In the 1700s, the Spanish arrived in what is now called the San Francisco Bay Area and the Ohlone ways of life changed forever. Europeans brought the mission system; new foods such as wheat, sugar, and grapes; and animal husbandry, which required a different relationship to the land and produced dairy products that many Native peoples could not consume.
In the classroom, the third graders watched a news clip from the summer of 2020, when protestors in Golden Gate Park pulled down a statue of the Spanish priest Junípero Serra, who enslaved and murdered Ohlone people in the 18th century. Some students connected to the anger the protestors felt; others brainstormed different actions the protestors could have taken to express their dissent. We discussed how a community decides which people and whose stories to venerate and how many of us know at least a few Spanish names and words (for example, the city of “San Francisco”) but most of us do not know the corresponding names and words in Chochenyo, one of the Ohlone languages.
In the kitchen, we made a wheatberry salad featuring many of the ingredients California is now famous for that were introduced by the Spanish, including olives and citrus. Both hard and soft wheatberries work well for this recipe, as well as any cooked grains such as farro, barley, or rye berries.
