Refusing development can pair with a constructive alternative, not mere negation
Evidence
The political quality of “doing nothing”—of not building at the West Berkeley site—is obvious here. But besides refusing development, what the Ohlone members have proposed is more than nothing. In 2017, Ohlone matriarchs Ruth Orta and Corrina Gould worked with a Berkeley landscape architect to create a different vision for the site: a forty-foot-high mound, echoing the shape of the original shellmound, covered in California poppies. The plan would also restore other native vegetation, create a dance arbor for Ohlone ceremonial use, and daylight a section of Strawberry Creek, which runs underground through the site. While this living monument would be of obvious importance to indigenous folks, I consider it also an incredibly generous gesture to other East Bay residents, who stand to inhabit this place more consciously. Gould herself described the potential site as an opportunity for all of us simply to remember “our compassion, conscience and civility, to learn to be human again, together.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 661
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- STORYSTEM: The forty-foot poppy-covered mound over a buried shellmound — a living monument rising over a parking lot — is a resonant image with narrative potential for a story about reclaiming buried sacred sites.