Exploring the Urban American Indian Experience in Yelamu

Recognizing the Legacy and Future of Native Americans in the Bay Area

Written by Richard Davis, Edited by The American Indian Cultural District Staff

Multigenerational activists raise a tipi honoring the 1969 Native Occupation of Alcatraz Island. Still from “The People’s Home,” courtesy the Director.

Today, non-Native San Franciscans are guests on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone, the traditional stewards and original habitants of Yelamu, also known as San Francisco. The SF Urban Film Fest (SFUFF) pays its respects to the Ramaytush Community by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Thursday evening’s program, Exploring the Urban American Indian Experience in Yelamu, hosted in partnership with San Francisco’s American Indian Cultural District (AICD), set a historical grounding for San Francisco’s urban American Indian community and highlighted some of their ongoing struggles for justice.

The first film of the evening, Gold, Greed, and Genocide (Directed by Pratap Chatterjee, Narration by Dalina Duncan [Pomo]) declares that understanding the present American Indian experience must begin with recognizing the devastating impacts of colonization and genocide from Spanish and European settlers.¹ In addition to the sheer human tragedy, the film details lasting environmental devastation, like that of hydraulic gold mining, which inundated California’s waterways with poisonous mercury. The film ends with Cheryl Seidner, then-Chairwoman of the Table Bluff Wiyot reservation, envisioning her people reclaiming their ancestral island which was taken from the Tribe in an 1860 massacre. She sings a song that came to her in a dream, inspired by the traditions that she hoped would one day be restored. In the years since the film’s release, the City of Eureka returned most of the island to the Wiyot — only after years of pressure and activism from the Wiyot community. In addition to raising funds to purchase a small parcel of the island, the Wiyot have spent years cleaning up extensive contamination and restoring a 1,000-year-old clamshell mound.

A mural depicting the native land of the Wiyot being excavated for gold. Courtesy the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), producers of “Gold, Greed, and Genocide.”

The program bridged to the present with Beyond Recognition (Directed by Michelle Grace Steinberg), a look into the personal journey of Bay Area Natives seeking recognition for their histories through land restoration for Indigenous cultivation. Ramaytush Ohlone Cultural Preservation Activist Gregg Castro describes how the Ohlone (along with many other tribes) were excluded from the federal recognition process on grounds they lacked documented evidence to prove their tribe’s existence despite thousands of years of history.

Viewers meet Ohlone activist Corrina Gould in an Oakland classroom sharing Ohlone history with young children. Later, she poses a question: How can a Tribe prove itself to a government when there was systematic destruction of their people and legacy by that same government? At a mall in Emeryville, Gould is joined by protestors speaking against the complex that was developed on top of, and at the expense of, a thousands-years-old shellmound containing Ohlone human remains. They gather around a replicated shellmound, created by the developer that neither addresses the destruction of human remains nor honors the Ohlone that are still living today. Clearly, struggles for visibility persist.² As one way forward in the fight for Indigenous land justice, Gould and fellow activist Johnella LaRose founded the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the East Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.³

Activists gathered in front of a church bringing visibility to indigenous sacred sites. Still from “Beyond Recognition,” courtesy the Director.

With rare archival footage, The People’s Home (Directed by Billy Marchese and Peter Bratt) honors the 1969 Native Occupation of Alcatraz Island as a critical moment in American Indian activism. It goes on to show today’s generation of urban American Indian youth working together to raise a tipi on Alcatraz Island. The message was clear: Native American youth will uphold the struggle for visibility and preserve their peoples’ sacred traditions.

The final film of the program, the rarely screened Sinew (Directed by Patty L. Collins), portrays the struggle, grace, and lifetime service of Blackfeet woman Betty Cooper, narrated in her own voice. Cooper was born in 1938 on the Blackfeet Nation reservation. As a six-year-old, she was forced by federal administrators into a boarding school for assimilation. Boarding schools were places of immense trauma and abuse for American Indian children through the 20th century, removing them from their homes, forcing them to wear European clothing, cut their hair, and speak English. Requirements making it more difficult to separate Native parents and their children weren’t established until the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, in support of which Cooper herself testified before Congress. Holding on dearly to her Blackfeet culture, Cooper escaped boarding school.

By 1963, now married with children, Cooper moved her family to Oakland to help provide them a better future.⁴ In coping with her husband’s struggle with addiction, she helped found the American Indian Family Healing Center, where she served as Director for ten years. Noting that all existing addiction treatment plans were male-centered models, Cooper developed the first Indian program for and by women. Understanding the healing power of family, she ensured women would not be parted with their children as was practiced previously. Reminiscing in the film, Cooper shares the joy and pride she felt when American Indians started holding drug- and alcohol-free spaces to gather and celebrate as a form of resistance.

Cooper has dedicated her life to nurturing Native culture among youth and providing culturally-informed community-based treatment using traditional cultural ways and cultural pride to deter drug and alcohol abuse. When she returned to the Blackfeet Nation reservation, she helped replace a medical model of treatment with a program grounded in family, ceremony, and Native language. As Cooper’s daughter, Lori Newbreast, says: her mother “made sure that the sinew in all of us is connected here.”

Cooper’s care work led her to seek a leadership role within the male-dominated Blackfeet Tribal Council. She was elected in a landslide. Sinew closes by commemorating her life of service to American Indians, which she continues today on the Blackfeet Reservation.⁵ Another of Cooper’s daughters, Theda Newbreast, concludes: “My mother is all of our ancestors talking to us now. They are begging and they are pleading…if you have one ounce of Indian blood in you or one ounce of Indian spirit….You got to stand up now…You got to fight for our water, you got to fight for our land, you got to fight for our ceremony, and you got to fight for our language.”

Betty Cooper on a visit to Alcatraz Island. Still from “Sinew,” courtesy the Director.

In response to the four films, Sharaya Souza (Taos Pueblo, Ute, Kiowa), Executive Director and Co-Founder of AICD, moderated a panel discussion amongst AICD Board Members and community leaders: film director Peter Bratt (Peruvian), Ohlone Cultural Preservation Activist Gregg Castro (t’rowt’raahl Salinan, Rumsien-Ramaytush Ohlone), Executive Director of the American Indian Cultural Center April McGill (Yuki, Wappo, Little Lake Pomo, Wailaki), and AICD Board President Mary Travis-Allen (Mayagna, Chortega, Seneca). Souza focused the panel on their experience as urban Natives in the San Francisco Bay Area and the ongoing efforts of urban American Indians to advocate for justice in a settler-colonial-based society.

The panel strongly identified with Cooper’s life experience. McGill noted that, largely due to the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, most American Indians live in urban places today, which can make them feel like outsiders if they choose to relocate to their ancestral Tribe’s reservation. Still, encountering Native culture true to one’s heritage is essential for belonging and healing. Just as Cooper ensured her children experienced Native ceremonies, the panel stressed the importance of ancestral traditions for Native American youth, particularly as mainstream America creates narrow stereotypes about the diversity of Native culture. Noting Cooper’s care for women in her urban community, the panel raised the injustice that American Indian women are murdered and missing at far higher rates than other ethnicities.

Panelists also remarked on the instrumental role of the 1969–1971 Alcatraz Island Occupation and the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation in improving conditions for Native Americans in the United States. Bratt, who grew up in San Francisco, talked about his personal connection with the occupation. He remembered his family home as a stopping point for Natives coming in from across the country to join the Alcatraz protest, recalling the music and storytelling at many of these gatherings. “Victories in the movement were few and far between, so artists and storytellers helped to keep the group resilient,” Bratt said. As highlighted in The People’s Home, the continuation of the tipi raising ceremony serves as a bond within and across generations, honoring the legacy of resistance and inter-tribal solidarity that the Alcatraz Occupation represents for many American Indians.

When Souza asked how AICD honored Native American culture and heritage, the conversation turned to the representation of Native American history in California’s education system. “4th-grade history has finally been updated to respectfully describe Native history,” Travis-Allen said, referring to the school projects of building model missions (such as San Francisco’s own Mission Dolores). “The missions weren’t made out of popsicle sticks and sugar cubes. They were made by slaves.”⁶

The American Indian Cultural District is the product of generations of Native activism, organizing, and community service. Founded in March 2020, AICD is the first American-Indian-based Cultural District of its size in the US. Dedicated to empowering the urban American Indian community’s voice and healing centuries of systemic oppression and racism, AICD preserves and celebrates diverse cultures, increases visibility, and secures equitable resources for American Indian people by American Indian people. To learn about AICD’s initiatives and to make contributions, please visit americanindianculturaldistrict.org.

Watch the panel discussion:

This event took place on February 18, 2021, was co-presented with the American Indian Cultural District and curated by SF Urban Film Fest Humanities Advisor Ron Sundstrom and Festival Manager Kristal Çelik. For more information about the SF Urban Film Fest, visit our website.

About the Author

Richard Davis is a recent graduate of the master’s in urban planning program at San Jose State University and an associate editor for APA Northern Section’s Northern News. He is a co-author of publications produced by Mineta Transportation Institute and UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center. He earned his BA in screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University.

Footnotes

1. For more context and history, refer to these recent scholarly resources: Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California, which documents the depredation of the Ohlone peoples under the Spanish mission system and subsequent settler-colonial interactions with Mexicans and Americans, and An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, which thoroughly documents the colonial campaign against Native Americans in California. Richard Slotkin’s investigations of American settler-colonial myths explore the cultural narratives underlying the genocide of Native Americans in the Western frontier. For those interested in learning more about the environmental impact of hydraulic mining, see this recent KCET article on lingering mercury contamination in California rivers and Andrew C. Isenberg’s Mining California: An Ecological History. Also of note, Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin on the role of mining in the industrial and financial development of San Francisco, Berkeley, and neighboring cities.
2. In 2015, years after the construction of the Emeryville mall, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) added tribal consultation requirements on construction projects meeting certain criteria. This process alone is insufficient, as projects that may possess Native American cultural resources may still be deemed CEQA exempt, spurring loophole closing legislation like AB-168.
3. Some scholars advocate for indigeneous environmental justice that decolonizes and extends beyond the Western liberal philosophy of environmental justice. Two recent books provide a wealth of knowledge on Indigeneous management of California’s natural resources and Karuk traditional foodways practiced along the Klamath River in Northern California.
4. Oakland was a major destination for Native families across the US who were forced to leave their homes under the 1950s Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Urban Voices: The Bay Area American Indian Community contains stories of Natives adapting to life in the Bay Area coming from reservations or rural areas.
5. A 2019 Missoulian article describes her present role as an elder.
6. The California Curriculum History Coalition, based at CSU Sacramento, prepares and distributes historically accurate, California Indian-vetted educational material, primarily oriented at elementary school students.