By Staff Reporter
October 29, 2025 — In the fog-shrouded precincts of Oakland, where the ghosts of California’s missions still murmur beneath the freeways, a quiet revolution was supposed to be underway. Sacred land, long desecrated by concrete and commerce, would be returned to its stewards.
It was the kind of story that makes progressive donors swoon: redemptive, Instagram-ready, a balm for the colonial conscience.
Justice, in the form of a voluntary “land tax” from guilty settlers, would flow like manna to the descendants of the Ohlone people, those original inhabitants of the Bay Area who were nearly erradicated by Spanish friars, American ranchers, and, later, tech bros.
Enter Corina Gould, the self-styled chairwoman of the “Lisjan Nation,” a figure who, until recently, embodied this dream. With her poised eloquence and unyielding gaze, Gould had become a darling of the rematriation movement—the feminist twist on repatriation, emphasizing women’s leadership in reclaiming Indigenous territories. In March 2024, she stood triumphant as Berkeley’s city council voted to hand over the 2.2-acre West Berkeley Shellmound site, a once-sacred Ohlone burial ground flattened in 1999 for a fish-processing plant (now, inevitably, a parking lot).
The deal was bankrolled in part by a staggering $20 million infusion from the Kataly Foundation, the brainchild of Reegan Pritzker—Hyatt hotel scioness, heir to a $40 billion family fortune—and her husband, the investor Chris Olin.
It was Kataly’s largest grant, a cornerstone of its mission to “catalyze transformative change” through equity and justice initiatives. Gould, beaming alongside filmmakers and community elders, called it “healing for our people.” The site was deeded to her Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, and the Shuumi Land Tax—a symbolic “rent” paid by non-Natives on Ohlone territory—began raking in millions more, all funneled toward what was billed as collective restitution.
Cut to May 2025, and the idyll shatters like cheap crystal.
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe—the only previously federally recognized successor to the historic Verona Band of Alameda County, with roots etched in 1906 federal acknowledgments and unsevered by congressional termination—unleashes a blistering public statement.
Gould’s “Confederated Villages of Lisjan,” they charge, is no nation at all but a “pop-up tribe,” a meticulously fabricated fiction designed to hijack funds and history from the very people it claims to represent.
“This isn’t rematriation—it’s theft,” the tribe thunders, accusing Gould of siphoning donor dollars while systematically erasing Muwekma’s sovereignty. The statement, dense with genealogical footnotes and ethnographic citations, reads like a prosecutor’s brief: Gould is a documented descendant of Muwekma enrollees—her uncle John Guzman Jr., aunt Reyna Guzman Cerda, and sundry kin have held tribal numbers since 1995—yet she rebuffed membership in the 1990s to forge her own rogue identity.
Before 2005, the tribe alleges, she knew next to nothing of her lineage; it was Muwekma’s ethnohistorian, Alan Leventhal, who handed her the keys to her ancestry at her own behest. Armed with that intel, Gould didn’t join the fold. She invented one.
The “Confederated Villages of Lisjan” materialized in 2018, a linguistic chimera that leaves California anthropologists scratching their heads—no pre-2018 trace in ethnographic archives, no shared kinship ties, no constitution or governance to speak of.
It’s a “pure political fiction,” per the Muwekma indictment: a ragtag alliance of non-Ohlone activists from god-knows-where, unbound by blood or tradition, yet bold enough to redraw maps that conveniently “erase” Muwekma territory, redistributing it to other unrecognized “pop-up” entities.
Their websites hawk the Oakland burial ground as sovereign Lisjan turf, while the Shuumi tax—now a multimillion-dollar machine—allegedly funnels proceeds straight to Gould, rebranded as communal balm.
“Indigenous sovereignty isn’t a brand that can be bought and sold,” the tribe retorts, branding her a “non-enrolled Muwekma Ohlone Indian” unfit to lead, let alone to lead astray.
For Pritzker and Olin, the betrayal stings with the acuity of a velvet-gloved slap. Kataly, launched in 2019 as a vessel for their hundreds of millions in social-justice spending, had elevated Gould to icon status: podcast cameos on Scene on Radio, fireside chats extolling “reimagined economies,” even a 2024 episode where she and Pritzker tag-teamed on the virtues of “right relationship.”
Justice Funders, that convener of woke wealth, had hailed the shellmound purchase as a triumph. Yet here was the Muwekma’s gut punch: Donors like Kataly were “well-meaning entities who do not have a clue about the aboriginal and legal history” of the Ohlone.
There are three tribes with verifiable federal ties—Muwekma, Amah Mutsun, Esselen—each with lineages snaking back to the Mission era, when ancestors were shuttled like chattel among Dolores, San Jose, and Santa Clara, their lives a grim pageant of forced labor and erasure.
A 2009 National Park Service study by anthropologists Randall Milliken, Lawrence Shoup, and Beverly Ortiz—mapping Ohlone connections to the San Francisco Peninsula—mentions Gould not at all, despite her decade-plus of activism. It’s a glaring omission, one that underscores the tribe’s core grievance: In the rush to fund “decolonization,” philanthropists skipped the homework.
Pritzker’s family, synonymous with five-star lobbies and boardroom polish, poured faith (and fortune) into a movement that prized intention over interrogation. Now, as Sogorea Te’ soldiers on with a glossy website touting the shellmound as a “victory for all Ohlone people”—Gould’s bio still aglow with lifetime-achievement baubles—the questions mount.
Will Kataly demand a clawback, or hunker down in donor denial, lest they admit to bankrolling a sovereignty-shattering sleight of hand?
Gould’s tumble joins a rogues’ gallery of “pretendians”—those spectral claimants who’ve haunted Indigenous spaces from coast to coast. Recall the 2021 defenestration of a faux Cherokee posing as Lenape royalty, or the ongoing East Coast reckonings with self-anointed “tribes” hawking casino dreams sans a shred of lineage.
In California, a state teeming with over 100 unrecognized groups clawing for scraps of recognition and resources, the stakes feel biblical. Gould’s rise, greased by alliances with progressive nonprofits and filmmaker allies like Toby McLeod, lays bare the vetting void in billionaire benevolence: a frontier where good intentions collide with grift, and the ghosts of missions mock the lot.
For Pritzker, whose Kataly ethos orbits “transformative change,” this is less a scandal than a mirror—reflecting the hubris of atonement on autopilot. In the end, true rematriation isn’t scripted with TED Talks or tax-deductible checks; it’s forged in the unyielding light of truth, where fictions dissolve and the real stewards, long sidelined, finally claim the stage. Whether the Bay Area’s philanthropists can summon that rigor remains the open wound in this particular healing.
Be the first to comment