Bay Area Natives

I am native to the Bay Area, but I am not a true native.  I do not belong to one of the tribes that have lived in this region for thousands of years.

Today we went to a gathering of the Ohlone peoples at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont. "Ohlone" is a general term for many different peoples, who spoke different languages, but who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area or just beyond it--Watsonville, Santa Cruz, Monterey, the Central Valley.

What surprised me the most about today's event--this sounds ignorant, but I'll bet a lot of Bay Area residents are equally stupid about this--is the sheer fact of the living people.  I had no idea that so many Ohlone still exist.  (Their numbers are in the thousands--three thousand?  Maybe more.)  And many of them are actively researching and promoting their cultural traditions, their language, their stories.  

The three of us, my son, husband and I, attended this event.  We first saw the remarkable permanent exhibit the park has on display at their visitor center, complete with a large tule boat and many artifacts like obsidian knives and spearheads; we hiked to the original site of an Ohlone village, where one can see tiny shellfish fragments on the ground--remnants of past meals the Ohlone ate--and enter replicas of a traditional wood hut and a sweat lodge.  After walking a mile and a half to get to the village site--through freshwater marshes, surrounded by tule reeds, cattails, and shorebirds, with the hot sun beating down--it was wonderful to sit in the small wooden hut in that former village, and feel the sudden coolness, the wonderful stillness.

When we hiked back to the visitor's center and the gathering, we visited the tables where they were teaching people how to make fire, by using only a wooden stick and a block of wood with little holes carved through it, slots about as wide as the stick.  You put a dry leaf beneath the hole, put the block of wood on the ground (someone else needs to hold it there), spin the stick very fast between the palms of your hand while pressing it down into the hole, and watch as smoke forms at the base (hopefully) and little embers gather on the dry leaf.  You can use those embers to light pine needles or whatever you have on hand that will serve as starter material.  We got to that stage at least--the smoke, the embers forming; we didn't have time to light pine needles and start an actual fire, but we are inspired to try this at home...it was a great experience for my computer-obsessed, indoor-oriented young boy.

Then we saw a dance troupe perform; it was led by Patrick Orozco, an Ohlone from the Chumash and Juaneno peoples who was born in 1939 in Watsonville, and who heard stories from his Ohlone grandmother and made costumes based on her description of the costumes she saw the men wearing at ritual dances more than a hundred years ago; he learned two songs from her, and was also able to obtain recordings of Ohlone songs from archives at the Smithsonian.  He formed a dance troupe called "Amah-Ka-Tura," and he has been its leader for decades.

My son witnessed about four of the dances; he was mildly interested (a bit hot and tired by that time), but I was fascinated.  I couldn't help thinking as I watched:  the Ohlone peoples have existed for thousands of years, and they persist, in spite of the crazy, materialistic, techno-obsessed Bay Area in which they must now make their homes...I am deeply moved by the graceful manner in which these people are celebrating and preserving their cultural heritage.