Protecting Indigenous Bedrock Mortar Sites
There are thousands of bedrock sites with ground-out holes the size of your fist scattered across the hills of Castro Valley and the East Bay. Some of these are even located on Castro Valley School District land, but they are not currently marked or used educationally.
Now, a group of informal friends as well a group representing six nations of indigenous people are hoping to bring awareness to these sacred sites and help protect them for generations to come.
These holes are called bedrock mortars—sometimes called BRM—and were used to ground grains and acorns for foods and medicine for thousands of years before the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans arrived. Castro Valley is built on an entire half-hidden landscape that came from its original Native American inhabitants, says resident Ray Will, and he believes this landscape needs to be revealed and preserved.
“Wherever there is a year-round water supply, people lived,” Will said. One group of Native people lived in Crow Creek Canyon, he added.
Will and an informal group of friends have located some of these bedrock mortars as part of their project, East Bay Hill people, which aims to catalog these sites. There are also remnants of native villages and many artifacts of tribal people’s lives, often in plain sight. Will says.
“Once you’ve sent these for what they are, you can’t unsee them,” he said. “It’s important we protect these original artifacts and as much as possible the places they were found.”
His concerns are similar to those of Corrina Gould, tribal chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Tribe.
That group brings together six nations of Lisjan, people who share the Chochenyo language and were forced to labor at Mission San Jose in Fremont and Mission Dolores in San Francisco. The Lisjan are part of the larger Ohlone people.
“We still know who we are. We still know how to pray in our own way. We still know where our sacred sites are. And we know how to bring back our language,” Gould wrote.
Native sites and artifacts are all around us in the East Bay, the land the Lisjan call Huchiun that they’ve never officially given up, Gould said. But in many cases, they’ve been paved over or built on, she added.
“We’re homeless on our own land,” she said, adding that efforts to “rematriate” native land here are beginning to gain steam.
A good start, she said, is the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which is a plot of Native-controlled land in East Oakland that is used for gatherings, religious ceremonies, grow food and plants, and educating both Native peoples and the general public about Native culture and traditions.
Will said that there were two sites in particular that took his breath away. One was the hundreds of bedrock mortars found at Morgan Territory, north of Livermore.
“The trails there are named after Native peoples,” he said, “but they don’t lead to the former villages.”
The other site that took Will’s breath away was the Ohlone Cemetery in Fremont, near but separate from Mission San Jose. Some 4,000 indigenous people are buried there, without headstones in a stark setting, Will said.
“There needs to be some acknowledgment that an entire culture was nearly wiped out here,” he continued. “Our education as California schoolchildren isn’t really complete until we know about this part of our history.”
With many remaining native sites and artifacts found on public land, Will thinks government bodies should start the process of finding, marking, and protecting them before the public is told their exact location.
Vandalism is one fear, he said, noting that an unmarked bedrock mortar in a Hayward park was recently spray-painted.
Gould, however, said that even innocent removal of the insignificant-seeming contents of a bedrock mortar could be destroying microscopic evidence of what people once ate and what medicines they used.
Archeologists need to evaluate sites and artifacts before the public arrives, Gould said.
She said that cities counties are required to consult with Native tribes about major revisions to their General Plans that could affect access to sites or artifacts. While there have not been many such revisions since that law was passed in 2005, she sees potentially quite a few coming up due to state laws just passed to encourage building more housing in already built-up areas.