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?

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Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place. 

As she tells her family's story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home?

In Episode 1, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay—an uprooting which ended her family’s time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa.

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In this essay Camille reflects on the journey of seeds, how much of what we plant in our gardens was brought to our soils during the slave trade, and the legacy of trauma and triumph that lies within our food. Planting food, she contends, even in contaminated soils, becomes both an acknowledgment of grief and a celebration of the beauty of growing.

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This week we are revisiting our interview with cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram where he discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability he calls on us to remember our inherent participation in the collective, embodied flesh of the Earth.

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In this essay, Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, offers a tribute to the preeminent nature writer Barry Lopez. Originally published in Notre Dame Magazine, we are republishing “An Unbroken Grace” to commemorate the first anniversary of Barry’s death. In 2018, Fred spent several days with Barry at his longtime home in Finn Rock, Oregon, along the McKenzie River. As he recalls the time that the two spent together beneath old growth Douglas firs, Fred reflects on the life of this great writer whose numinous encounters and lifelong adoration of mystery informed his practice of living in service to the power of story as a way to illuminate and heal.

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Tristan McConnell is a writer who spent years working as a foreign correspondent in Nairobi. In this essay, Tristan ventures across the rugged landscape of Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of Kenya’s Rift Valley: the place where, millions of years ago, our first human ancestors emerged and then dispersed in waves out of the continent. Present-day Turkana is a place that continues to be defined by human migration. As Tristan meets with archaeologists, pastoralists, and activists, he considers the ways in which Turkana’s long story is still being written.

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As we approach the longest night of the year, we invite you to find a few moments of quiet to tune in to this re-broadcast of recitations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.

In his seminal collection of poems, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely “received” prayers. Twenty-five years ago, Anita Barrows, an award-winning poet and translator, and Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher, collaborated to translate this collection. On the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Anita and Joanna recite a selection of these poems. Through their potent recitations, they bring the spirit of Rilke’s words fully into our time and remind us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being.

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Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born scholar, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His many books include The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he explores our imaginative failure in an age of ecological crisis. In this interview, Amitav speaks about his newest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, and how the widespread silencing of nonhuman voices is deeply entangled in capitalism and the geopolitical structures that sustain it. Storytellers, he says, must lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land. 

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In this in-depth interview, Rowen White shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds.

As we prepare to gather around our tables for Thanksgiving, we are re-sharing this conversation from 2019 as an invitation to honor and remember the embodied histories and relationships that are carried by the foods that nourish us.

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This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. Following up from last week's story on black ash, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder shares three tree migration vignettes: sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce. Each offers a glimpse of just one aspect of tree migration: nourishment, forest succession, and industry.

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