15-acres of undeveloped landscape sits as an oasis among the undulating, cookie cutter housing developments that crowd the edges of the Carquinez Strait, a natural tidal channel in Vallejo, California. At this spot, known as Glen Cove Waterfront Park, a swath of yellow grass, dappled with the woody stems of wild fennel, leads to the […]
Marc Dadigan
Posted inBlog
Fish and Wildlife Service denies an Indian her feathers
Marine Sisk-Franco has been a Winnemem Wintu Indian for all of her years, and the Northern California tribe’s way of life is all she knows. She’s the daughter of the tribe’s chief and their headman, she’s danced and sung at their ceremonies, and, in 2006, she bravely endured racial taunts and threats from drunken power […]
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U.N. human rights expert visits California tribe
Arron Sisk took the smoldering sunflower root and undulated it from Catarina de Albuquerque’s feet to the top of her head, its pungent smoke curling above her like a spectral crown. He then held it beneath her nose, and told her the root would clear her mind from bad thoughts, allow her to see and […]
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Tree equity
The Los Angeles community Sherman Oaks sounds like a place that should be verdant and laden with leafy trees. Not surprisingly, the students of Arbol University found that to be exactly true. Yet the students, who were using trigonometry and other tools to collect data about Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, were shocked at the […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
A long journey home
California tribe wants to bring back salmon from New Zealand
Posted inRange
Tribal recognition
When President Obama recently announced that the U.S. would finally endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP), he was immediately heaped with effusive praise from tribal and human rights groups alike. There have been unrelenting references to the Crow Nation giving Obama the Indian name, “One Who Helps People […]
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California’s tribal harvesting imbroglio
Frankie Myers’s tribe, the Yuroks, have gathered and harvested everything from mussels to seaweed on the Northern California coast since “the beginning of time,” as he puts it. The myriad coastal resources are of important cultural value to many Pacific tribes, and recent studies have shown that pre-contact hunter-gatherers were extremely adept at harvesting in […]
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Small Nevada tribe sues BLM over coal ash landfill
At a Southern Nevada Health District public hearing this October, farmer Norm Tom said that he and his tribe had “seen a lot of death” in the last 35 years, and he placed the blame squarely on the neighboring Reid Gardner coal-fueled power plant, run by Nevada’s primary power company, NV Energy. “Every time we […]