Charlene Nijmeh
Charlene C. Nijmeh is Tribal Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. From the Marine-Sanchez lineage, she descends from peoples missionized at Santa Clara, Mission San Jose, and Mission Dolores. She entered tribal work at age eight during 1980s repatriation efforts and was elected chairwoman in 2018 after the long tenure of her mother, Rosemary Cambra. She represents more than 600 members of the ten lineages of the historic Verona Band of Alameda County—previously federally recognized and never terminated—and leads the Tribe’s campaign to restore that status, including the cross-country Trail of Truth. A mother of five, environmentalist, and businesswoman, she also serves as president of Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, Inc., and of the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation, advancing cultural revitalization, land stewardship, and community building.

Joseph Iyolopixtli Torres
Joseph Iyolopixtli Torres is a Muwekma Ohlone culture bearer, dance captain, faith keeper, and Director of Cultural Programs for the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation. A descendant of Verona Band families from the Sunol and Alisal rancherias, he carries a warrior’s charge: to put song, dance, and ceremony back at the center of Ohlone nationhood. He mentors youth in dance and regalia-making, led the raising of a túupentak (sweat lodge)—the first in 127 years—and was instrumental to the Tribe’s 2024 Trail of Truth on horseback from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C. An abalone carver, traditional California Native dancer, and father of three from San Jose, Torres does not treat culture as display. He treats it as defense and as future: a living Ohlone people whose ceremonies, lands, and young people are strong enough to outlast the systems that tried to disappear them.

Bernadette Quiroz
Bernadette Quiroz is Language Revitalization Chair for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation, Executive Director of Muwekma Archaeological Services, and a member of the Foundation board. A Muwekma descendant of Verona Band families, she traces her line through her great-grandmother Dolores Sanchez, born on the Sunol Rancheria in 1911 and baptized at Mission San Jose, and through Ramona Marine, born on the Alisal Rancheria in 1893. Quiroz leads the reawakening of Chochenyo, the Indigenous language of the East Bay, building online lessons, workbooks, and curriculum so tribal members can hear and speak the language again. She has taught that language is inseparable from land: before contact, Chochenyo named a living world of waters, oaks, and obligation; after contact, it survived in fragments, field notes, and the last fluent speakers. A mother of three, she works so the next generation will not inherit silence.

Troy Hatch
Troy Hatch is a California Indian cultural leader and ceremonialist whose work lives in the intertribal world that has long bound Bay Area, Sierra, and Central Valley peoples. He has offered blessings at statewide California Indian gatherings and has been part of the dance and protocol relationships that connect communities such as Shingle Springs with Ohlone and other California nations. On this panel he speaks from that practice of solidarity: showing up for relatives, carrying song and prayer across territories, and treating another nation’s fight for recognition and cultural return as a shared obligation, not a spectator event.

Yei Tochtli Mitlalpilli
Yei Tochtli Mitlalpilli is a Mexica dancer and cultural teacher with Calpulli Tonalehqueh, the San José–based community of danza whose name means “community of guardians who accompany the sun.” In danza he teaches that the drum is a heartbeat, that movement is offering, and that the circle is a way of honoring the living world. He has described the work as representing Indigenous peoples of this continent—from Alaska to Chile—as one people, and he insists that Indigenous people are not immigrants on their own land: they are migrants, because the borders crossed them. Through Calpulli Tonalehqueh’s public ceremony, youth teaching, and Mexica New Year gatherings, Mitlalpilli practices a solidarity that is continental in vision and local in discipline—rebuilding calpulli life in the same city where Ohlone families are rebuilding theirs.

Richard “Razzle Dazzle” Regudo
Richard “Razzle Dazzle” Regudo is a Miwok elder, culture bearer, artist, and founder of an Intertribal Youth Program that has, for more than thirty years, carried Indigenous young people to song, dance, story, and ceremony. He takes youth across territories to learn from Native culture bearers—not as a field trip, but as a way of keeping nations alive in the bodies of the next generation. His work has been part of Miwok pride projects, Patwin remembrance, Big Times at Shingle Springs, and gatherings to honor sacred sites. A beader whose Beaded Hummingbird has been shown at the Crocker Art Museum, he treats traditional arts as living medicine, not display. At the Trail of Truth send-off at Crissy Field and across the Golden Gate, he stood with Muwekma singers and dancers. On this panel he speaks from a lifetime of intertribal youth work: solidarity practiced as travel, teaching, and the refusal to let another generation grow up without the pride that is rightfully theirs.