Two 3-foot orbs hand-painted with tribal designs will be unveiled this Saturday at 16th and Mission, part of a city-funded push to make the American Indian Cultural District visible in physical space — a week before San Francisco's 250th anniversary.

At the corner of 16th and Mission — the 16th Street BART Plaza, one of the more surveilled and unsettled squares in the city — two 3-foot orbs are going in this Saturday, hand-painted with tribal designs by artists Maize Black of the Haudenosaunee Mohawk Confederacy and Felicia Gabaldon, who is Choctaw. A raven. A native woman. The bird, as Black described while painting it, represents life.

The installation is part of the American Indian Cultural District, which the city formally designated to include the plaza, and funded through the city's Indigenize SF Initiative — a program aimed at amplifying American Indian culture through public art, heritage, and education. The unveiling is set for Saturday, June 21, one week before the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the Anza expedition, the group of Spanish colonists who landed here June 27, 1776.

That timing is not incidental. "We obviously are still here, we still exist," Gabaldon told NBC Bay Area while painting the sphere. "Which is why this is 250 years of resilience and honoring that."

The two spheres, which will eventually be joined by two more for a total of four, are a temporary installation — but Sharaya Souza, executive director of the American Indian Cultural District, frames them as markers toward something more durable: a permanent cultural corridor running through the Mission District, the neighborhood named for Mission Dolores, which the colonists built. "We truly believe this sort of art, this American Indian, this culturally-rooted art is something to elevate as a sense of pride and strengthen this neighborhood," Souza said.

April McGill, executive director of the American Indian Cultural Center, put the 250th anniversary in more direct terms. "There were several tribes, specifically the Ohlone, who were massacred," she told NBC Bay Area. "Several of our California Indian people were enslaved here, they were trafficked here, and those stories are the ones we're not really talking about."

San Francisco, per Souza, is the third largest relocation city in the United States — a legacy of federal programs that moved indigenous people off reservations and into urban areas in the mid-20th century. More than 18,000 American Indians live in the city today, she said. The Dissent reported in May on a six-story housing project for American Indians set to break ground in the Mission this fall; a sober-housing facility geared toward the community is also slated for 24th Street.

According to DataSF, the Mission has seen 23 eviction notices filed in the last 90 days and 2,582 311 requests in the last seven days. The orbs are temporary. The cultural district designation is not. Come Sunday morning at 16th and Mission, two of the plain gray plaza spheres will carry something they didn't carry before.