SOUL FOOD:

On the first Saturday of this month Susana Salas walked out to what once was a large prehistoric village and its cemetery near Warner Avenue and Bolsa Chica Street. It was her first visit to the place since luxury homes with views of the Pacific coast and Huntington Beach wetlands were built atop it.

She felt anxious, she said, her voice beginning to catch. This had been the home, then the resting place, of her ancestors; three decades of trying hadn’t prevented them from being disturbed.

The story isn’t a new one or even exceptional except for the rare artifacts found at the site known as ORA-83. Ed Mountford, chief executive of Hearthside Homes, which is building the 356-home gated community known as Brightwater, has said that nearly all of Orange County’s most coveted coastal dwelling places were once home to indigenous California Indians.

Which together with the unique discoveries at this site might seem like the best reason of all to preserve rather than build on it. Few, if any, like it are left.

An 8,000-year-old village, it once encompassed 17 acres on the Bolsa Chica Mesa. Along with 174 human remains and tens of thousands of artifacts, more than 1,000 stone carvings known as cogged stones have been found there.

The site is thought to have been a manufacturing and distribution center for the stones, part of a complex, interactive ritual associated with a now unknown religion. Only a small number of other cogged stones, which resemble cogged wheels, have been found at a 9,000-year-old indigenous site on the northern coast of Chile.

The idea that the stones have an archaeoastronomical, ceremonial and ritual significance — along the lines of the much larger stones found at Stonehenge — became a crippling point of contention in attempts to win ORA-83 a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Several of the staff on the California Department of Parks and Recreation State Historical Resources Commission just wouldn’t have it.

Never mind that Tom Hoskinson, an aerospace engineer with expertise in Native American sky watching practices, calendars and mathematics, supported the notion. Never mind that Commissioner Carol L. Novey pointed out that as Westerners, commission staff might “simply not understand the ideas put forth in the nomination.”

Minutes from a 2004 meeting considering the matter reads more like a transcript from a wiretap of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. While the commission deemed preservation of the site “paramount,” it nit-picked the reasons why — especially the archaeoastronomical reasons.

Yet along with its being a sacred burial ground, this spiritual significance may have been one of the most important reasons to leave ORA-83 intact. For, aside from the loss of life in earlier generations, it’s the Native American spirituality, so tied to the land, that has suffered the greatest blow by urbanization.

“Native American religion [when it] comes up,” Cindi Alvitre wrote in an e-mail, “is perceived as a novelty or curiosity.” Which may explain why the SHRC found the spiritual aspects of the cogged stones at ORA-83 so disconcerting.

Alvitre is descended from the Gabrieleno and Tongva. She is moompetam, a salt-water clan. The land of her tribe was the same land that is now Orange and Los Angeles counties and the Channel Islands.

With a bachelor’s in anthropology and a master’s in history, she is a part-time lecturer in the department of American Indian Studies at Cal State Long Beach. She is completing her doctoral dissertation at UCLA.

Her thesis is concerned with recovery from cultural and historical trauma among Indian tribes in Southern California.

“We are in a constant state of mourning,” Alvitre says.

Susana Salas, a Yaqui, whom I met at a protest of the Brightwater development, reflects this point as well.

“We live our lives trying to protect the graves of our ancestors from destruction,” Alvitre says, adding that they rarely succeed. “We are constantly reburying our dead.”

She asked if readers of this column could imagine their loved ones pulled from their graves “with all the prayers, tears, offerings [and] annual commemorations” so a developer could put up a tract of multimillion dollar homes. It’s a question I can’t answer.

I wonder how many of us would say, in the name of profit or progress, “Sure. Fine. Bury them somewhere else.” After all, as a society, we are cremating more — often scattering ashes to the wind — to save money and to save ourselves the traditional funerary spectacle of death.

At Brightwater, in the face of accusations that ancestral remains have not been dealt with properly, California Indians are again protesting the assault on their culture and spirituality. They plan to gather at Bolsa Chica Street and Warner Avenue at 10 a.m. each first Saturday of the month.

When the California Coastal Commission convenes on Oct. 15, 16 and 17, they will ask it to revoke Hearthside Homes’ permit to build on ORA-83, based on the site’s cultural and sacred significance. Alvitre knows better than to hold her breath.

She says commemorative plaques to the tribes that once occupied the land are the developers’ idea of compromise. “Fixed obituaries … badges of contemporary conquest,” she calls them.

With the reburial of the dead and limited access to the land for sacred ceremonies, “our spiritual way of life has been impacted by this development in the most extreme way humanly possible,” Alvitre says.

She thinks the developer should share the land it now holds title to. It should give a portion of the land back to the tribes.

GET INVOLVED

Attend the California Coastal Commission revocation hearing, October 15-17, time and place TBA. For updates, go to www.bolsachicalandtrust.org. Voice your concerns to the following:

Native American Heritage Commission

Mr. Larry Myers, Executive Secretary, NAHC915, Capitol Mall, Room 364, Sacramento, CA 95814; E-mail lm_nahc@pacbell.net

California Coastal Commission

Mrs. Teresa Henry, C.C.C., 200 Oceangate, 10th floor, Long Beach, CA 90802-4416; E-mail thenry@coastal.ca.gov

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.