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Evening at Cafe Ohlone

MOVED ONLINE - Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino: mak-huššištak / Our Vision

Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

**Due to coronavirus (COVID-19) precautions this event will not be public. Thank you for your understanding.**

A presentation by Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone), cofounders of mak-'amham and Cafe Ohlone, a restaurant pop-up at University Press Books in Berkeley devoted to the traditional foods of Bay Area Native peoples. They write:

“We are a Native American, Ohlone-run organization that operates in our indigenous homelands; we work to revive and strengthen traditional Ohlone foods for the wellness of our people. We work to keep our cuisine and culture strong to honor those before us who loved these powerful foods, and to have greater visibility for the Ohlone community that we are a part of.

“All our food is indigenous to California, specifically to the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area. All of the primary ingredients mak-'amham utilizes are foods that would be recognizable and attainable in the traditional Ohlone world before contact with outside forces. Our food represents true California cuisine, as these are the very first flavors of California before other foods and cuisines were brought here. We are proud to honor where we come from and who we come from. We are certain that our delicious Ohlone foods will speak to the dignity and sophistication of the community we descend from.”

Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone)
Vincent is a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the co-founder of mak-'amham and Cafe Ohlone. 

Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone)
Louis is a member of the Rumsen Ohlone community. He is the co-founder of mak-'amham and Cafe Ohlone.

We are two Ohlone people with the desire of following in the footsteps of those before us. Ohlone culture is vast, varied, and always beautiful and we are both proud of our Indian identities and active in the ongoing revival of our languages: Chochenyo from the East Bay, and Rumsen from the Carmel Valley. As we work together, and collectively with members of our communities, we work to decolonize; stripping away layers of imposed identity to return to what is ours. It's a process, but one that is ongoing and started far before we were born, and will carry on after we are gone. But we are certain that we will do everything in our capacity to continue to fight for what matters: the sacred, our culture, our families and our land. We strive to live as those before us did.

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu