This is Still Yelamu Ohlone Land: A Decolonized Map of "San Francisco's Mission District"

The "Mission district" is home to the oldest standing building and the mark of how colonization started in what we call "San Francisco", the Mission Dolores. The Mission system was a system of colonization, slavery, and genocide for California Indians. Recently Fernando Marti, made a map with an emphasis on the historical and contemporary First Nations history of the land of the Abalone people, the Yelamu Ohlone. This map covers the history of the impact of the genocide of the Yelamu Ohlone, the impacts of U.S. relocation policies within the Urban Rez (Reservation), the history of historical trauma of the relocation policies and its connection to self-medicating with alcohol, the burning down of the Indian Center and how it was used a a catalyst for the takeover of Alcatraz. There is much more but of course with any map or history, this is just the beginning.

 

This is from Fernando Marti himself in describing his Map:

 

"To walk always with an awareness of the past alive in the present. This particular place was Yelamu Ohlone land, land of the Abalone People, and it had names like Chutchui and Sitlintac. It is now called simply “the Mission,” like calling a neighborhood in the South “the Plantation,” the irony not lost on Native peoples. Nonetheless, it was here along the bars on 16th Street, that urban Indians forced onto the Urban Rez by Federal relocation policies, gathered and found each other in the 50s and 60s, from here the Occupation of Alcatraz was birthed, and here ghosts still dance around us, invisible like the 80,000 native peoples in the Bay Area. This is Indian land.

Hand-drawn text over digital print of 1859 US Coastal Survey Map. 11”x17”, ink on vellum, wood and string."