All around us, people are saving historic places. Whether they are community activists, grassroots advocates, architects, or formally trained preservationists, they each bring with them a passion for the past and a drive to protect the cultural heritage all around us. During Women’s History Month—and as part of our campaign for Where Women Made History—we are interviewing five women who illustrate the many ways we can protect historic spaces. In this interview we hear from Corrina Gould, the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, who has been advocating for the protection of the West Berkeley Shellmound, a sacred site of the Ohlone people located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

UPDATE: On March 12, 2024, the Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance authorizing the purchase of land containing the West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site. The City has purchased the property with funds raised by the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and will transfer the property to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

Listen to Corrina Gould describe, in her own words, how the preservation of cultural heritage is critical to the protection of the Ohlone people’s identity and traditional homelands.

In Her Own Words

Horše tuuxi. Ka at Lisjanka
Ka at ra at Corrina

Good day relatives. My name is Corrina Gould, and I just spoke to you in our traditional language of Chochenyo. My great-grandfather, Jose Guzman, was one of the last speakers of the language, and our ancestors come from this place in the East Bay. Many people thought that we were extinct—up until about 25 years ago—when we started doing this work around protection of sacred sites.

Today, I am the tribal chair of the Confederate Villages of Lisjan. I'm also the co-founder and co-director of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, the first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the country. We are working to rematriate land, to protect sacred sites, and to bring culture, language, and song back into our traditional homelands again.

The work that we have been doing around Ohlone cultural heritage is important because we have to believe that our next seven generations are going to be here, [even after] our ancestors went through three waves of genocide: the Spanish missionary period, the Mexican Rancho period, and the current occupation of the United States government.

And so we are always having to ask for permission to pray in our own homelands from somebody else that holds onto our territories through private land ownership. We are always having to fight to protect the sacred places that everybody else thinks of as non-existent, because they don't see us. I think that those are huge challenges as non-federally recognized tribes to continue to have to stand up against developments, to tell our story of historical trauma over, and over again.

What brings me hope in the work that we are doing is to see young people standing up for the sacred again, that they are bringing back language, that they want to learn the songs that they're working with other non-federally recognized tribes to do ceremony on behalf of our salmon and waterways. That brings me hope.

To see my daughters on the waterways for the first time in a hundred years, paddling toward our villages, to see my grandchildren rooted in our sacred places and lands again, to see young people acknowledging the plants that they're growing and doing that kind of work. That brings me hope.

To know that our next generations understand the importance of holding onto the culture and what our ancestors have taught us for thousands of years.

In my territory, the site that inspires me the most right now is the work that we've been doing on the West Berkeley Shellmound for five and a half years, we started doing this work to protect this site. It's been recognized as one of [America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places] by the National Trust.

What inspires me about it is that there are people from all walks of life, all intersections—it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are, what your gender is, what your religious background is—people come together because they understand the importance of this place, the sacredness, of this land and how it connects all of us. It grounds us in where we live now in the Bay Area.