“And because we’ve been disappeared, it’s not seen as the same.”Ĭalifornia Indigenous people faced what historian Benjamin Madley calls an organized attempt to destroy an entire people, surviving a cataclysm of disease, dislocation, unfree labor, mass death in confinement, massacres and abductions. ![]() “If this was a church or a synagogue, maybe you would say it was a hate crime,” Gould said. Sometime last year, someone deformed the mortars by carving deeper into them. Standing beneath a scarred buckeye tree on a path lined with small boulders ripped from their original location, Gould wondered aloud: “I’ve been trying to figure it out.”ĭamage to the rocks swayed Gould to share more about their history, hoping that education can persuade people to treat with deference a place she calls sacred. “I don’t know what we tell,” said Corrina Gould, who leads the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, an Ohlone tribe. Mortars, once common throughout the Bay Area, are now rare. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight ![]() It calls human beings to it for a reason,” she says. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Generations of Ohlone people used the bedrock at Mortar Rock as a grinding stone, wearing depressions into the rocks. Corrina Gould, spokesperson and chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, walked to the top of Indian Rock in August 2022 and looked out across the bay. All too often, public awareness brings vandalism, not veneration. Some Ohlone fear drawing attention to the rocks might do more harm than good. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley to return the largest collection of ancestral remains in the United States, and, in the case of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, sought to regain federal recognition.īut their advocacy hasn’t focused on Indian and Mortar rocks, where visitors rarely engage with Native history beyond the rough sketch provided by on-site plaques, let alone with the living culture of the Ohlone people. They have worked to protect the shellmounds in Emeryville and West Berkeley, put pressure on the Phoebe A. ![]() With limited resources, the Ohlone here have fought for their rights and heritage. And the same is true just up the hill at Mortar Rock, where generations of Ohlone people used the bedrock mortars as grinding stones, wearing deep depressions into the rock. It’s also a link between the past and present for Ohlone people who have made the Bay Area home for thousands of years. It’s a rare place that spawns both contemplation and community, isolation from society and connectedness with it. A natural getaway within city limits, it’s one of Berkeley’s most acclaimed destinations, featured in the New York Times for its “ swooning views” and part in the history of American rock climbing.
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