In 1925, Alfred L. Kroeber a once-venerated anthropologist and professor at University of California, Berkeley declared the Ohlone people of the East Bay to be extinct for all practical purposes. Kroebers inaccurate assessment contributed to the loss of federal recognition for the tribe. Millions of acres of land were ripped from the Ohlone people, an act that ended up being a contemporary continuation of the genocide and land theft theyd faced from Spaniards and Americans for two centuries.

Declaring a people extinct does not make it so, but it does push them further to the margins, forces them to disperse, and threatens their ongoing survival. Despite this, the Ohlone and their food traditions have survived. On UC Berkeleys campus, the same institution that declared the group extinct, the worlds only restaurant owned and operated by Ohlone people, serving their traditional food, thrives.

Business and life partners Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone from the East Bay) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone from the Carmel Valley) founded mak-amham (Our food) in 2017 to promote cultural awareness, and began Cafe Ohlone in 2018 as a vehicle for that work. Together, they present what they call a love song to Ohlone culture.

We want people to walk away from every meal understanding our community much more than they did when they first came in. Theres so much ignorance, some of it willful. But we want to lift up the knowledge thats been passed down from our elders and our community, Trevino says. He grew up with a deep understanding of his roots, passed down from his grandparents, who are now both in their late 80s. And despite the apocalyptic levels of gentrification in the Bay Area, Medinas family has never moved away, although this was an incredibly difficult feat. Thats a testament to the love and the sacrifice of those generations before us that they always maintained our place in our homeland, he says.