Tony Platt GoodToGo

THEIR CALIFORNIA

    In 2009, in response to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Del Norte County Unified School District in northwest California acknowledged institutionalized discrimination against its Native American students – including a climate of racial harassment and disproportionate use of suspensions and expulsions – and agreed to implement a series of remedies over the next five years.

    As part of this settlement, I was invited by Del Norte school officials in early March to lead a workshop for some twenty-five elementary school teachers. We met in Crescent City, just down the road from the notorious Pelican Bay supermax prison.

    The teachers are grappling with how to make their curriculum respond to charges of racism. In particular, they express their frustration with how the state-authorized textbook – Our California: History-Social Science for California by William White (published by Pearson in 2006) – addresses or, more accurately, distorts and ignores California’s Native past. Given the relatively high number of Native families in the Northwest, the resurgence of Native cultural practices during the last thirty years, and the region’s history as an epicenter of mass extermination policies and land grabs in the wake of the Gold Rush, socially responsible teachers want to do the right thing by their students. And Our California, they tell me, gets in their way.

    From the late 19th century until the latter part of the 20th century, the history of Native peoples in California was fashioned to suitably fit the state’s racially sanitized origins story and narrative of relentless Progress. By-passing California’s indigenous and Mexican roots, the state’s earliest textbooks and popular histories located the mythic idea of California in Castilian Spain, transported to the New World via religious missions from  the 1770s through the 1820s.

    The missions, that essentially functioned as colonial outposts and forced labor camps for some 60,000 Native neophytes, became in Malcolm Margolin’s words “places of defeat and death.” Yet, according to a typical children’s history book, published in 1908, the missions were a “fairy tale, wonderful and unreal,” an oasis of civilization in a “wilderness inhabited only by savage men and wild animals.” When newly independent Mexico abandoned the missions in the 1830s, it was retrospectively blamed by California writers for the degeneracy of Native peoples: “Free from restraint, they soon sank to a low depth of barbarism and vice,” observed a writer in Land of Sunshine in 1894.

    Well into the 20th century, architects of the California Story built a cultural firewall that insulated generations of young people from the horrors of the genocidal past. Instead, students were drilled in a catechism that portrayed native peoples as biologically inferior, racially different, predestined to extinction, complicit in their own demise, and in need of the firm hand of civilizing institutions. Their only chance of survival, so the argument went, was in the abandonment of native cultural practices and assimilation into cultural values promoted by social workers and Indian matrons.

    This official, mythic narrative of the past was disrupted in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of militant Native organizations, protest literature, and revisionist histories. By the time that William White did his research for Our California, he had many sources to draw upon, including Carey McWilliams’ Brothers Under the Skin (1944), Theodora Kroeber and Robert Heizer’s Almost Ancestors (1968), Vine Deloria’s Custer Died For Your Sins (1969), Byron Nelson Jr.’s Our Home Forever (1978), Jack Norton’s Genocide in Northwestern California (1979), and Tomás Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines (1994), not to mention a ton of specialized, academic monographs rooted in a critical framework.

    On the surface, Our California seems sensitive to multiculturalism, gender, and race. There are pictures of Japanese farmworkers, a black mayor of San Francisco (Willie Brown), and the first woman in space (Sally Ride); acknowledgment of the “unfair treatment of migrant workers” (with images of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta) and a paragraph on tribal government in a chapter on governance (including a photo of the Agua Caliente Tribal Council).

    But a close read reveals too many incorrect facts, problematic interpretations, as well as a heavy dose of amnesia regarding California’s Native past and present. By page two the misinformation is under way: “Our story of California begins hundreds of years ago with the California Indians.” This sentence manages to both reduce multi-linguistic and self-contained tribal communities to a generic Indian, and diminish their history by a few thousand years.

    A well-meaning effort to portray the daily lives of four tribal groups (Cahuilla, Chumash, Miwok, and Hupa) “long ago” is undermined by the assumption that they were static and homogenous, with no internal divisions and no changes over time. The statement that “thousands of California Indians live in our state today” is accompanied by a photograph of a Miwok ceremony “still performed today.” There are no images of Indians looking like you and me in work or school clothes.

    Accompanying an illustration of a swashbuckling, and no doubt studious Spaniard on horseback is a euphemistic take on the history of colonialism: “In the 1500s, European countries wanted to learn about new places.” And the vocabulary word for this lesson is “explore.”

    Accompanied by an image of now four swashbuckling Spaniards on horseback, the next lesson asks the question, “How did the Spanish change how California Indians [sic] lived?” And “died” would have been appropriate since native populations declined by about one-third in the period of Spanish rule. This time, the vocabulary includes “colony,” ever so nicely defined as “a settlement of people who come from country to live in another land.” Another key term, “mission,” becomes “a settlement set up by a religious group to teach their religion and other ways of life to native people.” The assumption that Native peoples are godless heathens is reinforced by an image of Chumash on their knees before a padre and giant cross.

    The mission system and its founding father, Junípero Serra, get the star treatment. Serra, whose 300th anniversary of his birth will be celebrated this year, is being touted for canonization by the Catholic Church. Our California gives him his own page and a saintly image. The missions themselves, which figure prominently in representations of California iconography, get five images in the book, all of buildings bereft of people. My favorite is an illustration of a “Spanish Mission” that resembles a contemporary Napa Valley spa, complete with “guest rooms,” “workers’ housing,” and “pottery shop and oven.” Not an Indian in sight.

    While the textbook acknowledges that “some California Indians” were “forced to give up their way of life” and that “many died from diseases brought over by Europeans,” the overall impression of the missions is positive. Here, “California Indians learned how to farm and make new things.” Presumably, stuck in the Stone Age for ten thousand years, they never got the hang of living off the land. Perhaps they were just lazy, given that the missions needed to teach them how to “work hard.”

    On page sixty-three, we learn that under Mexican rule “many California Indians had no land or money,” so ended up working on ranches. But after the war against Mexico in 1848 (described in one sentence as a “gain” in territory), Native peoples disappear from history, only to be reincarnated eighty-two pages and more than a hundred and fifty years later in a section on “tribal government.”

    Meanwhile, Our California sidesteps the challenge of teaching young children the history of genocide, mass extermination, human trafficking, and cultural erasure in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. Out of curriculum, out of mind.

    No wonder teachers feel frustrated, families are angry, and Native kids rebel against a curriculum that whitewashes their California.

YEAH YEAH YEAH

    Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez is an iconic figure in the Chicano/Chicana movement, known for her activism, political leadership, and publications. But when she arrived in New Mexico in 1968 to work on El Grito del Norte and, later, in the Chicano Communications Center, she was 43 years old and, in her own words, “almost totally ignorant of Chicano culture and life.” By then, she had already accumulated a lifetime of experiences: working at the United Nations, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Simon and Schuster; and giving up a promising professional career in 1965 to run the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s New York office.

    Before she became Chicana leader Betita Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland was a lover of words and language. At eight years old she was writing and typing a newsletter (“The Daily News”) for family and friends. At college in the 1940s, she wrote for and became associate editor of The Swarthmore Phoenix. In the early 1960s, while at Simon and Schuster, she edited Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Four Screenplays and translated a French novel, The White Stone. By 1965, she had written reviews of French New Wave and English “kitchen sink” films for Horizon and Film Quarterly; and reported on Cuba for the Manchester Guardian, on the Russian poetry scene for Evergreen Review, and on the Civil Rights movement for the Nation.

    Her writing during this period is original, sharp, vivid, and evocative. Here is an unpublished, untitled piece, written in 1964, that I found in her personal papers. I am publishing it here with permission of Betita’s daughter, Tessa Koning Martínez, in celebration of Betita’s 87th birthday on December 12th. I’ve added a title.

YEAH, YEAH, YEAH
Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez

    Took Tessa and her friend Valerie to see the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night in New York. When it was over, we all got up without a word and RAN out of the theatre and across Second Ave, Valerie in front and then me and then Tessa, running running up three blocks to the car which we jumped into and I started it in a sec and drove sixty miles an hour straight to the Doubleday store on 5th avenue which is open until midnight, Yeah Yeah Yeah.

    And I parked it where it says NO PARKING NO STANDING NO LIVING NO NOTHING and we all raced into the store with Tessa leading this time and zoom up to the record counter where we collapsed with our tongues hanging out, WHERE ARE YOUR BEATLES RECORDS SIR? There it was, the movie sound track itself. What could you want in life now? And WRAP IT PLEASE while Tessa disappeared, then hollered out from behind some stack of books, MOMEE THEY HAVE THE BOOK TOO, while Valerie watched for cops getting the car, and we threw money at the man for the book of the movie and raced out the revolving door. There was the clerk holding out the change but we had no time for that, had to get home to play it play it play it.

    So I drove up Park Avenue through three red lights. Valerie had to go home because her mother doesn’t believe in Beatles and she was late for dinnah, and now I am here with the music and beloved Tessa and two jumping kittens.

    So there is no death tonight.

SHAPE OF THE BODY

    There are only a few days of vacation left before Cecilia and I leave London and head back home to California at the end of August. We try to cram in as many sights and scenes as possible. Tate Modern of course. A young woman I’ve never met before approaches me in the vast expanse of the Turbine Room. Without any niceties, not even a hi or hello, she tells me in some detail how she nearly died from tuberculosis in Czechoslovakia when she was twelve years old. “I could see the pores open on my skin and suck in the air that saved me.” She sounds like a religious fanatic, but she’s not. She stretches out her arms, almost touching me, to show me where it happened. “Like an acid trip,” I offer. “Sort of, not really, and then I woke up in hospital alive,” she says.

     I’m interested, I ask for more. So she tells me of a time when she was younger, being pulled out of a sudden deep pit of snow by somebody’s hand. Nearly suffocated. “Whose hand?” I ask. “Nobody’s, it just felt like a hand. My father was many yards away.”

    I tell her my stories, how during the last five years I’ve had terrifying car accidents. In one a young guy ran a red light and sideswiped me, totaling the car. In the other I skidded across an icy highway on a dark-black night, off the four-lane road into a void that turned out to be a gentle rise. Not a scratch on me. “I’ve been healthy all my life,” I say, “then two near misses.” I don’t mention the obvious hit – the death of my son five years ago, but it’s on my mind.

    Now seventy years old, I’m hyper-aware of how bodies, as Metamorphoses puts it, “can change to assume new shapes.” I try to stay in shape, work out three times a week at the gym, erasing various aches and pains with the jock’s little helper, Ibuprofen.  “Never a day in hospital since I was a child,” I tell the Czech woman, “and just like that, two accidents over which I felt I had no control, and it could have been curtains.”

    Coming to a pause in our stories, we shake hands and part without saying goodbye. And just like that, an intimate conversation between strangers is over, both of us willing participants in Tino Sehgal’s improvisational script about what it means to connect with others. Later that evening, after dinner with friends, I begin to feel ill.

    The next day I'm shuffling between bed and toilet in our Fleet Street flat. I’m okay when I’m horizontal, but on my feet I’m a little dizzy. Could be flu or a bug or food poisoning. By the next evening, feeling a little worse, now easily tired, I search for fleet street doctors on the web and find the Fleet Street Clinic a hundred yards away.

    Soon I’m reporting my symptoms to a young, extremely pleasant doctor from Berlin. As I tell him my troubles, he googles. After he checks my heart rate and taps my stomach, he’s pretty sure I have a virus that has penetrated my inner ear, and that unless it’s a rare chronic variety, I should be okay in a few days. He advises me that it would be better, however, if I didn’t travel back home the next day as planned. He prescribes me £12.50 ($20) worth of painkillers “just in case your stomach hurts” and sends me off with a printout about Labyrinthitis and Vestibular Neuritis from patient.co.uk. My fifteen-minute consultation in a private clinic in London costs me £70 ($111), meds not included.

    Later that evening the nice young doc calls me to say that if I don’t feel better in the morning, “it might be a good thing to come in for a blood test.” The next day I insist that Cecilia take her flight back to the States. “I’ll rest for a few days, get rid of this virus, and come home later. I’ll be okay. I know my way around England,” I reassure her, “I don’t feel like an outsider.”

     I grew up in Manchester before leaving for California in 1963. I have relatives here. Moreover, two of my closest friends from San Francisco have just arrived to spend the year in London. “Don’t worry,” I tell Cecilia, “Mark and Lydia will help me if I need them.”

    Cecilia leaves at dawn. I get up, but the room is spinning. By now, as a later medical report notes, my stools have become decidedly offensive. I pop a couple of Imodium with a view to getting myself plugged up for the journey home. I don’t trust myself to take a shower without falling and I no longer trust the private medical system to provide an inside track to recovery.
   
    At my niece’s urging, I call the National Health System’s help line. A screener takes my details and within an hour I’m being quizzed on the phone by a nurse who takes his time to get all the details right. Later that morning, accompanied by Mark and Lydia, a GP at a local NHS clinic asks a few questions, puts her finger up my ass, and dismisses the diagnosis of inner ear virus. “It’s melena, you’re bleeding in your stomach, you’re clinically anemic,” she says, sure of herself, and refers me to University College Hospital. “The medical team is waiting for you in Emergency.”

    I crumple to the ground outside the clinic while Mark tries to run down a taxi. I feel like I have seen the future and it doesn’t work. During the short journey from clinic to hospital, I’m getting worse, more disoriented and physically incompetent than I have ever felt in my life. “I’ll always remember you at that moment,” recalls Lydia a few days later. “You suddenly looked old and frail. Like an old man.” She hesitates. “Something about the shape of your body, the way you bent over. You were deteriorating in front of me.”

    By the time we arrive at the hospital, I can’t make it to the emergency room. Mark puts me in a wheelchair and zig-zags me into the waiting room. “He’s deteriorating,” Lydia says to the receptionist. She’s scared. So am I, imagining the worst.

    A combination of events – my initial denial that it was blood down there, taking an over-the-counter drug that masked my symptoms, and the private doctor’s quickie misdiagnosis – had combined to put me at risk. The acute medicine team at University College Hospital moves quickly on my case. A relay of doctors confirms that I’m suffering from bleeding ulcers, no other pathology, not the stomach or colon cancer I feared. The nursing staff surrounds me with care and compassion. “Not to worry, darling, you’ll be better soon.”

    And they were right. Three days later, seven pounds lighter, topped up with three liters (5.2 pints) of blood, I’m on the mend. Ibuprofen, I’m told, is the likely culprit. “Three weeks of Omeprazole capsules and you should be fine,” says the discharge doctor.

    The care I receive from the NHS in England is comparable to the care that I would have received from Kaiser, my Health Maintenance Organization in California. Except a tourist from England with an acute problem would not have been admitted to Kaiser because it’s a members-only organization, linked for the most part to work-related health insurance. And if this same tourist had staggered into another hospital, the first order of business would have been the matter of payment.

    At University College Hospital in London, money was never discussed. I remember a nurse informing me that the “overseas team will no doubt visit you,” but they didn’t. I must have racked up quite a bill: x-rays, an EKG, blood tests, gastroscopy, lab analysis, and ICU-like care for the first twenty-four hours.

    I tell one doctor that I’m a long-time resident of the United States and a British citizen, but nobody asks to see my passport or check my identification. I don’t have travel insurance. Aside from £60 ($95) required by the Neaman Practice for their diagnosis and £25 ($40) for a big bundle of optional phone and telly services at the hospital, there’s no charge. It costs me about twice as much – a change fee – to re-book my flight home with United Airlines.

    After I’m discharged, I revel in the everyday, but feel compelled to return, not as a patient but as a visitor to see Michael who is in the bed next to me during my last twenty-four hours in hospital. We find common ground very quickly. We’re roughly the same age and class background, and share similar experiences as ex-pats, he in Spain, me in California. Our politics are very different – I read the Guardian and New Statesman, he reads the Daily Mail and Spectator – but neither of us is interested in ideological combat. Bigger issues are on our minds.

    Michael and I have both been healthy all our lives, never in hospital since we were kids. “I had a pain in my stomach,” he tells me. “Went to see some doctors and they told me I had inoperable cancer. I said no to chemo, what’s the point.” The docs told him he had about three months to live. “How long ago was that?” I ask. “Three months,” he replies, looking me in the eye. “It’s all over for me. I’m going to die very soon. Look,” he says, opening up his puny hospital gown to show me up close how the cancer has bloated his once lean and handsome body. He wants out of the hospital now, this minute. He craves his garden and the intergenerational household that he shares in London with his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

    “And you?” he asks. I tell him the dice rolled lucky for me this time.

    My last day in London, we talk personally about our families. I tell him about the death of my son Daniel. Michael tells me how difficult it was to let his granddaughter know about his own looming death. I give him the piece of slick, black-green jade that I always carry with me on trips for good luck. “It’s from a place in northern California called Big Lagoon. I found it on the beach. It keeps me grounded about what’s important,” I say to Michael.
 
    It’s difficult to say our goodbyes, both of us teary. “I wish we had met under better circumstances,” concludes Michael. “Me too,” I reply. When we shake hands, I feel the jade warm in his palm. “I’ll put a hole in it and wear it around my neck,” he says with a lovely smile.

****************

The writer is recuperating at home in Berkeley and is back at work. Michael Johnstone died at Trinity Hospice in London on September 20th.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” (Joan Didion)

    A couple of weeks ago I attended the 3rd Global Conference on Genocide in San Francisco. The conference, organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars, covered genocides, past and present, in many parts of the world. Just about everywhere, except here. In three days of panels and presentations, I could find only one discussion of California as a site of genocide, and it was in my paper.

    California can hold its own with other regions of the world regarding human-made tragedies – genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, lynching, racial segregation, eugenics, imprisonment without trial, and torture. We know this from the accounts of witnesses and survivors, and from richly descriptive social histories written during the last thirty years.

    Yet, California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress. The upbeat version of The California Story as a place of entrepreneurial ingenuity and cutting-edge modernity has served as a cultural firewall, numbing and cutting us off from the state’s bloody history.

    It is rare to find in our textbooks, classrooms, and public places a reckoning with our nineteenth century catastrophe: dispossession and massacres of native communities; break up of native families, including a commercial trade in women and children; organized efforts to erase thousands of years of cultural experience; and systematic looting of native graves and artifacts to the benefit of collectors, museums, and universities.

    It is even more rare to find accounts of local native resistance, from guerilla warfare during the Gold Rush to battles over land and repatriation in the twentieth century. Crude and racist representations of acquiescent native peoples dominated public space in California for over a century, making it easier to frame their near extermination in the imagery of natural history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as a result of human intervention – a genocide.

    Eugenic legacies persist today in the state’s 4th grade curriculum that transforms the colonial, racist imperatives of the Spanish mission system into a romantic origins story of uplift and civilization. And in the 7th grade, when The Diary of Anne Frank is typically taught, it is the rare teacher who makes a connection to California’s catastrophe.

    There are so few public acknowledgements of California’s history of atrocities against native peoples that I can list them here:

•    In 2005, the state erected a historical marker on Highway 20 in recognition of a massacre by soldiers of Pomo women and children on Bloody Island in 1850.
•    In 2006, Eureka City Council returned sixty acres of Indian Island (the site of another massacre) to the Wiyot Tribe as a gesture of reparations.
•    In 2007, Bishop Francis A. Quinn in a public speech acknowledged the “past mistakes and serious misdeeds” of the Catholic Church during the Mission period. “The Church apologizes for trying to take Indian out of the Indian. Let the Miwok be Miwok.”

    California does not have any monumental, officially endorsed, civic memorials to victims of mass injustice, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, Memory Park in Buenos Aires, or the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. Nor do we have any educational and cultural institutions devoted to learning about the motivation, psychology, and organization of perpetrators, such as the Topography of Terror in Berlin or Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg.

    There is nothing in California comparable to the federal memorial on Bainbridge Island, Washington, that commemorates how the first town under Roosevelt’s 1942 order removed all citizens of Japanese origins; or to Reconciliation Park in Tacoma, an ongoing private-public initiative to remember how the port city ethnically cleansed hundreds of Chinese in 1885.

    Due to lack of public funding, California also has a weak public arts presence in memorial culture. By contrast, Berlin's artistic projects are so embedded in daily life that you literally bump into reminders of Nazism at the top of Subway exits, or walk past them on the way to work, or see them next to ads in neighborhoods, or stumble over them on the way into a café. For example, hovering in the shadows of the gigantic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a nearby park is a kiosk that seductively invites you to look through a peephole at two men or two women kissing, and to imagine their fate under the Nazis.

    I understand the political importance of creating large-scale monuments in publicly visible sites, but personally I appreciate memorials that catch you off guard, make you figure out something for yourself, and are part of the everyday landscape. Smaller is not necessarily better than bigger, but often has a wider impact and may last longer.

    Coming to terms with this region’s long record of social injustices is necessary in order to chip away at chauvinist notions of the United States as destined by providence and militarism to lead the world, and of the mythic Golden State as a model of multiculturalism. Addressing our history in all its contradictions helps us to guard against hubris and to recognize our modest place in an interdependent world.

    We’ll know we’re making progress when we teach the Mission system as part of colonial history, when the genocide of native peoples in the northwest is taught alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, and when a genocide conference held in San Francisco pays serious attention to the region’s sorrowful past.

DEATH'S DOUBLE STANDARD

    It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the US became a signatory in 2010.

    The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

    Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases. There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

    Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the U.N. Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

    Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites – maybe as many as one million – were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce. There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.

    During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy. This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and – in the case of California – genocide.

    In widely read treatises – such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) – the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

    Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions. A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the US exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

    With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

    NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company – following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 – produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

    For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat.  The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

    It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

•    The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”

•    In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.

•    An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than thirty years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment. 

•    A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

    Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy. Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities. However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

"I AM HERE FOR OUR HISTORY"

    A sharp chill cuts through the balmy air on Tuesday morning (February 28) as a sizable crowd assembles at an iconic landmark for a ceremony marking the issue of an express mail stamp honoring the Carmel Mission on the northern California coast. Recognized for its dome-shaped bell tower and star-shaped window, and as the burial place of Father Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system, the Carmel Mission draws some 150,000 tourists annually. In vivid colors reminiscent of a vintage poster, the new stamp depicts the façade of the church and a courtyard ringed by verdant flowers. It commemorates a place, not the thousands of native people who lived and died there.

    Before the ceremony, I am invited to join Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, as she conducts a blessing over the “graves of the ancestors” in the cemetery behind the basilica. This small plot of land includes headstones for the Spanish priests buried here and a series of gravesites, ringed by abalone shells, “in memory of the Christian Indians” stacked in pits between 1771 and 1833. The Indians are anonymous, the priests named. A few yards away, Father Serra is interred in a large crypt.

 “These graves for the Indians are just decorative and symbolic,” says Ramirez, as she burns a sage stick and sprinkles tobacco over the ground. “Thousands of Indians are buried in the mission’s grounds. Everywhere we walk there are bodies beneath us.” As we follow her around the small cemetery, she studies the ground carefully, stooping every few minutes to pick up items at her feet. “Look,” she says, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked them to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.” It’s hard for me to look at the pieces of bone. Ramirez is almost matter-of-fact. “I do this every time I come here, every time.”

    We return to the courtyard for the stamp’s dedication. Louise Miranda Ramirez takes her place on the stage next to the other speakers. Each is given five minutes for their talk. The scripted ceremony goes according to plan until it’s her turn to speak.

    Bishop Richard Garcia blesses the new stamp and observes that the mission’s land is also “sacred to native peoples,” but unlike Bishop Francis Quinn during a mass in San Raphael in 2007, he does not apologize for “imposing a European Catholicism upon the natives.”

    A representative for the U.S. Postal Service talks about “similarities between the missions of early California and our colonial Post Offices, especially how they both served to connect and bind people together.” He’s impressed by the “efficiency” of the missions, how they delivered information on time. But he doesn’t discuss how the missions destroyed the very effective communication systems of native peoples and attempted to erase languages thousands of years old.

    An aide to Congressman Sam Farr describes her boss’ love of stamp collecting. She recalls her children’s 4th grade mission project and encourages everybody to “buy this historical stamp.” Not a word about the slave labor that built the mission or the lives and cultures stamped out by the mission system.

    The U. S. Postal Service consulted a California State professor, Ruben Mendoza, to make sure that the commemorative stamp is faithful to Carmel Mission’s provenance. He speaks today about the influence of European architecture and how Monterey was the “epicenter of the Christianization of California.” But the Postal Service did not consult Heyday publisher Malcolm Margolin, who also would have pointed out that, while the mission’s architecture has been faithfully restored, “the human details are invariably omitted: the sight of men and women in irons, the sound of the whip, the misery of the Indians.”

    The president of the Carmel Mission Foundation gives a fund-raising pitch, asking for help in raising five million dollars to make the basilica earthquake-safe. But he doesn’t mention the pittance it would cost to decently re-bury the exposed human remains and cover the ground of the cemetery with a layer of protective soil.

    Then, it’s Louise Miranda Ramirez’s turn to talk about “200+ Years in Five Minutes.” She’s here to represent the more than  six hundred tribal members of Esselen and Carmeleno descent, to speak for “the thousands of Ancestors buried under our feet in a mass grave.” The kids in the audience stop fidgeting and pay attention. “I am here for our Ancestors that are disturbed by the laying of new sewer pipes on their graves. I am the voice for the Ancestors disturbed by the rodents digging up their remains.” Some adults in the audience shift uneasily in their seats. “I am here for the few thousand Ancestors who did survive so that we could be here today. I am here for our children, our history.”

    Louise Miranda Ramirez ends her talk with a chant: “We are here, we exist/We are here, we exist/ We will always exist here.” She also says a few subversive words in her native Esselen. Only a few people in the audience understand that she is asking “the Creator and Priest to return our homeland to our people.”

    At the end of the speeches, a large replica of the new stamp is unveiled on the stage. The Master of Ceremonies asks all the speakers to gather around the stamp for a publicity photo. Louise Miranda Ramirez steps out of the picture in silent protest.

"THE RESULT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SAME"

    On a cold, wintry Friday in late January, with much-needed rain gently falling, my friend Robynn and I join a tour of San Mateo fourth graders at the Mission Dolores in San Francisco. The students, a teacher tells me, have been prepped for the visit by making models of the mission. “They use all kinds of materials, some buy kits. Last year, one kid used sugar cubes. It was awesome.” The kids are restless, wet and hungry, herded into pews in the chapel to sit through an introductory talk given by Vincent Medina. He quickly gets their attention. “My Ohlone and Bay Miwok great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were married here,” says the docent by way of introduction, pointing to a spot in front of the altar. “And they’re buried here too,” he adds without indicating any particular place.

    The docent frames the history of the missions as a story of culture conflict between the Spanish and Indians. It’s unusual to have a native person in charge of the mission narrative, even more unusual to have natives hold their own inside the narrative. Medina is determined to rescue his ancestors from historical oblivion and paternalism. It was Miwok, Yokut, Patwin, Wintun, Wappo, and Ohlone peoples, he tells us, who made and assembled some 36,000 adobe bricks that comprised Mission Dolores. Soon after the mission was dedicated in 1791, Ohlone artists created a large mural that combined native and Catholic imagery. But in 1796, the mural was literally, as well as metaphorically, eclipsed from view by a baroque-style relief sculpture imported from Mexico. It remained hidden from history, not unlike the Ohlone, for some two hundred years. Now, re-discovered, it’s still off-limits to the public for reasons of preservation, but you can see what it looks like in a faithful recreation painted on the wall of Mission Community Market on Bartlett Street.

    “People often say that the Spanish built the missions. But it was the Ohlone who built this one, under the supervision of the Spanish. Important to give them credit, it’s a matter of fairness and truth,” Medina tells the fourth graders. He asks them what they know about the mission. Shyly and briefly, they mention Junipero Serra, adobe walls, hard work. “Any questions?” he asks. One kid wants to know if the mission had toilets.

    We are told that the Spanish missions “left an important mark on our culture” – buildings, architecture, and art. As for the Indians’ experience in the mission, says the docent vaguely, “it was sometimes a very, very difficult place.” Gesturing to the chevron-patterned beams in the ceiling, he makes the point that the “Ohlone were not willing to give up all their culture.” Behind the altar is the mural that “we are trying to figure out how to preserve and show to people.” Medina leads the group in saying some basic Ohlone words – hello, good morning, and so on – and informs us that under the mission system “the Indians couldn’t speak their traditional languages.” It’s left to the teachers to later fill in the blanks and explain this system of linguistic enforcement. Very few teachers, however, take on this responsibility.

    The mission’s small cemetery is preserved in the inner courtyard. We know from Mission Dolores’ registry of baptisms, marriages, and deaths that native people who converted to Catholicism (typically after two weeks of training) were buried on mission grounds. The ancestors of Andy Galvan, another native docent, are interred somewhere in the mission, but he tells me, “We don’t know the exact location of their burial.” This is true of the 11,000 mostly Ohlone buried at the mission. There are human remains everywhere beneath our feet. The playground of the mission school sits on top of a huge cemetery, bodies stacked below. Kids play basketball over a pit of unmarked graves. “It’s a weird situation,” says Medina to the fourth graders, hinting at injustice.

    As the kids line up to ring the mission bells, Robynn and I leave the group and wander off into the cemetery. Some of the non-native dead are named and acknowledged in individual graves.
There’s also a full-scale model of an Ohlone hut and a modern, wooden tombstone that generically acknowledges the native dead. Strange to see a long-gone home resurrected in a cemetery, but at least the Church is making an effort to bring native people to life and acknowledge their central role in the mission.

    Better to tell half a story than none. But the untold half – the “difficulties” faced by native peoples in the mission – still remains off limits. We know that one result of Spanish colonialism in Alta California was at least a fifty percent decline in native populations. Disease was the main killer, but how did dislocation, servitude, and cultural annihilation undermine resistance to disease? Was it the early stage of a genocide carried out later during the American gold rush? In the name of Christian civilization, how uncivilized was the Catholic Church? The mission tour, much like the textbooks required of fourth graders, skirts these issues.

    But a large wall text on “Treatment of Indians,” prominently displayed in the Mission Dolores’ museum, defends the party line, making the near demise of native peoples during the mission period a matter of natural inevitability. It’s a chilling reminder how easy it is, in the words of George Orwell, to “make lies sound truthful and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”:

    “There is absolutely no documentary evidence to indicate that [Junipero] Serra ever mistreated any one, either personally or individually… The California missions and missionaries have always had their detractors and probably always will. Fuelled by emotion rather than persuaded by fact, the allegations tend to generalize and blame Serra for every excess and abuse that occurred during the entire 1769–1834 mission period. The mission system’s greatest ‘sin’ was not individual shortcoming, but inculpable eighteenth-century ignorance. Unable to solve complex medical, social and environmental problems, the Indian population was drastically reduced, especially through disease…. Whether Spanish, English, Russian, or even if no settlers had preceded the Americans, the result would have been the same.”

    I leave the mission’s museum with mixed feelings: surprised and glad to see native people rescued from historical amnesia; distressed that perpetrators of injustice once again evade a reckoning. On the way home, I take Robynn to the shrine of Tartine’s for some comfort food.

A BETTER DAY

“Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood

Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood

Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves

Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace

Let me die in my footsteps

                                                    
Before I go down under the ground”
                                        (Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” 1963)

    In 1963 I moved from England to California, in part to get as far away as possible from my father’s overbearing influence. The political divide between us had deepened as I embraced Marxism and the New Left, while he shunned anything smacking of isms, except capitalism. As he soured on politics, I was ready to be inspired by Mario Savio standing on a police car in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, urging us to put our bodies on the gears and wheels of the machine in order to make it stop; and by Malcolm X, as channeled by Alex Haley, saying it was possible for black and white to unite and fight. “In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America’s very soul.”

    My father and I, as it turns out, shared a very similar political trajectory: unrealistic optimism followed by pessimistic realism. For Monty, the 30s promised global socialism. For me, the 60s was a vibrant and hopeful era, with socialism spreading throughout the world, social democracy coming to the West, and colonialism on the run in the Third World. The collapse of utopian dreams is always rupturing, and always unexpected. The rise and fall of Alex Haley, and the spirit and untimely death of Mario Savio epitomize for me the hope and demise of the New Left.

    Alex Haley was an unlikely hero. Without any formal training in history, not even a college degree, he wrote two bestsellers that more so than any other books written about the United States in the twentieth century changed the public conversation about race. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), he made a black revolutionary into a popular, cultural icon and a model of redemption. And his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) – and, more importantly, the television mini-series on which it was based – are credited with generating an unprecedented black-white dialogue, as well as a compelling origins story. Six million copies of Malcolm X were sold by 1977 and 130 million viewers watched Roots. 

    Haley wasn’t a particularly good historian. He lifted whole sections from another author’s book for Roots; his ties to his supposed African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, are likely fictional; and recent research on Malcolm X has blown huge holes in Haley’s hagiography. But he was a hell of a good storyteller and the stories he told resonated with millions of people.

     I got a sense of his rock-star popularity in 1989 when he visited Sacramento State University, where I was teaching at the time. Nobody seemed to care about his oddly Republican politics, or the plagiarism charges, or sloppy scholarship. “You are the answer to the prayer of our ancestors who hoped during uncertain, terrible times that there would be a better day,” was his upbeat message spoken to a large, mostly youthful crowd on a crisp, fall day.

    He seemed to look each of us directly in the eye, urging us to find common ground, telling us what we had come to hear. He was on the road, giving his stump speech, the talk that he had delivered so many times since Roots that the only notes he needed were the ones reminding him where he was and to whom he was speaking. Some of my friends were disappointed because they expected something new or different. But most people there wanted to hear the familiar speech, delivered in his unpretentious style, a message of reassurance and comfort. He told us the story about how he came to write Roots. Like all good folk tales, we wanted to hear the ending that we already knew.

    Although Haley’s speech seemed to ramble from anecdote to anecdote, it was in fact finely honed and crafted, a mosaic of disparate threads. Constructed around a narrative that traced his life from childhood to the present, his story was crammed full of moral lessons, biographies, autobiography, motherwit, and parables.

    Haley’s message was relentless: a people whose voice has been long silenced and whose vision has been long hidden from history in fact possess a wondrous past that can’t be denied. The crowd listened closely, imagining the untold stories of our individual pasts and the unexplored potentiality of our collective futures. And in case we missed the point, the motif on his stationary proclaims: “Find The Good – And Praise It.”

    Haley’s stories moved easily between experience and imagination, a talent that upset critics who prefer writers to come packaged in appropriate boxes – fictional or non-fictional. By this time, Haley probably wasn’t sure which was which. In Roots, he invented dialogue. Malcolm X wanted Haley to serve as his recorder and clean up his grammar, but Haley engaged his subject in a passionate dialogue that resulted in a memorable book of many voices.

    Haley left the Coast Guard in 1959 after a twenty-year enlistment. He was thirty-eight years old, searching for a new career. He was an outsider to academia – he had quit college after two unsuccessful years, despite the advice of his professorial father – and regarded as an interloper by the Negro literati who, with one notable exception, had no time for a writer who had learned his craft writing love letters for illiterate sailors and public relations pieces for Uncle Sam.

    When C. Eric Lincoln, a fellow writer and authority on black Muslims, proposed Haley’s membership in an African American academic group in the early 1960s, years before he became a celebrity, he was voted down because he lacked proper credentials. In response to his inquiry to leading black writers, asking for their advice about how to make it as a freelance journalist, James Baldwin, fresh from his success with Go Tell It On The Mountain and Notes of a Native Son, was the only who took time to see Haley and give him tips about how to survive in New York’s cutthroat literary circles.

    Years later, the tables were turned: Haley’s books were selling in the millions and Baldwin was struggling to survive, economically and physically. When Baldwin called, asking for advice and a “loan.” Haley quickly wrote him the first of many checks, “never more than just a few thousand.” Haley told me that he would never forget the “thin-as-a-willow-reed” writer whose generosity defied the snobbish intellectuals who had turned their backs on a struggling writer without status. Later, when Roots made Haley a rich man, he turned over the royalties of The Autobiography to Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz.

    Though he got paid well to visit Sacramento State for half a day, there was no show-biz glamour or phalanx of security guards. He walked slowly through the campus, portly and easy-going, stopping to greet the constant stream of admirers who let out squeals usually reserved for movie stars. They came up asking for autographs or to shake his hand, but quickly found themselves answering his questions about their roots.

    Still, he was never really comfortable in the public spotlight or around intellectuals. He preferred writing about legends than being one. And so every year, once in the summer and once in the winter for two months at a time, he would retreat to the “fruitful writing isolation of a cargo ship,” crisscrossing the Atlantic and Pacific just as he had done in the Coast Guard.

    “It is my impression,” Haley wrote to me during a slow trip to Australia, “that academia contains some of the more grudging folk in this world. With no respect whatever to the institution of academia, I counted one of my luckier things that I did not become a scholar, as my professor father very strongly intended. In fact, there were three sons of us for whom he had this intention, and we turned out to be writer, lawyer, and architect. Dad, bless his heart, was still nonetheless proud of us.”

    When Haley finished his talk in Sacramento and the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, I realized that this was the first time I had ever been part of a truly multicultural audience on campus. For a brief moment, the university actually reflected the diversity of our community. Hundreds of black high school kids, most of whom will never make it to any university under our current system, had come to witness the rare spectacle of an African American as an American hero. They were loud and boisterous during Haley’s speech and, after it was over, they had a purposeful gleam in their eyes, a renewed determination to envision a better day.

    Alex Haley’s ability to reach and move a crowd reminded me of the time that twenty-two year old Mario Savio reached and moved me. I was in my second year as a graduate student in Berkeley in 1964 when Savio, in protest of the university’s ban on political speech, told a campus crowd on December 2nd that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part.” Drawing upon imagery from Thoreau, he called upon to us practice civil disobedience and to jam the gears of the machine. That day, Savio and 800 others were arrested in Sproul Plaza. I supported the Free Speech Movement, but avoided arrest then since I was nervous about my immigration status. (About a decade later, I’d make amends by getting arrested twice during People’s Park protests at the same site.)

    The FSM was a defining moment for activism in the 1960s and for my own political development. Poised between the civil rights struggles of the previous decade and the promise of the antiwar and feminist movements ahead, it offered our generation of students the opportunity to participate in history, to be activists in our own right rather than vicarious participants in other people's struggles. It was a joy to feel that we might be part of an emergent majority, with the moral authority of justice on our side for once. Savio was not the only leader of the student movement, but his example of self-sacrifice moved many people like myself to deeply consider our political commitments and to put our beliefs into practice. Also, it helped that we were on the winning side: the university revoked its ban on political speech.

    Thirty years later, in 1994, I was back in Sproul Plaza for the Free Speech Movement's reunion. In the intervening years, my political activism cost me my job at Berkeley, but I was lucky to get a tenure-track job at Sacramento State. Mario had not been as lucky. It took him until 1984 to get a science degree and until 1989 to get his master’s degree. He was nearly 50 years old when he started teaching math and philosophy as a lecturer at Sonoma State University. By then the boom years in academia were over and part-time jobs were the norm.

    There was a large crowd on hand at the reunion, including a new generation of activists who were eager to witness a slice of history and hear old-timers justify our pasts. Mario Savio - now graying, balding, and pony-tailed, like many of us in the crowd - spoke with vigor and eloquence about our legacy, likening us in the words of T.S. Eliot to "the hidden laughter of children in the foliage." There we had been, in the margins and shadows of political power, but still alive and kicking, "sudden in a shaft of sunlight even while the dust moves."

    Mario was not there that December day in 1994 to sentimentalize or bury our movement. If it had been hard on him to live with fame and notoriety in the aftermath of the 1960s, it was even harder to be treated in the 1990s as an icon of a long gone past. He insistently spoke to the present, of the growing boldness of an increasingly reactionary political system, attacks on immigrant and women's rights, and the rollback of civil rights gains. Be vigilant, don't mourn, and get organized, he told us.

    A few months later, Mario and I worked together in the Campus Coalitions for Human Rights and Social Justice, a loose-knit organization of campus activists in northern California. Our challenge, no less, was to go against the tide of immigrant bashing, prison building, and welfare cutting. In particular, we focused our efforts on opposing the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, which as Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot asked voters to go beyond even the most conservative Supreme Court decisions to end all forms of state-supported affirmative action.

    It was an uphill battle. Mario had been more hopeful than most of us that the attack on affirmative action would generate a political revival by combining youthful idealism with wise experience, creating the basis for a new, vibrant, cross-generational movement. Pity he didn’t live to see the rise of the Occupy movement; he would have been out there on the front lines. It was difficult for him to accept the degree to which universities had by the 1990s become sites of demobilization and cynicism. When his health, already a problem for many years, got worse, his friends urged him to slow down and take it easy, which, for a short while, he did. "Obviously I needed to pull back," he wrote me in May of 1996. "In the past I have not had the good sense to read my own signals right. Guess I'm growing up - at last, and just in time!"

    But, quickly, he was back in the fray, compelled by the news that the anti-affirmative action forces were in disarray and that, with enough effort and work, we had a chance to defeat Proposition 209. Mario worked with his son Nadav day and night to produce a pamphlet, "In Defense of Affirmative Action," which was used widely on campuses in the last few weeks of the campaign. It helped to close the gap in the polls, but with insufficient money, the damning of faint support by the National Democratic Party, and a low voter turnout, our anti-209 campaign failed by eight points.

    Mario suffered a heart attack and went into a coma a few days before the elections, and died the day after without regaining consciousness. He left life as he lived it, intensely committed and passionate in his public politics, gracious in private to his friends. I miss his shaft of sunlight.

Alex Haley (1921-1992)
Mario Savio (1942-1996)

FOR ALL OF US

    It’s about time: the Smithsonian has chosen its site on the Mall in Washington, D. C. for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC); the design for the building is approved; and the staff is at work on collections and exhibitions. If it all goes according to plan, in 2015 at long last we’ll have a national museum devoted to one of the country’s foundational and enduring experiences: Black history as the American story – a history “for all of us,” promises Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s director.

    What does it mean to denote a country’s racial past as central to its identity? This issue was on my mind in 2004 when I visited England, my place of birth and formative years, delving into my own experiences of race and looking closely at representations of British racial history in exhibitions and museums. (This was before the flurry of activities marking the bi-centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007.)

    My grandparents arrived in Manchester in the 1900s as immigrants from Rumania and Poland, looking for security from pogroms and work in the flourishing textile industry that had emerged a century earlier out of the “triangular trade.” The local economic boom was powered by cotton shipped into the port of nearby Liverpool, then transported to the textile factories in the Manchester area. From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, some 11,000 ships involved in trading slaves for cotton and other commodities left the major ports of Bristol, Liverpool, and London. Liverpool reaped more profits from slaving than any other European port.

    For a large chunk of the 19th century, mills and factories made Manchester into the hub of the rag trade and capitalist world. It was here after World War I that my Grandpa Daniels hustled as a small-time dealer in odds and ends, and my Grandpa Platt eked out a meager living as a tailor. And it was here after World War II that my father would make his fortune, mass-producing raincoats for Burton’s (a national clothing chain), and lose it in the 1980s when the industry moved to Asia in search of cheaper labor and newer plants.

    As a teenager in the 1950s, I took long walks in Dunham Park, an old estate converted into a public park near our family’s home in an exclusive country village near Manchester. I never stopped to wonder about the incongruous presence of a statue that featured a kneeling African slave, holding up a huge ornamental sundial. I had not been taught about the presence of black servants in England since the sixteenth century or the habit of English traders in the West Indies in the eighteenth century to regularly bring home young slaves as personal servants or gifts. If you look carefully at eighteenth century portraits of the landed gentry, you’ll often find them decorated with young Africans, typically close to the floor, on a par with the family’s pet cats, dogs, and monkeys.

    I was reminded of this amnesia when I visited the Cecil Beaton retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (1904-1980), as the catalogue dogmatically asserts, “was the most significant British-born photographer of the twentieth century.” I remember being attracted in the 1950s to his glossy, glamorous images of the rich and powerful, especially the movie stars, especially the female ones. But his class blinders and pomposity also irritated me then, as they did in the 2004 exhibit, which presented Beaton as a shrine to glorious Englishness. Take, for example, the 1944 photograph of Felicity Wavell – yes, Felicity – the wife of the British Viceroy, sitting in a carriage hauled by four anonymous, shoe-less Indian servants in turbans. Without the slightest hint of irony, the caption reads, “Beaton was impressed by the grandeur and vastness of the Viceroy’s house; the marble corridors and the number of servants in scarlet and gold liveries.”

    Also in the exhibit you can find a 1937 photograph of Coco Chanel, one of Beaton’s favorite subjects. She’s posed in an elegant gown, arms folded, leaning against a wall. Close by, but below her, is a pedestal bearing a sculpture of a generic black slave carrying a plant. The flesh-and-blood couturier towers over the ceramic servant, not unlike the relationship between the sundial and anonymous African in Dunham Park that I finally stopped to observe a few years ago.

    I grew up in an England that tried to contain most of its subjects over there. The thin strip of sea at the edge of the country’s southern border, The English Channel, kept out “wogs” from the Empire, as well as culturally separated us from “frogs” in France. By the 1960s, British racial anxieties were preoccupied with rebellions in the colonies and the specter of Caribbean, African, and Asian immigration to the core. My grandmother grew up a staunch racist, hating all schwartzes, but never knowing one until the Caribbean cooks at her fancy Jewish retirement home adopted her recipe for chicken soup. The last time that I visited her in 1994, close to her 100th birthday, she called out a cook to meet me and there they stood, the Jamaican and the Jew, arms around each other. On the other hand, my Uncle Phil who moved from Manchester to New York as a young man, stood firm in his hatred of “niggers” and died a bitter old man, his bigotry unblemished.

    Thanks to my parents’ politics, I grew up with a sense of moral outrage at racial injustice. Among my mother’s collection of antiques, now displayed on a shelf in my office at home, was an 18th century abolitionist snuff box – or what I thought was a snuff box – decorated with a slave on his knees, in shackles, and the abolitionist motif, AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER. It’s one of my favorite remembrances of my parents because it symbolizes the best of them, the progressive legacy they grafted on to me, the part of their leftist background they didn’t jettison when they climbed the class ladder into the all-white, suburban countryside.

    I grew up hating obligatory visits to places like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London because it represented the spoils of empire and arrogance of power, as well as boredom. I was reluctant to visit the V & A in 2004 because of these associations, but did so because I wanted to see if anything had changed. Much had changed, much had not. There was a fabulous retrospective of Vivienne Westwood that takes fashion out of the museum’s traditionally prim and proper displays into a hip happening. How much had things changed at the venerable V & A? Well, Westwood dedicated the catalogue of her exhibit to “freedom for Leonard Peltier.”

    But the core exhibit in the British Galleries, at least two floors of rare artifacts that chronicle three centuries of empire, was silent on race. Well, that’s not quite true. The historian Catherine Hall had told me that if I checked out a small room in the V & A, I would find a short film, twelve minutes actually, sandwiched between celebratory videos on country houses and the Crystal Palace. There I found and watched, alone, “Art, Design and Empire,” a politely subversive take on how many icons of British culture are not “originally British at all.” In the most radical segment of a video that mostly espouses a trendy multiculturalism – “we learn from them, they learn from us”– the artist Lubaina Himid discusses how a seemingly typical, 19th century watercolor of an English drawing room conceals “the hidden histories of the Empire.” Embedded in middle-class propriety, she tells us, is the history of violence. “Instead of having, you know, slave servants about the place, we’ll have a lovely piece of fabric or we’ll have a delicate table, so we’ve kind of brought it all in, colonised it, owned it and kind of made it British.”

    After watching the video, I trudged through two floors of encased artifacts in the British Galleries at the V & A, reminded why as a teen I disliked having to do this. I didn't see anything on race, but maybe I was missing something. I asked a young woman behind a desk, "Is there anything in the exhibit on the slave trade or the abolitionist movement?" She leaned forward, asked, "Sorry, sir, please?" I repeated the sentence in my best American English. She paused, pretended to mull over the question, smiled slightly. "No, sir, sorry, not that I know of. Sorry."

    While the V & A has taken the approach of boring from without and encircling its traditional collections with innovative exhibits, other museums have taken a more direct approach. In the three major slaving ports of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, there are exhibits that deal with the less-than-glorious aspects of British racial history. Just outside London in Greenwich, where the lords of the Empire decided the global rules of time and space, is the National Maritime Museum. Here, if glamorous naval relics or homage to Tintin at sea are not distracting, you can find a small exhibit on “Trade and Empire” that includes artifacts of slavery, a brief account of the abolitionist movement, and a quirky video that draws upon clips of old British movies to satirize colonial racism.

    The texts that accompany the exhibit are blandly neutral: “The display looks at the importance of trade in the growth of the British Empire and the vital role the Royal Navy played in developing and protecting that trade. It also shows how imperialism was an important force in world history and how it has influenced the culture of Britain today.” And there are no written materials on the topic to take away from the gift store at Greenwich. Teachers who bring their classes here also need to bring a great deal of background information with them because none is provided. The museum’s guide is silent on race and oblivious to the inclusion of a late seventeenth portrait of an anonymous (probably generic) young black girl, wearing a smile and slave collar of pearls, and looking up adoringly at her fair-skinned mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. As in the statue at Dunham Park and Cecil’s Beaton’s photograph of Coco Channel, the experience of slavery becomes a decorative backdrop to British Civilization.

    I approached the exhibit in Liverpool with low expectations. It was March and a sharply bitter wind swept off the Mersey and slapped away the protection offered by my winter wool coat. In the remade city center, which sprawls in an endless succession of charmless malls, working class shoppers checked out the bargains and packs of football fans got an early start in the pubs. I knew that Liverpool is an important center of immigration but I saw very few Black people on the streets or in the stores downtown, either selling or buying. A friend, sociologist Joe Sim, gave me a quick lesson in the city’s race relations before taking me to Toxteth, a segregated and run-down neighborhood still bearing the scars of race riots some thirty years ago. Out of sight, out of civic mind.

    The next day I walked from the city center to the exhibit. It’s located in a fashionable development by the docks that boasts private flats and condos, upscale restaurants and bars, and a sleek Tate gallery. When I found out that the materials dealing with race are located in the basement of the Maritime Museum, I prepared myself for a theme park designed by Madame Tussaud. But I was wrong. There’s nothing decorative or sentimental in the approach to race that you find in the exhibit on “Transatlantic Slavery.” The subtitle, “Against Human Dignity,” makes clear from the get-go that this will not be an exploration in postmodern ambiguity.

    The large exhibition stretches from pre-colonial Africa to the present. It’s informative, with smart captions and a well-written catalogue, expresses an antiracist morality, and names names, including many in high places. Walking through the exhibit, there is no doubt that Liverpudlians flourished off the slave trade and that every leading entrepreneur cashed in on the buying and selling of human beings. The portrait of a mayor of Liverpool hangs formally in a rogues’ gallery of slavery’s benefactors. The exhibit also shows the diversity and complexity of the abolitionist movement, and makes explicit the relationship between slavery and modern forms of racial discrimination. When facts and interpretations are contested – such as how many died during the middle passage or how much slavery impacts today’s race relations – the curators give us both sides of the argument and the responsibility for  deciding what we think. And there’s no effort to pretty up the past or to avoid the H word: “this African Holocaust,” notes the catalogue, “involved death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Its full impact will never be known.”

    Some historians might find the exhibit’s intellectual approach too economistic, given its emphasis on the accumulation of wealth as the motor force of racism. But I found it quite refreshing because I live in country where class has magically disappeared from public discourse or, when used, is put in quotes as if to infer that its existence is debated, in much the same way that fundamentalist Christians challenge the teaching of “evolution.”

    Some people are no doubt critical also of the separation of the exhibition on race from the mainstream exhibit on maritime history and artifacts: Old ships and sea lore on the main floor, humiliation and degradation in the basement. It’s an old, unresolved argument, and I’ve swung in both directions at different points in my life. Right now, given the resurgence of new forms of racism in England and persistent tendency in the schools to glorify British history, I think it makes moral and political sense to organize a distinct exhibit that demands sustained attention and engagement.

    The first part of the Liverpool exhibition offers a relentless exposé of the everyday workings of racism. So it was something of an emotional relief when I came to the section that deals with opposition and resistance. And there in one of the cabinets, unexpectedly, was a perfect example of the snuff box that I inherited from my mother after she died. The caption on the cabinet in the Maritime Museum told me that mum’s collectible was in fact a patch box, made of enamel on copper in South Staffordshire about 1790. This means that more than 220 years ago, another woman, rich enough to buy an expensive doodad – no relation to my mother, whose parents arrived by boat in England in the 1900s fleeing a Roumanian shtetl for a Manchester ghetto – sat in her grand boudoir, opened up this miniature box, and applied a small cloth patch to her face, either as a decoration or to cover a blemish, before heading off in a carriage to a social event. I like to imagine that she and her husband were part of the campaign to abolish slavery in Britain, urging the Royal Navy to patrol the West African coast and stop the slave boats making it across the Atlantic.

    The display of the patch box took me by surprise and I dropped my camera, breaking its casing. Maybe because it was here that I recognized the contradictions within my own past: the wealth that trickled down from the slave trade to the rag trade and a belief in the possibility of social equality, both are my legacy, the worst and best of human qualities.

    It was a mistake to go to the Liverpool exhibit by myself because this kind of experience needs to be talked about and through. So for my next exploration I searched out a companion and found Derrick Weeden who, luckily, had his own reasons for wanting to see how the Brits tackle, or don’t tackle, the race question. We spent the day together, traveling from Birmingham by train to Bristol, site of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Derrick, an actor based in Oregon, was on tour with David Edgar’s two-play cycle about American politics, “Continental Divide.” I was there to visit the playwright in his home city and to see the plays, which I’ve followed like a stage-door Johnny since David conceived them in our home in Berkeley in 1998.

    Derrick and I had talked briefly before this outing to Bristol, mostly about “Continental Divide,” but this was the first time that we had spent several hours together, alone, over the best part of a day. We were strangers to each other in most ways. On the train, I told him the story about the patch box and my family history. He told me about his experience going into a pub in Birmingham’s city center, by himself, on a whim. “Everything stopped when I walked in. Just stopped. Not a sound, everybody checking me out.” Perhaps I should mention that Derrick is six feet three, standing erect as he usually does makes him look taller, a sharp dresser, built like the baseball player he used to be in high school days before acting swallowed him up whole. And, oh yes, he’s black. “As black as coal,” as they used to say in England in the 1950s, if they wanted to be polite.  Derrick took in the scene in the pub, his antenna processing everything. His mother, originally from the West Indies, and his dad, a lifer in the military from everywhere, including Panama where Derrick was born, had taught him the rules of racial etiquette, how to get in, check it out, and get out if necessary. Derrick decided this time to get out. He left the pub, slowly.

    But, mostly, Derrick stays in the thick of things. He’s learned from his parents and his experiences, he told me, that white folks come in several shades and politics, that some can even be trusted. We discovered that we both had our personal reasons for visiting the exhibit on the Empire. Like me, Derrick traces one part of his family to the English heartland and he too is curious about how, in Joan Didion’s words, “history could bloody the land.”

    We were both impressed and moved by the exhibit on the Empire. It opens and closes with a variety of everyday people speaking about their experiences of race in Britain. Some praise the country that took them in from homelands they wanted to escape, some curse the day they arrived, some see racism on the retreat, others feel its burning presence every day. There’s no guide or catalogue, but the exhibit is well signed, has several hands-on displays, and is educational without being patronizing. As in the Liverpool exhibition, the approach stresses the economic roots of racism, shows its centrality to British imperialism, and credits the struggles of “nationalists and freedom-fighters in the non-white colonies who fought against colonialism.” The exhibit also takes on more complex issues, such as “the double-edged nature of much of the linguistic and sociological knowledge amassed by Britain in the name of enlightened scholarship.”

    Unlike the Liverpool exhibition, the Bristol museum integrates race into its core exhibit. I know, I know, a few paragraphs ago I was singing the praises of separatism. Now I sound like an old-fashioned integrationist. As I said, I can go either way on this issue. To me, the structure and form are less compelling than whether or not the exhibition demonstrates complexity, an ethical point of view, and honesty. It works in Bristol because the curators make race relations central to their presentation of how the British Empire was formed.

    But there are losses too: Ireland gets short shrift, a pity since it would be an instructive lesson about the making and unmaking of racial categories. And you have to look closely for information about the gendered aspects of colonialism. Overall, though, I’m glad that youngsters and tourists will get new ways to think about the celebratory history that they’ve learned as a catechism in English schools or imbibed back in the States from Masterpiece Theatre.

    Over a shared dessert of sticky toffee pudding at one of the new restaurants by the port in Bristol, looking out at the river that launched slave ships some two hundred years ago, Derrick and I discovered a sorrowful connection. What was most depressing to both of us about the exhibits in England was that we had to travel five thousand miles to find matters of race given serious attention in public institutions. After all, we live in a country that perfected the business of chattel slavery and refuses to even mark emancipation with a public holiday.

    Back home in the United States there are museums that deal with the contributions of specific ethnic groups, but what’s absent is any national recognition of the deep wounds and ruptures generated by racism. The Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture promises to shake up our reputation for national amnesia. It took England more than a century since the beginning of its imperial decline to initiate an honest discussion about the legacies of the slave trade. Hopefully, we wont have to wait that long to explore how the past bleeds into the present.

STRAIGHT SHOOTER: PIRI THOMAS, 1928-2011

    Piri Thomas, poet and writer, died Monday October 17, 2011, in his home in El Cerrito, California, surrounded by his wife, Suzie Dod Thomas, and family. His death at age 83 from pneumonia came after a long illness.

    What are the odds of a dark-skinned, Puerto-Rican-Cuban-American from Spanish Harlem shooting at a cop and living to tell the story? Pretty slim, but Piri Thomas not only survived after seven years of hard time in Comstock in the 1950s, he also wrote a lifetime of stories for us. Along with Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964) and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Piri’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) gave millions of American readers a devastatingly human portrait of life on the other side of the color line. He also wrote a moving account of doing time (Seven Long Times, 1974), a novel, several plays, a book of short stories, and recorded two CDs of poetry and music. He was an extraordinary performer, an inspiration for the genre of spoken word, and a tireless educator for social justice.

    He’ll be remembered for writing an iconic book. I’ll remember him for presiding over a literary salon in his picket-fenced home in Berkeley, at which he doled out equal time to neophytes and seasoned writers. For visiting classroom after classroom, spotting the most hostile students in the room and warming their cold hearts with love and passion. And for challenging binaries of race and proclaiming our common humanity.

    When Piri Thomas and Suzie Dod Thomas, his partner in everything, married in May 1988, I wrote this for them.

Straight Shooter

Lives lost before they knew life,
his friends are buried in anonymous pits
in America, not Germany.
Long before Presidential Commissions
and the War on Drugs,
they were lucky to get numbered graves.
Splashing every stone vivid with color,
excavating their remains,
he gives them each a name,
a place in our history.

He exchanged his 38 for a pen
but didn’t give up the bullets.
A straight shooter,
firing from his hip
while somersaulting through the sky,
or from the back seat of a limo
dressed slick in white,
his aim is magically true.
He’ll pierce our hearts
from
a
thousand
yards.

A survivor, he endured street fights,
taking many losses in back alleys.
A collector, he recorded
each small, memorable victory,
inscribed them all,
indelibly,
on
the back
of
our hands.


Leading The Way

She has seen America from its margins.
Straddling its borders,
she could pass through
the front door
if she so chooses.
A white Puerto Rican,
A Latina gringo,
looking in,
while looking out,
holding up mirrors
for us
to
see.

She exchanged her diploma for a vision
but didn’t surrender her smarts.
A builder,
she knows construction,
how to navigate the rocks in the river,
how to steer the water
from mountain top to ocean.
She’ll swim the whole course,
leading the way,
a glint in her eye,
in her hair
an ostrich feather.

(May 1988)

Tax-deductible donations in Piri’s memory (payable to Social Justice) should be sent to: Piri Thomas Memorial Fund, c/o Social Justice, PO Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. Memorials are being planned for the Bay Area, New York, and Orlando. Dates to be announced.

BETWEEN THE LINES

“If you cannot see
istilleat
between the lines
allofmymeals
then your collected facts
witha
will never constitute
musselshell
knowledge.”
(Shaunna Oteka McCovey, Yurok/Karuk, 2005)

    You can come to a place time and time again, year in and year out – as I’ve been coming to my getaway retreat in Humboldt County on California’s northwest coast for some thirty-five years – and not see for so long what a serendipitous experience suddenly makes obvious and impossible to ignore. My relationship with Big Lagoon first changed as a result of a personal tragedy. But it was my belated recognition of a social tragedy embedded in the landscape that triggered a journey that would become this book.

    Visiting Big Lagoon has always been a life-affirming experience for me, a place to slow down my citified pace and take small pleasures in the everyday. The Yurok refer to the lagoon as Oketo or Where It Is Calm, a name they give to any large body of enclosed water. Oketo seems especially appropriate for placid Big Lagoon, only a stone’s throw from the volatile Pacific Ocean. I typically escape here to luxuriate in the present. But out of the blue, about three years ago, I found myself propelled into the “cool sepulcher of the past” when I discovered that my bucolic hideaway was a short walk away from an unmarked Yurok cemetery that had been plundered early in the twentieth century.

    I thought I was familiar with every nook and cranny of Big Lagoon until this new information expanded my sightlines. Bob McConnell, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Yurok, taught me to imagine the thousands of people who lived, worked, and died here long before the region became a mecca for tourists. Gene Brundin, chairman of the Yurok Tribe’s Repatriation Committee, introduced me to Big Lagoon’s botanical diversity – its herbs, plants, and roots once regularly used as medicines, teas, and materials for baskets. And archaeologist Janet Eidsness encouraged me to look at the ground in new ways in order to appreciate how a midden of rocks cracked by heat from fire, oily dark-stained soil, and broken shells reveal stories about everyday native life.

    It’s an interesting paradox of the creative process, as choreographer Twyla Tharp observes, that you need to exercise rigorous control over a project, “but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.” Unlike my previous work, this is not an investigation that I carefully thought through and planned before starting the research. The topic came to me head on and demanded my attention. And once I agreed to go off into uncharted territory, I stumbled into fissures that run deep beneath the ground.

     Humboldt County is typically described in tourist guides as an “outdoor paradise” and “eco-tourist’s heaven,” with “legendary giant redwoods,” “stunning beaches,” “rugged cliffs,” and “picturesque coastal villages.” It’s a place “where you can connect with Nature.” I am very familiar with this narrative. It’s what draws me to Big Lagoon. But beneath this imagery of a pristine landscape is a messy social history of people divided by warfare, antagonisms, and disillusionments. From the perspective of the Yurok and other native peoples in the region, “much of the land has been wounded, broken or lost.” For some historians, northern California in the mid-nineteenth century was one of the bloodiest places in the country, deserving of a language that we usually associate with other countries and other times: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, even genocide. What happened in California did not presage Nazi Germany or mimic Boer-ruled South Africa, but there are resemblances and affinities that demand serious consideration.

    Thanks to the post-1960s generation of historians, we’ve made considerable progress in complicating the rosy-hued story of northern California as a place celebrated primarily for economic daring and individual initiative, peopled by “men with empires in their purposes/And new eras in their brains,” as Sam Foss put it in 1894. Now we know much more about the brutal underside of the Golden State, and about the micro-histories of people who were typically omitted from the master narrative of evolutionary progress – native communities, Chinese immigrants, women pioneers, Latino miners, and white workers who didn’t strike it rich.

    And yet it’s still so easy to visit Humboldt County and be oblivious to its troubled history: there are no public memorials or monuments or preserved sites that shock us into remembrance of tragedies not-too-long past or juxtapose the grandeur of the region’s scenery with its killing fields. Nobody seems bothered that a well-visited elk refuge in Redwoods State Park is named in honor of one of the country’s most notoriously racist ideologues. We seem to have a hard-wired capacity to deny and compartmentalize painfully disturbing information. For many years, I could separate my knowledge of Big Lagoon’s troubling past from its pleasurable present. In this sense, I was no different from my parents who refused to visit Germany because of its murderous legacies, but didn’t think twice about taking the family for vacations to what had been Vichy France, happily visiting towns where Jews had been rounded up for transportation to concentration camps.

    Death changes the meaning of a place. Until a few years ago, I’d never associated Big Lagoon with the end of life. But since the summer of 2006, when we followed our son’s wishes and launched his remains into the lagoon, it’s been impossible for me to separate the living from the dead.  And about a year later, answering the Yurok Tribal Council’s call to protect the cultural legacies of their ancestors who had been uprooted from Big Lagoon, I decided to learn more about this “place of ceremonial renown.” As a historian interested in public history and memory, how could I ignore this past literally buried in my own backyard?

    What I initially thought would be a personal exploration of mortality and a brief investigation into local events in a small place led to an investigation of complex big issues that resonate in the history of anthropology and archaeology, and in contemporary debates about patrimony and repatriation: Whose cultural meanings speak for a place? Whose history prevails in the public domain? What can be done to repair the damage and atrocities committed by long-gone generations? To answer these questions, I had to leave the rural quiet of Big Lagoon and travel to museums in London, Berlin, and Washington, D.C., and to a cemetery of slaves in New York; and delve into long-forgotten archives, shuttered cabinets, and basements stacked with human remains. I also had to learn to see between the lines.
______________
This is a slightly edited version (without footnotes) of the first chapter of my new book, Grave Matters: Excavating California's Buried Past (Heyday, October 2011). For more information about the book, see this link: Grave Matters