Time Has Many Voices: The Excavation of a Muwekma Ohlone Village

(birds calling) -

Interviewer

And since we're talking about ancestors, will you introduce us to the next generation here?

Muwekma Tribal Member

I'd like to introduce you to the next generation Muwekma, which is my son Lucas Tuyheste Arellano. And his middle name means strong, Tuyheste, because he is strong. Say hello, Lucas. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

Hello, Lucas. (speaking in Chochenyo) (soft contemplative music) -

Narrator

Today, Monica is taking her son Lucas on a field trip to Mission San Jose to learn about the history of his Ohlone Tribe, the Muwekma Ohlone. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

Lucas is old enough now. He's ready to learn about his past. He knows he's the proud descendant of the Native Americans who first lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. He's an Ohlone, a Muwekma Ohlone.

It's time for him to understand. -

Narrator

At the mission, they will learn about the Spanish invasion of California. In the late 1700's, the Spanish Crown made their forays into California. They built their missions and baptized thousands of Native Americans who then perished in great numbers from disease and hard labor under the Spanish church. Lucas's ancestors, the Ohlone, lived in 59 territorial communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, bound together by a common language.

Their way of life would be destroyed. -

Lead Archeologist

It happened so fast. In a matter of a few decades, much of California was abandoned. Native people were decimated and their villages deserted. Add another 20 years and the U.S.

Government took control of the land. And soon thereafter, they declared the Ohlone extinct. (birds tweeting) (festive chattering) -

Narrator

But the Ohlone tribes are not extinct. They are alive and thriving in the San Francisco Bay Area. Frank Lopez. I'm a member of the Muwekma tribe.

I'm a tribal member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. (speaking Chochenyo) Gloria Arellano-Gomez, Council Member of Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. Virginia Arellano, Muwekma Ohlone Elder. Lucas Tuyheste Arellano.

I'm a member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. -

Narrator

And in what may be a once in a lifetime event, Muwekma Ohlone tribal members are working hand in hand with archeologists and San Francisco City Officials to uncover an ancient village where their ancestors lived before the Spanish appeared. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

There's nowhere I'd rather be actually right now than here amongst my people and working and discovering part of our past. -

Lab Director

With the advance of isotopic studies, we're able to reconstruct parts of people's lives that we didn't know that we could figure out before, that we can reconstruct the mobility of a person's lifetime and also figure out mobility patterns of an entire culture. (soft contemplative music) -

Lead Archeologist

Together with the Muwekma Ohlone and with their active participation and with their blessing, we're really conducting one of the most intensive and rigorous archeological studies ever undertaken at really a early, pre-contact archeological village site in California. -

Narrator

The Muwekma Ohlone are now co-partners in the excavation of their ancestral village. As the archeology proceeds, the ancient voices from the past will speak. And the modern day descendants will be listening. (speaking in Chochenyo) -

Muwekma Tribal Member

Welcome. This is the story of our ancestors, where they lived for many years. (soft contemplative music) -

Radio Announcers

Morning Traffic report on I680-- -

Narrator

Each day, thousands of people drive through the Sunol Valley on Interstate 680 to or from San Jose. While traffic flow is the main concern for commuters, in the bigger picture, it's always been the flow of water that is important here as several creeks converge to form the largest watershed in the Southern San Francisco Bay Area. (water trickling) (birds tweeting) In 1910, Spring Valley Water Company built the Sunol Water Temple here at the convergence of three subterranean water sources. A century later, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has chosen this site for a new watershed education center.

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SFPUC Official

We're building an interpretive center, which we're calling the Alameda Creek Watershed Center here next to the Sunol Temple. And its primary function will be to provide educational opportunities for the public to understand the history and natural resources of our Alameda Creek watershed. -

Lead Archeologist

So, the city wants to build their watershed center in this location near the Sunol Water Temple. However, this is the location of an archeological site, a substantive one, and probably a very important pre-contact Ohlone village, but it's never been studied in any detailed manner. So archeological studies need to be carried out prior to construction. (people chattering faintly) (contemplative music) -

Narrator

Excavation on the site would begin in 2016 and would continue for over two years. The archeological team would unearth significant findings. -

Archeologist

Here's one. You can see all the pecking and battering in here. Here's another one that's got a bunch of battering on it. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

We chose the name Sii Tuupentak. It means Water Round House site. It's named after basically the Water Temple. And it also has to do with the importance of water for our people.

Water is life and this site is next to the Alameda Creek, being called Water Round House site, Sii Tuupentak was very appropriate.

Archeologist giving instructions

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Archeologist

So we are here at a large prehistoric archeological site about 200 feet northeast of the Sunol Water Temple. And we've been out here hand excavating for about a little over a year now. We've got a large midden deposit with an abundance of fire-cracked rock, hearth features. We got human remains, burials.

We got informal hearth features, we got artifacts, we got bone whistles, we got projectile points, and just an abundance of ground stone, flake stone tool, the whole assemblage for an occupation site of someplace where people were living for long periods of time, cooking, processing, and bringing back stuff they hunted and gathered and processing it on this site. So here, I am walking through where we did a bunch of hand excavation. After our initial test excavations, we found that this part of the site in the building footprint was really sensitive for archeological features of rock, and cooking hearths, and burials of human remains. So, we went to a different strategy of excavating all this area by hand.

And in doing so, we exposed a fair number of features, including these ground stone features that consist of large stream cobbles being brought up from the creek about 300 feet to the south of us. And then they're being used for grinding. They would take a pestle and work and create these cups. And they're oftentimes used for acorn and small seed, and they can also be used for grinding for making pigment and other things, not just restricted to seeds.

Maybe pounding small animals and stuff for food. But you see a cup here, you have one here. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

The weather's really nice today. It can get pretty hot out here. This may be a burial. I believe it is.

We've found some bone here. So we're slowly moving in until we expose more of what's underneath the dirt here. -

Narrator

Prior to unearthing burials, the Muwekma met and made critical decisions. -

Muwekma Tribal Chairwoman

The decision to do analysis on the ancestral burials was to prove that we were still here because different anthropologists even in the early centuries (said) that we were extinct people. But the previous chair wanted to prove that we were not extinct, that we were still here, and we were connected to these people. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

Analysis being done on artifacts and remains is a very sensitive topic within the Native community. Our tribe's decision to have analysis done was very important because we wouldn't have gathered so much information that is very educational for our membership. And so in anything we do, we do it with much thought and respect. And that also was extended to us from the archeological firm Far Western, and again, SFPUC.

And so it was a very positive experience and we're happy that we did it. (speaking in Chochenyo) -

Narrator

As they honored and cared for their ancestors, the Muwekma would head a plan to conduct detailed scientific studies of each burial, and would work side by side with the archeologists in all aspects of the dig. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

This is something that's been traditionally done with our ancestors for hundreds of years. They usually have a mourning ceremony or a cry ceremony over cemeteries for people who have passed on. So keeping with tradition, we wanted to invite the crew of Far Western and SFPUC to join Muwekma in cleansing the ground and cleansing our bodies, so a purification ceremony. So that way, we can move on with removing our ancestors who were never supposed to be removed.

So since we're doing this, we want to do it in the right way, honor them, start by purifying ourselves with sage, and offering a blessing, and moving forward. -

Narrator

In the two years of excavation at Sii Tuupentak, discoveries would include 36 distinct village features, 66 burials, and more than 13,000 artifacts covering a time span of 500 years of occupation. (contemplative orchestral music) (birds calling) -

Muwekma Tribal Member

This is Sii Tuupentak, the land of my ancestors who spoke Chochenyo, the Ohlone language. You're about to meet three of them. We don't know their names because they lived so long ago, but we've given each a Chochenyo name. (speaking in Chochenyo) -

Narrator

Caitim was born in 1453, just two years after Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy. Caitim, living in pre-contact California, would die before she reached the age of 20, while Columbus, when he was 40, began the journey that would land him on North America's shore. 2,000 miles to the south of Caitim in Central Mexico, Emperor Moctezuma was a ruler of a vast Aztec Empire. (wondrous music flourish) -

Osteologist

There's a lot we can learn about Caitim from her bones and teeth. This is just a plastic model, but when we're in the field, we look at the brow ridge and the eyes in order to determine if it's a man or a woman. There's also the jawline and muscle attachments on the back of the skull and below the ears. We use the pelvis as well to determine if it's a man or a woman.

And usually, women have wider pelvises for childbirth. And then when we have complete limb bones, we can use them in order to calculate the stature of the individual. Caitim was only five foot tall. Even at a very young age, there's indications that Caitim may have suffered from fairly severe osteoarthritis.

There was no cartilage between these two bones. And so at this articulation, they rubbed one another, forming a very smooth ivory-like spot which was visible in the field. This would've been painful during her lifetime. She also suffered from mild periodontal disease, which impacts the gums.

And had evidence of linear enamel hypoplasias on her teeth, which are thin lines which indicate childhood stress or malnutrition events. Many of the things that she suffered from were also seen in others of this population. Dental disease, osteoarthritis, and nutritional stress was very common. We can tell based on the fact that her wisdom teeth were just coming in when she died that Caitim was probably 17 to 20 years old at the time of her death.

-

Narrator

While much was learned about Caitim through osteology, a great deal more would be revealed on a molecular level. Isotopes such as strontium, carbon, and nitrogen are elements found in the air, water, and ground. These isotopes are taken into plants and into the animals and humans of the area that eat them. -

Lab Director

The reason that archeologists care about strontium at all is that it helps us figure out how humans are moving throughout the landscape. And what's really interesting about strontium is that it is taken up in different parts of our body at different rates throughout our lifetime. I'll show you how this works on this model of a human mandible, otherwise known as a jaw. So this tooth here, the first molar, the enamel of this tooth starts growing in utero, so even before we're born, and stops when we're about three years old.

So this tooth will record the location of those first few fragile years of life. Third molars, otherwise known as wisdom teeth, they start growing around age nine and stop about age 16. So this tooth will record the location that we were living throughout adolescence. Bone, unlike teeth, remodels constantly throughout our lives so it'll keep taking up strontium as long as we're alive.

So this bone will tell us where people were living those last few years of life. We selected this set of three samples, a first molar, a third molar, and a bone from 30 different people that were buried at Sii Tuupentak, including Caitim. -

Narrator

Samples were taken to the University of California Davis for isotope testing using a mass spectrometer. The results represent a series of isotope ratios. -

Lab Director

These ratios are all different for each local environment because the local strontium signature of each place is dependent on the geological formations around it and the water running off of those formations. So if you go even a few miles away from Sii Tuupentak, that place will have a different local signature than the site that we're investigating. And so we really want to know what the local signature is for Sii Tuupentak, and that's where this rodent here comes into play. Rodents are key to this analysis because they have a tight foraging range, which means that they don't move very far throughout their lifetime.

And as they age, and as they eat, they're within the area of the village that we're studying. So we're using the bones from rodents to figure out the local strontium range of Sii Tuupentak. Here is a graph showing the results of the four rodents that we have from this study. All four fell into a relatively narrow range of strontium isotope signatures, which give us a definition for the local range for Sii Tuupentak.

Let's learn about Caitim's life. Caitim's first molar tells us that she was born at the site because the enamel of this tooth grows from ages zero to three. And then after this period of time, it seems like she moved somewhere else because her third molar enamel is showing a different strontium range far outside of the local signature. This tooth grows from ages nine to 16, so it seems like during adolescence, she was living somewhere else.

Shortly afterwards, it seems as though she moved back to the site because she died at the age of 20, but her bone is telling us that she was living at Sii Tuupentak shortly before death. So Caitim was a local resident to Sii Tuupentak who migrated outside of this site during some portion of her life, but came back and died right where she was born. (contemplative orchestral music) -

Narrator

Culpete was born in 1550, 100 years after Caitim. Living in a lush inland valley of the Bay Area, she and her village, Sii Tuupentak, were part of a much greater population of over 15,000 Native Americans who together regionally formed a complex web of Bay Area tribal territories. They coexisted for the most part in peaceful social interaction and trade. (contemplative orchestral music) They could not know that 2,000 miles to the south, the Spanish under Cortez had landed in Mexico and were dealing violence and death to the Aztec Empire, making their way ever closer to Sii Tuupentak.

(speaking in Chochenyo) (wondrous music flourish) -

Narrator

Culpete is five feet, two inches tall based on stature calculations. And she lived to be between 35 and 40 years of age based on dental wear observations. She was buried in a flexed position on the left side, facing North, and was decorated with more funerary objects than any other individual recovered from Sii Tuupentak. She had over 1,154 items buried with her.

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State Archeologist

Culpete is one of the interesting individuals found at Sii Tuupentak. Her status is evidenced by the array of Olivella shell beads, abalone pendants, a flower pot mortar. Those are high status objects. And the volume of these materials, the beads in particular, is a symbol of wealth.

Olivella shell beads are brought in from the Coastal people. They're trade items. And the people have to bake them white to turn them neutral because they don't like the natural luster of the shell as symbols of wealth and money or currency, if you will, they have to be identical and similar to create the standard like we use coins. So they're baking them white on the coast, exporting them whole to the interior.

By the time we see them in the mortuary assemblages, we know that they've been cut and shaped into specific types. The whole purpose of shell beads is to function as currency and that is the symbol of wealth for the people. With Culpete, we find a large number of what are called M1 shell beads. And M1 beads are basically rectangles with a hole drilled in the middle.

And they're particularly interesting 'cause you can't wear them as a necklace. That means they were attached to a fabric of some sort. What might that fabric have been? That doesn't preserve.

Later in time in Mission Santa Clara, we find that women had buck skin dresses with red vermilion paint on it and arrays of Olivella shell beads sewn on in geometric patterns. So we'll find the beads, but the dress won't preserve. It's not unknown in the Bay Area to find certain individuals with great arrays of artifacts. And she's one.

And so the question is, why is this individual so bedecked with so many things? Projectile points, pipes, abalone beads, Olivella shell beads. These are all high status objects. Not everyone has these things.

And so I wonder whether she is what is known as a Maien. In the North Bay, the Marin Miwok talk about Maien. Ethnographically, they were interviewed and were able to say that in their day, there were high status women who actually directed who could be dance figures. They directed the architecture of the dance houses.

And so it speaks to us of the ancestral societies as being socially organized and somewhat ranked. There are poor and rich people in a Native society of the past. So she seems to be somebody of exceptional order. (soft contemplative music) (water rushing) -

Lab Director

Culpete has an interesting life story told to us by strontium isotope ratios, which is pretty similar to a lot of other individuals buried at the site. The first molar enamel from Culpete fell outside of the local range, which is why she's being classified as an immigrant to the site. Sometime between early childhood and adolescence, she moved to Sii Tuupentak because her third molar enamel is local to the site. And then it seems as though she stayed there for the rest of her life as her bone also is showing the local signature range for the site.

Culpete's story of immigration is one that repeats itself when we look at all 30 individuals that we studied from Sii Tuupentak. Here is a graph of people that were buried at the site early in time, between about 600 and 400 years before present. And I've separated out males and females. We're only looking at results from first molars and bone, which helps us separate out locally born individuals from immigrants.

Only two females and two males who were buried at the site were also born there. You can see that many of the first molars are outside of that local range. This is showing that most of the people were immigrants. They were born somewhere else and died at Sii Tuupentak.

Patterns changed later in time at about 400 to 150 years before present. Now, we're seeing that nearly all of the males buried at the site were also born there. In contrast, about half of the females were born at the site while the other half were born somewhere else. This stark difference between the sexes suggests that females may have been moving out of their place of birth to live with a marriage partner.

This marriage system is called patrilocality in which females move into the residences of their husbands and their husband's families. Interestingly, patrilocality is also the marriage system that was recorded by ethnographers at the time of contact with Europeans. What ethnographers couldn't have known is that earlier in time, this marriage system may not have persisted. And this is something that strontium isotope ratios and other studies of this kind could tell us.

(contemplative orchestral music) -

Narrator

Chutacsi lived in Sii Tuupentak in the late 1600s. He supported his family with hunting and regular trade across tribal territories. His village of Sii Tuupentak shared the bounty of the Bay Area by trade with other Ohlone tribes to the South and West with the Miwok, Wappo, and Patwin to the North and with the Yokuts to the East. This fertile land provided for everyone.

Far to the South, the Spanish had completed the conquering of Mexico. (swords clanging) (fighters yelling) 24 out of 25 million Indigenous people were slaughtered or had died of disease. In but a few short years, the Spanish would establish the first missions in Baja as they marched northward. (bird calling)

Muwekma Tribal Member

(speaking in Chochenyo) (wondrous music flourish) -

Narrator

Chutacsi was five feet seven inches tall, above average for a Sii Tuupentak male. And he lived to be 25 to 35 years of age. Strontium ratios showed that Chutacsi was born in Sii Tuupentak. He did not spend his adolescence there as the strontium ratios in the third molar were higher than the village average.

However, he migrated back to Sii Tuupentak before he died. Chutacsi was buried with three bone whistles, a pipe, and a large flower pot mortar. The flower pot mortar found with Chutacsi was much larger than the typical ground stone mortars of Sii Tuupentak. It was made of a volcanic stone not found in the area.

And there was no evidence that it had ever been manufactured locally. -

XRF Analyst

This flower pot mortar was very different than all the other mortars that we had. It was shaped on all sides. The base was shaped, the sides were shaped to be flaring or straight, and the bowl was shaped in a unique way. And that with the different kind of material, we knew we had something that was likely imported from somewhere fairly far away.

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Narrator

Tracking down the source area for this extraordinary volcanic bowl would lead to a site on the flanks of Mount Diablo approximately 25 miles from Sii Tuupentak. This was the land of the East Bay Miwok tribes who were known for making these large bowls and then trading them to other Bay Area tribes. -

Lead Archeologist

At Sii Tuupentak, only a small number of individuals were interred with flower pot mortars. That suggests that they were extremely rare. And although we don't understand the reasons these artifacts were taken out of circulation, we suspect that they had ritual power. Each one of them is intentionally broken and all the pieces are put into the funerary offerings.

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XRF Analyst

If those flower pot mortars were broken apart during the time that somebody passed away, the act of breaking those things apart would've been a significant event 'cause they're really hard objects. So not only are you intentionally destroying something that was significant, a significant object in the community and for this individual, but you're also creating a lot of noise. (mortar crashing) (bird calling) It's a pretty dramatic event to break those things apart, which might accompany a mourning, some kind of mourning ceremony. -

Narrator

In addition to the flower pot mortar, other stone artifacts found in the excavation were also from distance sources. The projectile points made of obsidian could be geochemically traced to a volcanic site in Napa within the territorial lands of the Wappo tribe over 50 miles from Sii Tuupentak. And an unusual brilliant red paint decorating a bone whistle at Chutacsi's grave was also cause for further investigation. -

XRF Analyst

So you can see here along the shaft of the bird bone whistle that that red pigment is right there. And then we put it right on top of the XRF window. And then we start our test. Results from the red residue on the bone whistle indicate presence of sulfur, calcium which is likely from the bone itself, iron which is likely from the bone itself, and dwarfing all those peaks is the mercury peak, which the presence of mercury is represented by two peaks.

This indicates that we clearly have a cinnabar residue on the bone whistle. -

Narrator

Mercury sulfide, known as cinnabar or quicksilver, was found on many objects at Sii Tuupentak. Though much rarer in nature than iron oxide, it is abundant in the South Bay Area at one particular location 35 miles to the south. That source area later would become the New Almaden Mercury Mine. -

Lead Archeologist

I think it's clear that the people from Sii Tuupentak didn't make these journeys to these raw material sources to acquire it themselves. And there's good reason for that. We know at this point in time that the Bay Area was densely inhabited. There were more than 10,000 Native Americans living there.

Each of them were living in well-defined tribal communities, and a territory. Not only that, I believe that this trade and exchange of raw materials was in part to facilitate the building of alliances and working networks of trade and exchange so that these communities could work together, could live together, and could share a complex social system that allowed such a densely populated group of people to live together in relative peace and harmony. (soft contemplative music) -

State Archeologist

The stylistic types of the artifacts we see at Sii Tuupentak fall into two classes. One is utilitarian,the basic things you need for gathering foods, processing foods. Other things stand out as exceptionally fine and unusual in terms of the workmanship. But what is key about those high status objects, as I'll call them, is that they're shared amongst other communities over a wide geographic region.

The Stockton serrated arrowhead styles, for instance, those are coming from Napa Valley area north of the Bay where that source of obsidian is. By the time they reach Sii Tuupentak, they're already in the final form, which means they're expensive objects. They have to be purchased or exchanged for. When we see the Olivella shell beads coming in, those too are manufactured somewhere else and being brought in.

The flower pot mortars are being manufactured somewhere else and being brought in. And so what you're looking at is the economic prowess of the people at Sii Tuupentak. That isn't common throughout every archeological site. It appears where you have tribal centers, where you have villages with social organization and ranked societies.

(contemplative orchestral music) (birds calling) (contemplative ambient music) -

Narrator

By the late 1700s, the Muwekma Ohlone had been living in Sii Tuupentak for nearly 500 years and within the surrounding valley for more than 2,000 years. In 1776, as the United States of America was crafting their constitution in the Eastern states, the Spanish Crown was extending their empire to Northern California, building a fort, the Presidio, in San Francisco. They would establish missions along the California Coast at intervals of approximately one day's journey on horseback. -

Lead Archeologist

Well, I think the first thing to point out about the Spanish missions is that the only mission that they had was the colonial, political, and military expansion of their empire into the Americas, to move it north, to counteract the perceived threat from the English and the Russians. This was a decision by the Spanish government to take this area by force and to have it cost as little as possible for the Spanish government in terms of money and support. And the approach that they did to that was to create these mission feudal enclaves. And the basic premise of that is that they would aggregate the Native populations into these feudal settlements and force them as effectively serfs to produce a surplus of food to feed these Spanish military Presidios.

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Narrator

Over a 40-year period starting in the late 1700s, the Spanish missions lured or captured Native people from the villages at first nearby, then reaching further and further afield to supply their continual thirst for more labor. The connection between the different tribes in the Bay Area collapsed. Life changed abruptly for the Ohlone. At the missions, they were subjected to diseases they had little immunity for.

Smallpox, tuberculosis, along with violence and poor nutrition. Once captured, they could not leave. On average, they would live only eight years further within the mission walls. -

Lead Archeologist

The people at Sii Tuupentak stayed out of the mission system really until 1795, but then once the mission in San Jose was established just a few miles away, for the next 10 years, everyone from Sii Tuupentak either went into the mission or fled to somewhere else. Add another 20 years in the U.S., government would seize these territories. And soon after that, they would declare the Ohlone extinct. (typewriter keys clacking) (contemplative music) -

Tribal Archeologist

I've been working with the Muwekma Ohlone tribe since 1980 when I first met Rosemary Cambra. When she introduced herself, she said she was an Ohlone Indian. And I said I didn't know anything about who the Ohlone Indians were. And I took her to the library and we grabbed Kroeber's the Handbook of California Indians, 1925.

And we opened it up and it said the Costanoan group is extinct for all practical purposes are concerned. Costanoan was another name for the Ohlone. And she said, 'I beg to differ with you, that we are not extinct. I beg to differ with Kroeber.

My mother's an Ohlone Indian. She was born in Sunol. She was baptized at Mission San Jose. She enrolled with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and I beg to differ with you'.

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Muwekma Tribal Elder

I believe that had they given the opportunity of educating our people in the greater society, I believe that we would've been able to advance ourselves, but not only our tribe, but the entire world. -

Narrator

The lineage of modern day Muwekma to their ancestors can be found in the early baptism records of the Spanish churches. Their history can also be found printed on a molecular level through shared sections of DNA strands. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

One of the analyses that we did at this site was ancient DNA and modern DNA. The modern DNA was done with our tribal council at the time. And what we found out is that we are connected to the ancestors that were recovered from this burial site. -

Narrator

Through matching segments of whole genome DNA, new results from the paleogenomic team's lab would further verify what tribal members already knew, that modern Muwekma Ohlone shared genetic ancestry with the inhabitants buried in Sii Tuupentak, a continuity extending back at least 2,000 years. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

We knew. We know where we come from. We're from this area. We felt happy with the results, but we knew we were from this area and it just solidifies that connection for us.

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Muwekma Tribal Member

I'm amazed and proud at how resilient our people have been for these thousands of years. And I know that we will continue to be resilient and push forward for justice for our people, and not only that, to keep our culture and heritage alive. But it takes us to pass it down to our children and to continue to encourage them to be involved, and to continue to stand proud as a Muwekma Ohlone in our community. -

Muwekma Tribal Member

I hope they understand that we still live, we still exist. We're here. We never left. I want them to understand that our people are smart.

They were smart. Our answers were smart then and we're still smart today, but most of all that we're still here. We never left. (contemplative orchestral music) -

Muwekma Tribal Member

There's nowhere I'd rather be actually right now than here amongst my people, helping, and working, and discovering part of our past, which is connected to the future. (speaking in Chochenyo) I am Muwekma. (contemplative orchestral music) (singing) (rhythmic percussion music) -

Narrator

Funding for this program was provided by The City and County of San Francisco and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.