The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey, California: Dispossession, Federal Neglect, and the Bitter Irony of the Federal Acknowledgment Process

This article presents a sketch of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey County, California, focusing on the making of the tribe's federally unacknowledged status. Consisting of over four hundred fifty enrolled members, the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation (hereafter OCEN, Esselen Nation, or Esselen) is currently petitioning to clarify its status as an American Indian tribe through the federal acknowledgment process (FAP) administered by the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

A history of junctures between federal action and acknowledgment of this community and instances of governmental neglect fostered the dispossession of tribal lands. I begin by briefly exploring the effects of Spanish colonization and missionization on the initial treatment of this tribal community by the federal government after American occupation. I argue that coastal, missionized Indians were overlooked during a period of treaty making in the 1850s as they were deemed already "domesticated," due in large part to their incorporation into the dominant economic order. I end by discussing the implication of this history for the Esselen Nation's struggle for federal acknowledgment and for the federal acknowledgment process. Simply put, the FAP criteria of sociocultural and political persistence and external recognition do not account for 230 years of state-sponsored violence, crass federal neglect, expropriation, and assimilationist policies.

For members of the Esselen Nation, the bitter irony of the federal acknowledgment process, which requires evidence of a continuous, distinct, politically active tribal community, is that the Indian Service Bureau acknowledged their tribal community as the "Monterey Band" in 1905-6, 1909, and 1923, but failed to establish the federal trust and fiduciary relationship with it as required by Congress. The Indian Service Bureau's failure to do so has abetted the theft of Esselen lands, making it more difficult for the Esselen to persist as a tribal community. Furthering their official erasure, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber declared Esselen and Costanoan peoples "extinct" in 1925. Kroeber's assessment notwithstanding, Bureau of American Ethnology linguist and anthropologist John Peabody Harrington conducted fruitful research with ancestors of the contemporary Esselen/Costanoan people during the 1920s and 1930s, recording over eighty thousand pages of notes that document the persistence of an Indian community in Monterey.

Beginning in 1928, many members of the Monterey Band enrolled with the BIA for land claims based on the eighteen ultimately unratified treaties of 1851. Though enrollees were required to establish tribal affiliation and have the sponsorship of other tribal community members, the BIA treated this community only as American Indian individuals, not as acollective entity. These BIA enrollments and the nominal payments received for the lands of California are clear instances of the federal acknowledgment of their tribal identity for members of the Esselen Nation. The history of these enrollments and payments is a poignant reminder of dispossession and federal neglect, making the negotiation of the federal acknowledgment process—an arduous and costly process by any measure—a profoundly exasperating bureaucratic nightmare.

The Esselen/Costanoan Interface

The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation consists of over four hundred fifty members from thirteen core families who trace their ancestry primarily to the Carmel and Soledad missions and around twelve largely bilingual Esselen- and Southern Costanoan (Rumsen)-speaking villages and multiple village communities that came under Spanish and Mexican control from 1770 to 1846. The aboriginal land of the Esselen Nation is the greater Monterey Bay region, including the Monterey Peninsula, the northern Salinas Valley, the precipitous Big Sur coastline, and the rugged Santa Lucia range and Carmel Valley. A plethora of identifiers were recorded for these different villages and peoples, as well as for the multiple dialects of the two languages spoken in the area. Explorers who visited Mission Carmel emphasized the existence of two nations at the mission, the Esselen and the Rumsen, based on these two languages, probably...