"Camillo Speaks!"

Camillo Ynitia Speaks

I was born on this land, in the Huiman tribe, near Sausalito.

The hills you call Marin were my home before they were measured, before lines were drawn through them like wounds. My people, the Coast Miwok, lived with the tides and the fog, with the oaks and the salmon runs. We did not own the land. We belonged to it.

By the time I was grown, the world had shifted. The missions came first. They said they were saving our souls while they took our labor, our children, our language. Many of my people did not survive those years. Those who did carried loss like a second skin.

When Mexico ruled this place, I was granted Olompali. They wrote my name on paper and said the land was mine. But Olompali was never just land to me. It was where our dead rested. Where our stories lived. Where the old ones taught us how to survive.

I believed that if I learned their ways—their laws, their words, their systems—I could protect what remained for my people.

I was wrong.

When the Yankees came, they changed the rules without asking us. They said our treaties did not count. They said our voices did not count. They taxed my land until I could no longer hold it. They made laws that allowed my people to be hunted, sold, and worked like animals. They took Olompali not with guns, but with papers and courts where we were not allowed to speak.

I watched my homeland pass into other hands. I watched my people pushed aside, forced to work on land that had once fed them freely. I watched our names disappear from maps, from records, from memory.

But hear me now: we did not disappear.

The land remembers us even when your books do not. The oaks still grow where we gathered. The wind still carries our language. My blood still walks this place.

You may have taken Olompali from my hands, but you did not take it from my spirit. And you did not erase my people.

We are still here.

**This picture was made taking the features of Maria and Maxima, his two daughters and putting them together. (there are no pictures that have survived of Camillo Ynitia)