Ohlone People: Thrivance

We Are Still Here. Honor the Past to Shape the Future.

A brief story

Kanyon CoyoteWoman and Gregg Castro share perspective about Ohlone Territory and Survivance to Thrivance. An educational video geared to help teachers and students of communities who want to learn more about the Original peoples and history of the place we call home. As Indigenous stewards, we are responsible, we have a sacred obligation to tending and caretaking our homelands - part of that needs to be HONORING TRUTH IN HISTORY. Honor the Past, to Shape the Future.

#RoamingOhlone poses in front of LFK Media's Camera

Contemporary Ohlone Territory

Ohlone (aka Costanoan) is a grouping term created by anthropologists to signify broad-based linguistic and cultural similarities among some 58 independent tribal groups. The language family of the tribes whose homelands extended from present-day “San Francisco Bay south to Monterey Bay, the Big Sur coast and the San Benito River drainage” was first named “Costanoan” in 1891 and “Ohlone” in 1978. The first time Native Americans were legally allowed to practice their religion and express their spirituality freely, was 1978 - Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1987.

The word Ohlone (pronounced “Óh-lone-e”) comes from the name of a single tribe of Ohlone, the Oljon (pronounced “Ol-hóne”).

This group is also sometimes called Costanoan (pronounced Cóh-stah-no-an). This word comes from a Spanish term “Costaño,” meaning “Indians from the coast.”

Timeline of the evolution of written word Ohlone from Oljon

While there was overlap in the overall cultures of Ohlone peoples from tribe to tribe, there were also many things that made each tribe district—from leadership, to sacred narratives, specifics of plant use, languages spoken, and more. Their cultures changed in the thousands of years that they and their ancestors have lived in the place now known as the San Francisco Bay Area. Change increased as non-Indians began to settle in the area after 1769. While Ohlone peoples experienced tremendous disruption, dislocation, and suffering in subsequent decades, an astonishing amount of ancestral knowledge has been preserved, due to the courage, sacrifice, bigheartedness, foresight and determination of many elders to share that knowledge.