Module 7: Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation - The Struggle for Recognition
Module 7: Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation - The Struggle for Recognition
OCEN is an unrecognized tribe whose homelands are entangled with the extremely expensive and prohibitive real estate market in Monterey County in California. Without a tribal income or land base, the tribe enacts highly creative tactics to protect their ancestors’ burial sites and their sacred sites from disturbance while struggling to reclaim ancestral remains held by settler institutions and for recognition by the settler state that has sought their disappearance. Led by the fiercely determined tribal chairwoman, Louise Miranda Ramirez, OCEN engages local, state, and federal governments and laws; corporations; private landowners; museums; various commissions; and the US military in order to assert their sovereignty despite a lack of federal or state recognition. Chairwoman Ramirez demonstrates the care necessary to protect Esselen relations under these conditions. Asserting an ethic and politics of togetherness, she describes how the tribe has always lived amongst the ancestors in order to care for them and how it is the care for and protection of the ancestors that is creating the conditions for them to be together again as a community.
The module includes: interviews with the Chairwoman and with tribal members working as cultural monitors at the following sites: The Presidio of Monterey, a Moss Landing construction site, a sacred site at CA Monterey 264, Asilomar State Marine Reserve, The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, and a reburial site; recording of the play, IYA: The Ex’celen Remember, written by Luis ‘xago’ Juárez and inspired by Chairwoman Louise Miranda Ramirez, based on OCEN’s efforts to protect their ancestors and which represents the lives of tribal members surviving and resisting the genocidal amnesia of the state of California; and an assembly cut of a film by the filmmaker and co-director of the Memory and Resistance Lab, Latipa, White Owl Green Star, a poetic depiction of Chairwoman Ramirez’ philosophy and commitments as a caretaker for the dead.
