The California Institute for Community, Art, and Nature gathered an exceptional group of native artists and cultural leaders to present to a full-house of attendees at Goldman Theater of the David Brower Center in Berkeley for a series of morning presentations.  Our speakers shared personal reflections on the value of the lessons they learned, how knowledge is conveyed, and the wisdom embedded in a variety of Native institutions, beliefs, and practices. They discussed to what degree this knowledge has been transferable to mainstream America.  Additionally,  a number of non-Indians who have had long and deep engagement with Indian communities added commentary on what they have learned and how it has…

April 7, 2018 On the afternoon of April 7th, 2018 at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) artifacts from the West Berkeley Shellmound and Emeryville Shellmound, some of them thousands of years old, were taken from the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum’s storage area and, for the first time ever, were shown to the general public. Over 300 people joined California I CAN and friends in the light-filled and elegant BAM/PFA amphitheater to view these remarkable objects and to hear a panel of contemporary Native California artists, skilled in traditional practices, discuss  how these objects were made, the aesthetic principles that guided their manufacture, how they were used, their place…

The Bay Area is home to hundreds if not thousands of writers, among them some of the world’s most prominent novelists, poets, and non-fiction writers. Scores of presses, ranging from those publishing limited editions of fine press books to major publishers producing a hundred or more titles a year have found fertile ground and flourish here. While the number of independent booksellers, long the backbone of the literary scene, has dwindled, those that have withstood the assault of chain stores and electronic ordering seem to be resilient, and in recent years their numbers are increasing. What factors have created such a dynamic and diverse literary scene? How have the literary…

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a spring of cultural renaissance, and he’s currently working on a spectacular project. Each year in the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of boats are taken to the local waterways to participate in the Tribal Canoe Journey, a beautiful display of native art and culture. In the summer of 2019, a special Tribal Canoe Journey will take place in the SanFrancisco Bay in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Island. We wanted to lend Julian a helping hand, so we threw a reception to get him in touch with some of our friends. The Bay ties together many kinds of people from different…

Founder of Friends of the River and the International Rivers Network and International Coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1990, Mark has long been an iconic figure in the environmental movement. A defining moment in his life, a deed that put him on the front pages of newspapers around the country, came in May 1979, when he temporarily stopped construction of the New Melones Dam by finding a hiding place on the Stanislaus River and chaining himself to the rocks. The river has been his teacher, and the lessons he has learned from decades of rafting and advocacy work are imbedded deeply in his mind and heart, worked into…

A direct descendant of Brigham Young, Brooke, with his wife Terry Tempest Williams, draws on Mormon background to create a unique environmental perspective. We arranged a reading and reception for him to celebrate his latest book, Open Midnight, an account of his work in establishing wilderness areas in Utah and communicating with the ghost of a Mormon ancestor born close in time to and in the same village as Charles Darwin.

For over 40 years, Tim’s writing and photography have combined with his love of rivers and nature with his drive for creative expression. Living for 22 years as a nomad in his van, Tim has canoed or rafted on more than 300 rivers. He is an award-winning author of 26 books and dozens of magazine articles, and his text and photos have been widely used for conservation campaigns, many of them successful. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Tim created a sumptuous book, Wild and Scenic Rivers: An American Legacy. California ICAN, was proud to host a reception for Tim. Some fifty people crowded into…

When Gretel Ehrlich called to say that she was in Berkeley and wanted to stop by for a visit, it felt selfish to keep one of America’s most provocative, original, and iconoclastic writers all to ourselves. We got in touch with a few friends, Osher Lifelong Learning gave us a comfortable room, and a couple of days after we got Gretel’s initial call we had assembled about thirty people for a brown-bag lunch. In a world numbed and half-alive from effects of comfort and convenience, Gretel stands out like an Old Testament prophet, who has left the soft life of the city to seek truth and the life of the…