We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

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President Fawn Sharp (Quinault)

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Strength

COMPOSED BY DAHR JAMAIL

Ultimately the solution to the crisis lies in our values, and we’ve proven that simply by existing today, regardless of how we had the most powerful country in the world try to destroy us, terminate us, and assimilate us. We lived under great pain and suffering. They carried out murder and genocide and attempted full-scale annihilation, but they never could stop that drumbeat in our heart. One could either just wither away like paper, or be like steel that just grows stronger and stronger. When the most powerful country in four hundred years can’t stop you, you know it is because of our resources, prayers, and blessings, and everything that has been across this land since time began. And we not only have survived, but we are now emerging even stronger.

—President Fawn Sharp

These are the homes of our elders, Pierre said, standing on the beach of Taholah, Washington, pointing at the gray, weathered wood siding of a small home standing barely fifty feet from the surf crashing nearby, with a couple of others just like it not far away. Out of respect, the Quinault give their elders their best home sites upon which to live.

The only thing separating these rickety structures from the coastline, which is ever advancing from sea level rise and increasingly potent storms, is a small barrier of sand dunes and boulders that were placed there as a breakwater. But even that has long since become half buried by sand.

Pierre Augare is the special assistant to the president of the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN), Fawn Sharp. He was showing me around the reservation while I awaited my time with the president.

Obviously we’ll be moving these houses uphill, which is where we’ve already cleared a site for relocating this village, he continued, then pointed up above to nearby hills covered in western red cedar, Douglas fir, western hemlock, lodgepole pine, and Sitka spruce, some of them reaching nearly three hundred feet high.

The Quinault are among a very small number of Native Americans who live and hunt on the same land, and paddle across the same waters as their ancestors did centuries and centuries ago. The Quinault and Queets tribes comprise the Quinault Indian Nation, along with the descendants of five other coastal tribes, which include the Quileute, Hoh, Chehalis, Chinook, and Cowlitz.

The ancestors of the modern Quinault lived in a way that shared in the cultures of the people living both north and south of them. Subsisting on sea mammals and massive salmon runs, hunting wildlife, and harvesting from abundant forests provided more than enough of the physical and spiritual necessities for their ancestors. The western red cedar is their tree of life, as it provided logs for their oceangoing canoes, bark used in clothing, and boards for their longhouses.

The Quinault are the Canoe People, and the people of the cedar tree. We remember our past while employing modern principles in a marriage that will bring hope and promise to our people now and in the future, reads the tribe’s website.

President Sharp, having been told by her elders to run for president, obeyed, won, and had been in office since 2006. And not needing to be told of the folly it would be to attempt to brace or push back against the most vast, deepest, wildest ocean on Earth, within days she began enacting her plans to move the QIN’s two villages to a site a hundred feet above sea level.

Pierre continued our tour, showing me the tribe’s small gym, community center, a small grocery store, and multiple other buildings and homes that were all awaiting relocation to higher ground.

While he did, I couldn’t help but think of my hometown, Port Townsend, located on the other side of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. With its small downtown at roughly six feet of elevation and right above the water, it is in the same situation as the villages of the Quinault, as well as dozens of other major coastal cities around the planet that will either be relocated entirely, or swallowed whole by the sea. Many of the inhabitants of Port Townsend take pride in being politically progressive, with the vast majority of residents being acutely aware of the climate crisis that is upon us.

Nevertheless, the best the city could come up with as a response was pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into tearing up downtown’s main street, aptly named Water Street, to upgrade electrical and sewage infrastructure underneath it in a project that was completed in 2018.

Pierre took me to the uphill site for the village. The QIN’s hospital is already there, as well as the main road that is going to run through the area. Trees have been cleared to make way for what is to come. Pierre told me how, literally, everything we had just seen down near the crystal blue surf is to be moved uphill.

Born in 1970, Fawn Sharp graduated from college when she was nineteen years old. Five years later she became an alumna of the University of Washington School of Law, after which she returned to the QIN to practice law for over a decade as their tribal court judge.

During that time the previous tribal president was preparing to retire. Sharp’s elders asked her to run for his position, but she was reluctant. Having trained to seek truth, justice, and fairness, she saw the role as political and she had no interest whatsoever in becoming involved with politics. The idea of being a politician did not reconcile with my personal concept of how I wanted to devote my life, she told me in her office at the tribe’s headquarters, where we spoke after my tour of the reservation.

We sat in her office across a wooden table from one another as the summer sun shone outside. Photos of loved ones lined her windowsill, and rows of law books filled a bookshelf along a wall. The Quinault tribal emblem, a wooden carving in the shape of a large eagle feather, and a carved canoe paddle, hung on the wall behind her.

Out of what she described as a sense of duty in response to the elders, President Sharp continued to take steps towards the presidency, and announced she would seek the office. But she was hesitant, and weary of what she saw as a potential morass of politics. At just that time, an elder pulled her aside and she explained her aversion to politics to him. He said, ‘Look, you’re not running to be a politician, you’re going to be a leader, and a leader brings those virtues to office,’ President Sharp said. ‘That is the difference.’ Hence she learned her first lesson in public service before she was even elected: It is critically important to ensure throughout your service that you hold the office and the responsibilities in high regard.

She sees her role as tribal president as a very sacred role. Bringing Indigenous traditions with her position of power, once elected she immediately began the process of decentralizing power from the presidential office and enacting a community-driven agenda. After being elected in March 2006, President Sharp also went to work immediately on restoration of their declining runs of blueback sockeye salmon.

The blueback are seen as the most prized of all the sockeye, as their rich oil content makes them a far tastier fish. The Dutch word for the blueback translates as excellence. The Quinault used to harvest from runs of millions of blueback in the 1950s, but since then they have been in steep decline. The ensuing decades saw the runs drop from the millions to the hundreds of thousands, to fifty thousand, to, in the last few years, President Sharp said, It’s just been a blip. In 2018, she explained, the QIN harvested twenty-seven sockeye. So we closed our blueback fishery, she said, after I asked her to clarify the number as being only twenty-seven fish.

That was her second introduction to the dramatic impacts of climate disruption, knowing that the climate disruption–fueled warming waters of the Pacific Ocean are the major contributing factor toward declining salmon runs. The tribe’s scientists showed her overlays of ocean temperature graphs with the salmon decline, and the temperatures nearly perfectly mirrored the declining salmon runs. They talked with her about ocean acidification. Then they talked with her about melting glaciers, which led to her first direct physical experience with the impacts of climate disruption. It was this that made her, literally, physically sick.

President Sharp was taken on a helicopter flight over the Anderson Glacier in nearby Olympic National Park. We were hoping to see the glacier, and it was in that moment we discovered it was completely gone, she said somberly. She leaned toward me from across the table and continued softly, but sternly: It had disappeared. That was quite a moment for me. It was then when it hit me at a deep level.

In October 2018 she took another flight to see if the glacier had come back at all. It had not. Additionally, President Sharp noted how much the nearby Eel Glacier had receded from her previous flight. Retreating 10 meters each year, and at a rate that is accelerating, the Eel had shrunk roughly 1,000 feet.

So I am coming face to face with all of this, after a decade of struggling and fighting, President Sharp said, her voice strained, nearly cracking with emotion. It really took an emotional toll on me. Some of our team saw me get out of the helicopter. They said it looked like I was about ready to throw up.

Yet things were about to intensify further for her, as though she were being forged by the same fire that is threatening Earth.

Not long after that experience, President Sharp took another heavy hit. Ballot measure 1631, an attempt to pass a carbon tax in Washington State which she had worked tirelessly to pass, failed to do so as the result of the fossil fuel industry spending $33 million to defeat it.

President Sharp had so internalized the defeat that she left the country for Mexico for three days, in an attempt to catch her breath. But, upon returning to the United States, she peered down from the airliner onto the record-breaking wildfires in California during the season that the town of Paradise was incinerated.

I’d always heard of the psychological impacts of the climate crisis, she told me somberly. But I don’t think I’d really felt it until this last year, after all of those events.

Yet it was the culmination of the blueback restoration project, her efforts to move their villages to higher ground, and numerous other projects related to the climate crisis, underscored by that series of shocking events, that led President Sharp to an understanding of the gravity of the role the Indigenous have in responding to the climate crisis. She had come a long way in her work, given that during her first term, she addressed the crisis while receiving much criticism from within the tribe from people who felt there were other more pressing issues to be dealt with.

So it took a while, she continued. And it’s taken a lot of deliberate effort to connect the climate crisis with things on the ground, but over the last decade our people have come to realize what is happening. And now here we are and Washington State has just declared another drought.

She was a young president with no political experience, finding out immediately that the biggest priority within her community was the loss of an iconic salmon species that not only represented the food they have relied upon for centuries, but is part of their identity and an aspect of everything they do, from births to weddings to funerals. Despite having held leadership positions such as being a trustee of the Washington State Bar Association–Indian Law Section and vice president and founding member of the National Intertribal Tax Alliance, and having received a degree in International Human Rights Law at Oxford University, President Sharp had (and continues to have) her work cut out for her.

When she had brought the climate issue up during intertribal, state, and federal meetings during the last two years of the Bush administration, she was faced with the challenge of engaging even a single person in the climate conversation. Hence, she reacted by, in 2008, attending the COP 14 climate summit in Poland, having already had two and a half years to pull together her agenda around the climate crisis. The goal was to pull fifty-seven tribes in our five-state region, along with Canadian First Nations people, into a land base that would collectively be larger than the European Union, she said. Since the United States was not a signatory nation of the Kyoto Protocol, yet an Indian tribe could be, her goal was to pull all of the tribes in her region (and Canada) together in order to open up a discussion in Poland about the carbon cap-and-trade market. But, before she arrived, countries had already begun backing off from advancing the cap-and-trade idea, in what would come as yet another defeat Sharp would have to overcome.

This trend continued into the Obama administration, when President Sharp watched then-president Barack Obama’s envoy attend the climate summit in Bonn, Germany, then conclude that the United States lacked the political will to take a stronger stand on the crisis. Undeterred, President Sharp, along with other tribal leaders, hosted a UN meeting at the National Museum of the American Indian, which found other countries that were very open to dialogue and advocating the interests of Indigenous peoples. She believed the agenda the Quinault had created was worth taking to an international stage, despite the lack of response from the U.S. government, and despite having had to declare a state of emergency early on during her first term, when in December 2007 a storm of nearly hurricane strength besieged the Quinault. It was a wake-up call, as their power was knocked out for eight days, and there was no water in what she described as an epic event. She has had to declare four national states of emergency thus far, and is doing so without a completed climate mitigation plan.

President Sharp had hoped that by working with Washington State governor Gregoire, and then with Governor Jay Inslee (with whom she was engaged as part of his carbon emission reduction task force), she could assist in advancing climate policy for the state. However, with these efforts having little effect, It made me realize if we can’t achieve climate policy in a state like Washington with leaders like Inslee and Gregoire, we are in serious trouble.

Thus, four years ago she began pulling together an idea of taking climate policy directly to citizens, due to the fact that she believes the average person understands that the climate crisis is real. They [the general public] understand the fossil fuel industry needs to be held accountable, so I thought in the Trump backlash there could be a sort of political wave, and in the 2018 election, and within Washington State we would be able to become the first state to put a price on carbon, she added. But she underestimated the extent to which the industry was willing to go in spending more money to defeat measure 1631 than had ever been spent on a Washington State ballot measure, as the total price tag for the campaigns from both sides was more than $50 million.

I actually made a statement at our last general council meeting that we may be the last generation to know what bluebacks are, she continued, her tone becoming increasingly resolute. I thought long and hard after I got back from Mexico, and decided that I wanted the next chapter of our climate agenda to be even more aggressive.

Now, the QIN’s official policy objective is to make the fossil fuel industry wish that ballot measure 1631 had passed, because, according to President Sharp, That was a bargain basement price of $15 per metric ton of carbon for them to have to pay. So our six-point climate agenda that I introduced a few weeks ago is something that we’ll now be addressing even more aggressively. I have a duty, and know there is a crisis, and it’s not only a crisis facing the Quinault, but people all across the world. We are left with no choice but to now come at the fossil fuel industry even harder.

The QIN is a sovereign nation with the inherent right to govern itself and deal with other tribes and nations alike on a government-to-government basis. The tribe’s website states: After 150 years of mismanagement by the federal government, it was obvious that tribes could manage their own affairs better and make their own decisions without external interference. This is the basic underlying philosophy of Self-Governance.

Hence, in 1988 the QIN’s Self-Governance Act began as a demonstration project in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Then, in 1990, the QIN, along with six other tribes, implemented self-rule in Indian affairs. Today, their tribal operations include Natural Resources, Health and Social Services, the Quinault Beach Resort, and Community Services, among others, all of which are geared toward promoting the growth and development of the full potential of their reservation.

It may take another century to correct the many problems created by the ‘Indian agents’ we once relied upon, states the QIN website. But we now look to the future while learning from the past.

President Sharp is extremely clear about the fact that, despite all the challenges the tribe has faced over the decades and centuries, We never relinquished our spiritual connection to the land and ocean, which is way more powerful than a piece of paper that speaks to ownership, she said, enunciating the words slowly and clearly.

Their 208,000-acre reservation, located on the remote southwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula, contains lush Pacific Northwest forest, strong-flowing rivers, emerald-blue lakes, and nearly two dozen miles of raw, largely untouched Pacific coastline. The QIN people share their home with cougar, bald eagle, black bear, elk, blacktail deer, among other animals, and the nearly 4,000-acre Lake Quinault is not far from the coast.

President Sharp told me of her fourteen-year-old son who has been gifted eleven songs from the lake that, as she said, have not been heard for over a hundred years. He told me that Lake Quinault is reawakening in order to heal herself.

Her son had been pressuring her to learn more about their culture and traditions. He told me that if I’m the president, I need to know all of this history and our legends, she said, laughing. He said, ‘You should know who you are.’ My response to him was to tell him that my generation had to go and get an education and become accomplished in this world, so that I could come home and support his generation. But that it is his generation that is now getting to learn our language while they are children.

President Sharp said that her son’s generation is the seventh generation since first contact in her area, for which she is deeply grateful, because that means the Quinault did not allow seven generations to pass without language and traditions being passed forward; otherwise their language would have been lost.

A cultural revitalization movement in the Pacific Northwest, which began in the 1970s, has continued to gain momentum with time. A large part of this has been the annual canoe journey that takes place each summer. Tribes from around the Salish Sea send delegations in dugout canoes from their tribal communities to a designated location, usually a host nation of the Coastal Salish people, where they all converge. The event has grown to include more than one hundred traditional oceangoing canoes from Indigenous nations from as far south as Oregon, and as far north as Alaska. The journey can last from two to three weeks, and is now a huge event each year for President Sharp and the QIN.

We didn’t allow seven generations to pass without being back on the canoes, she added. So his pressuring me has helped me a lot. Last year I was in the canoe journey, and was asked to stand and ask permission to come ashore. I felt like a baby, learning all of this; it felt like I was crawling and it was my first tribal journey, and I’m just now learning our ways.

Realizing that, she told her son, You guys are the leaders. I’m here to support you.

President Sharp understands the power and importance of the blessings and ceremonies that have existed on the land of her people for centuries.

Anything that happened in the last four hundred years really pales in comparison to the power of the connectivity of the songs across the country, she explained. I explain to people that no matter where you go within tribal communities you are going to hear a drum. It is the heartbeat of Native America. And in my mind it does not have a beginning and it does not have an end. It’s just one of those things that is created. No matter what public policies were leveled against us over the years, nothing could break our spirit. Nothing could stop the drumbeat. Nothing could break the connection that we feel at a cellular level, having our whole being level with the natural world and the environment.

President Sharp discussed environmental activists, and how she sees most of them engaged in what she referred to as a very mental struggle, then said, But for us, it’s just who we are and what we do. I cannot imagine not advocating for the natural world in these circumstances. It’s just part of our teachings and it’s part of that continuation.

She had felt that connection when she was out on the canoe journey the year before we spoke. It was when she truly experienced it firsthand. She hadn’t physically trained her body for the arduous journey in their dugout canoe, but when it launched from nearby Honshu Point into fourteen-foot swells and she could barely see their support boat, the time to live the old ways was upon her, ready or not.

I remember thinking ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this,’ she told me softly. Twenty minutes into the paddling, we were barely past the rocks, and I was already physically exhausted. But our skipper started singing one of the old songs, and once he sang that song, it was as though the ocean came to life and we were dancing with the ocean through the song. I felt this incredible, almost superhuman, power.

She had already told her young people that if they look at the landscape, That’s the same landscape our ancestors saw for centuries. There’s no development, no hotels, it’s just pure and closed to the public. It’s this that she remembered while canoeing, as the strength was sung back into her body through the ocean that was being sung through the song.

That experience reinforced at a spiritual level what I knew at an intellectual level, she continued. During my first year as president, I was invited, during a television interview, to come up with a myth and a truth. One that came to mind through prayer was the myth that the Europeans believed upon first contact that we were primitive and we were savages. But then there is the truth that if you look at scholars and scientists and people like Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of maturity, at the very base are selfish people, then as you climb up you get to the independent people, then finally the interdependent people.

President Sharp went on to point out how someone who is self-confident becomes independent, but only when they go on to care for other people have they arrived at the point at which they are considered to be a highly mature individual. This is the truth she went on to share in contrast to the myth.

I relate this to how we as a people [Native Americans] were not only interdependent relative to our fellow humanity, but we were interdependent relative to the natural world… to the animals, to the trees, to our Creator, to the Great Spirit that lives in everything, she explained. That is what Chief Seattle referred to, that all things are connected. What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. We are just one strand in this intricately woven fabric.

This is what came into her during the canoe journey, among the massive swells as the song was sung and the ocean danced and the strength flowed in and through all of it. She both experienced it, and thus knew it.

Then to witness my son rediscovering these songs that have been lost! The first one came to him when he picked up an eagle feather, and he said, ‘Mom, when I picked up that feather, it’s like the song just came to me.’ Another one was while he was at recess from school. He goes from Seabrook here to South Beach, and that was one of our trade routes where we had trails, and they would stop there next to one of the creeks. And it was at that spot another song came to him. So it’s very powerful and it’s very real.

This is what made her realize the importance of Native nations and tribes during the climate crisis. This is a time when tribes are beginning to occupy a leadership void caused by the absence of federal leadership on the climate crisis. Now the average citizen is beginning to understand and recognize the power of the treaties. They seem to be the last line of defense against fossil fuel exploration in this country, she said. The Lummi defending Cherry Point against coal, or those who are fighting against the crude oil exports, or Standing Rock.

It all connects for her, as President Sharp is watching Quinault children understand what Indian country is about. She remembers the television commercial of the Native American seeing a garbage dump, and the camera pans in to show a tear running down his cheek. Native children are realizing the value of our shared waters, contrasted with the idea of isolationism or superiority that is so prevalent in the dominant culture.

We fight against this because we are embattled, and we struggle, because we are in opposition to all of this, and we have so much adversity, but we really just want to live in peace with people, and be at peace with our world, she said softly, as tears welled in her eyes. So we advocate for better climate policy because we are aware of the global crisis, and how this will require everyone, because no one is immune from the climate crisis, and everybody has a responsibility.

She paused, then went on to state that everyone has their place, that we just need to remember the North Star of our values, and specifically for Native Americans, the precontact lessons that are timeless and have been proven through the centuries and millennia, and more recently, as science has proven what the Indigenous have always known—that they already had the best practices with Earth.

NASA did a whole study on science and traditional ecological knowledge, and their conclusion was that what we have always done was also the best science, President Sharp explained. And I know if our ancestors were alive today they would still be doing what they do, which always have been the best practices.

She believes tribes can lead the way in transitioning from fossil fuel use to a better, saner way of living. While most people understand how Indigenous communities are already the first and worst impacted by the climate crisis despite having had the least to do with it, what many non-Indigenous people may not know is how deeply connected Indigenous people were, and are, to the areas where they lived, and still live.

For our ancestors, this area was part of them, and now it is part of us, President Sharp said. So when the Earth suffers, we suffer. In contrast, if someone moves to another area, there’s no foundational rock or any sort of connection to it that they value and appreciate. So when we see the climate crisis, there is a sense of responsibility, and an inherent quality of feeling a deep sense of responsibility to seven generations out.

In October 2019 Sharp was elected as the twenty-third president of the National Congress of American Indians, perhaps in part because of how she lives her sense of responsibility to the future generations wherever she goes.

When I leave the reservation or fly to Washington, DC, and I’m looking at the landscape, I no longer see it as sort of foreign soil. I see it as part of a rich history with an unbroken chain of prayers and blessings from when time began, and I feel the ceremonies, she explained. And that will always echo throughout eternity. Nothing can kill or destroy that spirit, and that is who we are.

Acknowledging how the average person in the United States feels powerless and questions if the country is even a functional democracy, she reminded us how the real power in the country does not lie in the Oval Office, or the White House, or Wall Street, but in the voice of the engaged citizen, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.

"Historically, when we face crises, that is when people come together and rise above that conflict and embrace true values, then it becomes our finest hour, President Sharp said, speaking in a softer, lower voice, leaning forward on the table. Right now our generation is faced with a challenge, and with or without anyone else, we are going to strive for this moment in time to be our finest hour."

President Sharp paused, took a deep breath, then continued.

I think our Creator has a perfect plan that is in perfect timing for everything. We are led through times of crisis for a greater purpose that we’ll never understand until later. So our goal and objective is just to be true to Creator’s planning and calling for our life, and to resist the temptation to become apathetic or negative, and just be true to our own purpose. Because we are all here by design, and with a good heart and good intentions we can constantly seek each day the wisdom and guidance we need.

President Sharp believes that in every sector of society leaders exist that will rise above all the negativity and look to the greater good.

We must resist falling into an ideology, or politics, because we just don’t have time for that, and the work at hand is so serious; there is so much riding and dependent upon the work we do. We have to face each day with prayer and seeking guidance because this crisis truly does exceed the scope of human understanding. But so do the solutions.

President Sharp leaned back, took a long breath, looked out the window, then at the photos of her family members and children in the room, then back at me. Speaking calmly, yet resolutely, she concluded:

Ultimately the solution to the crisis lies in our values, and we’ve proven that simply by existing today, regardless of how we had the most powerful country in the world try to destroy us, terminate us, and assimilate us. We lived under great pain and suffering. They carried out murder and genocide and attempted full-scale annihilation, but they never could stop that drumbeat in our heart. One could either just wither away like paper, or be like steel that just grows stronger and stronger. When the most powerful country in four hundred years can’t stop you, you know it is because of our resources, prayers, and blessings and everything that has been across this land since time began. And we not only have survived, but we are now emerging even stronger.

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* Since this interview took place, President Sharp has been elected to vice president of the Quinault Nation during the Quinault Indian Nation General Council Meeting on March 27, 2021. At the time of this writing, President Sharp is president of the National Congress of American Indians.

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Gregg Castro (Salinan/Ohlone)

A Sense of Permanence

COMPOSED BY STAN RUSHWORTH

What are you supposed to do? You turn to your stories, you turn to your oral narratives, you turn to your learning, you turn to your Traditional Ecological Knowledge, you turn to what your culture has given you and taught you to do, and that tells you what you’re going to do.

—Gregg Castro

By his own declaration in News from Native California, Gregg Castro is a zombie, one of the walking dead. He is a former tribal chair of the Salinan people, a t’rowt’raahl Salinan/rumsien and ramaytush Ohlone, and an active participant in the Society for California Archaeology for twenty-five years, advocating for respectful treatment of Indigenous sacred sites. Gregg also speaks at local colleges and universities, and is interviewed by radio and television programs shedding light on local Native history and ongoing issues. He is a storyteller at Native gatherings, and a tireless advocate for as many Native peoples’ rights as possible. Despite an articulate, consistent, and kind presence, he is invisible in the sense that his people have no reservation, no federal or state or local recognition, no existence as defined by the American culture surrounding them. At the same time, Gregg can drive an hour south of where he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area to visit the place of origin of his people, a mountain that now carries a name not its own, and only his people still say the original name aloud. He is a Native man who can sit on a spot on a mountainside and look back in time for at least fifteen thousand years and see a long chain of ancestors working on that very spot, chatting, dancing, praying, and living in a way they had evolved for a very long time, a way that worked well for them and their surroundings. Gregg can sit and see his relatives, and he can feel their presence, and when he speaks, this presence is always with him. He calls it a sense of permanence.

Talking about his childhood, Gregg says, Even though my dad was raised in a family that raised him to know who he was, it wasn’t safe to tell others. He recalls that during the Mexican period, the Gold Rush period, and for a generation after, it was safer to identify as Mexican than Native, as this could save one’s life. Referring to his contemporaries, to many Native youth, and to those of his parents’ generation, he says, They grew up not knowing who they were … because for a lot of our people, their family and tribal history was suppressed. This makes Gregg’s work, and the work of a great many people like him, essential today. They carry a huge responsibility because they carry an antidote to generations of that suppression. We weren’t ashamed, we were proud. We knew where our homeland was, and we lived close to it. Our family still lives in this Salinas/Monterey area, and there were a lot of Indians there. Having that growing up, I think that gave me an anchor that others didn’t have. There were too many who had been forced to forget.

After World War II, families spread out to find work, and his went north to San Jose, but I still had that connection because we’d go back often. Part of his homeland is in the Los Padres National Forest, and part is on the Hunter Liggett military reservation, but to Gregg, it’s still looking like the place the ancestors would remember from thousands of years ago. If you ignore the bombed out old trucks used for target practice, it still looks like it did a thousand years ago. Walking those trails, I see the rock mortars that my ancestors used for thousands of years, and I’ve seen them my entire life, and this forms a literal rock-solid connection. This connection is what he passes on to the young and to others searching for a sense of connection to place, land, and culture.

This is not an easy task. As a kid, he understood his root connection deeply, but when he went to school, it changed. Objective knowledge came from the outside. They told me, ‘Well, the California Indians are dead, they’re all extinct.’ When he told his dad this, his dad said, Well, if you’re dead, they won’t try to kill you. Gregg calls this a very pragmatic stance, and chuckles. In my family, we didn’t have shame, but we might have had fear, the fear that it could go bad again. The culture surrounding him talked about the land and world and his people differently than he did. It wasn’t until later when I grew older that I began to understand that other people didn’t have that. They’d talk about their long history in the area, and I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, really?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ve been here a hundred years.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ I just knew we’d been here since the beginning of time.

Gregg would ask himself, How does an Indian person who’s supposed to be dead, extinct, fit in with this? It was the two opposing ideas, and feeling that pressure to reconcile them; that was the thing that was most unnerving to me, because I always knew who I was, but I had all these people telling me I couldn’t possibly be that because I’m dead. I’m extinct. I don’t exist. Some Lakota in-laws came to California and showed how deep the erasure of his people was. Even they didn’t realize at first that we were still around. And so there was this oddity, of two opposing worlds, and that’s the sort of life I’ve lived, not in confusion, but conflict, maybe, of two worlds butting against each other, and me in the middle. But Gregg’s base is deep and strong regardless, because his father was always very clear about who he was, and that’s who we were. What’s to talk about? It was never an issue for him.

The same solidity he describes in his father carries through in him without any compromise.

I ask Gregg to speak about climate disruption and the surrounding society’s response. Well, some of them think, ‘Oh, no, everything’s fine.’ They think their God is going to fix it for them, so they can do whatever they want. That’s a typical two-year-old, in a sandbox being a bully. And in their short understanding of their existence, their version of permanence is eternity to them … but it’s not eternity. Our stories tell us, very specifically tell us, there was a time before us. There was a time of Creation. There was a time when the first people, the real first people, were here taking care of the place, shaping it, forming it, taking care of it, to prepare it for us, and a lot of the stories talk about us being last. Not first, we were the last. And it was an incredibly beautiful place.

He describes how the last child in a family has everything in place already. Our stories tell us what was given to us, and what we’re supposed to do with this. He talks of Dr. Darryl Babe Wilson, an Iss/Aw’te culture bearer, who said, When we come last into the world for us to be in, all we have to do is learn how to take care of it, and be grateful for it, and humility and gratitude are some of the most basic thoughts that we should be having, because we didn’t do anything to earn this. Gregg says, This may be one of the most fundamental differences between cultures because they came in thinking ‘We came in God’s image,’ while we are taught we need to know our place, and the society that’s grown up around us is still throwing tantrums in the sandbox, still thinking the universe owes them everything. It’s extremely immature, and "it’s a huge immature baby that’s fully capable of destroying itself.

And that’s the other part of it that our stories tell us, that there isn’t always a happy ending. There’s no fairy tale. Our stories tell us there are consequences. That’s what they’re there for. They talk about various people, creatures, beings who screw up, and sometimes they don’t survive their screwups. And that’s the way of life, and two-year-olds don’t want to hear that. The two-year-olds can’t understand, let alone see, their own mortality and the possibility of it.

Regarding the environment and climate, Gregg says, "The elders have been telling us for a very long time, ‘There’s a big problem here,’ with major issues in what we’re seeing in the landscape, in the weather, in the animals, in the trees, in the atmosphere, and it’s really bad, and they’ve been ignored. And it’s hard to make it right now because people are still looking for the two-hour Hallmark movie version to make it right, that we might have some hardships, but in the end the sun will break through and we’ll all hold hands and we’ll be fine. And, there’s a great possibility that this won’t happen.

We have end of the world stories. And it doesn’t end well. In some cases it gets completely remade. The world survives, but everything in it does not. It gets transformed, and life begins anew, maybe with a whole new set of players who’ll get it right this time, and maybe they’ll survive. Gregg pauses, then adds, I don’t think people understand the danger we’re in, and just how fragile the world is. He restates his thought, with emphasis now on the word world: The world itself is not fragile, it’s fragile for people.

I ask Gregg how and why he thinks we have gotten to this point.

Even the most forward-thinking of them are still human-centered. ‘How do we save the world for us?’ they ask. When we sing, the Earth enjoys that, and it gives us a blessing because of that, but it doesn’t need it. We need it. And now we have it upside down. We’re at the top, at the pinnacle. But no, we’re at the bottom. If humans want to survive, it’s not too late, but it’s going to be on a drastically different level. He says we have to shift.

He talks about a history class, where history begins with Columbus, and the thousands of years before that don’t really exist in the mind. That is a constrained way of looking at things for their historical purposes. Well, they tend to look at environments that way too, in a constrained view. But, We are a blink in the world’s eye. Indeed, we have it upside down.

I ask how we might put it right side up, and Gregg offers that, Optimally, we have to disabuse ourselves of the idea of wealth. What does being wealthy really mean? We were incredibly wealthy before the Europeans showed up, because we had everything we needed. There was no homelessness. Nobody was starving. Everything was there for us, and we considered that to be wealth. A lot of wealth. Enough wealth. In Native gatherings in his childhood, Everyone was welcome, even though from different groups, including Whites, because they’re people. We treated them as equals, and I think kids are seeing that today. He points out that young people trying to adjust to radical wealth disparity is one source of a shift in thinking. He talks briefly about tiny houses, and other shifts in how young people perceive what is really needed. I think the question is, will it happen fast enough?

He jokes about TEK, Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Now that they can give us an acronym, they might begin to talk to us, and "there is some science, politics, and economics