This is the tenth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#10: Gregg Castro (Salinan, Ohlone)
      (Chapter 2, pp. 16-29)

Gregg Castro is a writer-activist within the California Indigenous community. As an archaeologist, he has worked to preserve his Ohlone and Salinan heritage for over three decades. Since his people have no reservation, nor federal or state or local recognition, they don’t exist as defined by the American culture around them. Thanks to his father, Gregg grew up in Northern California knowing who he was, but it wasn’t safe at that time to tell others, since it could cost them their life. When he learned in his San José school that the “Californian Indians” were all extinct, his father told him (p. 18): “Well, if you’re dead, they won’t try to kill you.”

The former tribal chair of the Salinan people, Gregg is an active participant in the Society for California Archaeology for over twenty-five years, advocating for respectful treatment of Indigenous sacred sites. He is also the co-chair of the Indian Advisory Board of the California Institute for Community, Art & Nature. As Cultural Director of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, he represents their San Francisco Peninsula homelands.  

As a Native man, Gregg can sit on a mountainside and look back in time for at least 15,000 years and see his relatives and feel their presence. When he speaks, this presence is always with him. He calls it “a sense of permanence.”

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