For more than 30 years, Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan has been on a quest: To memorialize more than 5,000 indigenous people buried in the mission’s cemetery, some of whom are Galvan’s own ancestors.
Galvan, a former archaeological consultant, remembers visiting Monsignor John O’Connor at Mission Dolores, the basilica’s pastor from 1983 to 1999, in the early 1990s, when the historic site was getting ready for a post-Loma Prieta seismic retrofit.
“We were having afternoon tea. He brought out the burial register and baptismal records, and we found my ancestors,” he said.
Galvan’s ancestor, Liberato Culpecse, was baptized in 1801 at Mission Dolores, but later moved to Mission San Jose. Culpecse’s parents, Jobocme and Poylemja, are buried in the mission’s cemetery, along with 5,700 other indigenous people, in unmarked graves. After seeing their names in these 200-year-old books, Galvan started thinking about ways to make all those ancestors more visible.
“I’ve collected the names of the Indians who were here during the Mission period,” Galvan said one afternoon in January, sitting in the pews of the old mission church. “Originally, I thought I could add an adobe wall and create plaques with all of the names. But even in 1992, it would have cost $1 million.”
Today, Galvan hopes to build a new, bigger museum on the Mission Dolores property that would include space for a plaque bearing the 5,700 names. The mission already has a small, one-room museum, but this one would extend into the adjacent playground for Mission Dolores Academy — which is part of the mission property, and was built over part of the mission’s cemetery. But the price tag has gone up: Galvan estimates the museum would cost $3 million to $4 million to build, and has only received donations covering a fraction of that amount.
As he pursues his quest, Galvan said he’ll need to reach out to local tribal groups to get their input.
“It would be a wonderful way for us to bring it into conversation, their actual names,” said Corinna Gould, co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Oakland, the only local tribal group to respond to Mission Local’s requests for comment. “Giving them names helps to humanize them, which has been difficult for a long time in the Bay Area.”
Indigenous people have lived on the San Francisco peninsula for more than 13,000 years. In San Francisco, the Ramaytush Ohlone lived in several villages, including one near the present-day mission site, called Chutchui, on the banks of a waterway they named Ehwate. When Franciscan monks, under the guidance of Junipero Serra, arrived in 1776, they decided that Chutchui was the perfect site to build a mission.
The Franciscans forced indigenous residents into labor. The mission church and other structures, including barns and barracks, were constructed by indigenous hands; not just Ohlone, but also Pomo, Miwok, Patwin and Wappo people from the wider Bay Area.
Missionaries baptized the indigenous people who lived and worked at the mission, stripping them of their given names and rebranding them with Spanish ones. The hard work, near-starvation rations and waves of infectious illness killed thousands of indigenous people at the site. Galvan wants their names — their indigenous names — to be known again.
Facing the steep cost of creating a memorial in the ‘90s, Mission leaders put Galvan’s memorial plaque idea on the back burner. O’Connor moved to another post in 1997, and it wasn’t until Galvan was hired as the mission’s curator in 2004 that he picked up the idea again. He wrote a number of proposals and grant requests, including one to the California Missions Foundation for what he called an “Indian memorial” at Mission Dolores.
“The response I got from the committee was, “What about the names of the Spanish and Irish people buried there?’” Galvan recalled. “I said, ‘It says Indian memorial.’” The grant wasn’t approved.
In 2009, the mission hired Galvan’s cousin, Vincent Medina (who’s now co-founder of Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley) as assistant curator, and the cousins took matters into their own hands. They bought a pair of redwood boards from Home Depot and carved the names of Jobocme and Poylemja — who are Medina’s ancestors, too — into the wood. They now stand in the mission cemetery.
“The grave marker in the center of the cemetery is a tangible piece that visitors, community members, and family members can visit that gives proof to specific Native people buried at Mission Dolores. It gives recognition to two of the individuals that are interred there, and even without much label copy tells a story that is necessary to tell,” Galvan and Medina wrote in an academic article published in 2018.
In that article, they proposed projecting the indigenous dead’s names onto a wall at Mission Dolores. That, too, proved difficult and expensive: None of the mission’s current spaces are quite dark enough, and the projector would burn through about $150 a month in lightbulbs.
In any case, “I want something permanent, and having it adjacent to the graves makes the most sense,” Galvan said. In 2022, he assisted in creating a similar monument at the Franciscan mission in Sonoma, which reads, “In this sacred grounds lie buried men, women and children of the local Coast Miwok, Patwin, Wappo and Pomo tribes. They built, labored and died at Mission San Francisco Solano.” The site includes a stone etched with the names of 896 indigenous people buried there.
Burying people in the ground and marking them with individual stones isn’t the traditional way local indigenous people honor their ancestors, though many do it that way today, said Gould, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust co-founder. Historically, most buried their dead in large shellmounds that were built up with seashells, earth and other materials, and located them within their villages, so the living wouldn’t be separated from them, she said.
Sogorea Te’ works in the East Bay to reclaim local land and steward it in indigenous ways. Recently, the nonprofit opened ‘Ookwe Park through an adopt-a-park program in Richmond, where tribes will grow and harvest medicinal plants, including yerba buena, mugwort, wild strawberries and soaproot. The site once held a shellmound, which was destroyed in the construction of the Officer Bradley Moody Memorial Underpass, Gould said.
It also purchased the embattled West Berkeley Shellmound site in March, formerly the location of a village and massive shellmound that covered many city blocks, all the way to the waterfront. The group plans to unearth Strawberry Creek, currently streaming underground, and build a new, poppy-covered shellmound that visitors can climb.
“We can show the magnitude of what a shellmound was. People can stand up high and see, similar to what my ancestors would have seen,” Gould said. The site will represent “not just the past and the horrific things that happened, but the resilience.”
Although Gould thinks Galvan is on the right track, she called the Mission Dolores memorial “a first step.” The Catholic Church extensively harmed the indigenous people of California, and owes them “some kind of reciprocity,” or even giving Chutchui land back to the Ramaytush Ohlone, she said.
Jonathan Cordero, founder and executive director of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, said the organization is working on some land-back initiatives in San Francisco, but none involving the Mission Dolores area. He declined to comment on the memorial plan.
For now, it’s unclear whether Mission Dolores will be able to raise enough money to bring its indigenous dead back into the light. Donations of any amount are welcome, Galvan said.
Disclosure: Beth Winegarner donates a small amount of money each year to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone.
Could be people inhabited the region 13k years ago, but at that time there was yet to be a San Francisco peninsula as land extended to somewhere near the Farralons and the Bay was a river confluence.
Excellent work.
RL E, have you read the book COOL GRAY CITY OF LOVE? A description of this area and the animals which inhabited it during the time you mentioned is given. Amazing! Also might want to check out THE DEVIL’S TEETH: You’ll never again see the Farallon Islands in the same way!
Thanks for your article about naming/memorializing the indigenous dead at Mission Dolores. I live in the neighborhood and did not know about this effort.
At the end of the article is a link to donate. It takes me to the Catholic church’s Mission Dolores site, with no option to designate my donation to Galvan’s project. No thanks. I do know about Sogorea Te’ and will consider them instead.
Thank you, Beth! Another fascinating story about what lies beneath, informative and poignant. (Haven’t been inside Mission Dolores in a long time. Always understood that indigenous people who did not “convert” were unceremoniously interred into “unconsecrated” ground: A field that is now part of Dolores Street. Do you know if that is true?)
Walter, I don’t know if any of that is true (though, considering most of them were forced to convert, I’m not sure if there would be any such division). In my book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries,” I write about the fact that many, many graves that were once located in the ground now covered by Dolores Street had to be moved, so that Dolores could be widened in the late 19th century. The same thing happened when 16th was extended east past the Mission. Most/all of those graves were relocated to within the current grounds, as I understand it, but there’s (almost literally) always more to uncover.
‘Forced to convert’. What does that mean exactly? Accepting a certain way of life to live within the confines of the mission, sure. We expect that of people in any institutional culture today. But the expectation of a renewal of life by conversion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Maybe, maybe not. The indigenous peoples obviously saw some advantage in being associated with the mission culture. Not understanding something doesn’t mean someone did something wrong and using 21st century sensibility as a lense into 18th century culture and life is a category error…just saying….
That’s a bit like saying African slaves “saw some advantage” to being enslaved, which is horrifying and wrong.
Thank you? By the way, where can I purchase “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries”?
Everywhere books are sold! 🙂
P.S. Oops! I meant to put an exclamation point after “Thank you”.