out with us and go gathering with us. And right here is Louis and an elder in our community, Gloria Castro. And do you want to talk about Gloria and some of the good things that she's doing with language? - So, Gloria is my great grandpa's first cousin. She's in her upper 80s. And as a young girl, she remembers her grandparents using our language, making these foods. She would go out and gather some of these teas, and preparing some of these foods with them. She remembers the Yerba Buena. That's where we were gathering this day. She remembers going out as a small girl and doing that with her grandparents. And she talks about those times and connects them to those times before. As these times where the world that we were given in our valley in Carmel Valley, it had everything that we needed, and all we had to do was know how to live with it, to live it a reciprocal way, in a way that was grateful, and a way that made sure that the bounty that our home has was maintained. She teaches us about those things. So Gloria remembers also when our language stopped being spoken in our family. She remembers that, when her grandfather passed, her mother never used it again. She remembers not having those foods anymore and not going to see extended family who would always get together to do these things. And she never stopped remembering those things, though, and never stopped caring about those things. She, in the 1990s, went to UC Berkeley in 1996 to look through language archives, because she wanted to find the language that her grandparents were using, and she did. Our language notes are there, and they're also in the Smithsonian. And she's a part of this effort. When we go through those notes, she recognizes things. She recognizes sounds. She can confirm when we speak that we sound like her grandfather, and she begins to hear his voice again in her ear. And she's just a major force leading all of us, making sure that our values are centered on those people from before, to make sure that those people who went through so much harm, that we can help them too and to make sure that these things continue. - So we know that this revival, it's been immensely successful for our community, because we're seeing these things come back home, and we're seeing them only get stronger and stronger and stronger right now. And our next part of this is going to be , which means "our hopeful future". But the next bite that we're going to have is a contemporary Ohlone food, and I'll introduce this to you. These are , which is a hazelnut flour brownie. We don't have brownie, obviously, in our Chochenyo language. It's not a native word. But an adopted word is rownie, 'cause we don't have a B sound and we elongate the vowel sound, and that's approved by our family. And so this contemporary dish, it has all of the food values that we have as a part of this. So, we traditionally, in our diet, we don't have any white sugars, refined sugars. We don't have any gluten. We don't have any dairy. That's not part of our traditional diet. So we leave those things out. We know that those things were imposed on our community also as a weapon. And so by leaving out things like gluten, by leaving out white sugars, by leaving out alcohol, by leaving out things that are harmful to our bodies, we believe that our communities, that they can be their most optimal to fight against injustice everywhere else we see it. And so, this work, it's to decolonize our diet. And these brownies that are here, they're made with a California native hazelnut flour, which we call . And also it's made with duck egg, so they're not vegan, if you are vegan. Sorry, I should have told you that first. If you're not vegan, please help yourself to them. But there's also crystallized salt that our tribe gathers from the East Bay shoreline, and some chopped walnuts that are in there as well. This is a contemporary Ohlone dish, and we hope you enjoy it. And we also can open this up to any questions that are here right now. And again, if anybody's ever had a question for an Ohlone person, please, this is your time, just please nothing too outlandish, but we're happy to answer any lingering questions that have been out there. - [Audience Member] Hi. First I want to know where is the cafe? Sorry, I arrived late. And also, what kind of food can we expect, like, I mean, dinner, lunch, or breakfast, et cetera? - Thank you. So, our cafe, Cafe Ohlone, it's in Berkeley, and it's right across the street from UC Berkeley. It's on 2430 Bancroft Way, so directly across the street from Sather Gate, from the student union and all of that. And our menu, we have several different meals at Cafe Ohlone. So, all the meals, they're centered on traditional Ohlone cuisines. So everything is... traditional to our people, foods that we know our ancestors recognize. Also, we embrace a few modern day touches here and there, like using chocolate in our brownies, or sometimes having coffee during our brunches, something that's not traditional. But most of the food that we have there, it's food that we know our ancestors recognize. Every Thursday, from one to three, we have a seasonal lunch tasting called The Thursday Tasting, which are many of the foods that we gather at the start of that week up in the East Bay hills, and also we will have many different native teas as well. So, the menu's always rotating just based on what's seasonal and what's available. But on any given day, you might get venison meatballs with a blackberry sauce and a native greens salad. You might get hazelnut flour muffins that are cooked with locally gathered mushrooms, walnut oil, native water crest, chia porridge, or fiddle heads, which are available right now, Indian potatoes or grilled Indian onions flash fried in walnut oil, sometimes smoked meats when they're available, like venison or salmon, those things that's always delicious, and we're always very happy. It's always hard not to stop eating it before it gets to the customers. But the other thing, we have a few other meals there as well. Every other Saturday, we have a formal dinner, called Mur, which means night time in Chochenyo, and it's a very elegant dinner. They're ticketed seats, and you can find out more about it at cafeohlone.com. And we bring in some of our hardest and most traditional foods, like the acorn bread that Louis was describing, bay laurel nut truffles that we make in a mortar with salt that we gather from the Bay, hearty stews that take hours to cook, smoked meats, very decadent desserts that are all with traditional ingredients. And we have speakers that come in to talk about a range of different issues that are affecting our community today, so political leaders, basketry weavers, people who are working on food sovereignty movements, all kinds of, a huge array of people, so others hear more than just our voices but know that we're part of a community doing work for a similar goal. And then, we have our brunches, sunwii Sundays, which are so fun. We ask everybody to at least check out the pictures, because we have a lot of our contemporary Ohlone foods like acorn flour pancakes, and duck bacon, smoked salmon frittatas with duck eggs, bay laurel nut coffee with hazelnut milk. We have a DJ that comes in, and it's just centered on contemporary Ohlone culture as well. And then every Tuesday, at 5:30, we have an event called tawwa-sii Tuesday, which is our tea hour, and we bring in four different native teas, a DJ comes down, we play games, tell stories, and have some small bites. And it's just a way for people to experience our culture, but also the cafe as well. And that's all available at cafeohlone.com. You're welcome. Any other questions? Oh, right there. - [Audience Member] I was wondering how many Ohlone people are left in the Bay Area, and are they only in the Bay Area, or are they scattered throughout ... Yeah. - So, good question. So, altogether in the entire Ohlone community, there's about 5,000 Ohlone people today, so not a lot of people, but definitely increased since those days where the genocide hit us the hardest. And we are certain that the numbers will only rise in the future. Most Ohlone people from my community, from the Muwekma Ohlone tribes, live in the Bay Area, so there's about 1,500 Ohlone people that are ... 1,000 to 1,500 that are right here in the Bay Area right now. But if you go further down south, in the Monterrey area that Louis is from, there are Ohlone people down there. There's Ohlone people in the Gilroy area. There's Ohlone people that go all the way down to Los Angeles, so there's a bit of a diaspora just with depending on whatever community you're talking about, because Ohlone people were also, to make it a little bit more confusing, we're not just one people but a series of interconnected tribes of people that have similar cultural traditions. So, my tribe and Louis's community are actually different, but we're both Ohlone people, just from different specific communities. But my community, about 1,500 people throughout the Bay Area today, yeah. And most of us, today, also are living along San Lorenzo and San Leandro Creeks, which is just in the East Bay, and that's where the area where all of our ancestors have always lived as well. Anything else? Well, thank you. We're going to start in just a moment. What time are we on? - [Herbie] 7:23. - Okay, so we're going to start our next part of this. Oh, excuse me. Okay. Our next part of this talk, which is , which means "our hopeful future". It literally means "our future will be shining". And ... in spite of those challenges that our people have experienced, like I shared, our people have found these really ingenious ways of surviving and staying put, not leaving home, being able to keep on whatever has been, they've able be carried on, and also revive the things that have been taken from us. And right here, to the left, there's a very respected and beloved elder in our community, one of Louis's relatives actually, and her name is Lydia Bajorkes. And Lydia's somebody who inspires us quite a lot, and this was a snapshot at a meal that we had at Cafe Ohlone recently, where we looked and we just saw her smiling the whole time. We saw her smiling at everything that was being shared, all of the foods that were being served. And right behind her is her grandson, and he's looking above, and you can tell he's looking with curiosity. But we look at that, and we see a look of pride, and that reminds us of when our people have always wanted to have our culture back. Whenever given the time and the space to have these traditions come back home, our people have always gone and done just that, strengthening our culture and carrying on whatever we could. And now we're living in different times. However, we can't be naive and think that colonization is over either, because it's not. We're just in a different stage of it. The fact that our tribe isn't still federally recognized by the government, the fact that we have little protections over our burial sites, our cemeteries, the fact that our shell mounds are always constantly under threat of desecration, the fact that we have to work twice as hard to revive things that should've just been carried on naturally, these things are colonization in action. However, we find ourselves compelled to find that courage that we know our grandparents and great grandparents and our ancestors had to be able to do the right thing and make sure that our culture only gets stronger. And the way that we see our culture, Louis and myselves and others in our family, is we see ourselves as just being part of a link, a chain. On one side of this, that's our ancestors, and it goes too far and too long to ever see the end of it. And on the other side, that's the next generation, the future generations that are yet to come, and it's the same thing. You can't see the end of it either. It just keeps going and going and going. And if you could imagine that, and just imagine us right now in our current place, in the 21st century, in 2019, as Ohlone people, we can either make that link stronger or weaker, and we only want to make these things stronger. That's our life's work. And so we wanna be able to recognize all those sacrifices of those people before us and make them proud, to make sure that these ways live forever. And we know that the next generation of Ohlone people are gonna grow up so empowered. They already are, just like how our elders, what they left for us. Our languages have been successfully revived. So, our languages, both the Chochenyo language of my family, and the Rumsen language of Louis's family, they were dormant, asleep, for two generations. And when they were dormant, nobody was speaking our languages. They weren't being passed on. And that wasn't, again, because our people didn't care, but it was because of how hard that suppression hits. However, our languages, in the early 2000s, in 2003, around there, 2003 to 2010, there was a revival stage, where our languages began to be revived. And now, Ohlone children are growing up with our languages yet again, just like how it was intended. Ohlone children are being named with traditional names again for the first time in quite a few generations. Our traditional stories, which are also religious texts for us, many of them, which were suppressed during the Mission times, forbidden during the Gold Rush, they're being told again to young people, and they're growing up with those stories again. Our religion, our round house religion that was banned, might I add, until 1978, is now revived, and our religion is only becoming stronger every year. So, new generations of Ohlone people are growing up empowered with our language, our religion, and also, might I add, our foods as well. Our foods, at Cafe Ohlone, is just one place you can witness this, but in Ohlone households, we're seeing quail eggs become more common than chicken eggs these days. We're seeing people crave acorn soup, one of those traditional power foods, again. We're seeing people begin to have these traditional foods commonplace again, back in our homes. And we can only imagine that if this becomes sustained for another generation, how far this is going to go. We know that our ancestors, they left us with undeniable strength, and we want to be able to pass that on to the next generation to make sure that things are easier for them, so they don't have to revive these traditions, but that they could just be carried on, just like how they were intended from our creation times as well. I also want to add that our political sovereignty is becoming stronger right now. So, more and more Ohlone people are becoming visible around the Bay Area. You drive into Berkeley these days, and on the "welcome to Berkeley" signs, you see "Ohlone territory" on every single sign that's in Berkeley. You see Cafe Ohlone, which we're very proud of, because we're part of this work. We are the founders of it, but our tribe and our communities are also leading this work with us as well. And our elders are the ones that we want to give all the credit to, as well as our ancestors, because without them, none of this would be possible. We couldn't be able to continue these things on without them. And also, just a testament to this, is our people have never left home, and I want to keep reinforcing this, because defeat doesn't look like what we have. And I'd like to share with you just an example. Some of you were here when I was sharing that I worked at Mission Dolores in San Francisco before we started this restaurant and this organization to keep our food tradition strong. And at Mission Dolores one day, one of the students who was there, a fourth grader, he asked me, he was very naive on California history, and he said, "So who won, the Ohlone or the Spanish?" And I said, "Well, I speak my language every day. "I was born right where all my ancestors have always lived. "I love acorn soup, had some this morning." I said, "My family has never lost our identity. I said, "If you look at it through this perspective, "I think we won, because if we didn't, "we wouldn't be able to practice these things, "know these things, have these connections, "be able to speak here about our strength "if we were defeated." We never lost our dignity. We never lost our pride in these things or the value of these things. We've just always needed time to be able to have these things come back stronger, and right now we're seeing that happen." And again, all credit goes to those people before us. They're the ones who make this possible. And we ask for all of you that are here as well to know that Ohlone people are here, to know that our communities aren't going to go anywhere, to know that if you ever hear people say Ohlone people are extinct, that that is a flat out lie, to know that our culture is only going to get stronger in the future as well. And we're doing this for those people before us, just like those people, like my great grandmother, like Lydia, like your great grandmother have done for all of us. I'd like to share with you this image, which is incredibly sweet, because this is my little cousin, Tara, and she's a tribal member and she's growing up right now empowered with these things, just as they were intended. Right there you see here making a traditional clamshell bead, which is our traditional money. And she's making that right there, as she's growing up learning our language, hearing these stories, knowing that all these things are stronger than ever, than they've been in quite a while. This is our friend, Alicia Adams, right here, another California Indian woman, passing on acorn bread to a young native child, empowering them with our food traditions from a young age. And I want to end with this right here before we get to some questions and answers. I started off with an image of my great grandmother, but this is her in a later period of her life, and that's me right there, and that was me when I was a child. And I end with this, because I want people who are here to know who we come from, that there's an unbroken chain of those people before us who learned from their grandparents, and they learned from their grandparents, who were very likely born in a world before colonization, and that's how close this all is to us. These stories and these people, the value of all of this, means so much to us, more than words can ever describe. And at Cafe Ohlone, when we're doing this work, we're doing it with prayer and gratitude, and we're doing it with the knowledge and the awareness that we can only do it from those people before us, and we ask you all to stand up for Ohlone people, even if we're not around. If you hear people say Ohlone people are extinct, to call them out on that, and say that's not true, to tell them that Cafe Ohlone and Ohlone people all around here are only making sure that these things come back stronger, and to also let people know that Ohlone people have never left these places, have never left the Bay Area, that our people will be in the Bay forever. And so, we're grateful for you all for taking this time. I know it's a fun experience here at the Exploratorium. I'd love to see Venn as well, but for taking the time to come and listen about indigenous culture, about indigenous people. Seeing a room full of people, not just even here for the brownies right now, is decolonization is in action. This is change in action, and we also wanna applaud all of you for taking the time to sit here and listen to us as well. So, thank you all very much. We ask you to come and visit us at Cafe Ohlone. We're in Berkeley. You can visit us at cafeohlone.com. Follow us on Instagram @mak-'amham. You can hit us up on the Gram. We're grateful for all of you for visiting us and listening to us, and we thank you all. We're gonna have our next tea, which is, this actually is the artemesia tea that's right here. We ask one thing on this tea. If you are trying to have a baby, please don't drink this tea right now. It has a very minor contraceptive effect, very, very, very minor, but we just wanna give you all the heads up on that, some awareness, so that, yeah. So, just in case anything happens, don't blame us. So, thank you all, and if there's any questions, this is the time right now. - [Audience Member] Hi. I have a question about the language. You mentioned that to you speak different Ohlone language. Can you understand each other? How closely related is the language among the different tribes? - Well, let's try. Why don't you tell if you could ... understand if they sound alike. So I'll start in Chochenyo. And so, in Chochenyo, which is the East Bay Ohlone language of my family, if I was to say "Hello, my name is Vincent." I would say Vinent Medina. - And in Carmel, we would say Louis. - Can you hear a little bit? - [Audience Member] If you repeat it again, I will be ... - Louis. - So, their is our , so our words are longer. Their words are often shorter. Our words often end in a vowel. Their words often end in a consonant. And so, there's a different sound that's there. But overall, we can mostly understand each other. A few times I'm like, "What'd you just say?" But most of the time, we can understand each other, because the languages are similar enough. - Thank you. - Thank you. - [Herbie] I saw a hand over here. - Hi, thank you so much. I was wondering if you, in looking through the archives and learning about the old foods, encountered any that you tried to recreate, to bring back, and ... ran into obstacles, had difficulties sourcing ingredients, and how you responded to those obstacles. Thanks. - Thank you. Yeah, that's a really good question and thanks for asking, because we do try with many of the foods successfully to bring back those old recipes from archives. And so these archives that we pull ... that we pull from, that were recorded by members of our communities back then, they tell us exactly how to make the foods. They don't give us measurements specifics, but they tell us how to produce the food itself. And we've done this with acorn bread, with bay nut truffles, with some of the greens that we gathered, with mushrooms and the traditional mushroom preparation, like chanterelles that we gather. And we ... We love the way that they taste, 'cause after they ... After we make them, there's like this feeling of communion when you eat the foods, because you get to try those exact same flavors that those people back then tasted, and how much they loved them as well. But it can be challenging with ingredients, because the Bay Area's urban, you know? There's a lot of city around us. And we're from the East Bay, but even in the East Bay, there's all the flat lands are urban, and the hills are becoming increasingly urbanized as well. And so, we have to gather as much as we can, but we also can't gather too much either, because we need to leave enough that's there for the plants to be able to replenish themselves. So an example of this is one of our traditional seasonal foods of right now are Indian potatoes. They're called brodiaeas, and they're these delicious little potatoes that grow at the very end of a flower that we identify. And traditionally our people would roast them and have these potatoes as a springtime food. However, today, we can only gather, like, maybe five of these little potatoes at one time. And even if we see a large grove of the brodiaeas, we can't gather more than that, because then the plants won't be able to come back up again the next season, you know? And they have a right to live too. So, what we started to do was, like, experimenting, and we were playing around with different potatoes that exist that we see at the farmers market, and we found one that tastes as similar as it can to those brodiaea potatoes. So we call them fauxdiaea potatoes, and they're made with Russian fingerling banana potatoes, which have these little heirloom potatoes that have a very similar taste to the brodiaeas. And we roast those in duck fat, a little bit of the bay salts, and serve them at the cafe. And it's a way to still keep those food traditions alive, even if it means supplementing it for something that's a little bit different as well. So, those are ways that we try to keep those things strong at the cafe, even when we can't gather everything that we want to gather, or not have access as well. Thanks for asking. Any other questions? - [Herbie] I have a quick question. - Sure. - [Herbie] So, you mentioned the clamshell beads were a signifier of money. So Louis, is that just like a super baller necklace? - It's like bling bling . Yeah, both of us are wearing Abalonian necklaces. So, for us Ohlone people, that's a common thing you'll see Ohlone people wearing Abalone necklaces on a regular basis. We, in our community, people wear them almost every day. For us, we often, these are more formal necklaces that we'll wear when we want to look really nice. But mine is made out of stone, soap stone, which is called , and red abalone. And Louis's is made from clamshell beads and red abalone as well, and these are our traditional necklaces made by people in our community as well for us. - [Herbie] Mission accomplished. You guys look great. - Thank you. Anything else? Great, well ... So, once again, thank you all for joining us. The Ohlone people are strong. We're not going anywhere. And come and visit us at Cafe Ohlone, please, in the future. Thank you.
Ohlone Cafe | mak-‘amham + mak-‘nuunu — Our Food, Our Story
Published: June 26, 2019
Total Running Time: 01:26:00
Get a taste of indigenous Ohlone food and culture through Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino’s presentations on four stages of Ohlone cultural identity: pre-contact, survival, revival, and a hopeful future.
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