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Shells and Bones

An ally’s insider story of the major #LandBack victory in Berkeley, California

Toby McLeod – December 18, 2024

 

Like many self-important citizens of Berkeley, I fancied myself a player on the world stage—too busy to spend much time on local issues. In the spring of 2016, just home from screening our four-part documentary film series, Standing on Sacred Ground, in Australia and Papua New Guinea, the phone rang, and the ancestors reached out and grabbed me.

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.

I called Lisjan Ohlone leader Corrina Gould and Malcolm Margolin, author of The Ohlone Way, and they passed the word to the community of dedicated activists who’ve worked for generations to protect dozens of Ohlone village and burial sites around San Francisco Bay—with minimal success. On a rainy winter night, I stood at the top of City Hall’s steps, watching Corrina and Malcolm slowly climb toward me.

At seventy-six, Malcolm’s waist-length gray beard made him one of Berkeley’s most recognizable authors. Tall and shy, he towered over the short, confident Ohlone activist who has spent her life fighting to protect the sacred sites of her ancestors—including a “local Standing Rock,” where in 2011 Corrina led the 109-day occupation of a threatened burial site at Sogorea Te’, twenty miles north of Berkeley in Vallejo.

As the three of us entered City Hall, Malcolm remarked, “I don’t know how you talked me into this, Toby. I don’t do Berkeley political meetings. I can’t stand politics!”

Sitting between Corrina and Malcolm at the zoning board meeting, we listened as a nightmare unfolded before us. A five-story apartment-retail complex was being proposed for the 2.2-acre site popularly known as “Spenger’s Parking Lot,” a north-south stretch of asphalt between Spenger’s Fish Grotto restaurant and the train tracks. In 2000, the land was designated a Berkeley City Landmark because it lies at the center of what was once a thriving fishing village. Starting around 3,700 BCE—and continuing for more than 5,000 years—Corrina’s ancestors built an enormous shellmound on the northern bank of the reliable freshwater stream that Berkeley settlers later named Strawberry Creek. By that time the Ohlone had scattered following a century of being hunted by Catholic priests and gold miners with guns.

Corrina told the zoning board that “Huchiun” was the first Ohlone village on the shores of San Francisco Bay. The gentle but fierce indigenous leader described it as “the birthplace of Berkeley, where people first laughed and loved, the first place around the bay where my people had babies and died. They lit fires and held ceremonies on top—and my ancestors were buried in the shellmound.”

Malcolm 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.”

As the developers ran through their slick PowerPoint and described a money-making monstrosity that would require excavating eleven feet of earth from the entire site, we visualized colorful abalone shells, flocks of shorebirds, and tule canoes riding winter flood waters to net migrating salmon. Where they fantasized a five-story building swarming with happy shoppers, we imagined grizzly bears, a mound of oyster shells, and Ohlone ancestors warmed by countless fires.

Over those five millennia, as the shellmound grew to a height of 20 feet, the human-built mountain featured ceremonial roundhouses, homes with burials out back, and ceremonies on top that oriented straight out to Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. The massive mound was larger than a football field, and its tremendous weight slowly pushed burials down into the soft, wet ground below. Orange flames atop the mound could be seen from across the bay, conveying messages to other shellmound people.

The village Corrina remembers as Xučyun (now spelled Huchiun) thrived for hundreds of human generations. Smallpox and enslavement in Catholic missions took a huge toll before gold rush genocide chased the remaining Ohlone into nearby hills. Early Berkeley settlers later took down the shellmound one load at a time to pave muddy streets and fertilize their farms. Sunday picnickers and high school field trips in the early 1900s dug out human skulls that ended up on mantelpieces in Berkeley homes. Professors and students from U.C. Berkeley’s Archaeology and Anthropology departments carted off scores of skeletons to study, measure and store in cardboard boxes and metal drawers in dusty university basements a couple miles to the east up Strawberry Creek. More than 400 documented burials have been disturbed in the area.

Today, the Fourth Street shopping district has been redeveloped into an upscale mix of retailers and restaurants where bourgeois clientele and Teslas offer a disturbing contrast to homeless encampments along the train tracks.

The developers presented glossy images of a modern architectural wonder, and assured the zoning board that the shellmound was to the west of the property boundary and thus, the proposed building site has no cultural or archaeological value. But the project’s well-paid Ohlone consultant admitted the entire village site is still considered sacred to descendants of ancestors buried there.

“Even after the close of the missions,” said Andy Galvan, the developer’s Ohlone advisor, “our ancestors returned to these sacred sites, to these homes, because this was their home that they had been taken from and moved to the missions.”

Indeed, the entire two-block area surrounding the parking lot was found eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register of Historical Resources in 2003 based on its archaeological significance. But that rarely stops what we call progress in America.

*          *          *          *

That alarming evening launched a series of meetings over the next three years held at the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, where our Sacred Land Film Project is based. A group of activists and native people formed the Emergency Committee to Save the West Berkeley Shellmound. Corrina assembled two committees of supporters—the activist youth we affectionately called the “outsiders” (night work, logo painting, event planning, social media), and the strategic elders, the “insiders” (political organizing, litigation, legacy media strategy, website development, fundraising). Our insiders’ group met 42 times in the David Brower Center conference room and 17 times on Zoom during the pandemic. Late into many a night, we debated how to tell the story, how to get comments on the environmental impact report from respected archaeologists, how to attract media attention during a housing crisis and, on a related matter, whether to challenge U.C. Berkeley’s stubborn hoarding of 9,000 human remains.

A couple of weeks after the Zoning Board hearing, on March 29, 2016, just across the street from the parking lot, construction workers digging a trench unearthed four human burials. Apparently, that project was small enough that no permits had been required. The remains were taken away by the same Ohlone consultant we’d just heard promoting the new condominium complex—who also runs a side business cleaning, storing and reburying human remains in a Catholic cemetery in Fremont. He receives thousands of dollars to take care of the bones. There were a few newspaper articles about these sad events, but few people noticed or seemed to care.

Not so Corrina Gould. These were her people. At a prayer vigil on a chilly Sunday afternoon at the corner of Fourth and Hearst Streets, Corrina looked through tears across the intersection toward Spenger’s Parking Lot. “The ancestors are showing themselves, surrendering themselves, to tell us they’re still here and they need us to protect them. They gave themselves up to wake us up.”

A small crowd of supporters murmured, “Ho.”

Seven months into the campaign we realized we needed an alternative vision. It wasn’t enough to fight against a housing development that threatened burials in a nationally-recognized archaeology site. We needed to propose an inspiring new concept—an altogether different landscape. After another Zoning Board meeting where the draft environmental impact report was presented, local artist Chris Walker approached Corrina and offered to help.

Chris made some sketches. Corrina liked what she saw. Indeed, everyone did.

Everyone, except the developers.

Viewers marveled at Walker’s vivid illustrations of an orange, poppy-covered mound with a spiral pathway rising above a daylighted Strawberry Creek flowing past a ceremonial dance arbor. The giant mound would not disturb what remains underground and could house a museum to celebrate Ohlone culture and the natural history of San Francisco Bay, and finally tell the long-suppressed story of genocide in California.

“The community will need to discuss this,” Corrina said. “But let’s present it as a concept to the Berkeley Landmark Commission.”

The drawings of a cultural park were stirring and very quickly took on a life of their own. Corrina and Ohlone elder Ruth Orta presented the drawings to Berkeley city officials in February 2017 and the powerful images breathed life into an alternative future. Our vision of a unique, contemporary monument was printed in newspapers, published online and shared on Facebook. The possibility of rematriating ancestral human remains back to the place from which they were stolen inspired new hope for restorative justice.

Shellmound supporters began to show up by the hundreds. As Corrina and I met with city officials to press the Ohlone case, activists played a cat-and-mouse game in the parking lot. No sooner would the developers blacktop over a colorful “SAVE THE WEST BERKELEY SHELLMOUND” mural than the midnight activists would be out in the dark repainting the giant logo. We photographed and filmed each mural and they live on like Ohlone memories of the village by the bay. There would be no smothering this campaign.

*          *          *          *

Corrina based her resistance on prayer and deeply felt obligation to her ancestors. She convened interfaith prayer ceremonies at the site where allies listened to profound, heartfelt speeches, rap poetry and Ohlone songs. Tibetans, Koreans, Hawaiians, Aztec descendants, Palestinians, Amazonian chiefs, African American preachers, Jewish rabbis and native people from all over North America offered solidarity. We made a series of short films posted on YouTube to spread the word, and as the crowds grew we could feel the momentum build.

It was an incredible experience to watch so many Berkeley residents tilt their heads and say, “Wait, you mean right here, an Ohlone village was born 5,700 years ago with burials in a shellmound?” You could see the light go on as people who thought they knew a lot about history experienced a wave of humility as they realized, If we can’t protect a sacred burial site right here in Berkeley then what hope is there that it can be done anywhere? It felt good to finally be working for sacred site protection in my hometown. It felt good to be serving, and not directing.

After screenings of our 2001 PBS film, In the Light of Reverence, shaken and concerned audience members often asked, “What can I do?” The best answer I ever came up with was, “Work under the leadership of local native people to protect or restore a sacred site near where you live.” As if hearing the ancestors’ call, our growing collective was doing just that, sharing a struggle in the name of taking responsibility, making amends with the Earth, and repairing harm. In response to an urgent threat, our community had organically imagined a positive local vision, which, in the divisive, traumatic era of Donald Trump, felt like healing medicine—an opportunity for reconciliation through the recognition of dark, long-buried history.

*          *          *          *

Corrina and I met with Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and each of the eight city council members. At these meetings, Corrina explained the esoteric meaning of the village location and the ceremonies that were done there. Clearly, the history, cultural integrity and rights of indigenous people mattered to these progressive public officials.

“After someone in the community died, my ancestors held a four-day ceremony,” Corrina explained to the mayor. “As the body was buried in the mound, the spirit of the deceased went to Alcatraz island to rest for four days. Then, after the ceremony was completed and the fire on top of the shellmound went out, the spirit was free to continue on through the western gate—where the Golden Gate Bridge is now.”

We created a sequence of fifteen maps to show the history and cultural significance of the village site. During a research visit to the Hearst Museum, I found dozens of graphic photographs of the 1950 U.C. Berkeley archaeological dig into what remained of the central shellmound, which unearthed 95 human remains and 3,400 artifacts. Chris Walker traveled to the Museum of Natural History in New York where he found an important map of the shellmound boundary drawn by famed archaeologist Nels Nelson in 1907, when he was mapping 425 shellmounds that once encircled San Francisco Bay. We discovered an unredacted copy of a sensitive archaeology report in the Berkeley Public Library, which enabled me to write a blog post challenging the lies told by the developer’s archaeologist.

When the comments on the environmental impact report were tallied, there were 1,770 letters opposing the project and five in favor. The developers met privately with Corrina and tried to buy her off with a compromise offer that was worth millions of dollars. She said no thanks. The Ohlone could not allow eleven feet of earth to be excavated even if they might get a nice cultural center, a history plaque and a strip of land. Corrina would not budge. She bought time and delayed.

The developers changed their strategy. For the first time, a new California law, SB-35, would be tested. The law was the work of Democrats in the state legislature, taking permitting decisions away from local zoning boards and planning departments, and prioritizing “affordable housing” construction close to public transit. (The shellmound site is adjacent to Berkeley’s Amtrak station.)

The developers dropped the environmental impact review of their original luxury condo project, submitted revised plans that included 130 less expensive units, and invoked the new fast-track process to build much needed affordable housing.

The shellmound defenders had to shift into crisis mode. Corrina made clear that she was not opposed to housing, but she argued that a landmarked archaeological site should be exempt from SB-35. Would the Berkeley City Attorney support her argument?

We went back to the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission. Dozens of citizens spoke against the project and urged the commissioners to defend the site. We went to the City Council where hundreds of supporters packed the chambers. Mayor Arreguín gave Corrina and her two attorneys, Michelle LaPena Lee and Tom Lippe, thirty minutes to make their case.

The city had to decide by June 5. On that day in 2018, we all held our breath, awaiting the 5 p.m. posting on the Berkeley city website. In the end, City Attorney Farimah Brown came through, upholding the historic landmark designation and ruling that the developer could not hide behind SB-35. The permit was denied. We all cheered—and then braced for an expensive lawsuit that would likely stretch into years.

And then, on August 24, the developers pulled out. They dropped the project and walked away. While it was too early to call it a victory, it was a huge moment and we savored it.

But before we could celebrate for long the landowners went on the offensive. The City of Berkeley had denied the permit partially on the grounds that the project would destroy an “historic structure,” which disqualified it from fast-track consideration. Scoffing at the idea that the shellmound site is an historic structure, the landowners sued. Berkeley went to court in partnership with Corrina’s Confederated Villages of Lisjan to defend the landmarked sacred site.

Could the shellmound, which settlers scraped away to ground level, legally be considered a historic structure? In October 2019, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch agreed with the City and the Ohlone that it could. Judge Roesch wrote:

“A historic structure does not cease to be a historic structure or capable of demolition because it is ruined or buried. That proviso is without basis in the text of the statute and would exclude many of the world’s most beloved archeological treasures, such as Hezekiah’s tunnel in Jerusalem, the Roman ruins in Pompeii, the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the cave cities of Cappadocia, and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Any reading of a statute protecting historic structures that would exclude such features from protection must be rejected.”

Once again, our celebration was short lived. The landowners appealed Judge Roesch’s ruling and a slow Court of Appeals calendar, a new round of legal briefs and the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic meant the case would not be decided for more than a year.

Our campaign was in limbo. Momentum was draining. What to do now?

*          *          *          *

On a cold night in early March of 2020, my phone rang at 11 p.m.

It was Berkeley City Councilmember Sophie Hahn. “A friend from the National Trust for Historic Preservation asked if we could write a proposal to have the West Berkeley Shellmound listed as one of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in America. It’s very competitive, but I think it would be worth the effort. The deadline is noon tomorrow.”

“Absolutely, let’s do it!” I exclaimed, before pulling an all-nighter.

After releasing In the Light of Reverence in 2001, the Sacred Land Film Project helped get several threatened Native American sacred sites onto this list, bringing national attention to their plight. In 2003, Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico was threatened by a coal stripmine that would have dewatered and devastated a sensitive cultural landscape. In 2004, Nine Mile Canyon in Utah, a site rich in rock writing and native history, faced a cataclysm of oil and gas drilling. National recognition of their endangered status helped protect both places. Since then, the Trust has continued to list indigenous sites almost every year. Most recently, New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon (threatened by fracking, listed in 2011) and Utah’s Bears Ears (radically reduced in size by the first Trump Administration, threatened by uranium mining, listed in 2016) were granted the dubious distinction of being recognized as both historically important and imminently endangered.

Within a couple days of submitting our application, we heard back that board members and staff from the National Trust would like to meet and then visit the site. They wanted to hear about the history of the village and shellmound from Corrina Gould, and learn more about her decades of struggle to protect the cultural sites and burial grounds of her ancestors.

Artist Chris Walker, who had created the detailed drawings of Corrina’s alternative vision for the site, offered his landscape architect firm’s conference room for the meeting. His office is a short walk from the threatened historic site.

Councilmember Hahn said she would attend the meeting if I wiped down the table and chairs with Clorox. She could already see what was coming just a few days later—the great Bay Area coronavirus lockdown, the first in the nation. In fact, the last hands I shook for more than three years were those of the National Trust representatives who came to the meeting and then walked with us over to the shellmound site.

*          *          *          *

Standing in the center of the asphalt expanse, Corrina described burial ceremonies on top of what was once a twenty-foot-high mound. I strolled over to visit my favorite part of the site, “Bore Hole #19,” now just a circular scar in the pavement near the parking lot’s western edge.

Twenty years earlier an archaeologist drilled down from that spot and hit a five-foot-thick layer of shell, extending from five to nine feet below ground. This was contemporary, physical proof of the rich cultural heritage beneath the parking lot.

Fifteen years later, that same archaeologist, now paid by the developers, claimed that he drilled down a second time in the same place and hit a boulder four feet down, so he could go no deeper. He also changed his opinion about the five-foot-thick layer of shells, and declared it an insignificant collection of disturbed shells eroded or moved from the original shellmound. We know the center of the enormous mound—which was 300 or 400 feet long—was slightly further west, but the entire surrounding village site has cultural value to Ohlone descendants, who have continued to conduct ceremonies at the site over centuries of remembrance.

The memories are in the land—as are the stories, prayers, shells and bones.

As I gently lifted a piece of loose asphalt from the remains of Bore Hole #19, a sprout of green appeared in the sunlit crack and came springing up into the air. Uncovering nature. Peeling back history. Discovering a living memory in timeless soil. I was hearing the ancestors’ call—not my ancestors perhaps, but people with history and dignity whose presence I could feel in that blade of grass, human beings deserving of respect and protection.

And with time I’ve come to feel my own ancestors’ yearning for repair as well.

I have to say, the West Berkeley Shellmound is an unlikely sacred site. Spenger’s Fish Grotto, once one of the busiest restaurants in America, is now boarded up, shut down forever. Strawberry Creek flows hidden in a culvert beneath landfill and asphalt. Bulging shopping bags from the nearby Apple Store are loaded into Porsches, BMWs and Volvos that congregate on the gray pavement. Bells ring loudly at a nearby street crossing as graffiti-covered freight trains rumble by, air horns blaring. Hills densely covered with super-hip houses rise to the east. Petite green trees in sidewalk hollows are the only nature in sight. The concrete pillars that hold up the University Avenue overpass are incongruously decorated with murals of Ohlone ceremonial dancers painted years ago and intended, no doubt, to show respect. But the people, the history, and the shellmound have essentially been erased.

Looking around me, the place felt beyond weird.

That evening, I was talking about the site with my 23-year-old daughter, Fiona, who’d come home during the pandemic. In a far-ranging conversation, as I tried to explain my mixed feelings about the site, Fiona uttered the phrase “the essence of colonialism,” and something inside clicked. I felt the powerful presence of the original, unadulterated shellmound. It’s wounding now had a name. The strangeness of its current state suddenly made sense, and the feeling of weirdness vanished. It was as if a door had opened.

The site’s mysterious, magnetic force suddenly made sense to me. This land has its own story. It remains. It endures—in spite of colonialism, Christianity and consumer capitalism.

Memories are rooted in the land: 5,000 years of human interaction with water, weather, shellfish and soil leave a lasting presence. This place of life and death, birth and laughter, now felt strong to me, its vitality undeniable and no longer lost to time. It may all be buried under an asphalt tomb, but it’s a thin veneer. Can we see through the barriers and distractions to restore this living, sacred place? Can we build a truth-telling monument that celebrates the resilience and survival of Ohlone people and culture? Might we make a film capturing this opportunity for healing and remembrance, and document the collaboration that makes it happen?

*          *          *          *

In August of 2020, we got the call from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site was recognized as one of America’s Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places. Though it felt a little odd to celebrate being “endangered,” it meant international recognition. It was an affirmation of our struggle—and it offered a potent media opportunity. We held a Zoom press conference and generated a flurry of media coverage. Video statements of support flowed in from U.S. Representatives Barbara Lee and Deb Haaland. Corrina was invited to make an hour-long Ohlone history presentation to the City Council. Chris Walker created a stunning, new, animated sequence illustrating the natural beauty of the village site suddenly overtaken by aggressive urban blight.

After the Zoom press conference, Councilmember Sophie Hahn joined Corrina at the site and we hung a banner on the chain link fence next to a “Private Property / No Trespassing” sign. A photographer from the local Berkeleyside website captured the victory scene as Corrina and Sophie did a congratulatory elbow bump. Socially distanced, wearing our masks, we celebrated a rare feeling of success in very sad times.

I wandered over once again to Bore Hole #19, the circle in the asphalt surrounded by parallel white lines painted to keep the cars in order. Seeing the barren, vandalized landscape now as “the essence of colonialism,” it struck me that Corrina and her allies are creating a ceremonial space in the city that is allowing people to ritually grieve and heal.

Photographing the zigzag parking spaces and patched bore holes, I wondered, Will we really let them build another monument to capitalism on top of a burial ground?

The antidote to commercial is communal—a shared space in nature where history is honored. In that place we feel humbled. We feel connected. We remember who we are supposed to be. Oscillating between despair and hope I could feel the place affecting me, changing me.

The West Berkeley Shellmound represents an invitation, a doorway opening into the hidden, painful part of ourselves, the part damaged by colonization. While indigenous people have suffered far more historical trauma than recent immigrants and descendants of settlers, all of our psyches have been damaged, like the land, our emotional vitality paved over. Yet, a spirited story is still held within our wounded bodies, just as it is in the land.

This place is transformative. Ceremony here invites people of all colors and cultures to come together, just to be here, to remember, to contemplate the trauma, to feel it and share it. Can we voice our trauma in community? Can we unearth it through ritual? Can we loosen its grip by restoring an ecosystem and telling its true story? The West Berkeley Shellmound offers that opportunity.

As Corrina says, “This is a place of healing for all people.”

The struggle over the West Berkeley Shellmound is about finding the hidden doorway, going through it together and building a new world. Though most of us are now guests, we are all indigenous to somewhere. We all want to love and know the earth, to be in direct, intimate relationship with nature and the ancestors who preceded us and whose fate we will all share. One way forward is collective acknowledgement of our historical trauma. The shellmound site is teaching us: first, we grieve together about our forgetting, and only then can we celebrate our remembering.

*          *          *          *

The Court of Appeals hearing on Zoom was ominous. The three judges (all white, one man, two women) seemed less than sympathetic to the shellmound’s cultural history and more than cognizant of California’s housing crisis. After the bruising hearing, on that same afternoon, the landowners surrounded the parking lot with a six-foot chain link fence topped by three menacing strands of barbed wire. Spontaneous protests erupted immediately—“Free the Imprisoned Sacred Site!” Hundreds of hand-painted signs went up on the fence, colorful ribbons everywhere, all torn down the next day by a laborer with a plastic garbage bag. A street blockade closed 4th Street and we filmed hundreds of people painting birds and flowers on the pavement, and then encircling the site with candle light as darkness fell and Ohlone songs filled the air.

The City of Berkeley and Corrina’s Confederated Villages of Lisjan appealed to the California Supreme Court to reconsider the case (they reject 97 out of 100). The appeals court had misstated facts and ignored evidence. Their pro-housing decision seemed predetermined. We generated a dozen eloquent amicus letters, urging the justices to take the case and protect the cultural site. Then, the gut punch: the Supreme Court declined to take the case. Once again, standing alongside Corrina Gould and all indigenous people, we witnessed the failure of the U.S. court system to recognize native spirituality and cultural connection to land.

*          *          *          *

In the end, after delaying the project for four years through litigation, a settlement was reached on March 8, 2024. With a $20 million donation from Kataly Foundation, $1.5 million from the City of Berkeley, and assorted other donations, land that was originally stolen was purchased for $27 million and returned to indigenous stewardship.

After an epic eight-year battle, a lot of prayer, and the unceasing support of the ancestors, the sacred West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site was protected. Under Corrina Gould’s determined leadership, a community of thousands worked with the City of Berkeley to resist the desecration of a sacred site and by a unanimous 7-0 vote the City Council transferred title to the indigenous-women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. This was one of the greatest Land Back victories in a lifetime—with national and international significance—a case study illustrating many valuable lessons.

Lessons learned, for allies? Collaboration. Listening. Litigation. Prayer. Perseverance. Faith in the ancestors. And most important: indigenous leadership, values, perspective and pacing.

In the final days of the battle, I asked the campaign’s leading light, Corrina Gould, if we should win against such long odds, what is the message of this eight-year-long struggle?

“Things can change in this world,” she replied. “It is trust that makes things right. Partnering has made this dream a reality. Thousands of people—funders, native people and allies—the West Berkeley Shellmound brings people together. Before, resources were unavailable to help Native people protect sacred sites and the resting places of our ancestors. Now we see what happens when resources are made available. Powerful prayers have been laid down at the West Berkeley Shellmound by people from all over the world. That has changed the energy of the place and helped make this happen.”