On Aug. 8, 2026, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area announced that about 150 acres in the foothills of East San José, a property called Bella Madeira, had come home. According to the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation, it is the first piece of homeland returned to the Tribe in generations. State records put the parcel at about 150 acres. The money that made it possible did not come from Washington. It came from Sacramento, through a California climate program whose rules explicitly include tribes the federal government does not recognize.
That matters because Washington still does not recognize the Muwekma. Interior’s 2002 Final Determination denied the Tribe acknowledgment, even though the same decision found that its ancestors had been federally acknowledged as the Verona Band between 1914 and 1927, and that Congress never terminated them. Bella Madeira shows what land return looks like when a tribe shut out by Washington finds a state door that is open.
This account is drawn from the state’s grant records, from the Tribe’s August statement as posted on the Foundation’s Bella Madeira page, and from the listing that marketed the property for sale. The Muwekma Times did not reach the Tribe for this story.
What the state approved
On Oct. 8, 2025, the California Strategic Growth Council approved Round 10 of the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program, or SALC. The staff report lists the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area as applicant for project SALC23_PP103_SCL in Santa Clara County, a $4,470,000 award covering the roughly 150-acre parcel.
The round itself was large. Staff recommended $121,647,339, including 47 acquisition projects covering about 40,244 acres. Seven of them would return 11,096 acres to California Native American Tribes or to a tribal nonprofit, an investment of $25.36 million, or 19.88 percent of available funds. “Tribes were the lead applicant on all seven recommended projects,” staff wrote. With one more tribal project approved on a contingent basis, the Council’s Oct. 14 press release counted eight projects returning 11,316 acres, for $33.16 million.
The eligibility language is the heart of the story. The Round 10 guidelines, as quoted in the staff report, set a 20 percent investment target for projects that provide secure land tenure to “a California Native American Tribe,” or to a member of “a Federally recognized or non-Federally recognized California Native American Tribe on the contact list maintained by the Native American Heritage Commission.” A separate 5 percent target covers projects where such a tribe is the applicant or a co-applicant. The program, in other words, does not require federal recognition.
What the Tribe plans
The project summary in Attachment A describes a fee-title purchase by the Tribe of a property bordering the City of San José. Staff ranked it “A – Project ready” and found it “Qualifies for 100% SALC Funding.” The land is meant for “the restoration and cultivation of traditional foods, medicines, and basketry materials” and for “cultural purposes including ceremonial practices.”
The Tribe will manage it, the summary says, using “TEK, cultural burning, polyculture systems, and supplemental grazing,” and will revive native plants and protect wildlife habitat. It has committed to donating “any surplus of the foods harvested to local food banks for low-income community members of East San Jose.” The project includes a SALC-funded “cultural management / land stewardship plan.” The summary also notes that “a portion of the property may be excluded,” without explaining further.
The Foundation’s page places the land in Thámien Ohlone territory and lists a Bella Madeira Horse Medicine Ranch among its planned enterprises. On Dec. 10, 2025, the Council took up a second Muwekma request: $250,000 to build the Tribe’s Conservation Office (SALC23_C18), recommended in the December staff report, which the Foundation says the Council approved. The project summary describes training for tribal members in ecological restoration, land management and traditional cultivation, “paid positions for the next generation of tribal leaders,” and frameworks for endowment and stewardship funding. The work spans all or part of nine counties. In the same round, Tamien Nation, another Ohlone community in Santa Clara County, was recommended for $100,000 to develop a land-conservancy model.
Saved from subdivision
The state’s case for the grant was about climate as much as culture. Attachment A notes the property has rural residential zoning and “could be subdivided into 5-acre parcels.” Keeping it for cultural use, staff wrote, “would encourage development within city boundaries and away from the hills.” They estimated 37 potential development rights extinguished, 8,064,467 vehicle miles of travel avoided, and 5,974 metric tons of CO2 equivalent avoided. SALC is paid for by California Climate Investments, which come from the state’s Cap-and-Invest auctions. The Department of Conservation runs it for the Council; details are on its SALC page.
The sale listing shows the threat in plain terms. California Outdoor Properties advertised roughly 150 acres at an asking price of $3,850,000. It described cattle-grazing land on multiple parcels, behind a gated private road, “surrounded by luxurious estate-style homes,” near Joseph D. Grant County Park and Lick Observatory. Its pitch: “build your dream home.” Neither the listing nor the state documents gives a final sale price, and the asking price should not be compared directly with the grant.
“Once we lose California’s agricultural lands and open space, we can never recover them,” Department of Conservation Director Jennifer Lucchesi said when the awards were announced, in the Council’s release and a statement from the governor’s office.
‘An act of rematriation’
The Tribe did not talk about grant numbers. It talked about coming home. Its statement, posted by the Foundation and on the Tribe’s LinkedIn page, read:
“The return of 150 acres of ancestral land is more than the return of a place, it is an act of rematriation, restoring the relationship between the people and their homeland after generations of separation. This land will become a place where culture is strengthened, language is revitalized, ceremonies continue, and future generations can reconnect with the homeland their ancestors have always known. To every Tribal member, ancestor, partner, and supporter who made this moment possible this homecoming belongs to all of you.”
The land Washington wouldn’t buy
The federal record explains why that word, homecoming, carries so much weight. In the Final Determination, the Bureau of Indian Affairs proceeded from a finding that the Muwekma petitioner “had previous Federal acknowledgment as the Verona Band or Pleasanton rancheria between 1914 and 1927.” The decision traces that acknowledgment to a congressionally funded program to buy land for “landless, non-reservation Indians of California.”
Special Agent C. E. Kelsey’s census of 1905–1906 listed 29 landless Indians at Pleasanton and 14 at Niles. Agent C. H. Asbury named a Verona band in Alameda County as a possible beneficiary in 1914, and the Sacramento Agency did the same in 1923. Then, in 1927, Superintendent L. A. Dorrington “concluded that land should not be purchased on its behalf.” None ever was. The decision also found that neither the group nor its members had been the subject of any law “expressly terminating or forbidding the Federal relationship.”
Interior still ruled against the Tribe in 2002. It found the Tribe had not shown continuous outside identification, community, and political authority since 1927, the last year Washington acknowledged it. The Tribe has always maintained that it was never terminated, only ignored. A federal re-petition process, which we explained here, runs to a Feb. 14, 2030 deadline.
A state door, and its limits
Few of the state’s tools are this open. As we have reported, California’s new co-management and cultural-burn laws are written for federally recognized tribes only. That is why the Muwekma’s first cultural burn in nearly 150 years, at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge preserve in January, took place by permit, on someone else’s land. Bella Madeira is land where the Tribe can burn, plant and pray on its own ground.
Other Ohlone nations are taking the same route. Near Monterey, the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation now owns 84 acres returned by Big Sur Land Trust with state money. Federal land is another matter: at the Presidio of San Francisco, returning land to Ohlone people is not on the new board’s agenda.
None of this replaces recognition. Land bought with a state grant is not a reservation, and it does not restore the federal relationship that lapsed after 1927. But about 150 acres on the eastern rim of San José are no longer for sale as someone’s dream home. A century after an Indian agent decided the Verona band did not need land, the Muwekma Ohlone have some.
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