Monica V. Arellano

Including the perspectives and voices of Native people is a crucial component of public engagement with California’s Spanish colonial mission sites. This project supports the implementation of community-developed plans, disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, to enhance the public interpretation of Indigenous Ohlone history at Mission Santa Clara on the present-day campus of Santa Clara University. University personnel and Ohlone partners will co-create public-facing interpretive materials, including a multimedia display, that honor the Native people who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara between 1777 and the 1840s. Funding supports archival research, community collaboration, student involvement, and display fabrication and installation. Local partners for this project include the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Ohlone Indian Tribe.

This proposal supports the completion of a ten-stop Thámien Ohlone Augmented Reality Tour for mobile phones that engages the public with Native Californian history, culture, and persistence at the site of Mission Santa Clara and Santa Clara University from precontact times through colonization and projecting into the future. Co-created with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in recognition of the tribe’s rhetorical sovereignty, or inherent right to tell their own stories on their own terms, this place-based project seeks to highlight Native experiences of colonization and cultural persistence by virtually emplacing Indigenous narratives, languages, and material culture on the modern landscape, creating opportunities for cultural knowledge sharing within and for the tribal community in the process.