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What started as a research project for one San Jose high school student has recently transformed into a nonprofit organization with hundreds of members and chapters throughout the nation, all advocating for a shared cause: to address systemic inequities facing Indigenous communities.
In San Jose, where it all started in 2023, that advocacy involves lobbying for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe to gain the federal recognition the tribe says it lost due to a clerical omission in 1927, which some elected officials and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs have disputed.
For Aaron He, a senior at private high school Bellarmine College Preparatory, the impetus for founding the Indigenous Justice Coalition — which gained nonprofit status in June — was learning that the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe was one of many unrecognized tribes across the state.
“I found this to be deeply connected to me, because almost all my daily activities were on land that is unrecognized by the federal government,” He said. “One of the guiding principles for why I got involved with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is that if you can take away rights of one community, you can take away the rights of all.”
Federal recognition, as Indigenous Justice Coalition co-vice president Ayush Iyengar explains, is important to the tribe’s culture and land rights.
“If the tribe is not officially recognized as having ownership over the land that they’ve inhabited and lived on for years, then in the modern day, they don’t get protections over that land,” Iyengar said. “It allows anyone to go to their burial sites and sites that are very crucial to their culture and history and essentially just build buildings over it, completely erase it to the ground, because technically, it’s not officially recognized as their land.”
He and a handful of his peers who joined the Indigenous Justice Coalition have since visited Washington, D.C., to rally support from elected officials, launched 30 student-led Indigenous Justice Coalition chapters, organized numerous events and advanced research partnerships with professors at Stanford and Santa Clara universities to compile archival documentation and produce an academic paper to correct the historical record.
They have also written grant proposals and secured over $500,000 in funding to support Native student internships and to build an air quality app that will provide environmental updates and recommendations to tribal members.
Caleb Wang, Indigenous Justice Coalition co-vice president, said his own family’s experience as Indigenous people who had escaped Taiwan made him feel called to support the Muwekma.
“I joined Indigenous Justice Coalition to help these fellow Indigenous people,” Wang said. “We’re not the same, but we’re in this similar situation that my family was in the past. And through developing relationships with them – getting to know how their mothers and fathers fought this fight, how their kids down the line will continue to fight this fight – that really motivates me to continue helping.”
For Leo Billante, the nonprofit’s outreach officer, justice can only be measured by how well society treats the most disadvantaged.
“It’s heartwarming to see that there are hundreds of other students that have the same kind of sentiment,” Billante said. “We share an ethos of humanity.”
A history of petitioning for recognition
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has been through a longstanding fight for recognition. Its members once identified as the federally recognized Verona Band of Alameda County, which the Muwekma maintain was wrongly omitted from a Bureau of Indian Affairs field agent’s list of California Indians in 1927. Decades of inconsistent recordkeeping followed before the BIA produced an official list in 1978.
BIA documents record the tribe as having submitted a letter of intent to petition for federal acknowledgement in 1989 before the petition went through a full review starting in 2001. In 2002, while conceding that the Verona Band was identified as a tribal entity, the BIA rejected the Muwekma petition on the grounds that the modern group did not meet all seven mandatory criteria to become federally recognized.
The official determination states that the tribe “was not identified by external observers as an Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis, does not comprise a distinct community at present, and has not demonstrated that it maintained political influence or authority over its members at any time since 1927.”
The tribe challenged the decision in the 2011 federal court case Muwekma Ohlone Tribe v. Salazar, which upheld the BIA’s decision. When the tribe appealed, the U.S. Court of Appeals also sided against them in 2013.
Another source of resistance has been the concern that the tribe’s federal recognition could open the door to gaming. A 2023 letter signed by U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren, Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna and Jimmy Panetta — and addressed to Charlene Nijmeh, chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone — stated that they didn’t want casinos in their congressional districts due to concerns that gambling would negatively impact the communities they represent. The letter further asked whether the tribe would support legislation with a prohibition on gambling.
During an interview with a reporter, Nijmeh confirmed that the tribe is not currently looking into building a casino but didn’t want to give up the rights to do so, as she called gaming an economic tool that can help tribal communities. However, she pointed out that even with federal recognition, such a business venture would need to be approved locally.
The tribe, she said, is more concerned with its members gaining access to the benefits offered to other federally recognized tribes, including college tuition, housing, health care and the ability to purchase and protect sovereign land — with one of the biggest priorities being repatriation.
“Tens of thousands of our ancestors and artifacts are sitting at UC Berkeley, and we don’t have access to them,” Nijmeh said. “We cannot repatriate them back into the ground where they belong because you have to be a federally recognized tribe to claim cultural affiliation under the Native American Graves Protection Act.”
She hopes that through federal recognition, the Muwekma Ohlone can purchase 50 to 100 acres near Pleasanton or some other contiguous open space in Alameda County to build affordable homes for her living tribal members and bury the ancestors currently on display in museums.
“We’re still here. And we will keep fighting to be seen and to be heard in our community,” said Nijmeh. “We won’t stop. We teach our children just like we were taught to pick up the mantle and continue forward.”
— Story by Aly Brown, Bay City News Service
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