Chochenyo

For the language, see Chochenyo language.
Chochenyo
lisiánish Impt
Languages
Chochenyo language

The Chochenyo (also called Chocheño, Chocenyo) are one of the divisions of the Indigenous Ohlone (Costanoan) people of Northern California. The Chochenyo reside on the east side of the San Francisco Bay (the East Bay), primarily in what is now Alameda County, and also Contra Costa County, from the Berkeley Hills inland to the western Diablo Range.

Ohlone elders at Alisal Rancheria (now Pleasanton California)

Chochenyo (also called Chocheño and East Bay Costanoan) is also the name of their spoken language,[1] one of the Costanoan dialects in the Utian family. Linguistically, Chochenyo, Tamyen (also Tamien) and Ramaytush are thought to be close dialects of a single language.

The Ohlone tribes were hunter-gatherers who moved into the San Francisco Bay Region around 500 CE, displacing earlier Esselen people.[2][clarification needed] In Chochenyo territory, datings of the ancient Newark Shellmound, West Berkeley Shellmound, and Emeryville Shellmound attest to people residing in the Bay Area since 4000 BCE.[3]

Chochenyo territory was bordered by the Karkin to the north (at Mount Diablo), the Tamyen to the south and southwest, the San Francisco Bay to the west, and overlapped a bit with the Bay Miwok and Yokuts to the east.

The West Berkeley Shellmound, a Chochenyo shellmound

During the California Mission Era, the Chochenyos moved en masse to the Mission San Francisco de Asís (founded in 1776) in San Francisco, and Mission San José of Fremont (founded in 1797). Most moved into one of these missions and were baptized, lived and educated to be Catholic neophytes, also known as Mission Indians, until the missions were discontinued by the Mexican Government in 1834. Then the people found themselves landless. A large majority of the Chochenyo died from disease in the missions and shortly thereafter, only a fragment remaining by 1900. The speech of the last two native speakers of Chochenyo was documented in the 1920s in the unpublished fieldnotes of the Bureau of American Ethnology linguist John Peabody Harrington.

In 1925, Alfred Kroeber, then director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, declared the Ohlone extinct, which directly led to its losing federal recognition and land rights.[4]

Today, Chochenyo descendants have joined with the other San Francisco Bay Area Ohlone descendants under the name of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. As of 2007, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe were petitioning for U.S. federal recognition.[5]

In 2017 the tribe opened Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley focused on traditional Chochenyo foods and cultural restoration.[6]

  1. ^ Robert Bayley; Richard Cameron; Ceil Lucas (20 December 2012). The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 803–. ISBN 978-0-19-934407-9.
  2. ^ Teixeira, 1997.
  3. ^ Stanger, F. M. Editor La Peninsula Vol. XIV No. 4, March 1968, pg.
  4. ^ Brown, Patricia Leigh (2022-12-11). "Indigenous Founders of a Museum Cafe Put Repatriation on the Menu". The New York Times. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  5. ^ Ron Russell (2007-03-28). "The Little Tribe That Could. As descendants of San Francisco's aboriginal people, the Muwekma Ohlone Indian tribe seldom gets much respect. But that could be about to change". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on 2012-08-27. Retrieved 2012-07-24.
  6. ^ "Our Story". Cafe Ohlone. Retrieved 25 August 2024.