4597 Shellmound Street, Emeryville 94608
If you head to the Bay Street Mall on the day after Thanksgiving—known widely as Black Friday and as the start of the Christmas shopping season—you may find Native people and their allies gathering here at the Emeryville Shellmound Memorial.
They’ll be encouraging shoppers to take their money to other places, where businesses are not built on the bones of Ohlone ancestors. They don’t mean this metaphorically, but quite literally: this mall was developed on top of an Ohlone shellmound, one of the ritual burial sites that once thickly dotted the East Bay landscape.
Shellmound refers to ceremonial burial grounds made of layers of shells, human remains, and other materials. Non-Native settlers, if they acknowledged the shellmounds at all, have largely viewed them as archaeological novelties, rather than recognizing that they are sites of spiritual or religious importance.
Some 425 such burial sites were documented in the region in 1909, but nearly all
have been bulldozed or buried in a century of urban development. The region’s largest once stood about sixty feet high, right here at the mouth of Temescal Creek. It was excavated in sections over the years, first covered by an amusement park and then a factory. In the 1990s the local redevelopment agency repurposed the area to build the Bay Street Mall. As the mall’s construction moved forward, community members demanded that the city of Emeryville engage in careful preservation and recognition of the shellmound site and its remains.
Emeryville’s leaders voted against shellmound preservation, however, and instead agreed to develop this memorial, in recognition of the approximate location of the shellmound. Native people widely view it as a site of desecration. Even though the memorial’s presence means that the Ohlone’s long presence is recognized here, the memorial suggests that their experience is largely historical—perhaps an ancient story that cannot be retraced. This erases the contemporary Ohlone presence and their request to respect ancestors buried there. So, although some form of memorial is probably better than none, it remains part of the pattern of ignoring the contemporary presence of Native people.
There has been another important contemporary shellmound struggle underway a few miles north in Berkeley, where a proposed development in the Fourth Street shopping district has long threatened to unearth burial grounds and other remains. Early phases of construction at 1900 Fourth Street disturbed human remains, giving force to a campaign to pressure the Berkeley Planning Commission to protect the site—which was already designated as a historic landmark.