Ramaytush

The Ramaytush (/rɑːmaɪtuʃ/) or Rammay-tuš people are a linguistic subdivision of the Ohlone people of Northern California. The term Ramaytush was first applied to them in the 1970s, but the modern Ohlone people of the peninsula have claimed it as their ethnonym.^[1][2] The ancestors of the Ramaytush Ohlone people have lived on the peninsula—specifically in the area known as San Francisco and San Mateo county—for thousands of years. Prior to the California Genocide, the Ohlone people were not consciously united as a singular socio-political entity. In the early twentieth century anthropologists and linguists began to refer to the Ramaytush Ohlone as San Francisco Costanoans—the people who spoke a common dialect or language within the Costanoan branch of the Utian family. Anthropologists and linguists similarly called the Tamyen people Santa Clara Costanoans, and the Awaswas people Santa Cruz Costanoans.

The homeland of the Ramaytush is largely surrounded by ocean and sea, the exception being the valley and the mountains to the southeast, home to the Tamyen Ohlone and Awaswas Ohlone, among others. To the east, across San Francisco Bay, what is now known as Alameda County is home to the Chochenyo Ohlone. To the north, across the Golden Gate, was a Huimen Miwok village. The northernmost Ramaytush local tribe—the Yelamu tribe of what is now San Francisco—was closely connected with the Huchiun Chochenyos of what is now Oakland, and members of the two tribes frequently intermarried at the time of Spanish colonization.^[3]

European disease took a heavy toll of life on all Indigenous people who came to Mission Dolores after its creation in 1776. The Ohlone people were forced to use Spanish resulting in the loss of their language. The Spanish rounded up hundreds of Ohlone people at Mission Dolores and took them to the north bay to construct Mission San Rafael. Although none of their villages survived, four branches of one lineage are known to have survived the genocide.^[4]

In 1925, Alfred Kroeber, then director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, declared the Ohlone extinct, which directly led to the tribe losing federal recognition and land rights.^[5]