News Break: Sogorea Te’ and Berkeley Flip the Extinction Script

Declared a vanished people a century ago, the Ohlones are rebuilding their presence on the San Francisco Bay shoreline through one of the most significant #LandBack victories in U. S. history.

In 1925 Alfred Louis Kroeber, UC Berkeley anthropologist and leading academic authority on Native California, declared the Bay Area’s Ohlone peoples “extinct so far as all practical purposes are concerned” since “only a few scattered individuals survive.” Were Kroeber alive today, he would have to rethink his professorial certainty. Last week the city of Berkeley agreed to purchase a disputed 2.2-acre ancient-shellmound site and transfer title to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a nonprofit founded and led by those “extinct” Ohlones.

Cofounder of Sogorea Te’ and the leader of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, Corinna Gould celebrated the alliance of the city and the land trust to right a historic wrong, an effort “resulting in the rematriation of our oldest shellmound and village site to its original people.”

The West Berkeley parcel, once the parking lot for famed Spenger’s Fish Grotto and now surrounded by upscale shops and eateries along Fourth Street, was the last undeveloped land within the boundaries of the first human settlement along San Francisco Bay. Established some 5,700 years ago where Strawberry Creek enters the bay, the village encompassed not only habitations but also a shellmound used for ceremonies and burials. At its largest the mound measured 300 feet by 100 feet and stood 30 feet tall. The village moved to a new location around 800 CE, but the mound continued to be used ceremonially.

That world came to a violently abrupt end when the invading Spanish drove the Ohlones into virtual and often-lethal enslavement in Mission San Jose and San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. Then came the Mexican rancho period, which relied heavily on Native Californian cowhands for the hide and tallow trade, and the American takeover during the Mexican-American War. Almost as soon as California became a state, it launched a government-sponsored genocide targeting the tribes.

This photo by UC Berkeley archaeologist Nels Nelson shows what remained of the Berkeley shellmound in 1907. Soon this, too, would be hauled off. (Wikimedia Commons.)

As Americans poured into northern California and settled, the 425+ shellmounds dotting the bayshore were dismissed as primitive middens, or garbage piles, left by the conquered tribes and fit only to be knocked down and hauled off as fertilizer and paving material by the conquerors. Whenever burials were encountered in the mounds, the bones made their way to the anthropology collection at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum.

Today the museum still holds about 9,000 human remains and nearly 25,000 funerary objects, many of them Ohlone, a sacrilege that remains galling to the tribe’s descendants today. The return of the West Berkeley shellmound site serves as a step toward righting that wrong.

Last week’s agreement caps a contentious history. After Spenger’s Fish Grotto shut down in 2018, Ruegg & Ellsworth LLC, the real estate company that owned the restaurant’s parking lot, submitted a plan for mixed commercial-residential development on the site. The city of Berkeley rejected it on the grounds that the area had been declared a city landmark. Ruegg & Ellsworth sued the city, first losing in Alameda County Superior Court but prevailing in the California Court of Appeal. When the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in 2022, Ruegg & Ellsworth put the property up for sale. The legal cloud raised by unsettled damage claims against the city chilled would-be buyers, however, and the site remained unsold.

On March 8, with yet another court date looming, the contending parties came to an agreement: accepting a $27 million buyout, Ruegg & Ellsworth sold the land to the city of Berkeley, which passed an ordinance to transfer ownership to Sogorea Te.’ Of the purchase price, $1.5 million comes from Berkeley’s general fund and $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’. Earlier this year the land trust received a $20 million grant from San Francisco’s Kataly Foundation. Now it’s putting that money to good use.

Soogrea Te’ has an ambitious plan for the site. It proposes a re-created mound, a restored and free-running Strawberry Creek, a central focus on education and art, and a space for reviving Ohlone culture. Most important, the shellmound park will begin to undo a process of erasure that began more than 250 years ago, when European conquerors set upon California.

That reversal is indeed cause to celebrate. Even Kroeber might call for a round of applause at being proved wrong.

More on the Berkeley shellmound restoration

Berkeleyside offered the best and timeliest media coverage of the settlement agreement.

A short, informative video by the Sacred Land Film Project brings this story to vivid life.

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s website offers information about the shellmound restoration as well as detail on the grant from the Kataly Foundation.