The Ohlone people gathered acorns on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for at least 4,700 years. We know this because of the shellmounds — more than 425 burial sites ringing the bay, living cemeteries where ancestors were laid to rest in layers of shell and earth. Almost all of them have been paved over. The West Berkeley Shellmound, the oldest village site on the shore, sat beneath the land long before the university was built on top of it.

In 2023, the National Science Foundation awarded $1.4 million to the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley for a series of exhibits designed to showcase Ohlone ecological knowledge and spark interest in science among Indigenous young people. The project was called Yuutka — “The Place of the Acorn” in Chochenyo, the language of the local Ohlone people. It was the museum’s first mixed-reality exhibit, and the first designed in collaboration with Ohlone youth.

The experience is built around a simple act: gathering acorns. Visitors use baskets equipped with 3D sensors to collect virtual acorns under black oak tree replicas, guided by an avatar of Dolores Lameira — a 95-year-old retired Ohlone tribal leader known as Auntie Dottie. Her great-nephew Vincent Medina co-leads the ‘ottoy Initiative at UC Berkeley. The initiative’s name comes from a Chochenyo word meaning repair. Mending.

The youth who helped design the exhibit are called tappenekšekma — teachers and learners. Carlos Bojorquez, twelve years old, described what the project meant: “Learning about how to communicate and collaborate with people… not reconnect with the past but be together.”

Not reconnect with the past. Be together. Present tense. That distinction matters.

In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated the grant. The Yuutka project and eight other Lawrence Hall of Science grants were canceled in a mass action affecting more than 1,500 NSF awards totaling $1.1 billion. The NSF stated that “research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities.” An Urban Institute analysis found that nearly 90 percent of all canceled projects contained at least one keyword in the DEI category.

The mechanism was a keyword search.

A keyword search classified four-thousand-year-old ecological knowledge as a diversity initiative. Acorn harvesting cycles, prescribed fire management, the tidal relationships that the shellmounds encoded — knowledge systems that sustained a civilization for millennia before the NSF existed — reduced to a flag in a database. Terminated by algorithm.

The Yuutka team had spent approximately $900,000 of the $1.4 million grant. The remaining $500,000 vanished overnight. The families paid out of pocket. The youth kept working. The museum sought foundation grants to fill the gap.

In June 2025, Claudia Polsky, a clinical professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of researchers whose grants had been terminated. The complaint called the cancellations “a disaster for the future of science in the United States.” U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a preliminary injunction restoring the grants and barring agencies from revoking funds using form letters without grant-specific explanations, or because of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

The grants were restored. Approximately 1,000 awards reinstated. More than $500 million returned to UC research.

Then in May 2026 — this month — the NSF suspended the Yuutka grant again. This time the justification was “foreign funding.” The Lawrence Hall of Science had not received any foreign funding for the project. Polsky’s legal team flagged the suspension as a potential violation of Judge Lin’s court order. Fourteen attorneys are now working the case.

The exhibit opened anyway. May 26, 2026. Yesterday.

Ari Krakowski, the principal investigator, said something that deserves to sit in its own space: “It’s strange that something like this would be threatening to anyone.”

Virtual acorns. 3D baskets. A ninety-five-year-old grandmother’s avatar teaching children about trees. That was the threat.

Here is the architecture. UC Berkeley was built on Ohlone land. The Chochenyo-speaking people were enslaved at Mission San Jose and Mission Dolores. Their shellmounds were paved. Their language was nearly extinguished. The university that sits on the bones of that erasure created an initiative — ‘ottoy, repair — to let the knowledge back in. Medina and Louis Trevino opened the first restaurant in the world to serve Ohlone cuisine, on a patio next to the Hearst Anthropology Museum — the institution that once displayed their ancestors’ belongings as artifacts. They are restoring native plant gardens on UC research land. They are teaching Chochenyo to the children whose great-grandparents were punished for speaking it.

The federal government looked at that and saw a keyword.

This is the same mechanism that reclassified the Not Invisible Act report as DEI and deleted it — 10,248 missing and murdered Indigenous people, filed under a category that could be defunded. The same mechanism that undercounts 90 percent of Native American students in California schools through a checkbox hierarchy that overrides their identity. The same mechanism that tried to reclassify tribal sovereignty as a racial category in Wyoming to eliminate the one legislative seat held by an enrolled tribal member.

The keyword is the weapon. DEI is the label that makes things deletable. It doesn’t matter what the thing actually is. The Yuutka exhibit teaches ecology, botany, materials science, and computational thinking. It is, by any standard definition, a STEM education project. But the people it serves are Indigenous, and the knowledge it honors predates the institution that funded it, and that was enough.

The second exhibit is planned for September 2028. Tule reed boats — part of a transportation display. Full Chochenyo language and Spanish translations.

Carlos Bojorquez is twelve. His brothers Albert and Victor are fifteen and sixteen. They chose to keep working after the money disappeared. They did not reconnect with the past. They were together.

The acorn is not a metaphor. The Ohlone managed California’s oak woodlands for thousands of years through controlled burns and selective harvesting that modern ecologists now recognize as sophisticated land management. The knowledge encoded in acorn gathering is science. It was science before the word existed. It will be science after the NSF finishes deciding what qualifies.

A ninety-five-year-old woman’s avatar stands in a museum built on her ancestors’ land, teaching children to do what her people have done since before the shellmounds were buried. The federal government called it DEI, cut the funding, lost in court, and cut it again with a lie about foreign money.

The exhibit opened anyway.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Bay Nature, Berkeleyside, U.S. News, Urban Institute, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust