Sidney Dearing

Few humans foraged the slough back then, although in the richly forested Oakland hills, Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone Indians seemed to have settled in a village along the banks of Indian Gulch Creek in an area that became known as Trestle Glenn. The Chochenyo fished the estuary, thanking Duck Hawk, the hero and benefactor who had made the earth a safe place for humans to live, for the food they took from it. By 1810, the Native Americans were gone, relocated to Mission San José by the Spaniards who had arrived with foreign presumptions: domination, possession, control. Title to the land passed, for the first time, into human hands.  

 

A Natural History of Oakland’s Lake Merritt, by Linda Watanabe McFerrin - January 1, 2001

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