The Road to This North Coast Place

On Friday evening at Northtown Books, North Coast poet laureate Jerry Martien and virtuso bass player Shao Way Wu performed a few selections from their new CD, The Road to Heaven. Martien said that they'd been doing these performances--reading poems with string bass accompaniment-- for twenty years, and it seemed like a good and easy idea to record them. Shao Way quipped that this sounded more impressive than it was--in that time they'd only done six or eight gigs.

They performed about half the poems on the CD, including the poem that gave the CD its title, in which Martien wrote that if you're not on the road to Heaven, you're on the road to Hell. It's a road CD, since most of the poems involve travel by car.

I stood in the back awhile at Northtown and listened until my own back complained. Martien's poems are popular for good reason, Shao Way's playing is tasty. But this isn't a review. I'm writing about the event here mostly because it reminded me of just how this blog got started. It was originally going to be a book, mostly of interviews on the topic of how to be native to this North Coast place, a concept inspired by author Wes Jackson. I got a North Coast Cultural Trust grant to do it, but contrary to the figures still on its web page somewhere, I didn't get the full $5,000 grant, but half of that. So I really didn't have the funds sufficient to publish a book. I started this blog instead.

Since there was an earthquake at about that time, the interviews I used had to do mostly with that topic, and related geology and topography. And some history about the real Natives of this place. But the very first interview I attempted for this project was with Jerry Martien. I thought the poetry of place was a good place to start.

I interviewed him at his house, and we got on well--so well, it seemed, that we spent most of the time laughing. I don't think I learned much about poetry of place, and I didn't use the interview directly. But in the course of what turned out to be a rambling conversation, I did catch on to one important element of becoming native to this place, which emerged from his stories about coming here and settling in. Jerry arrived with the 60s wave of back to the land hippies and idealists, and it was a tumultous time. (The stories of shenangians at HSU in the late 60s and early 70s alone are enough to curl your hair.) But what got people involved in the community first and the most turned out to be schools, and the welfare of their children.

So that's what I learned: to become native to this place, it helps a lot to have children here, and raise them here.

Over the years I've learned that I'm never going to become native to this place, so even this blog is now a huge joke on me. I'm just not that interested in local politics, and since I don't fish or hunt or camp out or do anything outside except hike, and I don't garden, eat in restaurants, go out much more than the theatre I'm required to attend to write about it for my paltry few bucks, and I don't drive around much either (unlike Jerry M, who by the way doesn't even recognize me anymore, and has completely forgotten about our conversation.) And I don't have kids, here or anywhere. So I'm not much of a North Coast kind of person apparently. Maybe I'm not even much of an earthling.

I can't say the place has been all that welcoming anyway. Years ago, someone else who came the same year I did said, "so we're both newcomers. And we always will be." Except that she won't be, because she left. But for whatever reason, me and my work don't much interest people here, except as it can benefit them and their work. Maybe that's more of the time than the place, I don't know. But I've been anonymous here in ways I haven't been elsewhere.

So this blog has few entries, and probably shouldn't exist anymore except as an archive. But hey, it's free. I don't know if it's on the road to heaven. I doubt it. And even if it's on the road to hell, I'm trying to enjoy the journey as much as I can.

Two Takes On Place

What does "this place" really mean, in real life?

It can mean lots of things. A couple of them were suggested to me by two letters to the editor, on the very same page of the North Coast Journal a couple of weeks ago.

The Journal had published an interview with Cherie Arkley about her plan for a development on the Eureka waterfront that includes at least one "big box" store, Home Depot. At the moment, opposition is gearing up to the Arkley plan, and a lot of it is aimed at the effects of generic Big Box development.

But apart from the merits of that approach, I was intrigued by a letter from Duncan B. MacLaren, Fieldbrook, that zeroed in on the more specific question of whether this particular place--not the waterfront exactly, but the North Coast area---needs this particular Big Box: Home Depot. Underlying the question is the demonstrable fact that at least some Big Box stores drive out local businesses. Wal-Mart of course drives out just about every kind of retail business, that's been demonstrated over and over again. But MacLaren seems to be wondering if we need a Home Depot, given the other similiar businesses here, and given the likelihood of Home Depot driving out other hardware stores etc., is it worth it?

MacLaren doesn't think so. He doesn't think "a 3-way lamp socket" is really going to be any cheaper at Home Depot than at various Ace Hardware stores already here. And whether Home Depot, where "lumber has never been its strong suit" would offer the variety and expertise of local businesses it might hurt or destroy. His conclusion: "Give me the expertise and variety of an Almquist or a Mill Yard every time."

At this point a more recent immigrant to the area may shed some light. When I think of what's different about "this place," it certainly includes places like Almquist and especially another store he mentions: Pierson's.

I've just never seen a store quite like Pierson's anywhere. The combination of variety, of sales and value, and of friendly expertise, is phenomenal. Plus this business has apparently been deeply involved in local communities for a long time, and has provided good jobs for people---judging from their commercials, with low turnover.

I'll bet it's part of the community's image to outsiders as well. When I think of Portland, I automatically think of Powell's bookstores and the Coffee People (who make the best mochas on the planet, consistently.) I'll bet there are people who when they think of Eureka think of Pierson's. So the question becomes, do we want to mess that up, and become just like the rest of the country, all buying at Home Depots? Would we risk that, or is there really room in this area for a big box Home Depot?

This letter was about a change that, if made, could harm something that makes this place This Place. The second letter was about a change that may have already done so. It was from Jessica Puccinelli in Fortuna. It begins: "On Jan. 3, the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to have Jack Noble's gravel crusher installed in our residential neighborhood on the bank of the Van Duzen. Those who made the decision hadn't driven our one-lane road or seen our homes."

She goes on to say they would have seen what a nice, thriving neighborhood it was, with a particular character to its homes, people and businesses. But---"They would not have seen the Nobles. They started the mining and moved out." Possibly because of all the noise, dust, water pollution and traffic due to the gravel trucks. (The name of "Noble" is all too perfect, unfortunately. Not as a quality but as the nobles who own the land, but don't live there.)

But if the supervisors had come, she contines, "they might even have seen a mated pair of bald eagles, our national bird, that also nest here. They're a beautiful sight. With a noisy crusher and more truck traffic, we may never [see] those birds again. And neither will anyone else."

That says it all. I don't know for a fact if what she says is accurate, but what made her neighborhood "this place" for Jessica, also made it a particular place for everyone. And now (she fears, as we all should) it's become just another ruined landscape,which are all too common. They are so common that it's often hard to remember what actual places look like.

All the characteristics of her place--the quiet, the bed & breakfast, the homes and the businesses suited for just that place, and the presence of that particular pair of bald Eagles--all gone.

It all becomes just like every no-place else.

Welcome to this site revisited

Now that there may be some new eyes coming to this site, thanks to a North Coast Journal article, I thought I would re-state the basic idea for this blog.

I wanted to create a space on the Internet to explore what makes the North Coast the North Coast: what makes this a particular place.

My first inspiration was Wes Jackson’s book (published in 1996, the year I got here) called Becoming Native to This Place. This was a powerful idea for a newcomer. How do you come to know and be invested in a place? 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. The passage of time obviously helps, but it's not enough.

The way Wes Jackson and others use the concept (like the poet Gary Snyder, it goes beyond roots in a community or an economy, but includes the particulars of the natural landscape. In their view, becoming native to a place is essential to keeping its character and its ecology alive.

That seemed especially appropriate here, not only because of the close relationship people on the North Coast have to their natural landscape, but because of the active presence of Indigenous peoples, the Natives of this place.

So on this blog and a companion one, called North Coast Texts, I started with a few themes. The first had to be the Native American presence and specifically the process of ongoing efforts of reconciliation, involving local tribes (especially the Wiyot) and the non-Native community, relations within the Native community, and how this might affect the relationship of everyone here to the place itself.

As for the place itself, I started from the ground up, by exploring aspects of local geology (here ) and also here.)

I also began describing my experiences and background as a newcomer here, and here (way down at the bottom of the month), and a little about the arts on the North Coast (mostly photos.)

There's more noodling on the basic concept, too.

I frankly had hoped to start dialogues on all these subjects, and more, through the comments. That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it still can. I’d love to find a way in which people feel comfortable discussing their experiences as newcomers. Or exploring what they value most about living here, and how they feel they can best express it.

That, by the way, was why I created two North Coast blogs. North Coast Texts was for exposition and longer posts. This blog was supposed to be more for discussions: more “blog-like.” But whether or not that happens, the articles and interviews exist as an archive, a useful resource.

Lately this blog has become more blog-like in that my more recent posts are shorter and more personal---more about how I interact with this place, and it interacts with me. I think the idea is still an important one. It transcends our likes and dislikes about institutions, politics and economics, although all of those are relevant. Eventually though it has something to do with our feeling for the place, and maybe even the feeling of the place for us.

Liberating the Local

(as published as guest column in Eureka Times-Standard on April 13,2005, reproduced here as an opportunity for discussion via the comments... Also, some additional quotes that didn't make it into the published piece:
"The most valuable service designers and artists can provide a locality may therefore be to help it develop a shared cultural vision of the future, but not to design the future for it."

"Around the world, the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies operate within a radius of fifty kilometers of their headquarters location. Local conditions, local trading patterns, local skills and local culture are critical success factors for the majority of organizations." )

by Bill Kowinski

In a book to be published later this month, global business and design guru John Thackara isolates ten principles he believes will characterize cutting-edge opportunities for a better future, based in part on lessons of the last decade in technology, business and others aspects of the real world. Of particular interest to the North Coast is Principle #4: Locality.

The focus of "both business and social innovation," he writes, is shifting from locomotion to locality: "Authenticity, local context, and local production are increasingly desirable attributes in the things we buy and the services we use. Local sells."

At the same time, Thackara believes that how many localities market themselves doesn't work. "There's a big difference between selling soap and making sense of a place---but many place marketers don't get it." They imitate each other, and try to trade on nostalgic themes they all have more or less in common. "Identity has become a commodity. Diversity or distinctiveness have been edited out," and every city depends on the same kind of facilities and publicity.

What attracts visitors is real difference; what attracts investment is real information about real opportunities and quality of life. It requires the locality to be permanently engaged in knowing itself, as completely and in as much depth as possible. "The lesson is that design for locality is not about a return to simplicity; it involves dealing with more complexity, not less."

Thackara is interested in more than analyzing efforts and predicting trends. He wants design to help create a better future. But many trends and opportunities to build what's necessary for that future converge in the local. Sustainable local economies can be encouraged by designing and investing in sustainable energy and other sustainable industries, for example.

He also sees important roles for the arts, not so much in creating spectacles to encourage business but in helping to create community, and aiding in exploring the qualities of this place. Above all, art is personal, and the personal encounter is one of the major advantages of smaller places.

There is a lot of good news for the North Coast in Thackara's analysis. We have not destroyed the complexity of the natural world to nearly the same extent as most cities. Citizens have denied industries and businesses that might harm the natural and cultural environment. People here are participating in planning and decisions that affect their future. Now the North Coast is in position to focus on local innovations and sustainable industries, particularly those that will be needed in the global climate crisis, which is likely to dominate the economics and politics of the next 50 years or more.

Thackara's book ("In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World", from MIT Press ) suggests that small localities can compete with larger places by forming networks with each other. If people within localities and among them can work together, which technology makes easier to do, their combined assets and energies can compete with metro areas, while each of them can still offer superior social qualities. It is their context of "intimacy and encounter" that will "win out over the big centers." (Contrary to predictions, technology hasn't eradicated face-to-face encounters; it encourages them, and people want them.)

Technology does provide new methods for sharing resources and infrastructure, for facilitating local economies and creating new opportunities for individuals and small businesses in small and rural places.

None of this is automatic, and all of it requires intelligence, energy and truly appreciating and valuing the diversity of people, places and ecologies that creates the local context. But does offer possibilities that could direct the North Coast towards a better future by becoming more truly itself.

Welcome to This North Coast Place

Greetings from the North Coast of California.

People who live here consider it a special place. But why? Why are people committed to living on the North Coast? What actions result from that commitment? What should be preserved, and what should change? What are the opportunities, and what are the responsibilities?

In his book, Becoming Native to This Place, Wes Jackson suggests that the key to making these judgments is to feel and act as if one's commitment is that of a native, with the knowledge and roots of family and culture in a particular place going back many generations. Poet and activist Gary Snyder has been making this point for decades.

This blog is meant to be a forum to discuss this idea and these questions. Every week I will add new content for discussion. For those unfamiliar with "web logs" or "blogs," the process is pretty simple. My posts are dated, so the most recent appears at the top of the page. At the bottom of each post there is a line that says "comments" ("0 comments" or "2 comments" etc., indicating how many comments there are.) Click on this to read other people's comments, and add your own.

For more on how to use "Comments," click here.

SITE CONTENTS (click to go there)
Weather or Not

Indian Island Vigil 2005

The North Coast and More About This Site

Native Peoples of the North Coast

Earthquake Country

Incredibly Ancient but Still Changing (geology)

Mapping the Territory

For more on subjects discussed here, please go to the companion site, North Coast Texts.

For bio and links to my work, please see my home page and portal.

Weather or Not

Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate in Literature, lived much of his life in his native Poland, but also much of it in Berkeley, California, where he taught Slavic languages. In 2001 he published an "ABC" book, a Polish form consisting of short entries organized alphabetically. Between entries for "Aosta" (a valley in the southern Alps) and "Aron" (a fictional character) is two paragraphs on "Arcata."

"Always a gray sky and ocean fog," he wrote. "I have been there a number of times and never saw the sun. Should one live there? Perhaps as punishment. Yet people do live in Arcata, because they have to."

Though published in 2001, the rest of this entry suggests his impressions of Arcata were formed a decade or more earlier, since he then discusses the timber industry as the reason people "have to" live in Arcata. But by the time we arrived in 1996, timber was no longer the dominant industry. Arcata's largest employer was (and is) Humboldt State University.

I have heard stories about what Arcata weather was like when the timber industry was dominant, especially about the smoke from the lumber operations, which darkened clothes hung on the line to dry. This had a familiar sound to me, because it is how people talked about Pittsburgh in the 1950s when the steel mills were dominant, and before pollution controls were instituted. It was said that downtown businessmen had to change their white shirts several times a day. (I was growing up thirty-some miles away, but I remember the flames shooting out of the mill stacks, and the smoke, on our rare drives to the city, mostly for baseball games.)

Did the smoke affect Arcata's weather? Probably to some extent. But as Milosz writes, because redwoods "require constant moisture, they grow in zones of perpetual fog." The North Coast is also known as the Redwood Nation, one of the last places on the planet with significant redwood growth.

However, almost all of the old growth redwood is gone (as we discovered to our sorrow shortly after we arrived), and much of the former redwood forest land is covered now with buildings and roads, pastures and cropland, rather than trees. Biologists realize that redwood forests contribute to creating their own weather, so the fewer trees in smaller forests could lead to some alteration of weather, perhaps even so great a change that the surviving redwoods will no longer have the conditions they need to thrive.

Factor in as well the ongoing shifts in climate caused by global heating, and the picture of North Coast weather is even less certain.

Nevertheless, weather and climate are major distinguishing characteristics about the North Coast. On the coast itself, temperatures stay in the same 20 degree band, shifting from 60s/low 50s in summer to 50s/low 40s in winter. There are significantly different microclimates even slightly inland (Blue Lake gets hot in the summer) and higher (up the mountain from Arcata gets snow some winters.) The lack of high heat in the summer was a major attraction for me, even more than the warm winter. We did research the sunshine: turns out that on average Arcata has about as many sunny days as Pittsburgh.

When we arrived here in 1996, the seasonal pattern was familiar to residents. I arrived in Arcata in the sunny blue blaze of fall. I remember being amazed at the softness in the air. The nights were clear, and the stars out here actually twinkle. The moon was so bright that, coming through the skylight, I could see myself in the bathroom mirror by its light. And there were some fantastic sunsets (though as elsewhere pollution may have contributed.)

Then came the rains. It turned out to be the rainiest winter of the seven I've experienced here, but of course we didn't know that at the time. We'd spent some time in Portland and Seattle, but this was not the same.

We had to adjust our clothing. Unlike Seattle, nobody here seemed to carry an umbrella. We didn't have a car that first winter, so after awhile we found relatively inexpensive full length waterproof ponchos. Margaret's was red, mine was black. She said I looked like Darth Vader, and with nothing showing but her face in the window under the hood, I thought she looked like a red Gumby.

That was the year of the New Year's flooding. For several days, the North Coast was entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Highway 101 was closed in both directions, and so was the airport. According to the newspaper, we were self-sufficient in milk, so I guess we could have held out for awhile.

That winter extended well into March, if memory serves. Once in spring we were at a house in the hills above Arcata, looking out a picture window as a storm started. There was lightning. Our host was startled. He told us to pay attention, because it might be a long time before we saw lightning again here. He was right.

That summer we learned the daily pattern: fog, sun, fog. And the nature of the fog was new as well. It wasn't this wispy stuff hugging the ground or floating like smoke up the hills (though there was that kind, too.) It was gray sky and maybe a wall of gray around you. That's when we learned the correct term: marine layer.

We got used to checking the wind direction, for rain from the north, fair weather from the south. We were both amazed at how things grow here. There is always something blooming. Eventually we collected some Gore-Tex duds, and got cars. There were other aspects to the North Coast dress code that aren't strictly weather related, but I did adapt partly due to the weather. I liked my t-shirts thicker, with long sleeves, and my sweatshirts and sweaters thinner. I got wool shirts, although I didn't actually wear them much. One way you feel at home in a place is when you dress for its weather more or less without thinking.

This winter I found myself being made a little nervous by all the great sunshine. It was too warm, and where was the rain? ( South to San Francisco, apparently, and around Los Angeles, draining into Death Valley.) The rest of the country was having a bad time, and I was counseled to enjoy our good fortune. But maybe I'd developed a weather eye for what's normal for the North Coast.

What weather experiences define the North Coast for you?

Mapping the Territory

by Bill Kowinski

Wes Jackson's book gave a defining phrase, "becoming native to a place," to an approach, a yearning, an ethic, that had been developing for awhile. One of my first encounters with the idea was in the prose and talk of poet Gary Snyder.

In a mid-1970s interview, asked what is the best thing that non-Natives can absorb from Native peoples, Snyder said: "Well, the sense of 'nativeness,' of belonging to the place to begin with, is critical and necessary. It doesn't matter what color your skin is, it is a matter of how you relate to the land. Some people act as though they were going to make a fast buck and move on. That's an invader's mentality. Some people are beginning to understand where they are, and what it would mean to live carefully and wisely, delicately in a place, in such a way that you can live there adequately and comfortably. Also, your children and grandchildren and generations a thousand years in the future will still be able to live there. That's thinking as though you were a Native. Thinking in terms of the whole fabric of living and life. The Native American people lived fifty thousand years in California, perhaps." [The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, p 86.]

This way of life goes back further still. Prehistoric humans, writes human ecologist Paul Shepard, were 'native to their place.' "They possessed a detailed knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation by oral tradition through myths---stories that framed their beliefs in the context of ancestors and the landscape of the natural world. They lived within a 'sacred geography' that consisted of a complex knowledge of place, terrain and plants and animals embedded in a phenology of seasonal cycles. But they were also close to the earth in a spiritual sense, joined in an intricate configuration of sacred associations with the spirit of place within their landscape." [Coming Home to the Pleistocene, p. 7)

But what does all this mean to us in the twenty-first century North Coast of California? That's our inquiry in this place in cyberspace. What does it mean, and what actions can we take as individuals and together, to become native to this place?



Newcomers to the North Coast likely are attracted by the combination of its natural attributes and the "way of life" possible here, characterized by a slower pace in a less crowded, built-up, mechanized, polluted and frenetic environment than exists in many if not most other places.

Within this general sense are specific attributes of just this place: for instance, where the redwoods meet the sea. The particular character of our rivers and beaches, mountains and valleys, marsh and forest, flora and fauna, and how each connects to the others. In there somewhere as well is us: people, as we live, work, travel, play, study, worship, nurture and dream.

For newcomers as well as for those who have been here for generations but are materially affected by change, it often becomes quite obvious that a place must also be economically sustaining. This doesn't always mean "living off the land" in an economic sense, or even living off the local economy. Or does it, in order to become native to this place?

There are other economic issues that may create conflict. Timber versus environment has already, even if as some argue, it is a conflict artificially kept alive. Development versus preservation is shorthand for another set of difficult issues that jump into the headlines from time to time, and simmer beneath them otherwise.

The role of newcomers in inflating real estate prices is a particularly relevant problem, if it means that newcomers drive out those who have lived here longer, and perhaps feel they have long been committed to becoming native to this place.

Community is another huge factor (and this is the subject of the follow-up book to Wes Jackson's "Becoming Native to this Place," called "Rooted in the Land," a collection of essays co-edited by Jackson.) What does community mean on the North Coast of the early 21st century?

My first interview for this project was with Jerry Martien. I expected we'd talk about the relationship of poetry to place (his book of poems published by Blackberry Books is called "Pieces in Place.") But I came away from our conversation with another strong impression. Jerry told me about coming to live on the North Coast in the 1960s. (When we arrived in 1996, everyone we met seemed to have come here in the 1960s.) He mentioned places where people would hang out, and shared good times and bad in a kind of community within the community. He also talked about working with others in the community for schools and for the environment, which all began in a proximate and practical sense, because he had children. It seems that children and their education and welfare is a strong motivation for becoming involved in community and community-building, and in preserving and enhancing the North Coast's natural environment.

This also suggests that working for the good of the place means working for the good of the community as well as the environment. It may mean political commitment in its many possible senses. For example, Manuel Pastor (who teaches at UC Santa Cruz) and Angela Glover Blackwell, authors of Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground, consider the idea of place as a crucial factor in social change. "Place matters tremendously," Pastor said on the PBS program "NOW", "There really is a geography of opportunity in the regional landscapes in which we live."

To shift the emphasis from "becoming native" to "this place" for a moment, what do we mean by place? The watershed, the town, the neighborhood, the patch of earth where we live? We also speak about the work place, and we tend to spend a lot of our lives there. Is the work place really a place? How does it fit into our sense of becoming native to this place?

The scale of the question can get very large, as in our place in the flow of the universe, or "think globally, act locally" and the global village, and the proper meaning and scale of polity and identification (California? The state of Jefferson? The United States, or the Blue States?) It can get quite small, as essayist Leslie van Gelder reminds us: "In our rooted sense of being, we are all individual places who maintain a singular point of view. Every person is a place."

Finally (for now), some say that crucial to becoming native to a place is a sense of the past, of the ancestors and the "timeless past" when traditional ways were set and lived, as well as the historical past. But it seems equally true that in addition to a sense of the past, there must be a sense of the future: a deep responsibility for legacy and continuity, and consideration of the consequences of present actions on the future of this place.

All of these are possible pieces of the answers we can consider, as they are pieces of the lives we live on the North Coast.

What are your thoughts?

The North Coast and more about this site

For purposes of initial identification, the California North Coast has Humboldt Bay as its more or less geographical center, with the cities of Eureka and Arcata, on opposite sides of it. Owing to a quirk of the California coastline, Eureka is the westernmost city in the continguous states.

The North Coast by some reckoning extends northward into southern Oregon, and south to at least Cape Mendecino. It extends inland, too, perhaps even into Trinity County. This is really northern California, not the mid-coast San Francisco Bay region, which is what's usually called northern CA.

Most of it is within Humboldt County CA. There are other ways of defining it, in terms of watershed, history, and polity ( there's longstanding discussion about its sometimes tenuous relationship to the rest of California, and its kinship to northwest states, for example in the once-proposed new state of Jefferson). But defining the North Coast is one of this site's explorations.


What You Can Expect on this site...

This project began with a 2004 grant from the North Coast Cultural Trust. One component of this site will be to discuss the North Coast's natural and historical legacy, and lay the basic groundwork for determining what makes the North Coast the North Coast: that is, the beginning of knowledge that a native would learn of what makes this a particular place.

To encourage dialogue, I wanted to keep the posts relatively concise, and suggest questions for discussion. But I've also created a companion site, North Coast Texts, where longer documents and more photographs appear, along with more links, related to the topics on this site.

When something is underlined on this site, it means it's a link. Just click on it and speed through cyberspace to its promised destination, assuming the stars are correctly aligned.

Through interviews, photographs, personal essays, links and comments, this site will try to accomplish several tasks:

To begin discussion on aspects of North Coast identity with basic information on the natural and cultural constituents of this place.

To explore the meaning of "place" and "becoming native" in the context of the North Coast.

To give all this personal perspectives, because we are really discussing the relationship of people-ourselves, right now---to this North Coast place.

These explorations are attempts to find the most relevant elements that shape a shared identity---that define this North Coast place. That identity can then help guide action.

One way into these subjects is through the perspectives and experience of newcomers. I consider myself a newcomer, although I've lived here since 1996. There are a couple of reasons I wanted to begin with this perspective. First, there are a lot of newcomers on the North Coast. People coming here from elsewhere seems to be the main engine of growth, and perhaps of change.

Second, newcomers have a lot of questions, and they see things here in a fresh way. They see things from the perspective of where they've come from, as well as what strikes them most forcefully when they arrive.

So those of us not born on the North Coast come here with experiences from outside that shape our perceptions of where we are now. Our "beginner's mind" prompts questions and observations that long-time residents assume, overlook or have forgotten... but often are pleased to be prompted to remember.

At the same time, the newcomer is likely to be naïve about many aspects of the place. Changes that the newcomer may believe would be of obvious benefit, may not really fit. They would change the very aspects of the place that attracted them to come here. The whole idea of becoming native to a place begins with understanding that it isn't a blank slate. It has character and characteristics that make it what it is. It is a system of systems; an ecology. So we need the knowledge that experts and long-time North Coast residents can provide.

Newcomers and long-time residents will together shape the future of the North Coast. That future may well depend on the knowledge they have of this place, the images they hold of it in common, and the commitment they make to it.

So this corner of cyberspace is dedicated to exploring this notion: becoming native to this North Coast place. I will be writing about my own experiences, which includes relevant reading, and my point of view. That's the "creative non-fiction" approach (which has been defined as "nonfiction with an unabashedly personal and subjective point of view"), but it is also intended to start a dialogue. I'm going to be honest and I hope others will, too.

It's a huge subject, way too much for one person. There is no logical, well-organized way to even enter it. So the idea here is to just get started, go in whatever directions we can, and see what happens.

I think that in addition to
*presenting as concretely and personally as possible, a point of view that might prime the pump of other peoples' observations, recollections and thoughts, and
* in addition to presenting some topic-related interviews,
* I can keep suggesting questions that define the scope of the idea: the many elements of what might go into becoming native to this place.

Anyway that's the idea. So welcome to this North Coast place.

North Coast with Native sites

The Place in Native

Here in the far northwestern region, we live along the Pacific Ocean coast, along rivers such as the Klamath and Eel, and among rugged mountains, vast forests, deep valleys and fertile flatlands. Redwood and Douglas fir, madrone and pines, oaks and maples fill our forests. Flowers and edible plants as well as those used in basketry once grew in great profusion, and are still present in some abundance. Multiple species of eagle, hawk, hummingbird, salmon, bear, wolf, fox, cat, dog, rabbit, squirrel, elk, deer and antelope were (and to some degree remain) present in daily life, as well as the more local and exotic species the region hosted, such as the alpine chipmunk, snowshoe rabbit, bighorn sheep and yellow-haired porcupine; the osprey, the wolverine, condor, and cougar.

All of this is directly reflected in foods, materials used for implements and shelter, stories, ceremony and many other ways. A lot of these influences are easy to see once they are pointed out, but a less obvious and more difficult one is the relationship to language.

Recently Cheryl Seidner (elected chair of the Wiyot tribe at Table Bluff) commented to me that the Wiyot don't have a word for "tree." They have words for many kinds of trees, in various states and stages. But they didn't conceptualize "tree" as a general or generic term, which tells us a lot about how specific and thorough their knowledge was, and also about relationship. The use of "tree" in non-Native language suggests they are objects rather than individuals or members of a species. For one thing, this makes it easier to categorize them as commodities, according to how profitable they are.

Here is some of what I learned from Julian Lang and others, in person and in my reading: The language of each tribe was derived from where they lived, and their experience in relationship with that land, with its creatures and weather, its plants and seasons. The places and their experiences formed the very structures of these language in ways that is difficult to understand for those raised with a language that has a very different history of development, such as English.

Native scholars have documented this aspect of Native languages. Often the words are based on sounds from the specific natural setting. (The name of a particular bird, for instance, may be based on the sound that bird makes.) The structures of words themselves reflect ways of relating to the world that is different from the world view that forms the basis for English words, sentence structure and even the use of tenses.

These differences matter, for they reflect entire world-views. Differences in the nature of these languages when compared to English have resulted in widely influential mis-translations of Native concepts, giving the world a false or incomplete idea of Native knowledge.
Traditional practices, traditional knowledge, aboriginal geography, material and non-material culture, the stories and mythology that are the core of our identity, are all intimately related and interdependent, so that they cannot really be separated. But the basis for all of them is language.

This is a reason that preserving and reviving their languages is so important to Native peoples of the North Coast. Some tribes have few if any speakers who learned the language as children. Apart from supporting our neighbors in their efforts to revive their languages, we have a second incentive: in comparing these languages to the English American language we have in common, we will learn more about being native to this place.

There is much more about the Native North Coast on the companion blog, North Coast Texts, including a Primer on local tribes with links; reporting on the recent return of Indian Island land to the Wiyot, and more on my own experiences and interests concerning Native peoples before I got to the North Coast. See how they compare with yours.

In the meantime, some questions you might address in the Comments below could include: if you are non-Native, what were your first experiences and impressions concerning Native peoples and cultures on the North Coast? What do you, as either non-Native or Native, believe are the special contributions of our indigenous North Coast Native cultures to how we all can become native to this place?