The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is made up of the known surviving American Indian lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay Area. Its people have lived on this land since long before there was a San Francisco, a San José or an Oakland, and they are still here.
The people and the homeland
According to the Tribe, today’s Muwekma Ohlone Tribe brings together the Bay Area lineages that trace their ancestry through Missions Dolores, Santa Clara and San José, and whose families were members of the historic, federally recognized Verona Band of Alameda County. The Tribe describes its aboriginal homeland as San Francisco, San Mateo, most of Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and portions of Napa, Santa Cruz, Solano and San Joaquin counties. (Source: Muwekma Ohlone Tribe)
The Tribe pronounces its name Muwékma (muh-WEK-mah). “Ohlone” is a name now widely used for the many related peoples of the coast between San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay. Some communities also use the older term “Costanoan.”
Missions and dispossession
Between 1776 and 1836, Spanish missionization brought many distantly related, and sometimes already intermarried, tribal groups of the Bay Area into Missions Dolores, Santa Clara and San José. The mission baptism, marriage and death registers kept in those years are now among the most important records of Ohlone families. The Tribe’s genealogists have used them to trace present-day Muwekma lineages back to their aboriginal villages.
Secularization of the missions, Mexican land grants, and then American statehood and the Gold Rush left Ohlone families landless in their own homeland. California’s Indian peoples endured an era of state-sanctioned violence, indenture and land loss. Eighteen treaties negotiated with California tribes in 1851 and 1852 were never ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The Verona Band: a federally recognized tribe
By the turn of the twentieth century, Muwekma ancestors were living in East Bay Indian settlements around Pleasanton and Niles, in what is now Alameda County. A federal special agent, C.E. Kelsey, counted the landless Indians living there in his 1905 and 1906 census, and the 1910 federal census recorded an “Indian town” in Pleasanton Township.
Washington dealt with this community as a tribe. The Interior Department later concluded, in its own 2002 decision, that the Muwekma petitioner’s ancestors had “unambiguous Federal acknowledgment as the Verona Band between 1914 and 1927.” (67 Fed. Reg. 58631)
Muwekma men also served in the U.S. armed forces from World War I onward, and the Tribe honors that service to this day. (Source: Muwekma Ohlone Tribe)
1927: recognition lost without a vote
After 1927, the federal government stopped treating the Verona Band as a recognized tribe. No act of Congress terminated the band. The relationship lapsed, the band was left without land, and its families carried on as a community without the protections and services that federally recognized tribes receive.
Ohlone families never stopped being Ohlone. In the 1920s and 1930s, Muwekma elders including José Guzmán worked with the linguist J.P. Harrington to record the Chochenyo language. Those recordings remain central to the Tribe’s language revitalization work today.
The fight to be recognized again
The Tribe filed a letter of intent to petition for federal acknowledgment in 1989. (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Petitioner #111) In the 1990s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs preliminarily determined that the Tribe had been previously recognized as the Verona Band. That determination meant the Tribe was evaluated under the rules for previously acknowledged tribes.
In 2002, the Interior Department declined to acknowledge the Tribe anyway. Its final determination found that the Tribe had not shown continuous outside identification, a distinct community, or continuous political authority since 1927. The same decision affirmed that the Tribe’s members descend from the historical Verona Band.
The Tribe challenged the decision in federal court. It argued, among other things, that Interior had treated it differently from other California tribes in similar situations. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Interior’s decision. (Muwekma Ohlone Tribe v. Salazar, 708 F.3d 209)
Still here
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe continues to press its case before Congress, the White House and the Interior Department. A growing list of Bay Area institutions has called on the federal government to recognize the Tribe, including Union City, Santa Clara and UC Berkeley’s chancellor. In 2024, the Tribe’s Trail of Truth carried its case across the country to Washington.
Meanwhile, the Tribe’s members keep the culture alive through language revitalization, cultural fire, dance and the protection of ancestral sites across the Bay Area.