Ohlone Native Plant Garden
The Ohlone Native Plants Garden was established in Spring 2025 at the ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ Forge Garden. A collaboration between members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ faculty, staff, and students, and with support from an Environmental Justice and the Common Good grant and the ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ Community Heritage Lab, this project seeks to connect garden visitors to ethnobotanical knowledge about native plant species growing in the Ohlone Native Plants Garden area and elsewhere in the Forge Garden. It also strives to create a space in which Muwekma Ohlone tribal members can strengthen connections to their traditional homelands and heritage practices.
Ohlone Heritage Hub website
The Ohlone Heritage Hub provides guidance and resources for learning and teaching about the rich history of Ohlone people at ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½. These materials have all been selected or approved by and Ohlone Indian Tribe members who trace their ancestry through Mission ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½, among other Bay Area missions. Non-Native ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ faculty have developed this guide for faculty, staff, students, and community members, including educators, to provide educational resources that align with the interests and commitments of the living descendants of the original inhabitants of these lands.
Google Earth Native History Tour
The , developed in collaboration with members of San Francisco Bay Area Ohlone communities, showcases the Indigenous history of the ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ campus. The tour, hosted in Google Earth, allows you to move through ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½'s campus virtually, using the arrow icons in the bottom left of the window to navigate. At most stops, you can click on the images above the text for a slideshow and/or further information from Ohlone representatives.
Ohlone Augmented Reality (AR) Tour
The will allow visitors to interact with about 20 stops on the ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ campus via their phones, revealing scenes such as a pre-colonial Thámien Native village, a virtual memorial to the Ohlone, and a visualization of the Tribal flag flying on the campus. These stops are crafted to reveal hidden histories, spur visitors towards critical reflection, and inspire visions of more just future relations. An extension of existing digital tours, early versions of this project focused on generation of 3D objects and buildings developed by students in the WAVE+Imaginarium Lab, and current work is being undertaken in the Human Computer Interaction Lab as well. This project is funded by a 2023 Whitham Family Collaborative Scholarship Award.
Mission ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ Cemetery Memorial Project
Co-created by the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ faculty and staff, this project is an interactive digital memorial to honor the approximately 7,600 Native people who are buried in the cemeteries associated with Mission ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½. The memorial includes the names of every Native person listed in the mission’s death records as well as videos featuring members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe reflecting on the connections between past and present. In conversation with Muwekma Ohlone youth, students in courses taught by Drs. Amy Lueck and Lee Panich authored biographies of notable Native individuals from Mission ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½. Open to the public in Fall 2023, the memorial is housed in the California Stories permanent exhibition in ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½’s de Saisset Museum. Funding for this project was provided by a Sustaining Public Engagement Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Restorying El Sausal Creek
A passionate mentor and eager collaborator, Brita Bookser recently co-presented research with students in her Tensions & Transformations research group at the Climate and Environmental Justice Conference at ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½. Weaving developmental science with the curricular and decolonial potentials of "restorying," these projects investigate content, qualities, and implementation of children’s literature in relation to climate and environmental justice. Specifically, this research focuses on the children’s story, I Am Sausal Creek/Soy El Arroyo Sausal, written by Melissa Reyes, illustrated by Robert Trujillo, and translated by Cinthia Muñoz. Sausal Creek is a culturally relevant waterway that travels through unceded Lisjan Ohlone Territory in what is currently Oakland, California.
Histories of Environmental and Social Change in Silicon Valley
As part of his teaching and research in ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½’s Department of Anthropology, Dr. Ryan Anderson has been chronicling environmental and social change throughout the Bay Area, with a specific focus on Silicon Valley. He wrote a 2018 piece with Dr. Mythri Jegathesan (Anthropology) for Anthropology News called “,” which challenges narratives of wealth and prosperity about the valley and its history. Dr. Anderson also teaches an ELSJ course (ANTH 3), in collaboration with the CHL, that explores the displaced, marginalized, and alternative histories of Silicon Valley through ethnographic research, photography, and oral histories.
Cultural Campout
The Ohlone Cultural Youth Camp, co-designed and facilitated by Isabella Gomez ‘28 (Philosophy) and Amy Lueck (English), is a culturally sustaining program that brings Muwekma Ohlone youth to their homelands to connect to land, community, and culture while strengthening their identities as college-bound students. During the camp, students practice traditional arts, such as abalone carving, and connect those practices to academic and scholarly practices and sites at the university, including science labs, Archives and Special Collections, the Imaginarium, and the de Saisset Museum. The 2023 pilot of this project was supported by a 2023 grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the following ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ offices: Mission and Ministry, Enrollment Management, Inclusive Excellence, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering.
3D Models of ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ Artifacts and Architecture
Check out our growing collection of 3D models on the . The collection includes architectural models created by Vedya Konda (‘23) and Elliot Lee (‘23) of the WAVE+Imaginarium Lab as well as a range of objects from campus archaeological collections and the de Saisset Museum. The artifact models were made by students in different iterations of the Virtual ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ course (ANTH 149/ENGL 100, co-taught by Lee Panich and Amy Lueck), in conversation with members of the Ohlone community. Funding for the lab’s 3D scanning equipment was generously provided by the College of Arts & Sciences, Center for Arts & Humanities, the Digital Humanities Initiative, the de Saisset Museum, and the Departments of Anthropology and English.