Mission San José is a Spanish mission located in the present-day city of Fremont, California, United States. It was founded on June 11, 1797, by the Franciscan order and was the fourteenth Spanish mission established in California. The mission is the namesake of the Mission San José district of Fremont, which was an independent town subsumed into the city when it was incorporated in 1957. The Mission entered a long period of gradual decline after Mexican secularization act of 1833. After suffering decline, neglect and earthquakes most of the mission was in ruins. Restoration efforts in the intervening periods have reconstructed many of the original structures. The old mission church remains in use as a chapel of Saint Joseph Catholic Church, a parish of the Diocese of Oakland. The museum also features a visitor center, museum, and slide show telling the history of the mission.
Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 as of 2020. Its proximity to San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and Silicon Valley has been a catalyst for recent economic growth.
The Ohlone, formerly known as Costanoans, are a Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. At that time they spoke a variety of related languages. The Ohlone languages make up a sub-family of the Utian language family. Older proposals place Utian within the Penutian language phylum, while newer proposals group it as Yok-Utian.
The Coast Miwok are an Indigenous people of California that were the second-largest tribe of the Miwok people. Coast Miwok inhabited the general area of modern Marin County and southern Sonoma County in Northern California, from the Golden Gate north to Duncans Point and eastward to Sonoma Creek. Coast Miwok included the Bodega Bay Miwok, or Olamentko (Olamentke), from authenticated Miwok villages around Bodega Bay, the Marin Miwok, or Hookooeko (Huukuiko), and Southern Sonoma Miwok, or Lekahtewutko (Lekatuit). While they did not have an overarching name for themselves, the Coast Miwok word for people, Micha-ko, was suggested by A. L. Kroeber as a possible endonym, keeping with a common practice among tribal groups and the ethnographers studying them in the early 20th Century and with the term Miwok itself, which is the Central Sierra Miwok word for people.
Coyote Hills Regional Park is a regional park encompassing nearly 978 acres of land and administered by the East Bay Regional Park District. The park, which was dedicated to public use in 1967, is located in Fremont, California, US, on the southeast shore of the San Francisco Bay. The Coyote Hills themselves are a small range of hills at the edge of the bay; though not reaching any great height, they afford tremendous views of the bay, three of the trans-bay bridges, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, the Peninsula Range of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Mount Tamalpais. In addition to the hills themselves, the park encloses a substantial area of wetlands.
The Emeryville Shellmound, in Emeryville, California, is a sacred burial site of the Ohlone people, a once-massive archaeological shell midden deposit. It was one of a complex of five or six mounds along the mouth of the perennial Temescal Creek, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay between Oakland and Berkeley. It was the largest of the over 425 shellmounds that surrounded San Francisco Bay. The site of the Shellmound is now a California Historical Landmark (#335).
Strawberry Creek is the principal watercourse running through the city of Berkeley, California. Two forks rise in the Berkeley Hills of the California Coast Ranges, and form a confluence at the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The creek then flows westward across the city to discharge into San Francisco Bay.
Indian Rock Park is a 1.18-acre (4,800 m2) public park at 950 Indian Rock Avenue in the city of Berkeley, California, on the slope of the Berkeley Hills. It is located in the northeast part of the city, about two blocks north of the Arlington/Marin Circle, and straddles Indian Rock Avenue. The central feature of the park is a large rock outcropping on the west side of Indian Rock Ave. The larger portion of the park, on the opposite side of the street, has several much smaller rock outcroppings, grass fields, and a small barbecue and picnic area. The rock is composed of Northbrae rhyolite.
Temescal Creek is one of the principal watercourses in the city of Oakland, California, United States.
West Berkeley is generally the area of Berkeley, California, that lies west of San Pablo Avenue, abutting San Francisco Bay. It includes the area that was once the unincorporated town of Ocean View, as well as the filled-in areas along the shoreline west of I-80, mainly including the Berkeley Marina. It lies at an elevation of 23 feet.
The Chochenyo are one of the divisions of the Indigenous Ohlone (Costanoan) people of Northern California. The Chochenyo reside on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, primarily in what is now Alameda County, and also Contra Costa County, from the Berkeley Hills inland to the western Diablo Range.
Bay Street Emeryville is a large mixed-use development in Emeryville, California which currently has 65 stores, ten restaurants, a sixteen-screen movie theater, 230 room hotel, and 400 residential units with 1,000 residents.
Indigenous peoples of California, commonly known as Indigenous Californians or Native Californians, are a diverse group of nations and peoples that are indigenous to the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after European colonization. There are currently 109 federally recognized tribes in the state and over forty self-identified tribes or tribal bands that have applied for federal recognition. California has the second-largest Native American population in the United States.
The Recognition of Native American sacred sites in the United States could be described as "specific, discrete, narrowly delineated location on Federal land that is identified by an Indian tribe, or Indian individual determined to be an appropriately authoritative representative of an Indian religion, as sacred by virtue of its established religious significance to, or ceremonial use by, an Indian religion". The sacred places are believed to "have their own 'spiritual properties and significance'". Ultimately, Indigenous peoples who practice their religion at a particular site, they hold a special and sacred attachment to that land sacred land.
The Karkin people are one of eight Ohlone peoples, indigenous peoples of California.
The Sogorea Te Land Trust is an urban land trust founded in 2012 with the goals of returning traditionally Chochenyo and Karkin lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship and cultivating more active, reciprocal relationships with the land. The land trust inspired the work of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy in the Los Angeles region of Southern California.
Vincent Medina is an American Indigenous rights, Indigenous language, and food activist from California. He co-founded Cafe Ohlone, an Ohlone restaurant in Berkeley, California which serves Indigenous cuisine made with Native ingredients sourced from the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas. As of 2019 he was serving on the Muwekma council, and he is Capitán, or cultural leader, of the ‘Itmay Cultural Association.
Johnella LaRose is an Indigenous grassroots organizer based in the San Francisco Bay Area who advocates for Indigenous communities and the preservation and restitution of Indigenous lands. LaRose is of the Shoshone Bannock and Carrizo tribes. Alongside fellow Indigenous activist Corrina Gould, LaRose is a co-founder of Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC), a San Francisco Bay Area-based organization working to protect and raise awareness about the region’s sacred shellmounds, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an urban land trust working to restore Indigenous stewardship of occupied Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the East Bay Area.
The West Berkeley Shellmound, in West Berkeley, California, sits at the site of the earliest known habitation in the San Francisco Bay Area, a village of the Ohlone people on the banks of Strawberry Creek. The shellmound, or midden, was used for both burials and ceremonial purposes, and was a repository for shells, ritual objects, and ceremonial items. It is listed as a Berkeley Landmark. Part of the site was paved in the twentieth century and for many years was a restaurant parking lot. In the 21st century, the lot was acquired by a developer, but development plans were stalled by the City of Berkeley and local Native American activists. In 2024 an agreement was reached for the land to be returned to the Ohlone, facilitated by a gift to the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, which will pay the majority of the acquisition cost, with the city paying the remainder. An artificial mound covered with vegetation and housing an educational and memorial center is planned.
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is an unrecognized organization for people who identify as descendants of the Ohlone, an historic Indigenous people of California. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is the largest of several groups in the San Francisco Bay Area that identify as Ohlone tribes.
