ON A SATURDAY night in November, the multilevel parking garage of the Graton Resort & Casino stands conspicuously empty. This is in contrast to the adjacent parking lot that, albeit, is both vast and marginally closer to the casino’s entrance, but that is also packed full with parked cars. Still more vehicles circle and circle through the lanes, looking for vacant spaces, despite the virtually empty structure just next door. There is no signage for the casino from the highway. The building however, in a minimal, modern design, proudly displays the backlit word CASINO above a waterfall wall at one entrance, and another glowing CASINO sign hangs from an asymmetrical, wave-like arch at the other. Once duly de-automobiled, visitors are greeted by a petite, be-suited man who welcomes them and wishes them luck.
Florence and the Machine’s “You’ve Got the Love” is playing on this particular Saturday, and the plushly carpeted interior smells of artificial fragrance and cigarette smoke. Once inside, any music that might be playing is all but drowned out by the buzz of bar revelers, card dealers, pinging slot machines and the frantic, shout-y ocean sounds of various sports (football, ring fighting) coming from the casino’s many, many televisions. The card games are up front, and the machines are in back—some three thousand of them. Scattered throughout are a variety of bar spaces to fit different purposes or moods. G Bar, a sports bar, boasts the highest number of TVs in an already TV-heavy space. I count more than forty. Sky Bar is lit fluorescent purple with white couches and wine-dark drapes, giving off an air of exclusivity, or at least the attempt of it. Another bar, called “8,” has beaded curtains, red velvet armchairs and cigars to smoke. According to the casino’s website it also offers “high limits and luscious libations,” and unlike the other bars is open twenty-four hours a day. There are four “casual dining” restaurants (steakhouse, fancy North Beach–style pizza, dim sum, grill) and a food court with a sign that says MARKETPLACE. Each vendor is a local chain—Three Twins Ice Cream, Habit Burger, Beach Hut Deli—but the feel is still more mall than local market; it is definitely a food court, and the presence of a Starbucks and a gift shop selling cigarettes and cheap dresses only adds to this impression. The Starbucks, like “8,” also never closes.
On the gaming floor, the brown carpet is patterned with enormous blue, pink and lime-green flowers—which looks more contemporary than it sounds, but which nevertheless will likely seem very dated in just another ten years. Some of the light fixtures look like giant abstracted pine cones, while others, a cascade of scarlet glass, resemble flurries of red butterflies tumbling down in a cone-shaped swarm. The clientele, although ethnically diverse, is skewed above age forty, with a generous salting of white-haired senior citizens thrown in. The ATMs all have $4.50 surcharges and display prominent signs for a gambling addiction hotline. There are surprisingly few college students, given the casino’s proximity to Sonoma State University, but I guess gambling takes money to burn, which college kids are not known to have a lot of. Besides, there are more solitary customers than parties. A man in a brown leather jacket with a washed-out brown mustache slouches lazily at a slot machine, feeding it quarters and giving off the impression that he has been sitting there, doing just that, since sometime in the 1970s. This is despite the fact that this particular casino has only been open for one year.
Nearly every detail of the place is down to the vision of one man, Greg Sarris: novelist, screenwriter, university professor, Indian chief—his term, at least sometimes—and now, casino owner. He is also the great-great-grandson of the last Miwok medicine man, Tom Smith. Officially, he’s the tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the only remaining American Indian nation in the Bay Area. Tall and European-looking, Greg wears pressed jeans and crisp button-down shirts in colors like pink, light blue and lavender. He has teeth like a movie star and it’s clear he works out, making him look decades younger than his more than sixty years.
As a tribe, the Graton Rancheria Indians are something of a hodgepodge, made up of the Coast Miwok, the Southern Pomo and the Wappo to the east, as well as a few others. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes over five hundred tribes in America. The California nations are mostly divided up into “Rancherias”—which is what the Spanish called both the indigenous workers’ quarters on mission ranches, and also the villages later set up for homeless Indians in the beginning of the twentieth century, once the missions had long faded. Because indigenous men and women were traded and transported from all over the state, many of the Rancherias were home to a mix of language groups and origins. Unlike the Navajo or the Apache, the California Indians became known less by their nation or tribal names and more for the places that collected them, sometimes less than a hundred years ago. For many Rancherias now, what matters is not that you can trace your lineage back to an indigenous ancestor, but that your ancestor was living on your particular Rancheria at the time of its official establishment.
In recent years, some California tribal members have been disenrolled, meaning their Indian citizenship is revoked and they no longer receive the monthly payments from the casinos that most of the California Rancherias operate. If a California tribe doesn’t have a casino, they are still eligible to receive funds from a designated pool of the other tribes’ profits. The disenrollment practice is something that has climbed in a number of states over the years, but has gained particular momentum in California since 2000, when Las Vegas–style gambling was made legal on Indian land. Some call the practice an important act of due diligence, while others have cried corruption, saying it is used to unseat political rivals or increase the casino payments by winnowing down the number of beneficiaries. Some disputes have involved gunfights, militia raids and standoffs at barricaded tribal headquarters. Disenrollment is serious business and has affected thousands of people across America. Some have called it a new wave of Native American genocide, including in the July 2014 issue of Native Max magazine, which publishes under the tagline Stay connected to your culture. Not only does disenrollment strip a person of her or his Native identity, but it can deny them access to health care, tribal schools, housing, and federal education grants, not forgetting the aforementioned monthly checks.
The entire Graton Rancheria tribe was stripped of their official tribal identity by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Eisenhower administration in 1958. The movement, starting from the 1940s, reasoned that Native peoples would be better off if they assimilated into mainstream American society, and thus some of the smaller tribes were no longer recognized as such. This was accomplished by revoking their protections and terminating their land agreements. The Graton Rancheria land was only fifteen acres to begin with, a mere three acres of which was viably inhabitable. After termination, just a single acre remained, the private property of one member—this for a people who once roamed over all of Marin and Sonoma. The tribe began petitioning to be reinstated in 1997, and in 2000 Congress passed the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act (coauthored by Greg Sarris). Eight years later, having saved up their payments from other California casinos, the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria (or FIGR for short), bought 254 acres of land and started lobbying for permits to build a casino of their own. To complete the project, the tribe took out loans for nearly a billion dollars.
As is to be expected, Greg is a busy man. In 2003, FIGR donated $1.5 million to Sonoma State University to create an endowed chair of Native American studies. Greg was given the position, and has held it ever since. It therefore isn’t a surprise that between teaching, writing, and running a billion-dollar casino, Greg doesn’t really have time to talk to me. Or if he does, he doesn’t want me to know that. Just getting a phone interview with him takes the kind of finagling usually reserved for Wall Street fat cats—with secretaries emailing to set up a specific ten or fifteen minutes here or there with “Mr. Sarris” between his other, more important engagements.
When we finally do talk, he wants to make sure I’m not writing fiction. He writes fiction about his people himself, but as far as he’s concerned, I shouldn’t; I am an outsider. He’s cagey about a lot, and talking to him for any period of time it is also clear that he is angry. Or if it isn’t anger, it is at least a passionate dislike. I’ll call it anger, for ease’s sake. He’s angry about how his people are often written about or discussed, and angry, too, about how Native Americans in general are so often erased from the conventional wilderness history of Muir and Thoreau. In the decade-long battle over Drakes Estero, and the arguments over whether or not to return it to its “original,” wild state, he says I am the only person to have contacted the man whose people lived on its shores for thousands of years, before there were oyster farmers there, or cattlemen, or missionaries. It is the Miwok who lived on Point Reyes, in the Olema Valley and along the eastern shores of Tomales Bay, and the stories Greg tells me about them are strange and fantastical.
The Miwok people believed that the dead walked into the afterlife along the path of light thrown by the moon onto water. It was their belief that the land of the dead lay somewhere out past where that path dwindled on the horizon, under the waves. So when the English pirate Francis Drake arrived in his galleon the Golden Hind in June of 1579, gliding on the sea’s shining passage at nightfall, the Miwok were beside themselves. Who was this man, pale as the dead, and traveling from such a long distance on death’s road? He came into Drakes Bay from the direction of the Farallones, which the natives called the Islands of the Dead, or the Islands of Spirits. (You see, biologist Steve Emslie was not alone in thinking the Farallones were haunted, and perhaps the ghost of the sealers’ woman had company.) But the Miwok did not only see pale faces aboard the Golden Hind. Drake had a beautiful young African woman with him named Maria, a concubine he stole from a Spanish conquistador some months prior during a water battle near Central America. There were also two “rescued” male indigenous slaves from Panama, named Guatulco and Paita. The Miwok were dark-skinned themselves, with broad faces. Maybe the African woman and Panamanian men read more as “living” to the native Californians, and the interaction between the seemingly-dead and the apparently-alive provoked a dramatic response. Longing to see their departed family and friends, the Miwok went down to the beach to greet Drake, weeping, their bodies smeared with pale ash, asking (or so the Englishmen thought) for Drake to take them as living passengers to that land of lost loves below the water.
This misunderstanding was remedied soon enough, however, and Maria, Drake and his men spent a month with the Miwok while they repaired their vessel. At that point in their voyage, the Golden Hind was already sitting low in the water from the weight of purloined Spanish silver, the former hoard of Maria’s previous master. It is said Drake buried some of the booty in the hills near Drakes Beach, and no one has ever found it. Originally part of a fleet of three galleons sent forth by Queen Elizabeth I, the other ships were lost in a storm near Tierra del Fuego, and the Golden Hind continued up the West Coast of the Americas alone. Aside from Drake, Maria and the Panamanians, the Golden Hind was also the temporary home to Drake’s twenty-two-year-old brother Thomas, a fifteen-year-old cousin or nephew named John who served as ship’s artist and head page, and the ship’s captain under Drake, a man named John Chester. There were also forty-five seamen, five “boys,” and nine officers, including the ship’s master, William Hawkins. Hawkins would later make his fortune pioneering the British slave trade, adopting as his crest the image of an African man bound at the chest and neck with rope. A tenth officer, by the name of Thomas Doughty, was tried for mutiny and beheaded by Drake while the Golden Hind was still in the Atlantic. Doughty’s brother John, also on board, was kept locked up for the rest of the voyage, and upon returning to England attempted to have Drake tried for murder. It didn’t work.
Many, many people came from the surrounding areas to see the foreigners and their giant wooden boat, bringing gifts and performing long orations. In his detailed diaries of their Northern California sojourn, the ship’s chaplain goes to great pains to describe just how virtuous the crew were with the local women and girls, despite their shocking lack of modesty. They tried and tried to get the women to cover up their bare breasts, he said, but they just wouldn’t do it.
Beautiful Maria was the only woman these sixty-four foreign men had seen in many months, but even so I hope that the chaplain’s story is true. It’s likely, though, that some English blood found its way into the Miwok lineage as early as then. If so, there is no mention of upset, and I hope it was consensual. The crew were outnumbered by many hundreds of natives. Besides, Greg tells me that rape was unheard of for the Miwok and Pomo peoples, out of respect or, at the very least, fear of women’s superior spiritual abilities. Drake later claimed that the Miwoks crowned him as their “king,” but who knows. Their power structure wasn’t that simple.
Greg doesn’t tell me where he gets his own stories from, but he has lots of them. He tells me about the cult of the Human Bear, and sends me a story he’s written about it. It began, the legend goes, when grizzly bears kidnapped a boy while the boy was out picking blackberries. They took him and raised him, schooling him in their secrets and giving him powers beyond that of a normal human being. Later, initiates into the cult of the Human Bear were also kidnapped. Some might be warned beforehand that they had been selected, but the actual induction came as a surprise: you were pulled out of your daily routine and into the world of the supernatural.
The Human Bears were frequently women, and they worked to broker treaties with the grizzlies—treaties that the bears seem to have honored. The bears were given free rein of the vast redwood forests, while the people would stick to the open plains, hillsides and lighter pine and oak woods. There was overlap, of course. The grizzlies had to come out into the open to hunt the tule elk.
There were other cults as well—hummingbird cults and bobcat cults, cults for animals and cults for places. Greg says the Miwok and Pomo believed that sorcerers could actually shape-shift, turning into a bird, if need be, to avoid capture. The magic they practiced was intrinsically linked to the land, to specific groves, valleys or beaches. Some places were good for healing, others for poisoning and curses, and each had its own song that could be sung to invoke its particular power. When I asked Greg to give me some examples, he said he couldn’t; too much had happened and it was all changed now. He does say that he laughs when he hears about people going up Mount Tamalpais to get married, because that was where the poisoners went to learn dark spells.
“I see that and think, well, that’s not going to last!” he joked.
Greg especially rejected the idea of a pristine and humanless landscape, of a place only being “pure” if it remained untouched by human hands. Not so, he says. The land was populous, the most populous part of the Americas outside of the Aztec cities, he tells me, and the landscape was heavily managed. Knowing that the elk wanted open plains to graze on, the Miwok cleared wide spaces for them using controlled fires, to make for better hunting.
Greg’s own great-great-grandfather, the medicine man Tom Smith, was known to be especially powerful, but was also prone to exaggeration. “He was a trickster,” Greg tells me. He is the one, Greg says, who made up stories for the ethnographers because they paid him for each story, and he wanted to be able to afford a nice suit to be buried in. When asked about oysters near Point Reyes, he said, Sure, they’re over by Valley Ford. We dig them up with a stick, even though oysters do not grow that way. He also took responsibility for the 1906 earthquake, claiming it was his own show of strength in a contest with another medicine man. Clearly, he considered the other medicine man to have lost.
Myth and reality meet each other in Greg’s stories, and I wonder if, in telling them, he is at any point taking after his great-great-grandfather Tom. I don’t mean this disrespectfully. He has written a story about a native man named Fidel, who, to avoid capture by ranchers, ran not to the cover of the woods but to the open meadows of what the natives called the Hummingbird Coast, on Tomales Point. Fidel was a member of the Hummingbird Cult, Greg reasoned, and was perhaps seeking that magic ground to turn himself into a hummingbird to fly away. He also tells of a mysterious green light that can be seen on that coast from Marshall, on the opposite shores of Tomales Bay. It seems to signify something—some source of magic—although what, I’m not exactly sure. I’ve never seen it myself, although I spent some weeks living on the water just across from that location. It sounds Gatsbyesque.
“I saw the green light,” Greg writes in one of the stories he sent me, and then, two sentences later amends it: “Maybe I didn’t see it, and only know it in my imagination.”
Greg and his tribe have had some problems with the casino, in that a vocal contingent of locals did not want it to be built. It is in Rohnert Park, about an hour’s drive from Point Reyes. When I was a kid, my family would go to Rohnert Park to go bowling or to the roller rink. There is a mall nearby on an expanse of former wetland. The residents there argued that a casino would bring unsavory elements into the community and take money away from local businesses. But Greg is quick to chalk up his opposition to prejudice. He says white Americans want their Indians to be penniless and selling beads quaintly from the roadside, content with their poverty. Anything else and they are “wagon burners,” he says with detectable vehemence. Greg says his goal is to use success with the casino to once again make his tribe stewards of the land. They already have organic and sustainable farming projects underway, and he tells me—with rather staggering ambition—that he eventually wants to “buy back all of Marin and Sonoma,” some of the most expensive land in the country.
Greg is interested in the idea of managed landscapes. After all, his people knew and managed the land around Point Reyes intimately. Aside from the land’s magical properties, the Miwok knew all of the ways to access its bounty. Along with burning brush to create better habitat for the elk, they also knew where the quail laid their eggs, they pruned food-bearing trees and generally sculpted the landscape to fit their purpose. This was a tamed landscape, he said, not a wilderness. There were wild lands out where no people lived, sure. But the native peoples of Northern California were not living in the wild. This was their garden.
Greg talks about writing as a path, as navigation, and about the land as literature, as a book or text. However while he hopes to read the histories of his people in their original geography, he knows there is no going “back.” In much the same fashion, the fantasy of “returning” the land to some “original” condition that is humanless is just that—a fantasy. If humans have been living around Drakes Estero—far fewer of them in the last 150 years than the thousands that came before—what does it mean to return it to the wild? This is what is all too often missing from the familiar wilderness scriptures of Muir and Thoreau: that the land was not empty when they found it. The first peoples of North America had already been laid waste by diseases before the settlers with their covered wagons ever started to move west. Diseases came to kill the Indians with the original settlers, with the Russian fur traders who settled near Bodega and wiped out the local sea otters, and the Spanish monks who were not so chaste, so that by the time of the Gold Rush 90 percent of the native population had already died out. The wild lands of America were a ghost town, not an Eden. Or if it was an Eden, it was a rather recently vacated one. In California, the Spanish missions spread diseases accidentally, but also treated the natives as second-class citizens, if not outright slaves. They were not allowed to leave the missions. Their lives were worth less. When a native woman was struggling in childbirth, it was not uncommon for a priest to perform a crude caesarean section, knowing full well that both woman and baby would die, but cutting into her living flesh anyway so the doomed infant could be baptized before death.
When conservationists talk of returning Drakes Estero to its “original” wild state, to what state are they referring? By the 1860s and 1870s, the homescape of the Miwok and Pomo was almost unreadable. Even something as simple as the grass had changed—the native perennial bunchgrasses having been overtaken by European annuals like wild oat, rattlesnake grass and foxtail barley. These are the golden grasses we usually think of when we think of California’s golden summer hills. They do not belong, and yet are so triumphant, and have replaced what was natural so thoroughly that they could never be removed. Their seeds came from the dung of Spanish cattle and horses, during the height of the Spanish missions between 1769 and 1824, so that by the time of the Gold Rush, the very ground beneath the natives’ feet was unrecognizable. The plains and grasslands and prairies were important to Northern California’s first people. They believed there was safety in openness. It was in the open that the bears could not harm them, where their food was abundant, where the spirit could fly. Good magic was practiced there. The Miwok believed that karma worked: that to wound a person or an animal, or even a tree, would invite swift retribution. But the Europeans seemed to be above the laws of the natural world; they killed people and cleared forests and emptied the coastal plains of pronghorn and elk. They betrayed not only the Indians, but each other. Francis Drake returned to Plymouth in September of 1580, the year a young William Shakespeare, not more than twenty years old, left Stratford-upon-Avon to begin his career on the London stage. But before returning home to fame, fortune and a knighthood, Drake stopped on a small island devoid of people, where he left Maria, his mistress, pregnant with his bastard child.
The truth is harsh sometimes. Or not even sometimes: often. This is why we need myths. Both to understand and escape from this harshness. Most of the time we live in the casino-world—all sounds and distraction (all sound and fury, signifying nothing)—not the world of the Human Bear. When we turn now to nature, what are we looking to remember, and what are we hoping to forget?