Commemorate SF’s 250th birthday (6/29/1776) with Andrew Galvan, curator of Mission Dolores and a direct descendant of the Ohlone people! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/commemorating-250-years-of-sf-at-its-birthplace-tickets-1990599811622

On June 29, 1776 — just five days before the Declaration of Independence was adopted on the other side of the continent — Spanish missionaries held the first Catholic Mass on a windswept peninsula that the Ohlone people had called home for thousands of years. Many historians consider the event and day as the “birthday” of San Francisco as a place.

Exactly 250 years later, we gather just a few hundred feet from that same spot to ask: what did that founding really mean? And what does it still mean today — for the city, for the United States, and for the Ohlone people whose way of life was forever changed by it?

This event kicks off a weeklong series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of San Francisco, the U.S.A., and a look ahead at the next 250 years. And there’s no better person to start that conversation than Andrew Galvan, curator of Mission Dolores and a direct descendant of the Ohlone people who were present at that very founding moment.

Galvan holds a perspective that is truly one of a kind. He is simultaneously a steward of the Catholic mission that reshaped his ancestors’ lives and a living carrier of the Ohlone culture that predates it by millennia. He’ll take us back to June 1776 — to the establishment of Misión San Francisco de Asís (MIssion Dolores)— and trace how that pivotal moment set the stage for the rise of one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, and the beginning of a new era for his people. No honest celebration of San Francisco or the U.S.’s 250th birthday is complete without this history.