Shellmound Peace Walk Honors Native American Ancestors
The Bay Area was once ringed by shellmounds, monuments and burial grounds for the Native Americans who lived here.
On Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m., a small circle of people, bundled in scarves, hats and rain gear, stood in the wide median of Encinal Avenue near High Street on Alameda's East End.
"There was a village here until 1847," said Zoe Holder of Alameda's Multicultural Center, one of 30-plus walkers participating in Day Four of the 10-Day Shellmound Peace Walk. The walk passed through Alameda Friday and Saturday.
The Ohlone village was "the last in Alameda and one of the last in the East Bay," said Holder.
Amidst the cars whizzing by, a break in the heavy rain and the playful shouts of children at the bus stop across High Street, the group stood silent, allowing their imaginations to venture back in time to a wholly different landscape, one in which the site was home to members of the Ohlone people.
In 1847, what is now the island of Alameda was a peninsula. Just north of the village site was a huge shellmound, a massive mound of shells, artifacts, as well as human remains — one of hundreds created by native people and marked on early European maps of the region. To the east, the salty waters of the San Francisco Bay would have been at the village's eastern edge. Landfill has since moved the shore many blocks away.
"Just to think they managed to stay here that late," said Holder, observing that most Native Americans were forced out of their Oakland homes by 1809.
The Peace Walk, which this year takes a route from San Jose to Benicia before looping back at the Huchiun Shellmound (now the site of the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville), was first held in 2005. This year the walk is sponsored by Indian People Organizing for Change, Shellmound Peace Walkers, SSP&RIT, a Native American advocacy group, and Foot Prints for Peace.
This fifth Peacewalk is being held in celebration of modifications to the federal Native American Graves Protection and Reparations Act, originally passed in 1990. The act is designed to make it easier for Native Americans like the Ohlone, whose tribes have neither federal recognition nor land, to gain possession of their ancestors' remains when they are unearthed or located in museums or collections.
Made up of shells, including clam, mussel and oyster shells, shellmounds were so huge they appear as landmarks on the original Coast Guard maps of the area. Some of them have been carbon-dated at more than 5,000 years old
"We stop at the different shellmounds that have been desecrated and built over and we pray," said Corrina Gould, a Chochenyo Ohlone and one of walk's organizers. "Our prayers for those four years [of the walk] were to have the ancestors returned. Now the prayer is to find places for them."
Some walkers slept Saturday night at Alameda's First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ. Others joined the group for the day, meeting at the corner of Washington and Mound streets for a prayer circle. Then they continued down Washington Street a few blocks, pausing to honor the site where the remains of a 3-year-old Native American girl were unearthed by a construction crew a couple years ago.
Then on they walked down High Street, orange-vested guides marking the front and rear of the group. They reached the site where the Ohlone village once stood, then walked on to Lincoln Park, where they stopped at the plaque that memorializes the site of the huge shellmound, know as the Sather Mound.
It was disassembled in 1908 and the bulk of the material there, including human remains, were carted away and used for roads.
"Shell mounds are cemeteries," said Gould. "And every time there's a building there you know that someone's cemetery was taken out for a shopping center or a Starbucks."
Gould said that shellmounds were common in the Bay Area but not unique to it. "In other places in the world," said Gould, "people have found ways to build around them. But not here."
Then the group walked on, up Lincoln Avenue, some drumming, others chatting. They left Alameda by way of the Park Street Bridge to walk along the Embarcadero, an area once known as "Shellmound Tract."
Saturday's walk finished for the night at a shellmound in Berkeley at Fourth and University, after a day-long 12-mile urban trek.
"When you're walking you don't pay attention to the cold and rain," said Wounded Knee De O'Campo, a member of the Me-Wok tribe, who said he was walking as a call for people of the world to stop the "desecration of scared places."
Rain is necessary, he said, to cleanse the earth, for plants, for animals, for people. "It is always a good day for a walk," he said.
Eva Pearlman-Nov. 22, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Patch. All Rights Reserved.
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