On the Topic of Native Land...

My home lies on the land of the Confederated Villages of Lijisan, who were a subgroup of the modern umbrella term "Ohlone." The group of native tribes located around the bay rebranded themselves as the collective Ohlone in the 1960s, inspired by the American Civil Rights movement, and the British Independence movement led by Gandhi. 

Unfortunately, there is frighteningly little information about the culture of the Confederated Villages of Lijisan specifically, but we do know a fair amount about the general lifestyle of the Ohlone as a whole. For one, the Ohlone, like many civilizations, were a hybrid of hunter-gatherers and cultivators, creating sedentary settlements. They were mindful to maintain animal populations, acting without overhunting, and getting a large food source from gathering seafood, namely Bivalvia. Religiously, the Ohlone did not have a singular religion, as they were some forty-plus individual tribes that primarily interacted through trade and ceremonies, but overall their religions were shamanistic in nature.

All this changed drastically due to Spanish colonization, hence why so much information about the Ohlone lifestyle has been lost. This is because Spanish colonization was characterized by evangelism, and so many years were spent driving the religion of the Ohlone into the ground, as well as attempting to force them to conform to Spanish cultural habits. A key aspect of this is folk tales: folk tales were an integral part of Ohlone culture which were nearly eradicated through evangelism; this was to the extent that these folk tales are highly valued today, and passing down these tales is almost an obligation to preserve the culture that had been trampled upon.