Diff for "ScandalOfCal"

The Scandal Of Cal

Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley

Tony Platt / Beaverton Lib. 378.7946 PLA

The book is an aggrieved rant; I did not read much of it.

I was motivated to purchase and read Malcolm Margolin's "The Ohlone Way", which has this paragraph on page 56:

• Rather than valuing possessions, the Ohlones valued generosity. Instead of having inheritance, which is a way of perpetuating wealth within a family, the Ohlones generally destroyed a person's goods after his or her death.

page 58:

• It was forbidden to speak of the dead, to mention their names, or to recount their deeds. All memory of the past -- and with it all sense of human history -- was buried with each generation.

The Ohlone might have considered archaeology blasphemous, if they allowed themselves to think about it.

California was claimed by Spain in 1602, and colonized/missionized after 1770. In 1821, the Mexican War of Independence wrested California from Spain, and soon after US settlers arrived. The US annexed California in 1848, and it became a state in 1850. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.

During that time, most indigenous people died of disease, and many were enslaved or massacred. 16,000 were left in 1900.

UC Berkeley was founded in 1868, when there were 30,000 indigenous people in all of California, and fewer than 1000 Ohlone left in California, almost none in the East Bay area. UC Berkeley is sited on land once occupied by Ohlone, but it did not displace the living Ohlone.

There are native remains buried under the City of Berkeley, and under the UC campus. There may be some native remains buried in the ground underneath my house. We all live where others lived and died. Living is not a crime. Platt writes as if it should be.

Platt is an Affiliated Scholar with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, and has taught courses at UCB. A "Progressive" rather than a producer, though he tells producers what to do. The producers mostly ignore him.

The book describes U.C. Berkeley's failure (mostly in the many decades ago) to follow Platt's dictums. There are probably more living Ohlone today than when UCB was founded; I wonder if Platt has personally helped any of those living people. Perhaps some would like to matriculate to UC Berkeley and learn something useful; how would Platt's dictums affect that?

Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber wrote that the Ohlone were extinct; he later backtracked and said their culture was extinct. Platt is offended by this - but Alfred Kroeber died in 1960 is also "extinct". His daughter Ursula Kroeber Le Guin lived in Portland, where I met her. She turned out well, and whatever mistakes her father made, she more than amply compensated for them with her writing, and her son Theo Downes-Le Guin's work.