October 22, 2018: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Publication of The Ohlone Way
A wonderful gathering took place at Berkeley’s historic Hillside Club on the evening of October 22nd, 2018 when over 200 cherished friends and members of the public joined with theCalifornia Institute for Community, Art & Nature to celebrate and reflect upon the 40th Anniversary of the publication of California I CAN Founder Malcolm Margolin’s landmark book – The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the SanFrancisco-Monterey Bay Area.
Longtime friends and colleagues of Malcolm and The Ohlone Way shared wine and hors d’oeuvres as old friends greeted each other and new friends were made. Hillside Club member and Berkeley Frame Shop owner Tim Holton (whose idea it was to organize this event in the first place) launched the formal program with tales of the founding of the Hillside Club as a uniquely Berkeley institution. Following Tim’s introduction, Mary Nicely, from the office of State Assembly member Tony Thurmond, presented Malcolm with a beautiful framed resolution recognizing the significance of The Ohlone Way to the collective history of the State of California.
Malcolm then invited small groups of three or four friends to join him on stage in a living room-like setting, on couches and easy chairs, and called upon each to share their personal recollections of the origins, creation and ultimate impact of the book.
Archeologist Kent Lightfoot, poet and philosopher Susan Griffin, publisher Victoria Shoemaker, Poetry Flash editor Joyce Jenkins, book distributor Ron Shoop, typesetter Christopher Weil, and printer David Lance Goines offered commentary on the state of affairs in Berkeley forty years earlier as well as how they remembered their first encounters with the Ohlone Way. All told stories about how this book opened their eyes to a world that had been hidden in plain sight and how important that awakening was to their understanding that the place where they lived and worked was, in fact, Ohlone Territory.
Following the first two panels, Steve Wasserman, current publisher of Heyday Books, leapt to the stage to give an impromptu and heartfelt tribute to Malcolm and to the remarkable legacy of not only The Ohlone Way but Heyday Books itself.
The final panel of the evening, composed of Ohlone activist Greg Castro, Spokeswoman for the Federated Villages of Lisjan and Ohlone Shellmound activist Corrina Gould, and Indian Canyon storyteller and cultural practitioner Kanyon Sayers Rhoods, was nothing short of deeply profound and moving as Malcolm’s Ohlone friends and colleagues told him directly how The Ohlone Way had helped them see their own history in vivid detail in a book that showed respect and appreciation for their history and culture (although, as Greg said with a grin, “Malcolm didn’t get everything right, but he was definitely close enough!”).
Some thoughts on the 40th anniversary from Malcolm:
“In the fall of 1978, exactly forty years ago, I published The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. I thought then that the book—printed, bound, and distributed—had been finished. Looking back on the last four decades, I have come to realize that this was hardly the case. As its author, I have learned much in my forty years of research and ‘deep hanging out’ with the native people of the Bay Area and California. At the same time, theIndian community whose history and culture the book describes has changed in ways no one could have imagined back then.”
“In the last forty years we have witnessed something so unexpected as to seem miraculous: a revival of language, belief, and traditional practice that allows us all, Native and non-Native alike, to experience the Bay Area’s deepest, truest, and most abiding sense of itself as part of a vibrant and contemporary culture.From today’s perspective, it’s clear that the publication of The Ohlone Way was only one step in a surprising, soulful, and gratifying journey that continues to this day. It’s a journey you won’t want to miss. We are all “works in progress.”
Special thanks to all who came, to the Hillside Club, to the California I CAN team of staff and volunteers who made the evening so very special, to our friend Heather Hafleigh for the photographs, and to Grant Thompson for the videography of the evening.
We also owe a great debt of gratitude to Linda Yamane, a longtime friend and associate, and to Steven Meadows.
Photos by Heather Hafleigh.