It was the mid 1800s...

In the mid 1800s, when the Europeans came, it was about — lace-collared dresses, stiff portraits, polite society clubs.. were popping up. People admired the young girls who wore ribbons in their hair and posed in photographs with straight backs and practiced smiles.

But hidden in plain sight were two girls who did not belong to that world at all.

Their names were Maxima and Maria, Coast Miwok children whose families had survived mission rule, land seizures, and the forced march north that people would later call California’s own trail of tears. As young as they were, they already understood danger. They had heard the whispers: Indian children disappear. Indian families are driven out. Indian names erased.

The young neighbors who lived nearby, one night, by lantern light, whispered to the girls:

“If they see you as Indian, they might take you.

If they see you in military disguise costume, they might leave you alone."

So she helped them in costumes that would blend in, them like the others, even curling their hair like society accepted and liked (do you see the ringlets?)

They tried so hard to blend in society by dressing to blend in, even up in Hopland, and yet there was everything that said, We belong at Olompali — their hearts still lived on the shores of Tamál-Húye, land in now Marin.

People never guessed the truth. No one would have guessed they were 100 percent Coast Miwok blood, after all, they wore cloths, not skins of animals or grass skirts, so no one ever guessed it.

Every evening, after their chores, Maxima and Maria would sneak to the backyard, sit under the Oak trees and redwoods, and whisper stories from home, before, at Olompali, and after they moved up north to the wooded areas of Hopland:

– the sound of tule boats slicing across the bay

– the smell of bay laurel after rain

– their father Camillo’s voice calling them back from the hills of

   Olompali

– their mother grinding acorns into soft flour

– and the songs sung so softly you had to close your eyes to hear

   them

– the smell and crackling noises of the fires burning from the

   different villages and their own

– the sound of the coyotes at night, howling and calling each other

   and telling locations

They held tightly to these stories, because everything else had been taken.

Sometimes the girls lingered near water, watching the moonlight ripple on the water, when they go often to what is now Richardson bay, and Maxima would say:

“Someday we won’t have to hide.”

Maria would nod, clutching her sister Maxima's hand.

They grew into young women quietly resisting the erasure around them — carrying their identity like a hidden ember, keeping it alive beneath the starched dresses and practiced manners of society.

And though the city forgot their names, the land did not.

Long after their disguises faded into memory, people would look at an old photograph and say, “Who were these young girls?”

The answer waited in the soil, in the trees, in the creeks that remembered everything:

They were Coast Miwok children.

They survived by hiding in plain sight.

And they carried their people’s story forward when the world tried to silence it.