Tag Archives: Ohlone

June 14, 2011 · 8:28 pm

“Ten Years” Tour: Using New Technology for History

Chris Carlsson installing a "Ten Years" plaque at 2937 - 24th Street. 2011 photo by LisaRuth Elliott/Shaping San Francisco.

In the recently published Ten Years that Shook the City: San Francisco, 1968-1978, editor Chris Carlsson and the contributing essayists argue that the years 1968-1978 saw important innovations in grassroots political mobilization in San Francisco. These innovations included new directions in environmental justice work; changes in student, labor and immigrant organizing; housing rights and anti-gentrification campaigns; and unprecedented interventions against racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Accompanying the publication of the book is the release of a self-guided walking tour. The tour covers twenty-four sites in the Mission District, and each site is related to an essay that appears in Ten Years (a map of the sites is available for free at City Lights, The Green Arcade, and other local bookstores, galleries, and cafés; and can be ordered online for $5). Visitors to each tour site can dial (877) 919-7464 to hear an audio recording by the essays’ authors about the sites – similar to audio tours by phone offered at some museum exhibitions.

What is especially innovative about the Ten Years tour is the use of on-site QR (“quick response”) codes. Posted at each of the twenty-four sites is a plaque identifying the location as part of the Ten Years tour. Visitors can use their smartphones to scan the QR code featured on the plaque, automatically opening one of twenty-four webpages on their phone. For example, visitors to 3030B – 16th St., near the site of the former San Francisco American Indian Center, can find a Ten Years tour plaque that includes the following QR code:

QR code for "Reflections from Occupied Ohlone Territory"

When this QR code is scanned from the “Ten Years” plaque (or from this computer screen) with a smartphone, a webpage opens on the phone with an excerpt of Mary Jean Robertson’s essay, “Reflections from Occupied Ohlone Territory.” The webpage also features an audio file of Ms. Robertson reading from her essay. The audio file can be heard by clicking on the “play” button of the audio bar, or, if visitors are using an iPhone, an mp3 of the recording can be downloaded.

This is not the first time Chris Carlsson has used of emerging technology to deliver historical content. Carlsson is one of the founding members of Shaping San Francisco, a grassroots project dedicated to documenting underrepresented aspects of the history of labor, ecology, transportation, and political activism in San Francisco. Beginning in 1998, the Shaping San Francisco team had developed some of this historical content and made it available in the form of CD-ROMs. Perhaps more interestingly, Carlsson and his colleagues also installed 6 public kiosks around they city – including locations such as Rainbow Grocery, Modern Times Bookstore, and the Anarchist Book Fair. The kiosks featured desktop computers that were not connected to the Internet, but whose hard drives contained of the content from the CD-ROMs. Together, the CD-ROMs and the public kiosks were intended to make this historical content as accessible to as many potential users as possible. Furthermore, users were encouraged to submit original content themselves – such as oral histories and historic photographs – for future upgrades of Shaping San Francisco.

By 2009, however, the Shaping San Francisco team had phased the kiosks out. The team migrated the historical content from the CD-ROMs and kiosks to a new format – an online wiki called FoundSF. By choosing to use a wiki, the Shaping San Francisco team was again implementing an emerging technology. The FoundSF wiki has been supported by both CounterPULSE and the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society.

Although stand-alone kiosks with no Internet connection became obsolete, at the time of their debut they were a groundbreaking use of new technology. Similarly, wikis and QR codes might eventually be superceded by other ways of delivering historical content. However the new trends develop, Carlsson and his colleagues may well continue to blaze trails by acting as early adopters of emerging technology to make historical content as widely available as possible.

Recreating the Mission Dolores Mural in a New Setting

Mission Dolores mural detail, courtesy of Ben Wood

In 1791, local Ohlone artists painted a 20′ x 22′ mural on a wall of the sanctuary at Mission Dolores. Currently, however, that mural is hidden behind a massive 1796 reredos, or wooden altar. In 2004, artist Ben Wood and archeologist Eric Blind devised a means to digitally photograph a 5′ x 22′ portion of the mural without moving the altar – a project that earned them the 2004 Governor’s Historic Preservation Award. Now, Wood is overseeing a project to recreate that portion of the mural in a public setting a few blocks away.

Wood consulted Annice Jacoby’s 2009 publication, Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo, and found the names of artists Megan Wilson and Jet Martinez – both of whom have been active in the Clarion Alley Mural Project. Martinez was interested Wood’s proposal to recreate the Mission Dolores mural, and had already been in communication with Jeremy Shaw, Executive Director of the Mission Community Market, about the possibility of creating a mural on the wall of Mission Market at 85 Bartlett Street (between 21st and 22nd Streets). The Mission Community Market (MCM) is a nonprofit that began in 2010 as part of the San Francisco Planning Department’s Mission District Streetscape Plan. It organizes a weekly open-air farmer’s market at Bartlett and 22nd Streets that also provides a venue for local Mission businesses and arts and youth organizations. Shaw had been meeting with neighborhood business owners about the possibility of putting murals on the walls around the MCM. Martinez, Wood and Shaw felt that a recreation of the Mission Dolores mural would be an appropriate beginning for a larger mural project in the area. The owner of Mission Market was amenable to having the mural painted on the outside of his store; and through Megan Wilson, Ben Wood met two other local artists – Bunnie Reiss and Ezra Eismont – who, along with Martinez, signed on to paint the mural.

Wood has invited Mission Dolores staff to collaborate on an interpretive panel that would accompany the mural, in the hopes of highlighting the stewardship and programming at Mission Dolores in relation to its historic resources. Wood has also consulted with Charlene Sul, Chair of the Advisory Council for The Confederation of Ohlone Peoples about the project. More recently, Wood has been in conversation with Sul’s son, Anthony, about the possibility of his participation in the painting of the mural. Through these and other Native contacts, Wood has been soliciting input about the mural’s creation, presentation, and interpretation.

Wood has created a video about the project to assist in his goal of raising $8,300 by April 4. For additional information about the project, please visit the Mission Dolores Mural website.

“Indigenous Renewal” – Commemorating Native American Activism

Alcatraz Welcome, 2009 photo by Jackie Sutherland.

On the evenings of Wednesday, November 25 and Thursday, November 26, a series of film and still images will be projected onto Coit Tower to mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of Alacatraz Island by a coalition of Native American activists. The project, called “Indigenous Renewal: Alcatraz Occupation Remembrance + Ohlone Presence Celebrated,” represents a collaboration of San Francisco-based artists Ben Wood and David Mark. Neil Maclean, as part of the Ohlone Profiles Project, also invited a number of other contributions from local native supporters and some Ohlone. In conjunction with the projection on Coit Tower, a running commentary about the images will be broadcast on KPOO San Francisco 89.5 FM.

On November 20, 1969, a coalition of Native Americans – many of them college students – took over Alacatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in an unarmed occupation that would last until June 10, 1971. At its height on Thanksgiving, 1969, as many as approximately 400 Native activists occupied the island. Alcatraz had been abandoned as a federal prison facility since 1963, and although the U.S. Coast Guard established a blockade of the island at the beginning of the occupation and the FBI were poised to land, the federal government withheld action until the numbers of activists dwindled to about 15 in 1971. The inital occupying party, calling itself Indians of All Tribes, demanded that Alcatraz be developed as a Native cultural center, including programs such as a museum and a center for Native studies. More broadly, the activists drew attention to a wide range of Native issues related to sovereignty, repatriation and civil rights.

Ben Wood described to me the variety of sources from which he selected footage and images that will be projected on Coit Tower. These include images of the occupation that archivist Alex Cherian of the San Francisco State University Special Collections & Archives helped Wood to find. Eric Blind, Presidio Trust Archaeologist, provided imagery related to his work in repatriating Native artifacts. Andrew Galvan, the curator at the Mission Dolores and himself an Ohlone, made it possible for Wood to shoot footage of the 1790s Ohlone mural hidden behind the reredos in the Mission. In addition to these cultural heritage professionals, Neil Maclean built relationships with a wide net of Ohlone and other Native people and their allies throughout the Bay Area, who provided additional imagery and participated in the project. The resulting collection of images had also been used on by these artists on previous projects involving projections on Coit Tower in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Among the content that will be projected this year will be:

Alcatraz Is Not an Island, by James Fortier
Rendezvouz with Alcatraz, by Ben Wood & David Mark
Welcome to Ohlone Territory, by Marlo Mckenzie and Neil Maclean
Ohlone Families, by Charlene Sul and Anthony Sul
San Bruno Mountain, by Keith Moreau and Sam Ellis Moreau
Native America Segments, by Lorenzo

“Indigenous Renweal” will take place on Wednesday, November 25 and again on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26, from dusk until the following morning. Wood and Mark have recommended Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 31, and Washington Square as locations from which the images can be seen. Running commentary about the images from Ohlone and other Native participants in the project will be able to be heard on KPOO San Francisco 89.5 FM. For more information about the project and the artists, please go to Coit Live or Ohlone Profiles.

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Filed under Mission Dolores, Presidio Trust, San Francisco State University Special Collections & Archives

Tagged as Alcatraz, Indian, Native, Native American, Ohlone, San Francisco

Tag Archives: Ohlone

“Ten Years” Tour: Using New Technology for History

Recreating the Mission Dolores Mural in a New Setting

“Indigenous Renewal” – Commemorating Native American Activism

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