Who Gets to Define History? On Indigenous Displacement in Northern California
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.
This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home—on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California—and one woman’s effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. In episode two we learn that the Coast Miwok culture predates the geological formation of the San Francisco Bay.
In tracing thousands of years of Indigenous presence and history, all the way through the oppressive colonial systems that have become today’s mainstream culture, this episode asks: Who gets to define history?
Originally released on February 1, 2022.
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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
Theresa Harlan is founder of the Alliance for Felix Cove, a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating her Coast Miwok family’s life at Tomales Bay. She has a long history of working in the Native American community as an art writer, curator, and consultant. Her essay “A View of Our Home, Tomales Bay, Calif.: Portrait of a Coast Miwok Family, 1930–1945” appeared in Our People, Our Land, Our Images: Indigenous Photographers. Theresa is a board member of KGUA radio and the Native Media Resource Center. Born in San Francisco, she is the adopted daughter of Elizabeth Campigli Harlan (Coast Miwok) and John Harlan. By birth, she is Jemez Pueblo and an enrolled member of Kewa Pueblo of New Mexico.
