West Berkeley Shellmound – Land Back

On the line was my good friend, Sophie Hahn, who sat on the Berkeley Zoning Board. “You need to come to the hearing Thursday night and spread the word to as many Ohlone leaders as you can,” she said. “There’s a big condo development being proposed for 1900 Fourth Street, the West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site.”

I’d been working for four decades to help protect sacred places around the world, from the Hopi mesas in Arizona to the McArthur River in Australia, from the Altai Mountains of Central Asia to Mt. Shasta in northern California.

But I had never engaged with a threatened sacred place at home, in the urbanized Bay Area. Malcolm Margolin told city officials, “In the Indian world place has power, and while the physical attributes may be degraded, the power and the story remain. This is important. In modern cultures, the past is kept alive through a sense of history—events arranged in a temporal sequence. In the Indian world, time is flat. Knowledge of who a people are is preserved by place.

The stories and powers adhere to places, and together these stories comprise the knowledge bank from which native people draw a sense of self and of culture. Even if the story is erased from the memory of all human beings, it is kept by the power of place in a kind of safe deposit vault accessible to specially trained medicine people, or sometimes given as a gift by the place to ordinary people.”

I might add that Mount Diablo has this “power of place”.