The stories Indian and Mortar rocks can tell us (2024)

“I don’t know what we tell,” said Corrina Gould, who leads the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, an Ohlone tribe. 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.”

Damage 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. Sometime last year, someone deformed the mortars by carving deeper into them. “If this was a church or a synagogue, maybe you would say it was a hate crime,” Gould said. “And because we’ve been disappeared, it’s not seen as the same.”

California 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.

There are many Indian Rocks around the country — in Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Washington, Florida, Oregon — one as anonymous as the next. The names were slapped on by settlers, eclipsing thousands of years of rich histories with the same reductive reference to Native people.

Their names are “the artifacts of colonizers,” said Devlin Gandy, an archeologist and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who lived at a house on the corner of Indian Rock Avenue when he was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.

Two years ago, neighbors living on Indian Rock Avenue raised questions about how they might more appropriately commemorate the area’s Native history. And some Ohlone have also expressed interest in a new name, though the conversation is only beginning.

This summer, sitting on a bench facing the chalked-up wall at Mortar Rock, a part of the park that more often resembles a climbing gym than a cultural heritage site, Monica Arellano, vice chair of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, said she would like to see the city rename the park in the Chochenyo Ohlone language and add more prominent signage. As it is, “I don’t think people can realize and have appreciation for the cultural significance,” Arellano said.

She even has a preliminary suggestion for a new name, the Chochenyo term for bedrock —‘ullaš ´irek, pronounced oo-lah-sh ee-rehk.

Gould told Berkeleyside she prefers a name that references the area’s significance as a sacred place, and mused about what it might be like to renew the tribe’s relationship to the area and hold private ceremonies there, temporarily closing the area to the public.

“These rock relatives are calling people to be here: to put our hands on here, to be able to be a part of this landscape again,” Gould said, pressing her hands on the rock and admiring the view.

Gathering stones and ‘the end of our world’

Ohlone origin stories put Native people in the Bay Area at Time Immemorial — in other words, at the beginning of the world.

One version of an Ohlone origin story begins with a ruined world covered in water. Only one peak stood above the flood: Tuyshtak — a Chochenyo Ohlone word meaning “dawn of time,” which the Spanish called Mt. Diablo. From the top of the mountain, Eagle, Coyote and Hummingbird watched the waters recede. Eagle, the Chief, sent Coyote to survey the land below and he returned, reporting that the land was dry. Then Coyote made Native people.

Researchers have already documented thousands of years of Native history in the Bay Area, putting science behind what Indigenous people have long said — that they have been here, and continue to be here. There is 10,000-year-old rock art in the foothills of Tushytak and DNA analysis linking 2,000-year-old ancestral remains to living members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. And scientists have repeatedly revised their estimates, pushing them further back in time.

By the time the Spanish arrived in 1769, California was densely populated with diverse groups of Indigenous people speaking perhaps 100 different languages and living in many tribes that moved around, traded and intermarried.

One of these tribes was the xučyun (Huchiun) Ohlone, living in parts of what are now Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The term Ohlone was later used as an alternative to Costanoan, meaning “of the coast,” to draw together the disparate Bay Area tribes that had been devastated by California settlers.

The first recorded meetings of the Spanish and Ohlone came in 1772, when a Spanish expedition led by Captain Pedro fa*ges traveled through the Bay Area. The Huchiun are largely absent from this account, save this note: Not seeing Native people in the area that is now Berkeley and Oakland, Captain fa*ges concludes that they must be afraid of grizzly bears roaming the area.

In general, Ohlone processed plants, meat and fish in bedrock mortars, which tended to be near village sites or water sources, said Gloria Arellano-Gómez, Monica’s sister and a former council member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, repeating the standard story about how Ohlone people would have used Mortar Rock. A sign welcoming visitors to the park names the plants Native people used in cooking there: leaves of California bay tree, elderberries, buckeyes.

The Arellano sisters emphasized the area’s significance as a social place. Unlike portable mortars small enough to carry, mortars carved into bedrock serve as community gathering sites. “They even called them gossip stones,” Arellano-Gómez said.

In the winter, Ohlone lived in village sites by the water, like the one next to the shellmound now buried beneath the Fourth Street parking lot in West Berkeley. Come spring, they went into the hills in smaller groups, according to archeologist Breck Parkman, establishing base camps at bedrock mortars.

Indigenous people wore depressions of different shapes into the rocks. Ohlone ground acorns in shallower bowl-shaped mortars, while conical mortars with steeper walls were used to process seeds and grasses, according to Parkman. How many there are in the bedrock could indicate the number of people using the site.

Though mortars were once ubiquitous, so many have been destroyed. That these few mortars are even notable today, Gandy said, reflects the impact of colonization. “This is very special right here, to see so many,” Arellano said.

Gould disputes the idea that Mortar Rock was used as a place for processing food. She describes Indian and Mortar rocks as sacred, ceremonial sites, which she said she learned about through her family’s oral traditions. At Mortar Rock, Gould said her ancestors would have ground plants for medicine used during religious ceremonies for healing and seeing off the dead at Indian Rock.

The top of Indian Rock affords a clear view of what Gould referred to as the Western Gate, where the Golden Gate Bridge now stands and what the Huchiun Ohlone, according to Gould, saw as the “end of our world.” In the religion, she said, spirits leave this world through the Western Gate.

Keeping Ohlone history alive

After thousands of years in the Bay Area, the arrival of the Spanish in 1769 changed everything for the Ohlone.

What followed ruptured an entire way of life for Indigenous people and left 90% of California Indians dead within a period of 100 years, a time that Ohlone author Deborah A. Miranda called “the end of the world.”

In California Missions, Indigenous people found disease, despair and forced labor. One in three infants did not live to see a first birthday. Then came U.S. state-sponsored genocide of the Gold Rush era, when Congress paid about $25 per scalp, hand or body of an Indian for a sum totaling over $1 million. All the while, boarding schools stripped Native children of their families and culture and subjected them to rampant physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

The Native people who survived were often refugees on their own land. When the missions shuttered in the 1830s, many Indigenous people from Mission San Jose went to the Alisal Ranchería near Pleasanton, forming a community made of people from many Bay Area tribes.

As land was being converted to Mexican rancherías, Native people became almost the sole source of agricultural labor, often coerced. They worked the land as slaves, as indentured servants or for meager wages.

At the same time, rancherías also became centers for Indigenous life — at Alisal, Native people kept Indigenous traditions alive, exchanging stories and cultural practices with one another and even traveling to other parts of California to share cultural practices.

By 1910, the census counted 41 California Indians living in Alameda County and called Pleasanton “Indian Town,” though this was likely an undercount.

The ranchería was located near Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, a castle built by Phoebe Hearst and named after a 15th century carved-stone wellhead shipped for the mansion from the Italian city. (The castle later became the Castlewood Country Club.) The Verona Station had been added along the Western Pacific Railroad so the Hearst family could entertain their elite guests.

And so, the census called the people of “Indian Town” the Verona Band of Alameda County. It was under this name that Indigenous people here earned federal recognition as a tribe, a status that lasted from 1914 to 1927.

Ohlone people today — people like Gould, Arellano and Arellano-Gómez — are descended from these families recorded on this 1910 census. They can trace back their ancestors to the names scrawled in cursive on the census logs, people like José Guzman and the children of Avelina Cornates Marine.

People from the Huchiun tribe don’t appear on the 1910 census. There are no known descendants of this tribe, according to Gould and Alan Leventhal, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe’s historian and a professor of Indigenous history at San Jose State University.

From the 18th century onward, most accounts of Ohlone people and history were told through the lens of the other — settlers encountering Ohlone for the first time, archeologists documenting their language, government employees counting their numbers.

“Our stories were told through the viewpoint of archaeologists at UC Berkeley,” Gould said, a perspective that flattened the complexities of Indigenous lives. The work by Ohlone people to restore the Huchiun name and legacy in Oakland and Berkeley has been an effort to correct that history.

A century after the destruction of an entire ancestral line, the Muwekma and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan have clashed with one another, competing to represent Huchiun Ohlone land with their own visions. Gould says tribes always disagreed with one another — it’s other people, like anthropologists at UC Berkeley, who tried to mash their viewpoints together.

“We continuously push against that by showing up as different tribes with different viewpoints,” Gould said.

This, combined with the devastation of this period in American history, threatened to wipe the past from memory — if it weren’t for the effort of Native people to keep it alive.

That the Ohlone survived at all, and managed to maintain cultural practices, is itself a victory, said Vincent Medina, who opened Cafe Ohlone with Louis Trevino last summer as “a love song to Ohlone culture.”

Ohlone people have also partnered with researchers to preserve the Chochenyo language. Between 1921 and 1939, linguist John Peabody Harrington from the federal Bureau of American Ethnology created field notes vital to current efforts to reconstruct the language. Today, recorded songs by Guzman and Angela (María de los Ángeles) are housed at the Smithsonian and there are multiple Chochenyo Ohlone language keepers tasked with keeping the legacy alive.

“Every day, we wake up exactly where our family has always woken up. We have never lost that connection to the land. The culture is transmitted, the language is spoken, the food eaten, the religion is practiced,” Medina said. “That’s not defeat at all. That’s continuity. That’s persistence. That’s victory right there, because there was an effort to try to erase and destroy all of those things. But our family, our elders, our ancestors, our forebears, they wouldn’t let that happen.”

Monica Arellano and her sister, Gloria, visited Mortar Rock recently with their children in tow. As soon as the women sat down for an interview, their kids disappeared to explore the park. That, Arellano imagines, is how Ohlone ancestors might also have spent time there, children scampering about, families preparing food, talking.

“To have that … reflection,” she said. “It makes me emotional.”

Boulders, blessings and basem*nts

By the time Berkeley became a city in 1878, Native people were largely gone from the area, though not entirely.

“Berkeley grew up without us here, for the most part,” Gould said.

In the city’s early years, residents lived in the flats: in Oceanview, a working class neighborhood on the water in what is now West Berkeley, or around the new University of California campus. The Berkeley Hills, home to Indian and Mortar rocks, were oak woodland. A 1908 ballot measure would have kept them that way, preserving 980 acres in Thousand Oaks as a sprawling public park, but the measure failed. Around the same time, another idea to move the state capitol to Berkeley, just next to Indian Rock, also flopped.

Instead, as early as 1909, the Mason-McDuffie Company began taking out full-page spreads in the local paper, urging residents to buy, buy, buy. The low price, the view and, especially, the “curious” public parks, were all part of the appeal. Ads commodified the landscape “for the benefit of the fortunate residents” of what was then called Berkeley Heights.

Perhaps it was Duncan McDuffie’s affinity for nature — he helped establish California’s state parks and had already begun a rock climbing career in 1902 — that preserved Indian and Mortar rocks as the city’s first public parks.

When they built the streets, developers apparently razed a shellmound to the ground. The contents of the Emeryville shellmound were used as fertilizer and grading material for Berkeley’s roads. They contained Native American remains.

Anthropologists were also drawn to Indian Rock. Based on preliminary research by UC Berkeley anthropologist Nels Nelson, the San Francisco Examiner declared Mortar Rock Park an “Indian Capital” in 1910. Articles cited the natural chimney at Indian Rock and the size and number of mortars as evidence of a significant Native presence — referring to the Berkeley Hills collectively as “The Indian Burial Grounds.”

UC Berkeley researchers had been digging up remains in Berkeley and across the country since the early 1870s, storing what eventually amounted to the largest collection of Indigenous remains in the United States at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum. Despite federal repatriation laws, the remains of at least 9,000 Native Americans are still in the university’s possession, kept in a basem*nt and in other campus buildings.

Research into Indian Rock appears to have been abandoned not long after it began. Development moved forward, apparently without the input of the state’s Native people, who in 1925 were wrongly pronounced extinct by UC Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, save “a few scattered individuals.”

Throughout the 1900s, as the hills grew crowded with homes, the boulders — miniature, privately owned versions of Indian and Mortar rocks — were integrated into the architecture. The book Berkeley Rocks: Building with Nature features photos of boulders inside of basem*nts and bathrooms and nestled into staircases.

Single-family homes, apartment buildings and storefronts sprouted up throughout the city, leaving little trace of the Indigenous Californians who came before. Today, there are many times more Indigenous remains at the Hearst Museum than there are Native students at UC Berkeley, as two Native Cal students, Sierra Edd and Ataya Cesspooch, note on their podcast, Indigenous United.

A place with a life of its own

Around the back of Mortar Rock, past a wall white with climber’s chalk, are a few medium-sized rocks with mortars shaded by a sparse canopy of trees. Some line the small park’s walking paths, the mortars jutting out at odd angles, while others are lodged in the earth, immovable.

A few of the mortars have been made deeper and wider, obfuscating their original use. Nearby, a buckeye tree bears an unusual scar, a thick line about 2 inches wide, carved into the trunk.

Gould called the damage a “huge wound to our tribe,” drawing a comparison between what had been done to the mortars and the razing of the shellmounds to the ground in West Berkeley. “How do we tell those folks that have stood with us [to protect the shellmounds] that this is happening right here, again, in Berkeley?” she asked.

Efforts to protect Native places have focused on particularly sacred locations. This is, at least partially, a kind of triage — if the whole landscape is threatened, you pick and choose what you fight for.

But Gould hopes that drawing the connections between Indian Rock, the shellmounds and the village site can inspire protection, not only of the place itself, but of the larger landscape connected to it.

On top of Indian Rock, Gould gestured to where the shellmound and village site would have been, now covered up by a bustling city of one-story bungalows, storefronts, highways.

“This is how it triangulates right into the sacred landscape. They’re all connected to this place. This is all our home,” Gould said.

The idea of a sacred landscape hasn’t taken root in public discourse, but Berkeley Councilmember Sophie Hahn, who has been involved with efforts to save the shellmound, said that boundaries of Native significance span much larger than a small plot in West Berkeley. “We probably could designate the whole city [as a historic site],” said Hahn. As a gesture to that end, Hahn helped pass a resolution requiring that City Council meetings begin with a land acknowledgement.

As Gould walked around the rocks, she referred to the rhyolite as her “rock relatives,” a reflection of the way the Ohlone see Indian and Mortar rocks and the natural world writ large — as living beings.

“Geographic places have a life of their own,” said Medina, who teaches a weekly Chochenyo language class. “They have their own agency, their own personality, their own identity, their own way of doing things.”

So too at Indian Rock. From a Native perspective, it’s no accident that these rocks, tucked into the heart of an upscale residential area, inspire contemplation and closeness — it’s in the rocks’ very nature.

“There are very few places these days where you can do some deep hanging out,” Gandy said. “I feel like [Indian and Mortar] rocks have been deeply hanging out. And when you’re in their presence, you kind of get inspired to, too.”

The rocks on this hillside have borne witness to several million years of history, a scale that dwarfs the origin and growth of the modern city of Berkeley, the development of the sport of rock climbing and even the region’s many thousands of years of Native history. Stories from throughout those eras are inscribed on the rocks, clues left behind by geologic forces, Indigenous people and climbers.

“And they will tell us those stories if we listen to them,” Gould said.