For more than 30 years, Andrew Galvan has been on a quest: Memorialize more than 5,000 indigenous people buried in the mission’s cemetery.
Vincent Medina and Andrew Galvan sit near a memorial for their ancestors, Jobocme and Poylemja, in the Mission Dolores cemetery. Photo courtesy of Andrew Galvan.
Galvan’s ancestor, Liberato Culpecse, was baptized in 1801 at Mission Dolores, but later moved to Mission San Jose. Culpecse’s parents, Jobocme and Poylemja, are buried in the mission’s cemetery, along with 5,700 other indigenous people, in unmarked graves. After seeing their names in these 200-year-old books, Galvan started thinking about ways to make all those ancestors more visible.
“It would be a wonderful way for us to bring it into conversation, their actual names,” said Corinna Gould, co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Oakland, the only local tribal group to respond to Mission Local’s requests for comment. “Giving them names helps to humanize them, which has been difficult for a long time in the Bay Area.”, on the banks of a waterway they named Ehwate.
“The response I got from the committee was, “What about the names of the Spanish and Irish people buried there?’” Galvan recalled. “I said, ‘It saysin Berkeley) as assistant curator, and the cousins took matters into their own hands. They bought a pair of redwood boards from Home Depot and carved the names of Jobocme and Poylemja — who are Medina’s ancestors, too — into the wood. They now stand in the mission cemetery.
In any case, “I want something permanent, and having it adjacent to the graves makes the most sense,” Galvan said. In 2022, he assisted in creating a similar monument at the Franciscan mission in Sonoma, which reads, “In this sacred grounds lie buried men, women and children of the local Coast Miwok, Patwin, Wappo and Pomo tribes.
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