Ohlone Erotic

The Ohlone were never a single people in the way the name suggests. Before the Spanish came, the central California coast from the Carquinez Strait down to Big Sur held dozens of independent tribelets, each a few hundred people with its own territory, its own leadership, its own marriage ties to the neighbors. They spoke eight related but distinct languages: Karkin, Chochenyo, Tamyen, Ramaytush, Awaswas, Mutsun, Rumsen, Chalon. The umbrella came later. Spanish soldiers called them Costanoans, coast people, and in the twentieth century the communities took up Ohlone instead, borrowed from a village name on the San Mateo coast, largely because it was theirs and the other one was not.

This was among the most densely settled country in North America north of Mexico, and the bay is why. Acorns leached of their tannin were the staple, but the marshes gave waterfowl, the tidal flats gave clams and mussels, the creeks gave salmon, and the hills were burned on a schedule to hold them open for elk and seed grasses. People crossed the water in boats bundled out of tule reeds. The shell mounds they left ran hundreds of feet across and rose several stories, built up over thousands of years, holding the dead as well as the kitchen refuse. Nearly all of them were carted off for road fill and paving between 1850 and 1930.

Seven missions founded between 1770 and 1797 took that world apart. Disease, forced labor, and the shattering of the tribelets cut the population by something close to ninety percent within two generations, and when the missions were secularized in 1834 the land went to ranchers rather than to the people who had been held on it. The eighteen treaties California tribes signed in 1851 were never ratified; the Senate sealed the files for fifty years. Most Ohlone bands today, the Muwekma of the East Bay and the Amah Mutsun among them, remain without federal recognition, which is a matter of paperwork and politics rather than of whether they are here.

They are largely Catholic, largely urban, and largely living within sight of where their ancestors did. Chochenyo and Mutsun are spoken again, rebuilt out of the notebooks J.P. Harrington filled with the last fluent speakers in the 1920s and 1930s. The Sogorea Te' Land Trust, run by Ohlone women out of Oakland, has been putting Bay Area ground back into Indigenous hands and collecting a voluntary land tax from the people who live on it.