mak-warép Ohlone Land Conservancy’s Manner of Affecting Meaningful Change

Reacquiring and Actively Stewarding Land

We work to return Ohlone ancestral lands to Ohlone care through acquisition and long-term stewardship — managing those lands through cultural burns, traditional digging and aeration, seasonal coppicing, and the reintroduction of interconnected native plant communities suited to Bay Area microclimates. We study soil health and document the outcomes of our work with data to demonstrate the efficacy of Indigenous-led ecological restoration.

Practicing and Transmitting Traditional Culture

Our land-based work is inseparable from cultural practice. We gather traditional foods, medicines, and basketry materials; strengthen the Chochenyo; and share traditional knowledge intergenerationally within our Ohlone community — informed by our elders and by documentation recorded by community members in the 1920s and 1930s.

Building Partnerships That Advance Ohlone-Led Stewardship

We work alongside UC Berkeley, CSU East Bay Concord Center, fire agencies, and conservation organizations — bringing Indigenous-led land management into these partnerships on our own terms as experts on our ancestral landscape. We pursue government and institutional relationships that meaningfully acknowledge Ohlone history and culture and support land return.

Working Toward a Permanent Ohlone Land Base

Our long-term vision — Ohlone Land — is an East Bay site with restored gardens, cultural dining experiences, and private community space for Ohlone people: a place for harvest, ceremony, and gathering that has been denied to us since the 1927 disenfranchisement of the Sunol Rancheria.

Convening Ohlone and Non-Ohlone People Around Food and Culture

Through mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone, the only Ohlone restaurant in the world, we create dignified, beautiful spaces where Ohlone culture is represented in the culinary world and the public can learn Ohlone history and living culture directly from Ohlone people. We believe these encounters build respect and repair old wounds.