Ohlone Profiles: A Brief Report on Some Currents of Native American Dance in Northern California

SHORE: Minneapolis. Photo by Erin Westover.

When a teacher or politician tells you that we no longer exist, you can tell them you know it’s not true, because you have seen us dance.

—Chief Tony Cerda, Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe (Ohlone)

In 2008, six Ohlone elders asked Mary Jean Robertson, the Cherokee co-director of the Ohlone Profiles Project, and me to engage in four cycles of ceremonies at Ohlone sacred sites in San Francisco. They wanted to dance where they could reconnect with their ancestors in ceremony, and with their ancestors’ guidance make their lives more visible in San Francisco. We were talking at Ann Marie Sayers’ place, “Indian Canyon,” with its remote waterfall that had been a ceremonial gathering place for Ohlone long after central California had been colonized. Up until the 1920s, Ann Marie’s ancestors had hosted Ohlone escapees from the Missions and the Rancherias. Indian Canyon is the only parcel of Ohlone Territory (Bay Area and central California coast) that has never been taken from Ohlone hands. As its chair, Ann Marie has been a visible Ohlone leader who would come to San Francisco to bless new buildings, parks, murals, and exhibits, and would always offer a gracious, though poignant “welcome to Ohlone Territory” in her blessing. At our meeting in 2008 she framed the request for the group: “Ohlone people can sing, dance, and pray in the remote hills near Hollister, the mud flats and marshes east of San Jose, and the industrial areas of west Oakland, but if we do not appear in San Francisco, we will remain invisible.”

In the 1980s I lived in a collective house with San Francisco–based choreographers and performance artists Keith Hennessy and Jess Curtis, I helped with the site specific work of Sara Shelton Mann’s Contraband, and I volunteered protecting native species in the canyons at San Bruno Mountain, a mountain visible from my bedroom window. There, I had met a local hero, the San Bruno Mountain Man, who taught me to see unmarked Ohlone village sites alongside the highway on the way to the airport, and ancient outdoor kitchens among the rocks along the tiny stream in one of the mountain canyons. The Mountain Man, David Schooley, also taught me that there were living Ohlone I could meet. Their culture was not recognized or protected, he said, but because they had lived among the lupine that host the larvae of an “endangered” butterfly species, since 1973, their ancient sites on San Bruno Mountain were protected by a kind of coincidence, alongside the lupine. In 1992, after returning from a gathering of people in Guatemala to “Celebrate 500 Years of Resistance to Colonization,” I brought Rosemary Cambra, Chair of the Muwekma Ohlone, and nine other Native Americans and supporters to a village site on San Bruno Mountain’s edge, outside the protected area, threatened with high rise development. That was the first time I called a gathering to support Ohlone culture. It didn’t go well. Rosemary didn’t have free time to accept another threatened site on her to-do list. The Sioux, Cherokee, and Lakota I had assembled from San Francisco couldn’t help because they wanted Ohlone leadership. The whites, with our can-do optimism, were irritating and naive about what we could accomplish. The Mountain man recited an Ohlone poem, “I am dancing. On the edge of the world I am dancing,” and Rosemary interrupted, asked him to stop, and threatened to leave. (Ten years later, David Schooley and Patrick Orozco succeeded in bringing the village site under the park’s protection.)

The next time I saw Rosemary was in 1996 when she agreed to introduce the Santee Sioux author and leader John Trudell, whom I was presenting to read his poetry at the Unitarian Universalist Society. Rosemary wanted to welcome the poet to Ohlone Territory. Trudell’s radio broadcasts during the Red Power Movement’s Occupation of Alcatraz Island had brought him respect across Native America as well...