Beneath a sky heavy with the promise of rain, supporters of the Alliance for Felix Cove—a group dedicated to rematriating the only Coast Miwok-built home that still stands within the Point Reyes National Seashore—assembled on Sunday morning to build and launch a traditional tule-reed canoe.
Leading the effort was Redbird, an educator of Pomo, Paiute, Wintu and Wailaki decent, who guided a few dozen participants in handcrafting the 20-foot vessel. Mostly adhering to the traditional methods of the Coast Miwok, the group lashed together thousands of tule stalks—reeds filled with tiny air pockets that lend lightweight flexibility and buoyancy—harvested from the shallow waters of nearby marshes and muddy shores.
“It’s not rigid like a modern boat; it’s a whole different experience,” Redbird explained, cradling a dense bundle of tule in his arms. “It’s more attuned to the water, more immersed in nature. You become part of it. You’re not fighting the waves; you’re moving with them.”
For thousands of years, the Point Reyes peninsula—including the spot at White House Pool where the canoe was pieced together—was home to the Támal-ko, the name for the people who lived along Tomales Bay. They settled on the region’s grassy hills and in its dense pine forests, and they thrived near its estuaries and granite headlands.
But their relationship to their homeland came to a violent end with the arrival of European settlers and the establishment of the Spanish mission system in the mid-1700s. Indigenous communities were stripped of their resources and forced into missions, where they were coerced into conversion and conscripted into labor.
By the 19th century, ownership of the peninsula shifted from Spanish to Mexican hands, eventually landing with brothers Oscar Lovell Shafter and James McMillan Shafter, along with Oscar’s son-in-law, Charles Webb Howard—San Francisco lawyers who carved the landscape into today’s alphabetic network of dairies and ranches.
It was Howard who hired Captain Henrik Claussen to expel the remaining Támal-ko. According to anthropologist C. Hart Merriam, Claussen used the school census to identify the 60 or so families still living along Tomales Bay. His men then set about dismantling their homes, rifles in hand, empowered by laws that allowed settlers to form militias. By 1905, Merriam wrote, “As a result, most of the Indians crossed the Bay and scattered and soon became practically extinct.”
Yet beneath this familiar history of conquest and colonization lies a lesser-known counternarrative: the enduring presence of the people who lived here, who persisted well into the 1950s, long after most Támal-ko had been dispossessed.
Absence can also be a kind of evidence—one that underscores the erasure of Indigenous presence. Theresa Harlan, the adopted daughter of the last Támal-ko family to inhabit these shores, is determined to restore fullness to this forgotten story, changing not only which histories we preserve but what we think it means to preserve them.
“The medicine is memory,” Ms. Harlan said. “I’m simply the daughter of a woman who lived here, who thrived here, who found conflict in schools here but also found empowerment in her physicality and her strength to be able to row across the bay two or three times before the afternoon.”
On the eve of the canoe launch, at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, Ms. Harlan stood before a packed crowd and, with a calm intensity, recounted her family’s story along with her vision to restore Felix Cove, the site of her ancestral home, as a place of ceremony, education and memory.
Ms. Harlan, founder and director of the Alliance for Felix Cove, submitted a vision plan to the National Park Service last year, proposing a cooperative agreement for long-term stewardship, including gardens, interpretive signage and the restoration of historical structures.
Officially demarcated on maps as Lairds Landing, Felix Cove is a sheltered 12-acre expanse across the bay from Marshall, reachable only by boat or by a mile-long trail lined with Douglas fir and bishop pine. Three weathered wooden cabins built in the 19th century and now tagged with graffiti sit on a grassy flat overlooking the water.
This last pocket of Támal-ko territory to remain under Indigenous stewardship was taken by ranchers in 1956. Now part of the park service’s holdings, efforts are underway to reclaim not just the land, but also its history.
The timeline for adoption of Ms. Harlan’s plan remains uncertain. Approval of the proposal now rests with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a federally recognized tribe of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people that established a co-stewardship agreement with the Point Reyes National Seashore in 2021.
“Because of our general agreement, we have a trust responsibility to the tribe,” said Anne Altman, superintendent of the seashore. Greg Sarris, tribal chairman of FIGR, was unavailable for comment.
Historian Dewey Livingston joined Ms. Harlan, along with Joel and Nick Whitney, descendants of the family that owned much of the peninsula in the 19th and early 20th century, at the Dance Palace last Saturday. Ámate Pérez, the conversation’s moderator, emphasized the importance of telling the “hidden stories” of California’s Indigenous people to “repair historical ruptures and repair our common humanity.”
The gathering was sparked by Joel Whitney, a Brooklyn-based writer and great-great-great-grandson of Oscar Shafter, who reached out to Ms. Harlan after reading about her work in this newspaper. When Ms. Harlan received the call from a descendant of a family she had long viewed as a pernicious symbol of colonization, she couldn’t help but laugh—not at him, but at herself.
“At some point,” she reflected to the audience, “you have to decide, are you going to live in a world of abundance, open heartedness and open mindedness or are you going to live in a world of exclusion, isolationism and scarcity?”
As Ms. Harlan recounted her family’s history, she spoke of their resilience through three waves of colonization. They “survived the terror of the Spanish missions,” she said. “They survived the Mexican era. They survived American colonization, and they made it all the way to the ’50s.”
In the early-19th century, Domingo and Euphrasia Felix, Ms. Harlan’s great-great-grandparents, settled at the cove, raising their children while working as a cook and fieldhand for European ranchers. Her grandmother, Bertha Felix, was born there in 1882 to Joseph and Paulina Felix, both of Támal-ko descent. Bertha remained at the cove with her husband, Arnold Campigli, the son of Swiss-Italian immigrants. Together, they farmed, raised livestock, made butter and gathered medicinal herbs.
“When the Campiglis were there, they weren’t set apart; they were part of the ranching community,” Mr. Livingston said. “Bertha worked on the ranches, and Arnold served as the maintenance man for the O.L. Shafter estate.”
Ms. Harlan’s mother, Elizabeth Campigli, grew up at the cove alongside six older siblings. After Bertha’s death from tuberculosis in 1949, Elizabeth’s brother, Victor Sousa, remained there until the mid-’50s, when he was served eviction papers by Sayles Turney and James Lundgren, who claimed they gained ownership of the cove after purchasing the surrounding K Ranch from the O.L. Shafter estate years earlier.
“Uncle Vic,” as Ms. Harlan affectionately calls him, contested the eviction in court, asserting squatter’s rights. But California’s legal system, designed to enable settler occupation, provided no protection for Indigenous land claims. “California laws were written to protect and enable settler-colonists to occupy our land,” Ms. Harlan said.
Proving squatter’s rights required documenting five years of residence, fencing the land and paying taxes. While testimony confirmed the Felix family’s presence at the cove long before K Ranch was deeded in 1870, the absence of tax records led an appellate court to force their departure in 1956.
For Joel Whitney, the Shafter story is emblematic of a broader reckoning that white Americans are due to face amid the country’s crisis of self-concept. “This country has a lot of waywardness that we’re all suffering from,” he said. “Not knowing where we come from, not knowing who our land elders are, who our first relatives are—that’s a big part of our lostness.”
Nick Whitney described his family’s history as “an extraordinary contradiction—a story of remarkable industry, activity and change, yet change that unfolded under devastating terms. But for much of our recent history, that change was framed as progress.”
The Whitneys offered a close-to-home example of the work that many non-Indigenous Americans need to undertake, said Jennie Pakradooni, a naturalist from Lagunitas who attended the event. “I think it’s relatable to a lot of folks who are not involved in Land Back or not tuned into anything around Indigenous ways,” she said. “For them to see an elder white person relating in this way is extremely transformative.”
Back at the tule canoe-building workshop at White House Pool, Ms. Harlan twisted a reed into cordage, securing one end in her teeth as her fingers deftly worked. She described her first visit to her family home in the late 1990s, a few years after her mother’s death, when Mr. Livingston led her and her sister to the cove by boat.
“It felt both strange and sacred, as if I was stepping into something very private,” she recalled. “But at the same time, it felt like meeting a long-lost relative—someone who carries the past with them. It was as if someone had taken my hand and said, ‘Here’s your great aunt; let her tell you her story.’”