The shellmound

This tour begins at the bus stop, here next to the Berkeley train station. Standing at the bus stop, first figure out the cardinal directions: Where is the ocean? That is west. Look to the north and you will see the chain-linked cyclone fencing, and beyond that is a parking lot. Now, through your mind’s eye, re-envision this space in the year 1900, when your view would be blocked by the 60-foot (20-meter) shellmound towering over this land. Here within the braided delta of Strawberry Creek, in the broad marsh stretching to the salty Bay, a Xučyun Ohlone village once flourished. The shellmound was a physical testament to the habitation of humans here since time immemorial.

A shellmound is sometimes described as a midden, as though it were an unsightly heap of refuse. But the shellmounds found throughout the Bay Area were not landfills. The ranchers and settlers who came West and began to make their home in the East Bay in the late 1800s marveled at these symmetrical hillocks on the landscape, overgrown with grass. In the gaps between the vegetation, they could see that the hills gleamed a chalky white. Each shellmound is a dense masonry of shells and bones—oyster, clam, mussel, deer, and other items—bound together by a mortar of ash from ceremonial fires. Interred within the mounds were the precious remembrances of the families who lived here—the stone tools, decorative art, and the remains of the people themselves. This site, the Berkeley Shellmound, has long been sacred to the Xučyun Ohlone and is estimated to have been constructed between 5000 and 1200 years ago—older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids at Giza (Ingram).

The people of this region, like the people across much of coastal California, had long been subjected to the Mission systems, forced removal policies, and subsequent conversion boarding schools . The first mission constructed in the San Francisco Bay Area dates to 1769. From that time until 1833, 81,000 indigenous people living in the Bay Area were relocated from their aboriginal lands to the brutal confines of the missions in San Rafael, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz and as far away as San Juan Capistrano in Orange County. This relocation strategy was purposeful, used to dismantle the political structures of the tribes and disrupt the ability to organize revolts. Well over 60,000 people in those earliest years of contact with the Spanish died from European diseases, including smallpox (Milliken et al.). After the mission era and during the foundational zeitgeist of California, state-sponsored militias received bounties to quite literally hunt American Indian men, women, and children. In his second state address, the first Governor of California, Peter Burnett, is infamously quoted: “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct. ​​While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert” (Burnett). In the 1850s the state of California authorized $1.3 million in state funding to subsidize militia campaigns against Native Americans, equivalent in purchasing power to over $52 million today (Madley). And in the 1890 census, there were only 28 people in the Bay Area who self-identified as American Indian (Milliken et al.). This genocide is the living legacy that displaces us from being able to truly comprehend the history of this place.

Amidst these feelings of pain, loss, and shock, we must understand that the fire is still burning. We can still strike a truly hopeful note, because the Chocheño-speaking Ohlone people continue to live here in Xučyun, and their traditions and languages are still here. In March of 2024, the city of Berkeley bought this parking lot and gave the land to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. A humble gesture, but the first time in over 200 years that the future of this place is once more firmly in the hands of Ohlone people.