MUWEKMA OHLONE News:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — This week the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay asked Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of New Mexico – the first Native American to serve in the role – to make the National Eagle Feather Repository accessible to the Tribe.

The repository is maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Current policy guidelines wrongly discriminate against unrecognized tribes, limiting access to the repository to members of federally recognized tribes. 

In her request for access to the repository, dated July 10 (included below), Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh asserts that the federal policy violates the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and should be changed immediately.

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe was previously federally recognized and has never been terminated by an act of Congress. All of the Tribe’s members descend from that previously recognized Tribe. A seven-year Stanford University genomic study conclusively linked the Tribe’s ten core lineages to a 2,000-year-old burial ground on their homelands. In 2022, a federal district court judge in the Northern District of California found that the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe retains its sovereign immunity despite being wrongly excluded from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ official list of recognized Tribes.

Indian Country has an enormous amount of hope for justice invested in Haaland’s historic tenure leading the Interior Department. The department includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs and has enormous control over federal lands, natural resources and the environment.

Nijmeh is planning a three-month-long journey across the United States by horseback from California to Washington, D.C. beginning next May. The journey will culminate at the U.S. Capitol where she will demand justice from Congress and the Biden Administration.

Muwekma Ohlone Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh said in a statement:

“Our religious practices and many of our ceremonies require these feathers, and to prevent our access to them would be a continuation of the federal government’s longstanding policy objective of eradicating us. 

“This is no small injustice. It is a deep and painful assault against us, intended to prevent us from practicing our traditions and keeping sacred ceremonies alive. This policy is just one small policy of the thousands of federal policies that were architected to destroy our People and to assimilate us out of existence. It’s an offense of the highest order, and it’s akin to Gov. Peter Burnett’s state-sponsored bounties on our heads.

“Forcible dispossession is an act of violence. The federal government has waged so much violence against us. They have taken so much, and they still want to take more – with a policy that attempts to sever us from our culture and prevent our ceremonial practices.

“Our ancestors fought too hard to survive so that we could be here. For us to sit silently and continue to endure the same policies of eradication from this administration would be unconscionable. We have an obligation to future generations to have a forward posture when it comes to the assertion of our sovereignty and the survival of our people.

“Maki Mak Muwekma.”

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s request for access to the repository: