By Abel R. Gomez

It’s Pride Month again in San Francisco. Amid the many parties, art exhibits, and performances, thousands will participate in the Trans March and Dyke March the last weekend of June. Even more are likely to attend the San Francisco Pride Parade that Sunday. Held annually since 1972, the event’s website suggests “the San Francisco Pride Celebration and Parade is the largest gathering of the LGBT community and allies in the nation.” San Francisco has an important history as a safe haven for many LGBTQ people as well as various immigrant, progressive, and arts communities. During the 1960s, San Francisco was a hub for various counter-culture movements and political organizing. Today, many of these communities have been displaced by the rising gentrification of the San Francisco Bay Area. But before all of this, before San Francisco had its current name, it was (and is) part of the traditional territory of Ohlone peoples. If we care about justice, we must contend with this history.

A walk around Castro Street reveals virtually nothing about its Indigenous history. Named after José Castro (1808–1860), a Californio military leader against U.S. rule of California, the neighborhood is one of the best-known LGBTQ spaces in the world. During the 1940s, U.S. military men were discharged for their sexuality in San Francisco. By the 60s and 70s, the Castro district became the major center for gay life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Amid the many restaurants, bars, and shops, visitors are offered a sense of queer history through the GLBT History Society Museum and Rainbow Honor Walk. The Rainbow Honor Walk is made up of a series of plaques along the sidewalk honoring important historical LGBTQ figures, including Bayard Rustin, Frida Kahlo, and Christine Jorgensen. Only one Indigenous person is honored, We’wha (1849–1896), the most famous Lhamana (a traditional mixed-gender role) among Zuni people of what is now called New Mexico. While the importance of We’wha’s inclusion cannot be overstated, it is important to note how Ohlone and other peoples Indigenous to the Bay Area remain largely invisible in this space.

The narrative changes just a short distance from the main Castro area, when one reaches Mission Dolores Park. The park is a popular hang out spot, especially during warm summer days. It even has a sunbathing spot affectionately known as the “gay beach.” Dolores Park is also the site where the Trans March and Dyke March begin during Pride weekend. It is here that the Indigenous history of this land can’t (or at least, shouldn’t) be ignored. The park is named after Mission Dolores (originally, Mission San Francisco de Asís), the Franciscan mission located blocks away from the park. This mission was arguably the single most destructive force to peoples Indigenous to the land we now call San Francisco. Violence and death of Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous queer people, at that mission is fundamental to how the land was removed from Ohlone peoples and transformed into part of what many see as a gay mecca.

Mission Dolores was founded in June 1776 near the Ohlone village of Chutchui as part of a series of twenty-one missions along the California coast. These missions served the dual purpose of securing land for Spain and Christianizing (i.e. “civilizing”) Indigenous peoples. The peoples the Spanish encountered were complex societies with their own political, economic, cultural, and ceremonial systems rooted in thousands of years of relationship with their lands. We call these peoples Ohlone today (previously, Costanoan), but this name actually refers to over 58 distinct pre-contact tribal communities that span present day San Francisco and the East Bay, all the way to Monterey and Big Sur. Other missions built in Ohlone territory are Mission San Carlos Borromeo (Carmel, 1770), Mission Santa Clara (1777), Mission Santa Cruz (1791), San Juan Bautista (1797), and Mission San Jose (Freemont, 1797). While relations between Spanish and Ohlone peoples were initially friendly, this quickly changed. Baptism was followed by a life of near total control by Catholic authority including food, work, clothing, language, agriculture, and religion. In short, the mission aimed to destroy Indigenous selfhood through a European Christian framework. Failure to submit to priestly authority was met with various forms of physical punishment, including flogging and time in stocks. Runaways were captured by Spanish soldiers and returned to mission grounds.

The mission also imposed a strict European cis-hetero-patriarchy onto Indigenous peoples. While women and third-gender people held ceremonial roles in pre-contact life, religious authority was dominated by men in the mission system. The only permissible form of sexual activity was through church-sanctioned heterosexual marriage between one man and one woman. As such, unmarried Indigenous women were held in a locked room called a monjerio at night to prevent sexual activity. In addition, Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation, Chumash) has argued that the missions strategically targeted those who did not fit into European gender and sexual binaries. Miranda notes that the Spanish recorded their encounters with Indigenous third gender people, describing them as joyas (literally, “jewels”), in journals and records from several California missions. Though held in high regard in their tribal communities, Miranda argues these third gender people were subjected to beating, shaming, misgendering, murder, and erasure in the mission system. Comparable forms of violence and erasure of Indigenous women and third gender people are widespread in histories of European colonialism. It continues today in the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits across the Americas.

At the conclusion of the mission period in 1834, scholars estimate that the Indigenous population of California was reduced by 90%. Foreign diseases, killings, and the various changes brought by Spanish settlement radically ruptured Indigenous life. The Mexican, and later American, periods prolonged these changes. California became Mexican territory as a result of Mexican independence (1821). While the intention was to return land to missionized Indigenous peoples, the lands surrounding Mission Dolores went to Hispanic families. Landless and impoverished, many Native families worked as servants, ranch hands, and in some cases slaves, to Hispanic families around San Francisco. The Gold Rush (1848–1855) drew a slew of outsiders into California, further disrupting Indigenous life. After California achieved statehood in 1850, settlers engaged in mass killing, rape, and enslavement of Indigenous peoples across California. As Mutsun-Ohlone elder Ann-Marie Sayers (chairperson of Indian Canyon) put it in the recent documentary In the Land of My Ancestors, “California, indeed, is a golden state. Reality dictates that the foundation of California, the foundation of this entire country, is built on lies and deaths of Indians.” As a result of this violence, Ohlone and other California Indian people employed various strategies for survival. For some, this meant disguising themselves as Mexicans to protect against the widespread killings.

Despite the best efforts of settlers, Indigenous peoples could not be erased. With the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, Indigenous peoples from many parts of the United States were encouraged to move into urban setting such as the San Francisco Bay Area, with the promise of job training and employment. The policy aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples, but networks built by urban Indigenous peoples generated the American Indian Movement (AIM). One of the most pivotal moments of AIM was the nineteen-month protest occupation of Alcatraz island (1969–1971) led by Indians of All Tribes (IOAT). Across the lands now called the United States, Indigenous peoples fought against racism, incarceration, and the violation of treaty agreements between their nations and the U.S. This coincided with powerful revival of languages, songs, ceremonies, dances, and cultural identities across Indigenous communities. Ohlone peoples also experienced a revitalization. In a collaboratively written article with members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, Les Field suggests Ohlone revitalization was sparked by Black Power and American Indian movements and the disruption of Ohlone burial sites across the Bay Area. Ohlone, too, worked visibly to revive their cultures, protect sacred sites, and reassert claims to their homelands.

San Francisco is also an important site of queer Indigenous organizing. In 1975, Barbara May Cameron (Lakota) and Randy Burns (Paiute) founded the first queer Indigenous rights organization, Gay American Indians (GAI), in San Francisco. This opened the way for the founding of Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits (BAAITS) in 1999. As BAAITS member Roger Kuhn (Poarch Band of Creek Indians) has explained, “BAAITS exists to recover and restore the role of two spirit people. And we do this by creating a forum for the expression of the spiritual, artistic and cultural ways in which two spirit people have always been part of community.” Two spirit is a contemporary term used to describe pre-colonial Indigenous concepts of gender and sexuality beyond the binary. BAAITS organized the first, and still largest, Two Spirit Powwow in San Francisco, now in its 8th year. This year’s Powwow was opened by two Ohlone sisters, Carla and Desiree Muñoz (Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe). BAAITS also marches in the annual San Francisco Pride Parade and organizes social gatherings throughout the year.

As I walk through the streets of San Francisco this month, I will be thinking about all of these histories. I know that as a non-Indigenous Latinx queer person, I have directly benefitted from the violence that happened here. Lineages of my family migrated from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Mexico to the Bay Area. I have a relationship to this land, and if you live here, or visit for Pride, you have a relationship to this land, too. We can take the opportunity to be in good relations by uplifting, supporting, and celebrating Ohlone survival. This can include acknowledging the history of the Ramaytush Ohlone, descendants of the Indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula, and other Ohlone communities in the Bay Area. It could also look like supporting Cafe Ohlone/Mak-’amham, an Ohlone pop-up restaurant, started by Vincent Medina (Muwekma Ohlone) and his partner Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone). We could contribute to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an Ohlone women-led land trust in Oakland, or attend the Indigenous Storytelling Gathering at Indian Canyon.

Violence against queer people is inherently interconnected with violence, erasure, and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It is connected to the ongoing gentrification of the Bay Area since Spanish contact and the continued policing of black and brown peoples on Indigenous lands. As we celebrate the resistance of trans women of color at Stonewall (1969), let us also remember that wherever Pride celebrations happen in the U.S., those celebrations are on Indigenous lands. This month can be an opportunity to acknowledge those connections and work in solidarity to create a better world for all peoples living in Ohlone territory. In the words of Kanyon Sayers-Roods (Mutsun-Ohlone/Chumash, Two Spirit Society of Indian Canyon), “A queer future, potentially, to me, would be honoring truth in history for all of our nations.”

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