Buried Twice: How the U.S. Tried to Erase the Muwekma Ohlone from History—Then from the Law

In 1978, the Bureau of Indian Affairs omitted the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe from its list of federally recognized tribes. There was no hearing. The Tribe—previously acknowledged by the federal government as the Verona Band of Alameda County—had never been terminated by Congress or executive order.

All members of today’s Muwekma Ohlone descend from that Verona Band. Four Democratic county parties—San Francisco, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz—endorsed federal legislation to restore the Tribe’s recognition.

But Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of San Jose, one of the longest-serving members of Congress, has opposed the tribe’s federal recognition.

In Washington—in January 2023— Charlene Nijmeh, the Tribal Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone, met with Lofgren. The Chairwoman was told: Sign away some of your tribal rights – particularly the right to operate a casino.  In exchange, Lofgren would introduce federal legislation for federal recognition. Nijmeh declined.

Muwekma had never said it planned to establish a casino. But Nimjeh did not feel it was right to surrender some sovereign rights since every other federally recognized tribe had those rights.

Turnabout

When Lofgren first ran for Congress in 1994, Nijmeh’s mother, Rosemary Cambra, the Chairwoman at the time, organized campaigns, raised money and got out the vote. Lofgren promised to help restore their status.

The Tribe says special interest money connected to California’s casino industry has influenced Lofgren.

Sixty-eight tribal casinos operate in the state. Wealthy, federally recognized tribes control most of the casinos. Lofgren and her party get millions in donations from them. They don’t want to risk competition.

Muwekma had backed Democrats who said they stood for social justice, environmental protections, and working-class communities. When it was time to correct a forty-year-old bureaucratic error, they were met with silence. Zoe Lofgren led the opposition.

The Tribe

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe comprises all surviving indigenous lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay region. The Tribe never left the Bay. But survival was perilous at times.

Stanford University’s genomic study confirmed that the Tribe’s members carry the DNA of ancestors who lived in a 2,500-year-old pre-contact village in what is now Silicon Valley.

Where tech campuses now sprawl, beneath glass towers and parking structures was once a place of tule huts and shell beads, fire circles, and woven nets.

Near the water’s edge, where creeks veined the valley, and fish came heavy in the baskets. And children were born. Lovers found each other. Bones were buried with obsidian knives and beads of abalone.

The Mission Not of Christ

Then came the Spaniards and Muwekma were forced into labor at Missions Dolores, Santa Clara, at San Jose——they were herded in stone buildings. Children baptized with names not theirs. At Mission children were taken first. Washed, renamed, and marked as converts. The friars kept ledgers—of baptisms and confirmations. There were lashes for the ones who ran. There was starvation and sickness—flu, fever and tuberculosis, passed from one to another in crowded sleeping quarters.

Spain called it salvation. The Church called it civilization. The Muwekma Ohlone were made to build with stone and adobe hauled on their backs and balanced on palms.

Once baptized, the people awoke to the mission bell. They worked the fields, planted grain, threshed wheat, tanned hides, forged iron, raised livestock, milked, cooked, cleaned. The men dug irrigation canals. The women wove cloth, and birthed children and buried them.

They were not allowed to leave. The gates were watched. The soldiers armed. The friars carried whips beneath their cassocks. There were stocks and shackles for disobedience. Public lashings were an example to the others. If they fled—the soldiers rode after them. If they were caught, they were dragged back through the gates, paraded before the others. Bruised, bleeding, and punished again.

They called it la doctrina. What it was was a prison with hymns.

Extermination and Manifest Destiny

By the time California became the thirty-first state, its star stitched in celebration of manifest destiny—the Muwekma Ohlone had no land left of its own. They almost had no people left either.

California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, declared a war of extermination against the people who had lived on that land long before the word California was spoken. Burnett said, “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

The state offered rewards for the bodies of Native people. Scalps of men, heads of women, limbs of children. Posses of ranchers, drifters, men with rifles and no maps, hunted for Indians.

Phoebe Hearst

Those who remained ran to the hills of Sunol, or Niles, or the Amador valley in Pleasanton. The survivors of the Verona Band lived as hired hands of ranchers on lands they had once called their own. They tended pastures, mending, hauling water, dragging fence. They were the hands that fixed the gates and backs that carried bales. They ate in silence and slept in sheds.

The Hearsts—Phoebe above all—believed in refinement, in civilization. In the foothills of East Bay, Phoebe Apperson Hearst gave them shelter. Work on the ranch, meals in the kitchen, blankets when the winter crept down the hills. She let them stay when others did not. Phoebe Hearst did not drive them from her land as others had. She allowed them to stay—on her ranches in Sunol and Pleasanton. At a time when bounties were remembered, and the “extermination” had been official state policy.

The Verona Band

The decades passed. In 1905, they appeared in Washington’s ledgers through the C.E. Kelsey Indian Census, as the Verona Band of Alameda County. Their name was recorded. Their need and the wrongs of this nation under its flag were acknowledged. Congress appropriated funds. The law was clear: land must be purchased for the landless tribes of California.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, charged with the mandate, passed the responsibility to the Sacramento Agency. There, Lafayette A. Dorrington, Indian Agent did not hold hearings or consult the Tribe. He decided, with the stroke of his pen, that the Verona Band had vanished.

No act of Congress. No treaty. No formal termination. The Muwekma were removed from the list of tribes eligible to receive land. No reason given. No due process. The land, which had been set aside, never came.

What happened next did not unfold in chambers or courtrooms. The Muwekma children were sent to federal Indian boarding schools—Sherman Institute in Riverside, Stewart in Nevada, places meant to civilize the Indian out of the child. Hair was cut. Language forbidden. Discipline was swift.

At home, the elders kept the stories alive. Burial sites were tended quietly. Ancestors were visited at night. Decades passed.

Rosemary Cambra

In the 1960s, when Caltrans plotted highways through sacred ground, Rosemary Cambra, a matriarch with no formal title, became the voice of the past.

She was born into a world that denied her name. To the state, she was not Muwekma. But she knew where her people were buried. She knew the language.

She fought to stop the desecration of the Ohlone Cemetery at the site of the old Mission San Jose. She testified before city councils, preservation boards, and university panels. She wrote letters by hand. In 1984, she led the reorganization of the Verona Band into what would become the Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Council.

Cambra became the Tribal Chairwoman, and held that position for 43 years. Under her leadership, the Tribe filed its petition for federal recognition with the Department of the Interior. The Tribe began to gather death records, school records, military enlistments, church rolls. Every scrap of paper the government had written on them. She worked with historians, legal experts, and anthropologists to reconstruct a paper trail of identity.

And Cambra attended funerals. She raised children. She buried bones returned in boxes from museums. She was arrested once, for trying to stop an archaeologist from digging up a burial site. She struck an archaeologist with a shovel.

The current Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone, Charlene Nijmeh was eight when she witnessed her mother hit the man with her shovel. Cambra was arrested. They lost their home. She declared bankruptcy. But they continued the fight.

Federal Recognition

In the 1990s, they submitted a full petition for federal recognition. Hundreds of pages. Declarations. Lineages. Reports from anthropologist Dr. Les Field, who called their case overwhelming. The Bureau delayed. Recognition was not denied. It was postponed.

Federal law calls it a trust responsibility—a promise etched into statute and precedent, made in the name of justice. The Muwekma Ohlone have been told their recognition is pending, their rights under review. Decades passed.

Universities have come forward—Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara, San Jose State. Anthropologists have published. Geneticists have proven. Historians have testified. The academic world agrees: the Muwekma never disappeared. But recognition comes from Washington. Where one letter of opposition can stop a bill, and one congresswoman’s opposition can bury a tribe deeper than any grave.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.