An unrecognized Native American tribe from San Francisco ramped up its claim to the Presidio after President Donald Trump ordered an end to the federal trust overseeing the national park.
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe formally requested the president return the 1,500-acre park at the base of the Golden Gate bridge to its supervision, where it would create a new reservation, the San Francisco Standard and KRON4 reported.
The Manteca-based tribe that once inhabited San Francisco said the move “would reduce federal taxpayer spending and constitute one of the most significant rematriations of Indigenous land in U.S. history,” according to a statement.
The request comes after Trump issued an executive order last month to dissolve the Presidio Trust, established by Congress in 1996 to redevelop the former military base and manage the park and its nearly 200 commercial tenants.
The Trust is operating in the black, earning $182 million last year while reinvesting $58 million in net operating income back into the park. It relies on Presidio profits and private donations, not taxpayer money, according to a Trust report.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment by the Standard.
“This is an opportunity for President Trump to do what the state of California has failed to do,” Charlene Nijmeh, chair of the tribe, said in a statement. “Not only will returning the Presidio to Indigenous care be the right thing for our people and for the land, but it will also save the federal government — and taxpayers — money.”
The tribe, working with the Lakota People’s Law Project, has launched a petition seeking public support for the initiative.
Tribal officials said they submitted a right of first refusal to the federal government during the decommissioning of the military base in 1992, but faced opposition from prominent California politicians, including the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats.
In the petition addressed to Trump and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe called the Presidio “a beautiful national park on the tribe’s traditional homelands in San Francisco.”
It said the goal of the petition is to “rematriate” the Presidio and “establish a new reservation” there.
“Rematriation,” according to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, is “Indigenous woman-led work to restore sacred relationships between Indigenous people” and “ancestral land.”
The tribe said the “rightful return” of the Presidio would be “an extraordinary act of reconciliation” and that the Muwekma people maintain a “deep cultural and spiritual connection to the Presidio lands.”
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe claims on its website that it was once federally recognized as the Verona Band of Alameda County but was omitted from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ first official list of recognized tribes, drafted in 1978, according to the Standard.
The tribe has sought to reaffirm its federal status for more than 45 years. There are 614 members of the tribe, living mostly across the Bay Area, an unidentified spokesperson told the newspaper.
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