A Beautiful Summer, With Losses

Should I feel guilty? I feel grateful. While most of the nation, and even friends who live a few miles away, are suffering through a very hot summer, the weather in Arcata has been magnificent. We've had sunshine and cool air. The strawberry crop this year is terrific (though it looks like the heavy spring rains suppressed the tomatoes), the hummers are humming, and we've just spotted a butterfly.

But the summer hasn't been without loss of prominent members of the North Coast community. Both were unexpected. The most recent, the one that is affecting a lot of people at the moment, is the death of Tim McKay, who began the North Coast Environmental Center more than 30 years ago, and has been a stalwart of the environmental community ever since. He died of a heart attack at 59. But at least he was doing something he loved--birding--and in the company of someone he loved.

I met him only a few times. I was a guest on his radio program once. But his Center was so important to this place that it is inevitable that it plays a role, known and unknown, in our lives here. Sometimes in unpredictable ways. I first knew that the Seventh Generation Fund was here, for example, when I read a summary of one of his many interviews with Chris Peters, its director. Seventh Gen became my entry to learning more about the Native community here and elsewhere.

McKay was a giant of this place, and his influence was felt beyond it. A short summary of his achievements is in the Press Democrat; John Driscoll of the Times Standard provides more context and memory. The North Coast Journal collected reminicences for its cover story. Through the voices of people who knew him well, a portrait of the person begins to emerge. Sid Dominitz, long time editor of ECONews (who I did meet in the first year I was here) quotes McKay's philosophy of activism: "Persistence is victory," and the methodology of "endless pressure endlessly applied." McKay lived it, though his persistence was not angry and blaming but centered. It strikes me that it takes someone with the temperament of a birder to make that work.

Earlier this summer, Eric Rofes died of a heart attack at age 51. Christina Accomando, a colleague at HSU, wrote this about him in the North Coast Journal. Again, I met him only once or twice, in connection with the very valuable Education Summit he organized at HSU every year. I was surprised to learn how much of a national figure he was, and well-known in one of my old stomping grounds, the Boston area. So the Boston Globe article on him was quite a revelation to me.

I don't want to project my own ignorance on the rest of the North Coast. Yet I wonder if our provincialism didn't give less value to Rofes than he deserved. Certainly I thought the importance of that unique Education Summit was not appreciated as it should be, and I know that frustrated him. What will happen to it now?

Of course a lot of people are asking, what will happen to the North Coast Environmental Center? Whose voice will replace Tim McKay's at meetings, on the radio, in hearings and in Congress? These are very great losses for this community. Let's hope the example of these two men inspire others to come forward and continue their work.

Being Natives to this place

Before even starting to explore the notion of becoming native to this North Coast place, we must begin with the people who are Native to this place.

The notion of becoming native is one of those fruitful and perhaps necessary paradoxes, especially in a nation of immigrants, at a time when people move around so much. The idea of becoming native is to feel the same deep identification, and to have the same stake in a place as someone born here, with generations of ancestors buried in its ground.

It's a notion pretty much in direct opposition to what would seem to have been the approach of the first non-Native influx into this part of the country, during the 1849 Gold Rush. Then it was to use what this place offered as raw material, while that which wasn't useful to the invaders was destroyed or ignored.

This is one of the rare regions in America where indigenous peoples still live more or less where they have for many centuries before Europeans arrived. It is probably rarer still in the amount and frequency of regular contact indigenous Natives and resident non-Natives maintain in daily life.

I wonder how many non-Native people here on the North Coast appreciate how unusual is this daily opportunity for contact with Native cultures. It's certainly not everywhere in America that a local government meeting begins with a welcome by the tribal leader of the indigenous people who lived on the land where they are meeting. But here it's perfectly natural for a peace march to begin with a Native prayer, not conducted by some Sioux medicine man from far away (or someone claiming to be one) but by a local resident.

Newcomers probably notice this, at least at first. The North Coast is predominantly white, more so than most areas of California, and most urban areas throughout North America. But it is probably even more rare for the most numerous and culturally influential "minority group" to be Native peoples. It was that way for a long time here, and although indigenous peoples are no longer the largest population after whites throughout Humboldt County, they remain numerically significant and culturally very influential.

When moving here from western Pennsylvania first became a possibility, and I looked over this territory on a map, two things struck me immediately. First, the surroundings of state and national forest, and then of wilderness. Second, the Yurok reservation, Hoopa Valley and other Indian lands nearby. Both of these were powerful attractions.



The second writing job I did here---and the first one I actually got paid for---was for the Seventh Generation Fund, the only foundation aiding grassroots and traditional Native American cultures that is run by Native peoples. International in scope, it is headquartered in Arcata.

I'm still not sure why Executive Director Chris Peters hired me. Maybe he isn't either. (I worked on several projects there for about a year.) I'd sent him a letter out of the blue, after hearing him speak at a Green Party convention. But thanks to him, I met Natives of many cultures and places throughout the West, and I finally was getting to witness something of the relationship of people from an indigenous culture to their home place.

It was an opportunity to learn about cultures that were unfamiliar, yet were far from foreign: they were cultures that grew directly from where we live. At the same time, it was a chance to correct the imagery we often have as non-Natives. Here it is especially possible to understand that Native cultures and Native peoples are of the present, as well as being deeply rooted in traditional knowledge.

That was the beginning of a continuing journey. By working on various projects as well as through just living here, I've met and come to admire a number of North Coast Native people, young and old, women and men, as well as other Natives who bring their own traditions and backgrounds from elsewhere to their lives here. However else I feel about my time here, I'll always be grateful I came into contact with Cheryl Seidner, Chris Peters and Julian Lang, in particular. I've learned a lot, and I still know little. But I know a little of who they are, and a little more of who I am. And through them as well as my own sporadic experience, I know something about this place.

And now that I think about it, there is something specific to this venture that I learned from that first talk I heard Chris Peters give. He suggested that Native populations and cultures might not survive many years into the future. It might well be up to non-Natives to finally learn the same responsibility for the earth that is at the core of Native cultures, because this is the ground that supports us as well, in every sense.

I hoped then and hope now that he was wrong about a dwindling away of Native populations. But I realize at this moment that he was saying essentially what this project is trying to say: that we must all become native to this place. And the place to begin is with the peoples and cultures that began here, and remain here.

Natives in Place

I got a lasting lesson from a particularly feisty Julian Lang one day at the Seventh Generation Fund office. Julian is a Karuk scholar, writer, artist, activist, musician, performer and participant in ceremony, with an office at Humboldt State University for his various activities, including the Institute for Native Knowledge.

I've gotten to know him better since, but on this day I was still learning about him. He was complaining that I hadn't interviewed him yet for the Native Performance Fund grant proposal I was working on for Seventh Gen and the Humboldt Area Foundation, and when I asked him when I could do so, he said he didn't have the time. So I wound up asking him a couple of questions and following him around the office with a tape recorder. In the years since then I've quoted his statements that day so often he must be sick of them, but for me they remain touchstones of eloquence and relevance.

The goal of funding for Native cultural projects, he said, shouldn' t be to finance more "feathers and beads, but get to the crux of life. Let's work towards creating of a consciousness in our people about Native traditional identity--that we are part of a place. This is the original purpose of our languages and stories. They tell you, 'Now I am Wiyot, I am a Humboldt Bay person.' Or I am an Eel River person, a Mad River person. I am a person from this village site, I am a person from this place. I am an ocean person, a bay person, a mountain person. Really connect people with their environment."

"We must find ways to enable ourselves to share our cultural understanding about the land we live in. To create an authentic, mythic experience for everyone, that is indigenous to this place. A shared experience, so we are able to talk about it, to come to a mutual understanding about the sacredness of the land, which is contrary to most of what American society tells us." The goal should be "not only an intellectual understanding, but a cultural understanding, which is different."

In Native culture, identity and environment are connected at the core. The tribes of this region developed within a specific natural context, as "river people" or "ocean people," for example. The diversity of landscapes and conditions (like all the micro-climates that exist so close to each other) probably defined the diversity of indigenous peoples, for this region is characterized by a number of small tribes living close to each other, sharing aspects of their cultures and stories, but remaining distinct.

Their dances and stories referred to animals and plants around them, and their creation myths and other stories include prominent features of the local landscape.