Indigenous Founders of a Museum Cafe Put Repatriation on the Menu

BERKELEY, Calif. — One among Vincent Medina’s most vivid recollections as a teen is of a category exploring his ancestry as a member of the Ohlone folks, an Indigenous tribe within the San Francisco Bay area. An aged trainer, wagging her fingers in anger, informed her younger costs that the close by College of California at Berkeley was “holding our ancestors in plastic baggage and paint cans” beneath the college’s athletic services, “though now we have repeatedly requested for a correct burial.”

The human stays had been saved within the basement of a gymnasium on the Berkeley campus.

“I take into consideration that on a regular basis,” Medina stated lately of the lesson. “There was a silence that went all around the room.”

Right this moment, at 35, he’s a co-founder of Cafe Ohlone, a restaurant and aspiring cultural heart on the terrace of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, on the identical Berkeley campus the place the stays of his and different Ohlone ancestors are entombed. Created in a uncommon collaboration with the college, ‌Cafe Ohlone celebrates ‌the traditions and delicacies of the folks whose ancestors have lived within the area for some 10,000 years, as its members press for the return of their sacred objects and stays.

Hummingbird sage and piles of crushed oyster shells convey the spirit of‌ “oṭṭoy’’ — a phrase meaning to fix or restore in Chochenyo, an Indigenous language of the interior East Bay. ‌

Therapeutic is what the cafe hopes to convey to its new web site. One of many nation’s largest repositories of sacred artifacts, the Hearst Museum has a posh‌ and fraught historical past with the area’s Indigenous folks. It at present holds about 9,000 ancestral stays and 13,000 funerary objects collected for the reason that 1870s — the bulk Ohlone — and it has been gradual to‌ ‌ repatriate them, in response to the California State Auditor’s workplace and the college itself.A further 200,000 archaeological objects within the museum are awaiting evaluation by tribal specialists to find out their significance.

After years of inaction, the college and museum have made the return of Indigenous cultural artifacts, which is required by federal and state legal guidelines, a precedence, and the museum has largely been closed to accommodate the trouble. Since 2020, 1,000 ancestral human stays and roughly 54,000 sacred objects and belongings have been returned, in response to the college. (The Ohlone stays beneath the gymnasium have been moved within the Nineteen Nineties and are actually housed in a safe museum area.)

“Our function is to take care of and home collections eligible for repatriation and to assist advance repatriation in as expeditious a method as potential that’s respectful to the tribes,” stated Caroline Jean Fernald, the Hearst Museum’s govt director. “It’s an emotional course of for a lot of.”

Amongst these main the way in which are Medina, of the ‌Chochenyo Ohlones from the East Bay, and the cafe’s co-founder, Louis ‌Trevino, 31, of the Rumsen Ohlones, ‌a gaggle from Monterey County. The college reached out to them in an effort to redress many years of what it described this fall, in a information launch, as “structural violence and racism towards Native American peoples, the dangerous penalties of that are nonetheless confronted by communities as we speak.”

The al fresco eatery‌ was designed ‌by ‌the panorama agency Terremoto‌, with native crops ‌behind lit screens‌ and miniature shell-mounds ‌that recall Ohlone village and burial websites alongside the East Bay shoreline that have been excavated‌ by U.C. Berkeley archaeologists. ‌

Birdsong and music sung by kids and elders ‌ — ‌ members of the family of Medina and‌ ‌Trevino ‌ — ‌spill from hidden audio system in redwood columns carved with every singer’s title. The‌ir repertoire features a love track to the Chochenyo language, sung to the tune of the Sixties hit “Angel Child‌,” and the form of gossipy banter that may be heard round an Ohlone kitchen desk.

The ‌cafe made its preliminary debut in 2018 as a candlelit communal pop-up in the back of a e book retailer off campus, serving up acorn soup with bay nut truffles and different delicacies. From the beginning, it has been a deeply private enterprise. “We created Café Ohlone as a result of we felt remoted in our homeland,”  Medina stated. “We wished to see our tradition mirrored on our personal phrases.”

Medina and Trevino, companions in life and delicacies, met eight years in the past at an Indigenous language convention. ‌ ‌They have been in a car parking zone after they occurred upon an article within the U.C. Berkeley pupil newspaper through which‌ ‌ Kent Lightfoot, a extensively revered archaeologist and anthropology professor, advised inviting the cafe onto the college’s campus as a therapeutic gesture. “We realized how lovely and symbolic it could possibly be to convey our baskets, mortars and pestles — all these dwelling objects — to be with the normal objects of our ancestors till they’re returned,” Medina stated.

Stone pestles with oil from historic fingers, feather baskets and different artifacts “have a personhood to them,” he added. “They inform who we’re. So they may sense our presence.”

Together with different Native Individuals, the Ohlone have been victims of genocidal acts and suppression of their language, faith, arts and even their names. They have been enslaved beneath the Spanish Catholic mission system, and, from the 1840s to the 1870s, have been targets of a “conflict of extermination” signed by the primary governor of California aimed toward eradicating Indigenous folks from land that settlers‌ ‌coveted. Hundreds of Native folks have been slaughtered by formally sanctioned militias and U.S. troops, and by vigilantes, in what the historian Benjamin Madley of the College of California at Los Angeles has referred to as “a well-funded killing machine.”

Searching for refuge, some Ohlones gravitated to remoted canyons within the East Bay hills — now largely suburbia — within the late 1800s, the place conventional ceremonies flourished. There they encountered Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson Hearst, the museum’s founder and benefactor, who continues to be known as “Auntie Phoebe” by some Ohlone elders.

Hearst, who was U.C. Berkeley’s first lady regent, employed many Ohlone girls, together with Medina’s ancestors, as housekeepers for her 53-room Hacienda del Pozo de Verona and supplied a modicum of stability. ‌ ‌

Even earlier than the museum’s founding in 1901 the college served as a repository for Indigenous stays and funerary objects taken with out prior and knowledgeable consent from state infrastructure tasks; as soon as the museum was established, it grew to become “complicit” in persevering with such accumulating, Fernald, the museum’s govt director, stated in an interview.

In 1925, the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, who led the museum for 38 years, declared the Ohlone folks “extinct,” which two years later resulted in a lack of federal tribal recognition and rights to the land base. His view, which he later tried to revise, was predicated on the notion that solely primitive societies earlier than European contact have been genuine. Final yr, the college eliminated his title from what had been Kroeber Corridor, house of the Division of Anthropology, as a result of, within the phrases of Chancellor Carol Christ, Kroeber’s ‌actions “clearly stand in opposition to our college’s values of inclusion and our perception in selling range and excellence.”

Throughout Kroeber’s tenure, for the sake of examine, the college excavated shell-mounds — ceremonial locations and burial websites created by Indigenous folks — and in addition took human stays and objects ranging from fish hooks to Abalone shell jewellery‌. “Our folks have been faraway from their cemeteries within the title of analysis,” stated Medina, who now sits on a state-appointed advisory committee beneath the ‌Native American Graves Safety and Repatriation Act, at U.C. Berkeley. “It was an plain crime.”

However the Ohlone ancestors sized up Kroeber and his colleagues. ‌ “When he would come across the household would disguise their finery and baskets beneath the floorboards,” Medina stated, recalling tales his mother and father informed him about efforts to maintain the cultural inheritance alive.

Linguists and anthropologists from the Smithsonian Establishment’s Bureau of American Ethnology, amongst them John Peabody Harrington, recorded tribal elders within the mid-1900s concerning the “outdated methods” — religions, dances, looking and gathering practices — and the injustices they skilled. These archives and elders’ recollections allowed Medina and Trevino to show themselves the Chochenyo and Rumsen languages.

Extra providentially, the historic data proved to be a culinary gold mine — an Ohlone ‌model of “Pleasure of Cooking” — brimming with knowledge about chia seeds, venison, gooseberries and different components. Medina and Trevino started experimenting with dishes, together with acorn bread, and scouring the panorama for watercress, yerba buena, and black walnuts.

Trevino’s culinary roots return to his boyhood as a cashier at his grandparents’ restaurant east of Los Angeles (‌“I by no means met my great-grandmother however was intimately acquainted along with her sauces,” he wrote within the quarterly journal Information from Native California). Their desirous about Ohlone delicacies has advanced: pastas harken again to Medina’s Sicilian great-great-great grandfather, who used broomsticks to dry them, and to Mexican and vaquero- inflected dishes like Venison Chile Colorado. (They nonetheless do the cooking in collaboration with campus cooks.)

The out of doors ‌cafe‌ is open by reservation and plans name for Medina and Trevino to curate an adjoining gallery when the museum reopens subsequent fall. Their broader purpose is to create a cultural beachhead -— one which may encourage regulation college students to plunge into tribal sovereignty points, as an example, or structure college students to change into attuned to sacred websites‌. ‌

Lauren Kroiz, an affiliate artwork historical past professor and the Hearst’s college director, says the cafe will remodel the museum into “a spot of dwelling and resilient cultures,’’ informing future guests about language, meals methods and different subjects.

However main challenges stay. The Hearst has been “one of the crucial intransigent in returning stolen items and ancestors” and complying with federal regulation, stated Chip Colwell, the writer of “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Contained in the Combat to Reclaim Native America’s Tradition.”

Many of the stays and sacred and cultural objects on the Hearst have been taken from ancestral lands of Bay Space tribes which can be nonetheless not federally acknowledged, stated Sabrina C. Agarwal, a bioarchaeologist and anthropology professor who chairs the state-appointed advisory committee at U.C. Berkeley.

The dearth of federal recognition, she stated, was the results of genocide, pressured migration and assimilation and “salvage anthropology” by early anthropologists like Kroeber who “believed erroneously that the tribes would die out, or already had, and wished to save lots of no matter they might,” Agarwal stated. The college additionally used the dearth of federal recognition as an excuse to “gradual issues down,” she added.

However the stability of energy is shifting towards enlisting Indigenous peoples to determine whose ancestors and belongings are affiliated with whom, led by the state’s Native American Heritage Fee. (The fee arrange the advisory committees all through the College of California system to guarantee every campus complies with federal and state rules.)

A 2001 California state regulation expanded eligibility for repatriation claims to tribes with out federal recognition, which embody the Ohlone. However the course of for returning materials stays complicated and time-consuming, Agarwal stated.

Whereas they wait for his or her treasured cultural artifacts and stays to be returned to the Ohlone, Medina and Trevino honor their ancestors by serving up dishes utilizing mortars and pestles, winnowing baskets and different historic implements, echoing those remaining within the museum.

They see the cafe as a “place of continuity,” the place basket makers and different artists from across the state may collect beneath its conventional redwood shade construction, or ramada. It’s already a brand new form of landmark the place, as Medina put it, “elders can dress as much as the nines, come out for a Saturday evening dinner and have the ability to sit on the head of the desk.”