Bay Area Indians’ Questionable ClaimsNew DNA evidence concerning the origins of San Francisco's Muwekma Ohlone tribe has been largely misrepresented by the press.
MAY 3, 2022
ELIZABETH WEISS
The Muwekma Ohlone tribe has been making headlines. USA Today declares “The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe was declared ‘extinct’ in the 1920s. New DNA research says otherwise”, while the New York Times writes, “New DNA Analysis Supports an Unrecognized Tribe’s Ancient Roots in California,” and Smithsonian Magazine reports “This Native American Tribe Wants Federal Recognition. A New DNA Analysis Could Bolster Its Case: The new findings could help Muwekma Ohlone prove they never went ‘extinct’.”
These articles, and many others in local newspapers, fundamentally misunderstand the ethnographic work of Alfred L. Kroeber, U.C. Berkeley’s first professor of anthropology. Worse still, they misunderstand, or perhaps misrepresent, the new DNA evidence, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), regarding the Muwekma Ohlone, who are seeking federal recognition. That recognition could result in a huge payout in terms of valuable Bay Area land.
In the USA Today article, journalist Celina Tebor writes that A.L. Kroeber, in his monumental 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California, was mistaken to conclude that the Muwekma Ohlone were extinct. DNA evidence published in PNAS, Tebor writes, shows links between nearly 2,000 year-old remains found in the San Francisco Bay Area and the modern Muwekma Ohlone tribe, which is then used to conclude that the Muwekma Ohlone are not extinct.
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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bay-area-indians-questionable-claims/
