A panel of Indigenous people recounted stories of Tomales Bay and spoke about the living culture of the Coast Miwok for a packed-in Dance Palace audience on Sunday afternoon. On the doorstep of the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Indigenous representatives of Marin and Sonoma, accompanied by local historian Dewey Livingston, described their struggle for the park to recognize the recent history and contemporary voice of those with the most profound claim to the land.
Though each of the Indigenous panelists could tell stories of the bay that go back generations, none currently live in West Marin.
“For most of us Indigenous folks, we’re homeless in our own homeland,” said Dean Hoaglin, the chairman of the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin whose family roots are in Marshall.
The marquee panelist was Theresa Harlan, a retired state employee and Indigenous advocate whose family lived at Laird’s Landing, a secluded cove on the western shore of the bay, for four generations. Last fall, Ms. Harlan founded a nonprofit, the Alliance for Felix Cove, after the unofficial name she has given to the inlet in honor of her mother’s family, the Felixes.
The event’s title referred to “stories and memories,” but the panelists made it clear that their mission is to show white people that Coast Miwoks can’t be relegated to the past and are very much alive. Addressing current material conditions, Ms. Harlan said, is as important as recognizing an often-forgotten history. Her most immediate goals are to make Laird’s Landing more accessible to her family and to restore the house her grandfather built there.
“I’m here to share the vibrancy that was here when my mom was young,” Ms. Harlan told the 100-strong crowd. “That means being able to walk down that road to the cove without having to ask permission from the National Park Service to unlock the gate. It means that we can invite our family and friends to join us and we can go inside our family’s home.”
Ms. Harlan’s nonprofit, comprising a group of eight Indigenous women and a loose contingent of volunteers, is hoping to raise money for various projects that will commit her family history to public memory while giving its living members unrestricted access to the cove. With $80,000, she said, the alliance can design a virtual reality exhibit that will memorialize the Felixes’ life at the cove, where they grew vegetables and caught halibut, abalone and oysters while working for ranching families.
The third panelist, Jacquelyn Ross, also discussed Indigenous foodways. Ms. Ross, who comes from a Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo fishing family, has focused her advocacy on food security and marine species like abalone.
Ms. Harlan also described another project her group is planning: the launch of a traditional Miwok tule canoe on Tomales Bay. Initially, she planned to collaborate with Blue Waters Kayaking on a community-wide event at Heart’s Desire Beach. But because of crowd limits in the state park, the launch will be private, she said. To raise money for the canoe, which will be fashioned by native ecologist and craftsman Redbird Willie, Ms. Harlan and Blue Waters will host a donation paddle from Heart’s Desire to Felix Cove on Oct. 16.
“It just seems like Tomales Bay is inaccessible for having a large celebration,” Ms. Harlan told the Light. “It is an uncomfortable feeling that to have a family gathering, I have to ask the park.”
Ms. Harlan’s frustrations with the park stem in part from the fact that she is not an enrolled member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the federally recognized tribe that holds a formal agreement with the seashore. When the park only considers Indigenous perspectives through the tribe, she said, it misses the important voices of numerous unenrolled Miwok descendants.
Mr. Hoaglin has faced the same difficulty at Kule Loklo, the recreated Miwok village centered on a ceremonial roundhouse near the Bear Valley Visitor Center. He led the dance ceremonies there for years, continuing the legacy of his friend Lanny Pinola, an Indigenous park ranger who transformed the replica settlement into the beating cultural heart of the local Miwok community. FIGR approved the dismantling of the roundhouse after the roof collapsed in 2019, and has promised to rebuild it, but the site has remained derelict for three years. Mr. Hoaglin and his council’s efforts to make a change have largely gone nowhere.
“It’s hard for me to go over there to see our sacred space in the shape it is,” Mr. Hoaglin said.
Ms. Harlan asked Mr. Livingston, a longtime Inverness resident, to take part in the panel because his extensive historical research has involved interviewing local Indigenous elders and documenting the theft of Miwok land. The panel’s moderator, former county staffer David Escobar, a member of the Lenca-Potón Indigenous group of El Salvador, put Mr. Livingston on the spot: “What gives you the wherewithal,” he asked, “to write about Indigenous history?”
Mr. Livingston responded: “I’ve long felt that it wasn’t my story to tell, and yet I’ve realized that I have a responsibility, in telling the whole story of the place, to tell as much of that history as I can.” Permission from and collaboration with local Indigenous people, he said, was crucial to that work.
Ms. Harlan added that she felt everyone present was interested in rejecting the white settler-driven narrative of history and telling a more inclusive story that was not “innocent of history.”
“I think that we, especially the folks here in this room, are interested in shedding that innocence,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”