For many, Monday was Columbus Day, the day Europeans arrived on the North American continent. But more and more people are choosing to recognize it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in honor of those who were already here.
One of those tribes lived in the South Bay, and on Monday they arrived in the nation’s capital to demand their existence be recognized.
Members of the Muwekma Ohlone arrived at the Arlington Bridge in Washington DC on Monday after a two-month journey on horseback that began at the Golden Gate Bridge. The tribe called it the Trail of Truth as they crossed the country demanding to be absorbed by the federal government.
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“Muwekma Ohlone has been fighting for 45 years for recognition of our existence,” says tribal chairman Charlene Nijmeh.
The tribe once numbered nearly 30,000 people and says it has about 600 living members.
Nijmeh said Muwekma was once recognized, but decades ago the Bureau of Indian Affairs ruled that they were in fact ineligible to be on the list of government-sanctioned tribes.
“We should never have gone through the federal recognition process,” Nijmeh said, “because that process is only for tribes that were never recognized by the government or that were terminated. Our tribe has never ended and we have been recognized.”
As a result, Muwekma does not have sovereign nation status.
In August, the San Jose City Council was considering a resolution in support of recognizing the tribe when they began receiving letters from local members of Congress.
Rep. Anna Eshoo sent one saying: “The relevant question for Congress is not whether the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is a native population of the Bay Area. I certainly don’t dispute this claim, and neither does the BIA. Instead, the primary question is whether the tribe constitutes a separate and long-standing sovereign nation entitled to a government-to-government relationship with the United States.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s message to the council was more blunt.
“The Council may wish to consider whether its intervention in this federal matter is at all appropriate,” she said.
The council would consider the support resolution in September. But at that meeting the proposal was withdrawn without further action.
“And I’ve heard from every council member and woman saying, ‘Yes, she’s pressuring us to stop taking action on the resolution,’” Nijmeh said. “She wants to kill him and I ask: why?”
In January last year, the tribe received a letter from five local congressmen – Eshoo, Lofgren, Ro Khanna, Jimmy Panetta and Eric Swallwell – stating: “We have discussed the issues regarding the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and we agree agree unanimously on one crucial point: none of us want casinos in our congressional districts because we fear gambling will negatively impact the communities we represent.”
With sovereign nation status, tribes have the right under California law to offer gambling on their lands. Instead, the congressional delegation asked whether the tribe would be satisfied with federal recognition if it excluded the right to open a casino.
“What Congress is asking Muwekma to do is give away our rights. What they are specifically saying is that we don’t want you to go gaming in the Bay Area,” Nijmeh said. “You’ve taken enough from us. You took away our country, our culture, our language. You no longer take anything from future generations.’
That’s why they came to Washington. They hope to gain a more sympathetic audience from President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, because they already know what Congress thinks about it.
