Several months back, during a visit to the rooftop bar at a Residence Inn in Berkeley, I grabbed the city’s glossy “official visitors’ guide” and sought out the historical tidbits that such publications usually feature.
“For millennia before the arrival of Europeans,” I read, “Berkeley, along with the entire East Bay, was inhabited by the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone. The specific area now known as Berkeley was referred to as Huchiun.”
Not too shabby for a public relations pamphlet, but it quickly leapt over centuries to detail the arrival of the Spanish in the late 1700s, the gold rush (1848), the establishment of the University of California in Berkeley (1873), and the free speech movement and Summer of Love in the 1960s, which the guide claimed gifted the city with “a bias for original thinking” and a “quirky college town vibe.”
For the last five years, I have delved into California’s history to highlight UC’s part in a troubling narrative, especially regarding Native Americans. Starting in the early 20th century, scholars at Berkeley (and at USC and the Huntington Library) were pivotal in forming the state’s public and cultural identity. They authored textbooks and popular histories, conferred with journalists and amateur historians, and spun a semiofficial story that portrayed Indigenous peoples as static and negligent caretakers of the land. Their account of California’s history reframed land seizures and massacres as progress and propagated the myth that Native people had quietly vanished into the past.
Despite this skewed history, driven by new research and ongoing Indigenous activism, tribal groups and a newer generation of historians have sought to correct the narrative. For thousands of years, California tribes and their lands flourished, adapting creatively to shifting conditions.
When Spanish and American colonizers exerted control over the West, tribal groups resisted. Notably, the state was one of the country’s most violent regions during the 19th century, warranting terms typically associated with foreign conflicts: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. Despite such devastation, California’s population today boasts over 100 tribes and rancherias.
Authentic pre-California history rarely seeps into our public consciousness and cultural understanding. I’ve become a collector of the retrospective fantasies we consume instead — those few phrases in the Berkeley visitors’ guide, Google searches, sanitized facts on menus, snippets on maps and in park brochures, what’s enshrined on countless plaques and roadside markers. These are the avenues through which most individuals encounter historical narratives, and where history gains a false sense of authenticity.
One Sunday, while waiting for a plate of delightful lemon-ricotta pancakes at the Oceanside Diner on Fourth Street in Berkeley, I noticed a bit of history on the menu. It stated the neighborhood was developed in the early 1850s when workers and farmers established a commercial center — a grist mill, soap factory, blacksmith, and an inn. It neglected to mention that the diner stands on an Ohlone site that thrived for 2,000 to 3,000 years, part of an interconnected web of communities stretching from the San Francisco Bay, across the current Berkeley campus, and following a canyon and a fresh stream into the hills.
A friend recently gifted me a bottle of Redwood Empire rye whiskey, noting the label describes the whiskey as being named after “a sparsely populated area” in Northern California featuring “an often inaccessible coastline drenched in fog, rocky cliffs, and steep mountains” and being “home to majestic coastal redwoods.” It’s a space “where you can connect with Nature,” but apparently not with the tribes who have inhabited it since time immemorial.
Traditional travel guides tend to overlook troubling details, instead highlighting California as an exemplar of diversity and prosperity. Historical misdeeds are laid at the feet of Franciscan missionaries who, per the 1997 Eyewitness Travel Guide for the state, “employed natives as cheap labor,” and “European colonists committed an even graver offense by spreading diseases that reduced the native population to about 16,000 by 1900.” This shaky history overlooks the transgressions of Americans and jumps to the mid-20th century when Native Americans, to some readers’ surprise, “chose integration throughout the state.”
Though guides have become trendier, they remain mostly devoid of historical context. For instance, the Wildsam “Field Guide to California” mentions “There There” by Tommy Orange (an Oakland-born Arapaho and Cheyenne) in its must-read fiction list, includes a comprehensive LGBTQ+ timeline, and covers Chez Panisse and the Black Panther Party, yet reduces Indigenous history to “the 1400s [when] diverse native tribes flourished.”
UC Berkeley’s botanical garden, which houses “one of the largest collections of California native plants in the world,” is situated in Strawberry Canyon, a route historically followed by Ohlone for hunting in the hills. Not a single plaque in the 34-acre park acknowledges the site’s pre-California legacy, nor do any books in the gift shop educate visitors about contemporary environmentalists’ lessons drawn from Indigenous land management practices, like prescribed burns and selective harvesting.
The omissions engendered by the tendency to portray California’s origins in an overly positive light dampen curiosity and distort a fundamental comprehension of American history.
For example, the Lawrence Hall of Science, a learning facility for Berkeley students and a public science center, has launched a project to “promote a clear understanding of the lived experiences of the Ohlone people.” Sadly, it sidesteps the university’s involvement in the systematic looting of Indigenous graves across California and the appropriation of ancestral burial sites in Los Alamos, N.M., where UC Berkeley contributed to the atomic bomb’s development.
Additionally, nearly everyone on campus is aware of the free speech protests, yet few know about the longest ongoing protest movement in the state, which is a movement still vigorously pursued against the university: the fight to repatriate ancestral remains and cultural artifacts, which began in the 1900s when the Yokayo Rancheria, according to local media, managed to hire lawyers to halt “grave-robbing efforts by [Cal] scientists near Ukiah.”
Even activists in the Bay Area are vulnerable to this collective amnesia. In April, I took part in a rally on the Berkeley campus protesting the Trump administration’s harmful educational policies. The main speakers, representing various departments — ethnic studies, African American studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and the humanities — championed the significance of anti-racism education and recounted the ongoing history of student-led protests on the Berkeley campus. What was glaringly absent was not only a Native American speaker but any reference to the exploitation of Indigenous sites intricately linked to the university’s foundations in culture and material wealth.
I’m reminded of Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti’s words: “The hardest mistakes to correct are those that are ingrained.”
Out of history, out of mind.
Tony Platt is a scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. He is the author of “Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California’s Buried Indigenous Past” and most recently, “The Scandal of Cal.”
