Interview with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino of Cafe Ohlone
Vincent (left) and Louis (right) at Cafe Ohlone, image courtesy of Cafe Ohlone
Here at Wild Oyster Project, I often talk about how native Olympia oysters have been found in the Bay Area for thousands of years and were a staple of the Ohlone people. Oftentimes the history of oysters begins with the Ohlone and ends with the Gold Rush, misplacing the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area and Olympia oysters as something that happened in the past. I had the good fortune to speak with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, the cofounders of Cafe Ohlone and mak-’amham, about living Ohlone culture and the importance of eating where you live. I am very grateful to Vincent and Louis for taking the time to speak with me for the Wild Oyster Project.
- Casey Harper, Deputy Director
Casey: To start, can you tell me a little more about yourselves and about Cafe Ohlone?
Vincent: horše ṭuuxi. I am Vincent Medina and I’m Chochenyo Ohlone. It’s important to know there are many tribes collectively known as the Ohlone. Louis and I are both Ohlone but from different parts and different tribes. For example, I am from the Halkin area in the East Bay which runs from South Oakland to Hayward where we speak the Chochenyo language. Ohlone people are a multicultural, multilingual series of independent nations that are closely connected.
Louis: I'm Louis Trevino, cofounder of Cafe Ohlone with Vincent, and I'm Rumsen Ohlone. Our lands are in Monterey, in the area around Elkhorn Slough and Carmel Valley, and we speak Rumsen Ohlone.
Vincent: Cafe Ohlone was born out of mak-’amhamam, a cultural nonprofit we started in September 2017. mak-’amham means “our food” in the Chochenyo language. At that time, there was a groundswell in the revitalization of Ohlone language and culture and we wanted to see Ohlone food traditions become a part of that. Cafe Ohlone was opened in September 2018 and led food gathering trips, cooking classes, and served formal dinners. Cafe Ohlone is the public face of the community work we do behind the scenes, providing a place for Ohlone people to be seen and represented, especially for the approximately one thousand Ohlone living in the East Bay.
Casey: Speaking of Ohlone food traditions, what are the traditional ways of harvesting, preparing and eating oysters? Can oysters be found on your menu?
Vincent: We do have oysters on the menu which we get from Tomales Bay, we are very happy to be able to source oysters from an area so close. We look forward to having native Olympia oysters on the menu in the future. The Ohlone have always been stewards of the land, managing the landscape. An example of this would be the salt ponds that were originally constructed back in ancient times. Ohlone would collect shellfish in the area around salt ponds with digging sticks made from either wood (manzanita or oak) or deer bone to pry the oysters from the rocks and mud. They would be collected in burden baskets or trays and prepared a number of ways like being cooked in an underground earthen oven, or strung on a dogbane cord and smoked and then eaten with acorn bread. It was a very refined way of eating oysters and would be part of a grand feast eaten on top of a shellmound.
Casey: Shellmounds are found all through the Bay Area, can you talk about the importance of Shellmounds to Ohlone culture?
Vincent: A shellmound is a mortuary complex. When a person passed away, they were buried in the shellmound with shells like oyster, clam, olivella, and abalone carefully placed over them in a very ceremonious way. It was about returning to the earth, returning to the landscape, and it was a slow process performed over thousands of years. There is evidence people were in California forty thousand years ago. Shellmounds were so massive by the time Europeans arrived they used them as navigational landmarks.
Louis: There is an intact shellmound cut by a creek which over generations and thousands of years of Ohlone use, has grown and become covered in vegetation and earth, and over the same amount of time the creek has cut down while the Ohlone have built up, thus creating a canyon. If you were looking at this hill and canyon, you would think it’s a natural formation, but it is the work of Ohlone people over many many years. A shellmound is not in stark contrast with the surrounding landscape, it is part of it.
Vincent: In January 2020, before the pandemic had come to California, we had a shellmound feast at Cafe Ohlone. It was about teaching people what shellmounds are all about. Shellmounds were places where we could gather and be close to our ancestors, with every generation of our family. By making the same foods with the same ingredients - meals of finely prepared oysters, clams, sea greens, acorn bread and berries, we are eating and experiencing the same flavors they did and connecting to them through this incredible depth of time.
Casey: Oyster aficionados often talk about the "merroir" of oysters - how the flavor of oysters encapsulates the environment in which they're grown. The same species of oyster grown in Tomales Bay doesn’t taste the same as an oyster from Puget Sound. Can you talk about the importance of food reflecting the land where it is grown?
Vincent: All the foods we feature at Cafe Ohlone are indigenous to this specific part of California. California is a large place and we never wanted to say we’re making the “indigenous food of California” because that would be an overstatement. We wanted to respect this place specifically,with all of its abundance. There are microclimates from Tuyshtak (Mt Diablo), to the hills, and down to the shoreline creating all these different foods. The Ohlone have no word for famine, but we do have a word for abundance. There were always alternatives. If the acorns didn’t come in, there was the fruit of the buckeye tree.
Cafe Ohlone intentionally highlights pre-contact foods. Through deep conversations with our elders and going through family archives recorded in the 1920s, we’re taking a long step back and looking at what traditionally was here. There was a real tie with the suppression of our culture and the suppression of the landscape. We wanted to highlight that the menu, like the landscape, is seasonal and always changing. Right now is the time for acorns which will be very central to the menu. In the fall the mushrooms like chanterelles and oyster mushrooms start to come in and we have more game like smoked venison and fried duck. Winter is a time of being inside, being together, and telling stories, so we have a lot of heavy foods like hearty stews with indian potatoes, broth made with mussels and clams and seaweed fried in duck fat, and warm teas made with rosehips and sage. The spring has lots of fresh greens like Indian lettuce (claytonia) and in the summer you have berries - strawberries, thimbleberries, gooseberries etc with these sweet colorful juices . It’s a cycle that makes sense, in the fall you prepare for winter, after heavy winter eating you need to cleanse your body with springtime greens which then prepares you for energizing summer foods. That’s the sophistication of traditional eating.
Casey: I should have eaten before this interview, that sounds so delicious.
Louis: Pre-contact foods were given to our people at the time of our creation, given and taught to us and are very place specific. All these foods are deeply connected to the land and all those things that come to our land were selected from by the Ohlone, like oysters, so we would like to have an active role in seeing oysters restored.
Casey: At Wild Oyster Project we envision the future of San Francisco Bay as a hybrid landscape that serves people and wildlife. We can’t restore the bay to a pre-gold rush state and remove decades of pollution and industrialization, but it can still also be wild, with a resilient and robust bay ecosystem. Environmental restoration often invokes this idea of resetting the clock on a landscape but really it’s about finding the best way forward.
Vincent: Life is interconnected and we know how resilient plants and animals can be. One time we were picking up clams from Tomales Bay and unfortunately they were packed in this styrofoam container. While we were trying to figure out how to best get rid of the styrofoam, a Ceanothus moth landed on it and laid eggs. At that point we had no choice but to keep the styrofoam container because now these beautiful native moths were growing on it.
Casey: Yeah, we’ve seen oysters growing on shopping carts thrown into creek mouths and on big styrofoam blocks used as dock floats at marinas. Oysters are out there, nature is out there, it just needs a place to land.
Vincent: Europeans wrote back in the 1700s that when they first arrived to the East Bay, it looked like park land with these interconnecting boulevards between the oak trees that ran from the hills to the coast. Those boulevards were essentially used as highways and were black with the ash from controlled burns. Ohlone stewardship of the land was so specific to place and so in tune with the land, it wasn’t necessarily visible to outsiders. Controlled burns as an example, do not just remove overgrowth, but loosen and aerate the soil, and open up meadows, and are carefully planted afterwards. The abundance that Europeans observed was a result of careful planning and management and deep knowledge.
Casey: Cafe Ohlone is reopening in November at the new location on Berkeley campus. Since closing for the pandemic in March of 2020, what has that journey been like?
Vincent: Community work involves everything we do. Since the pandemic started we’ve done 70 weeks of online Zoom language classes. Every Friday Louis leads the Rumsen language class and Thursdays I lead the Chochenyo class. Throughout the pandemic we’ve been thinking a lot about different foods introduced throughout our history. We reached for comfort foods that made us feel good in a hard time and we thought about food our grandparents would make, like slow chilis from the mission/rancheria times which were adopted into culinary traditions and “Ohlone-ized” with native ingredients and flavors. For example, my family makes a Chili Colorado with venison, oyster mushrooms, and california bay, so the only thing not traditional is red chili. And Louis’ family makes Albondigas with venison, native greens, and meatballs made with amaranth seed and chanterelles. We’re very mindful of incorporating those dishes that were brought in from outside and turned into an Ohlone dish. It reinforces to the public that Ohlone people have been here every step of the way and it is a living culture with new things being adopted.
Casey: I've heard a lot about the brownies and can't wait to finally try one, do you have a favorite dish?
Louis: For me, it’s acorn bread. It’s about a six month process from the time of the acorn dropping to serving it. You have to grind it, cure it, leach it, and turn it into flour so fine it passes through the weave of a basket. You don’t do that if you don’t value that food. It requires a relationship with acorns, there is so much care and love there.
Vincent: Bay nut truffles are such a specific food to this area. The nuts are gathered from the Bay tree, the nut is shelled, it’s roasted, ground down for oil and hand shaped into truffles. It tastes like dark chocolate and espresso, it’s a big energy hit. It’s wrapped in a single piece of Indian lettuce with one dried strawberry on top. It’s one perfect complex bite.
Casey: What can you tell us about the new location?
Vincent: It’s a soft reopening in November with a grand reopening happening in January. It will be a much larger version of the original Cafe Ohlone, and it’s going to feel like walking into an Ohlone village - there will be baskets and murals on display, Ohlone language will be projected on the walls, crushed shells on the ground, and with live music performances. It will be a very, very beautiful space.
It was a pleasure speaking with Vincent and Louis about their work. It is evident they have put in countless hours talking to elders, researching, recreating, and innovating the sophisticated dishes they serve and strengthening their community. Their faces light up when describing the new Cafe Ohlone and I can’t wait to experience it myself.
Wild Oyster Project works to restore native oysters throughout the unceded ancestral homelands of the Ohlone peoples. Most of our work these days is done from home in San Francisco and Oakland, whose original inhabitants are the Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone. At the Wild Oyster Project, we talk about oysters being part of a holistic approach to ecosystem restoration. We acknowledge we are guests in this land and that holistic approach includes centering indigenous voices who have always been and continue to be its stewards. We must embrace Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in how we care for our cities lands, waters, and all its people.