The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area is appealing to President Donald J. Trump to clarify the Tribe’s federal status — and sources tell The Inquirer that he may do so in matter of months.
The Tribe has developed a newfound allyship with the Republican Party over the last two years. On a local level, the Santa Clara Republican Party endorsed the Tribe’s federal recognition, and the Tribe endorsed the Republican nominee for Congress in California’s 18th congressional district against one of the most senior Democrats in Congress (who twice served as an impeachment manager against President Trump, and served on the ‘January 6 Committee’).
The Tribe was at the center of Indian Country’s political discourse in the months and weeks running up to the election, in which President-elect Donald J. Trump wildly overperformed among Native American voters. Exit polls conducted by NBC suggest that 68% of Native American voters supported President Trump, a swing from a mere 11% four years ago.
The Native American vote made a significant difference in a slew of closely contested swing States where margins of victory are most tight, and where Native American populations are largest: like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, for instance.
The Tribe has long been victimized by the Democratic Party’s corruption, and after 45 years, they are looking elsewhere for support.
Why was the Tribe targeted with police violence in Washington, DC?
In the months running up to the election, the Tribe was traveling by horseback from its Bay Area homeland in California to Washington, DC, and stopping at indigenous communities along the way. The Tribe was seeking allyship and sharing its generations-long struggle to be seen by the federal government. And along the way, Tribal Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh was honest and forthright about her experiences of mistreatment by California’s Democrat-dominated political machine.
Nijmeh called out some of the most powerful Democrats in America with hard truths: like the time that Senator Diane Feinstein told her she didn’t want ‘an urban tribe’ in her city; Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s two tenures as Speaker with a very cold shoulder; Governor Gavin Newsom’s failure to invite any Ohlone tribe to participate in his ‘Truth and Healing Commission’; Rep. Anna Eshoo’s demand the Tribe sign away its capacity to pursue economic development projects; and then-Senator Kamala Harris’ refusal to help the tribe, telling the former Chairwoman that “it’s none of my business”.
All the while, Indian Country was following along on a slew of social media platforms.
When the Tribe arrived in Washington, DC on horseback on Indigenous Peoples Day, it’s procession of 200 to 300 people marched from the Arlington Bridge over the Potomac to Capitol Hill. The delegation setup camp at the foot of the Capitol on the National Mall. The following day, the Tribe was brutalized by federal police officers at the hands of the Biden administration.
Although the Tribe well-communicated its intentions to permit officials with the National Park Service, the National Parks Police waged deliberate and calculated police violence against the delegation on October 15th and 16th. Native women and children were brutally manhandled, thrown to the ground, bruised, and traumatized. The police officers on the scene threatened to seize and euthanize the Tribe’s horses, instigating a standoff that lasted for hours.
That police violence was broadcast across Indian Country on live-streaming platforms, and Indian Country was stunned that this type of mistreatment could happen under the leadership of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to lead that department. Haaland oversees the National Parks Police in addition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The National Park Service is led by Chuck Sams, the first Native American to serve as Director.
The incident shook Indian Country’s support of the Biden-Harris Administration so stunningly that Biden hastily and unexpectedly organized a formal apology for Native American boarding schools – devoid of compensation for the victims – in the days before the election. Having just witnessed the violence that the administration waged unnecessarily against Muwekma, the apology fell flat.
Why don’t the senior-most Democrat Party officials support Muwekma?
There are 68 Indian casinos in the State of California – that’s more than the entire State of Nevada. These tribes tend to have very small memberships, allowing them to spend heavily on campaign contributions, lobbyists, and media operatives. Gaming tribes have donated more than $60 million to the Democratic Party in recent years, and nearly $6 million to the Harris-Walz campaign.
Today, California’s gaming tribes form a main pillar of Nancy Pelosi’s California-based political machine. They control a casino cartel that is bitterly defensive of its largess and viciously smear the dozens of wrongly unrecognized Indian Tribes across the State, who they see as a competitive threat. Under California state laws, established by two voter referendums, every federally recognized tribe is entitled to two gaming licenses to operate 2,500 slot machines at each location.
Muwekma, with its aboriginal territory including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, and Silicon Valley, is seen as a lucrative market from which far flung venues draw. If Muwekma were to construct casinos in San Francisco and San Jose, it could impact their revenue numbers. That reality has made Muwekma the principal target of gaming tribes’ lobbyists, who have vehemently opposed legislation that would affirm Muwekma’s federal status.
Pelosi gained her influence in the Democratic caucus in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in part because of her access to large campaign donors who could be directed to send contributions to the candidates and campaign finance vehicles of her choosing in the contested races that she was interested in, allowing her to cultivate a chamber of members owing her their loyalty. In turn, she owes a great deal to the gaming tribes that helped bankroll her rise to power.
Who is Zoe Lofgren?
Rep. Zoe Lofgren is one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party. She represented Silicon Valley’s tech industry for the last 30 years, and has been a prolific fundraiser. Lofgren functions as a gatekeeper to that largess for younger colleagues. That influence has earned her the title of Chair of California’s delegation to the House of Representatives – and she is widely seen as Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s “political enforcer”.
Lofgren is one the most senior members of the House Judiciary Committee and serves as the Ranking Member of the Science, Space and Technology Committee. On the Judiciary Committee she serves as Chair of three key Subcommittees: Anti-trust Enforcement, the Internet, and Immigration and Refugees. Lofgren’s daughter serves as General Counsel at Google, which has been a subject of criticism in California’s 18th congressional district.
Lofgren served as an Impeachment Manager twice and was the second-most senior Democrat on the January 6th Committee. Lofgren has repeatedly called for President Trump’s imprisonment.
Who is Tribal Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh?
Charlene Nijmeh grew up watching the matriarchs of her Tribe fight to protect its ancestral burial grounds. She was eight years old when her mother, Rosemary Cambra, hit an archeologist with a shovel as he was digging up her ancestral burial ground. It was an act of desperate resistance against colonial legal structures that were architected precisely for the purpose of subjugating her people.
Cambra was arrested. She went to jail, she lost her house, and she went bankrupt for defending the dignity of her people that day. Cambra went on to serve as Tribal Chairwoman for 43 years.
The incident had a formative impact on Nijmeh, who went on to become a pioneering voice in the textile recycling industry. Through her investment vehicles, she has built a closed-loop textile recycling system that diverts 100% of all donated textiles from landfills. What can’t be resold at her network of 123 reuse superstores in Central America, is reprocessed into fiber and used to manufacture carpet underlay and building insulation.
It’s an inspiring story of entrepreneurial success that has an incredibly positive environmental impact. Nijmeh puts indigenous values and the ethos of protecting the environment at the core of the business model. In the process, she has created 6,000 jobs in Central America, hundreds of jobs in the United States, and diverts more than 60 million pounds of textile waste from landfills every year.
In 2018, when Cambra retired as Tribal Chairwoman, the Tribal Council appointed Nijmeh to succeed her. During her tenure, she has reinvigorated the Tribe’s fight with the federal government to affirm it’s never-terminated federal status.
Why did Charlene Nijmeh run against Lofgren?
Rep. Zoe Lofgren was raised in Palo Alto, CA before studying at Stanford University and Santa Clara University Law School. She was raised, educated, and built her career on Muwekma Ohlone land. Her congressional district sits on the Tribe’s aboriginal territory, and for years she professed her support for the Tribe – even back in the 1980’s when she sat on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. The Tribe even helped her get elected in 1994 when she first ran for Congress in a tight primary against Mayor Tom McEnry.
In 2001, Lofgren stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to call on the Bureau of Indian Affairs to affirm the Tribe’s federal status.
That’s why it was so puzzling that, for her first five years as Tribal Chairwoman, her phone calls went unreturned. Her requests to meet were discarded. Rep. Lofgren issued proclamations lauding Nijmeh’s environmental work, but ignored her phone calls on behalf of the Tribe.
“It was bizarre,” Nijmeh later explained.
By the fall of 2022, Nijmeh made progress working with other congressional offices. Rep. Anna Eshoo said she would champion the issue and promised to introduce legislation on the Tribe’s behalf. Nijmeh worked to gain the support of Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Ro Khanna, and Rep. Jimmy Panetta’s offices. They were all poised to sign onto the legislation – until December of 2022 when Lofgren inserted herself into the process and began demanding that the Tribe sign away its right to pursue gaming projects.
In January 2023, the ultimatum became even more clear when the five members of Congress came together for a meeting with Nijmeh in Anna Eshoo’s office on Capitol Hill. Lofgren waged her finger and demanded that the Chairwoman sign away the rights and freedoms of her Tribe’s children in exchange for the corrective legislation.
“It’s offensive that one member of Congress could think that it’s appropriate for her to demand any cession of any property interest from any Indian Tribe whatsoever. That shouldn’t come up in any politician’s business dealings. But she feels like she should have the authority to strip us of an asset that was established under State law in two voter referendums, and by Congress in the form of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act,” the Chairwoman explains.
Critics of Lofgren believe her behavior was illegal, violating the Non-Intercourse Act, which prohibits anyone from negotiating the cession of any interest from an Indian Tribe outside the presence of a federal commissioner tasked with protecting that Tribe’s interests. Nijmeh asked the United States Attorney in the Northern District of California to investigate.
“Following that meeting, I could see who Rep. Lofgren really was. Growing up, we all thought she was an ally and supporter of the tribe, but when it came down to supporting us – she decided to do the bidding of her special interest puppetmasters instead,” Nijmeh adds.
“When you’re being bullied, you have to stand up to the bully or nothing will ever change. You have to call out the behavior and confront it. Our people refuse to be abused by politicians and powerbrokers for another generation,” she explains. “I decided to run for Congress to elevate the struggle of my people into the regional discourse, and to stop the Democratic Party political machine from bullying us out of existence.”
Who are the Muwekma Ohlone people?
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe was “previously unambiguously federally recognized” – and is the only Tribe in the United States to have received that Determination from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that is not currently on the list of federally recognized Tribes. The BIA erred in 1978 when it first drafted its original list of recognized tribes and neglected to place Muwekma on that list, and Muwekma has been in a fight with the federal government to fix its mistake ever since.
In May of 2022, a federal district court judge in the Northern District of California affirmed that the Tribe has retained its sovereign immunity despite not being on the BIA’s list.
A seven-year Stanford University genomic study conclusively links each of the Tribe’s lineages to a 2,500-year-old burial site in San Francisco. That study was published in 2022.
The Tribe is comprised of all the known surviving Ohlone lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Tribe’s ancestors were enslaved at Mission Delores in San Francisco, Mission San Jose, and Mission Santa Clara, in agrarian forced labor systems.
During the American period, gold was discovered and the first governor of California issued bounties on Indian heads and declared a war of extermination. San Jose was the Capitol of California at the time and a central focal point of the genocide. The Tribe’s surviving members found refuge in the hills of the East Bay at rancherias in Sunol, Niles, and Pleasanton, where they worked the ranches of Phoebe Hearst.
In 1905 the Tribe was federally recognized as part of the CE Kelsey Indian Census, which was commissioned by Congress to identify all of the homeless bands of California Indians who were in need of land. The Tribe was recognized as the Verona Band of Alameda County, after Hearst’s railroad station. It was included in a series of appropriations bills through 1927 that mandated that land be purchased for the Tribe.
But in 1927 a racist Indian Agent by the name of Lafayette Dorrington, who led the Sacramento Agency at the time, unilaterally and illegally refused to purchase the land for the tribe and began administratively discarding the Tribe, along with 135 other bands of California Indians.
The Tribe’s children attended Indian boarding schools through 1947. Their members were enrolling with the BIA under the California Jurisdictional Act each decade, and the Tribe’s leaders were organizing to protect their Ohlone Cemetery in the 1960s from Caltrans, and to protect the desecration of ancestral burial grounds in the 1970s and 80s.
“The Muwekma petition of recognition… an overwhelming preponderance of evidence gathered in the hundreds of pages of the Muwekma petition, which simultaniously substantiates the contemporary and historic existence of the Muwekma,” explains Dr. Les Field, an anthropologist with the University of New Mexico. Dr. Field helped prepare the Tribe’s petition for federal acknowledgement in the 1990s.
“The idea that the Tribe could have disappeared for a couple years and then popped back up the next decade, and then disappeared for a few years, then popped up the following decade is illogical,” he adds.
Why is Lofgren so hellbent on stopping the Tribe?
The Tribe approached the San Jose City Council to pass a Resolution of Support of affirming the Tribe’s federal status in the Spring of 2023. That Resolution would have been a non-binding statement of support that the Tribe could have brought with it to Washington as an example of the region’s broad-based support for the Tribe.
Rep. Lofgren and Rep. Eshoo both issued last-minute letters full of inaccuracies to the Council to thwart an open floor vote. Lofgren instructed staffers to demand that the Resolution not be brought to the floor. Lofgren herself threatened that she would back primary challengers against any Council members who refused. Her fervent opposition to the Tribe has raised eyebrows, even among her supporters.
In Washington, DC, Lofgren is known to have been spreading misinformation to undermine the Tribe’s legislative efforts. Younger members of the caucus are afraid of Lofgren’s iron-fisted style and generally acquiesce to her policy postures. Several members say explicitly that they can’t support the Tribe until Lofgren is onboard.
Many Tribal members feel that the Congresswoman is shaking down the Tribe on behalf of the Party’s financiers, essentially using her office to defend the interests of the gaming cartel that currently exists in California.
Who is funding opposition to Muwekma?
There are two leaders of gaming tribes in California whose callous behavior towards the struggle of California’s many wrongfully unrecognized tribes is particularly villainous: Chairman Marc Maccaro of Pechanga, and Chairman Greg Sarris of Graton Rancheria.
Maccaro has served as Tribal Chairman of Pechanga Band of Indians since 1991, and in 2002 broke ground on a large-scale casino that sits between San Diego and Los Angeles in Temecula, CA. Two years ago he was elected President of the National Congress of American Indians. The first thing he did upon becoming President was to introduce a resolution that would ban unrecognized tribes from becoming members of the organization, which was founded in 1944 to defend Indian sovereignty.
Greg Sarris is the Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which owns the Graton Casino Resort in Rohnert Park, CA, located about an hour and a half north of the Golden Gate Bridge. He has long funded lobbyists to oppose Muwekma’s affirmation in aim of protecting those gaming interests. Graton is currently planning a massive $1 billion expansion, which will include a doubling in the size of its gaming floor.
It’s unclear whether Democrats will buck the gaming interests that bankrolled the California Democratic Party, but with the waning influence of octogenarians like Pelosi and Lofgren, observers believe that scenario is increasingly likely.
Chairwoman Nijmeh has vowed to continue her activism in forthcoming iterations of the Trail of Truth, with a series of direct actions planned in California this year.
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