Part 3: Savoring my last day in San Blas

This post marks the ending to my story of exploring the San Blas Islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama, back when few tourists came to the islands. Click here if you missed Part 1 or Part 2:

The next morning, I’m the only passenger on the Hotel San Blas tour boat — the dugout canoe. We’re headed to Grass Island, one of the few outlying islands in the archipelago that has a name. When we get there, children once again emerge to meet me –t wo boys and a girl with a baby in her arms. Soon they are teaching me the Kuna words for sun, water and canoe. They ask me to tell them the words in English.

The children’s teenage sister emerges from behind one of three huts on the island. She wants me to look at the molas she and her mother have sewn. Then another little boy walks up to us, wearing a plush cow stuffed-animal backpack.  He squeezes one of the cow’s hooves, to show me that it plays a song. The digitized music is a contrast to the lapping Caribbean waves: “It’s a Small World After All.” He doesn’t speak English and has no idea how ironic the tune is, given where he lives, that’s coming out of his little backpack.

Dinner will be served, as always, back at the Hotel San Blas, where the food is rumored to be the best in the archipelago. I wouldn’t know otherwise, of course, but I’ve been pleased with fresh fish every day. Situated in noisy Nalunega village, the hotel is all bamboo walls and thatched roofs. Beds are little more than thin mattresses set on too-bouncy springs. Bathrooms are in a separate building, across a white-sand path near the dining hut. The toilets and sinks look as if they haven’t been cleaned in a week. But then, the Kuna aren’t in the habit of cleaning bathrooms – their toilet is the sea. Several huts on stilts set over the water have nothing in them but a hole in the floor.

I eat dinner with the hotel’s sole waitress, a bright-eyed woman who tells me she has two young children. Later she dozes in a hammock next to mine, her beaded legs hanging off the edge. I look out at the sea, a book resting on my stomach. The whisper-soft waves lull my eyes closed. White, fist sized crabs skitter out from under the hammock and into burrows near the water’s edge.

The next day, I take more excursions that are part of my pre-paid hotel stay – first to Pelican Island, which has only one hut where an old man lives alone. I circle the entire island in 340 steps, slowly counting them like a child. There is time for that kind of thing here. I’m glad for that. In the shallow water swim tiny guppies, a fragile shimmer of blue and green iridescence.

Life here is not easy or idyllic, though, despite the turquoise water and white sand and palm trees. There are a lot of fish to be caught, but no fresh water for drinking or cooking. There are coconuts, but little other fresh produce. Nearly everything must be shipped in. Every manufactured item is precious, not only because it takes so long to arrive, but also because the islands are “poor” by most standards, and especially Latin American standards. For this reason, each non-Kuna visitor to an island must pay one U.S. dollar to the island elder. They money helps the residents buy food and other goods.

At sunset, back in Nalunega, I watch two women out in the water. They paddle a dugout about 20 feet out to clean debris from the depths. Even for this wet, sloppy work, the women wear what they always do: mola blouse, sarong skirt, beads wrapped from elbow to wrist and knee to ankle. Without hesitation, they jump out of the canoes, plop into the water, dip underneath and emerge with huge palm fronds, washed here by the tides. They pile the fronds high in the boat. Skirts and blouses dripping with saltwater, they hoist themselves back into the dugout and paddle away.

Tonight’s dinner is fresh lobster with rice simmered in coconut milk. Our waitress is proud of the catch and repeats the word for lobster in Spanish – langosta, langosta, langosta! After eating, I lie in the hammock for awhile before finally shopping for the molas hanging on the sides of the village huts. The Kuna will not budge an inch on their set prices. I admire their patience, and spend my last hours – and last dollars – on the handiwork of the Kuna women.

Part 2: Uncovering the real San Blas Islands

The continuation of last week’s piece on my experience being among the very first tourists to the San Blas Islands (Kuna Yala):

After breakfast at the only hotel in the San Blas Islands (aptly named Hotel San Blas), Jose Amalo, our boat captain, Burgos, the Londoner and I set out together in one of Burgos’ dugout canoes to visit an outlying island.

Slop-slap, slop-slap. I daydream with the rhythm of the waves.

We beach-land on a tiny island and I step out of the canoe into warm, ankle-deep water. Women and children emerge from three grass huts to see the visitors. A young boy splashes into the water and looks on shyly. I soon learn his name is Ronal. He is five years old, he tells me in the international child language of five proud fingers stretched wide. Ronal shows off his little brother, Anu, hoisting the infant up on his shoulder for my approval.

Few words are needed for this kind of welcome.

The Londoner and I drink fresh coconut water and spend an hour walking around, which is a very long time on an extremely tiny island. Only fallen coconuts, coral and the occasional palm frond interrupt the white sand. We don snorkeling gear and swim out along the island’s reef. Ronal splashes near shore as his mother looks on from their hut. Orange and yellow starfish the size of giant platters cling to the slopes of the reef, which is covered in green sea grass that reaches within two feet of the water’s surface. As I paddle back to shore, a giant white manta ray undulates along the sand below me.

Later, I get a rare peek inside a Kuna hut, where people gather as fish sizzles in a pot filled with coconut milk and bananas. I do not go inside; I do not want to break the Kuna law designed to protect their fragile culture.

Our own lunch awaits us back on Nalunega. I say goodbye to young Ronal and climb into the canoe.

We pass islands with just a few huts on them. Kuna villages such as these were one of the first signs of civilization that Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa saw when he crossed the isthmus in 1513. There was a bitter fight at Waka Nono beach, not far from the current Carti airstrip, between the Spanish conquistadors and Kuna Indians. The Kuna reportedly killed hundreds of Spaniards and threw their heads into the sea.

While the Kuna have been fighting to maintain their way of life for centuries, not all Kuna are willing to adhere to their cultural traditions. Over breakfast today, Burgos told me that many Kuna teenagers, now educated by the Panamanian school system, are leaving the islands and marrying non-Kuna in Panama City and elsewhere. “It’s bad,” Burgos said, looking away.

How do elders like Burgos balance tradition with the seemingly inevitable encroachment of modern life? So far pragmatism has served them well. The Kuna do not seek alliances with anyone, but they remain friendly with Panama and Columbia, both countries that have “annexed” the San Blas coastal areas and the islands over the course of history. For the Kuna, though, neither country has claim to the islands. San Blas, or whatever anyone else wants to call the islands, is Kuna Yala (Land of the Kuna) to the people that live here. Even the strip of mainland Panamanian coast where the Kuna paddle a full day to get fresh water and tend fields of vegetable and fruit crops is known – to them — as Kuna Yala.

The Kuna have lived in traditional ways and avoided assimilation as much as possible. Despite centuries of colonization, missionary activity and war, the Kuna have refused to get caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war.

Today the San Blas Islands are considered a semi-autonomous territory of Panama. The Kuna have an organized government, the Kuna General Congress, which meets twice a year. The congress governs all aspects of life in San Blas with the exception of education. The Panamanian government has set up Spanish-language schools on the more populated islands, including Nalunega. Elder Kuna are not pleased with the schools. They argue that island life does not require Spanish language skills or mathematics.

They have some valid points, and indeed, the concrete-block school building on Nalunega looks odd amid the Kuna’s thatched huts.

Also seemingly out of place are the churches that have been built on various islands by missionaries of all stripes –- from Mormon to Baha’i to Catholic. The Kuna tolerate the missionaries, but most villagers maintain their traditional beliefs. Kuna healers still treat the ill, and ancient rites are still observed.

Still, it’s hard to keep the modern world out, especially when your homeland looks and feels the part of the quintessential tropical paradise. It’s not surprising then, that the Kuna know the value of allowing tourists to visit. Yet they still struggle to maintain their independence, as Panama rapidly modernizes. The Kuna fight for rights to the mainland rainforests they use for sustainable agriculture, while ranchers want to clear the land for grazing. Despite representation in the Panamanian parliament, the Kuna stand little chance against business interests. During the 1970s, certain mainland territories were demarcated for Kuna use, but deforestation for cattle ranching still threatens an area the Kuna have deemed a forest reserve. And in the mid-90s, the Panamanian government granted mining rights for three-quarters of mainland Kuna Yala.

We get back to Nalunega just in time for lunch – fresh conch mixed with vegetables and rice. As we eat, some of the women try to sell us molas, and Burgos tells us about an inna feast that will take place the next evening on Nalunega. The inna feast celebrates the coming of age of a young Kuna girl. Celebrants drink chichi guerte (a libation made of fermented sugarcane juice and corn), sing song and dance. As wagas (foreigners), we can watch from outside, but we cannot go inside the celebration hut. If we do, we’ll be fined.

Five dollars is the penalty. I wonder if some tourists – for which $5 is no big deal — purposely break the rules.

After lunch, I go for a walk around Nalunega, taking care not to intrude on the scenes of daily Kuna life that I witness. I will be the only visitor staying overnight on the island tonight (the Londoner is due back in Panama City on business later today). I do my best to be invisible. It just seems more just that way. I’m curious, as always. When I hear joyful singing in the night, I want to go out and see. But I don’t. For me, it’s more ethical to temper my curiosity and just listen from my bed. The Kuna Indians, like any native people, are people first. Their unusual-to-me customs are to be respected, as is their private time to practice those customes.  I fall asleep to the sounds of women singing in their native language, and laughing in the universal one.

STORY TO BE CONTINUED AND CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK …..

Part 1: San Blas Islands (cir. 2000), being among ‘the first’

 This is the first third of a story I wrote about traveling to the San Blas Islands, off the Caribbean coast of Panama. The story and my photographs were first published in 2000 in Passionfruit magazine. Today the islands have opened up wide to tourists, but a dozen years ago, I was one of the first non-local people allowed to visit and stay in the San Blas, the Kuna Indians’ homeland.

 

I squint into the impossibly bright sun and see, swaying ahead – blades of grass?

No, they’re the tops of palm trees on islands so small and flat they fade in and out like mirages on the horizon. I close my eyes and press my sandy feet against the bottom of the dugout canoe. Slop-slap, slop-slap – the ocean pats the underside of the boat in a singsong rhythm.

More than 300 tiny islands make up the San Blas archipelago, which is just off the Caribbean coast of Panama. The islands are home to some 20,000 Kuna Indians, descendants of indigenous Central Americans who fled to the islands in paddle-distance 150 years ago in a largely successful effort to preserve their independence and traditions.

I’ve come to this remote place to see how the Kuna’s experiment with tourism is working – and of course, because I’m insanely curious about how indigenous people live and survive in the modern world. It isn’t easy to satisfy this curiousity anymore, but over the past few years, the Kuna have begun to encourage tourism on just a few of their islands, hoping to bring in some much-needed money. Tourists’ activities are tightly controlled by the Kuna in an effort to minimize their impact on the San Blas environment and culture. One of them is not allowing visitors into their homes.

But visitors, by nature of visiting, change a place. Will the Kuna survive this experiment intact? And as someone from a completely different culture, is it ethical for me to even be here? My curiosity and the possibility of staying in a Kuna village wins out. I am just 25 years old, after all. I take life as it comes, rarely contemplating anything for too long.

I’m also interested in learning more about the Kuna’s matriarchal society.  In Kuna culture, young women select their husbands. After a selection is made, the man lives with his wife in the house she shares with her mother. Property belongs to women and is passed from mother to child. The Kuna liken the Earth to a caring and generous Kuna mother and celebrate their own Earth Day, which they call Mother’s Day.

Women’s esteem in Kuna society has been solidified in modern times as molas have become the backbone of the Kuna economy. Molas are hand-stitched squares of cloth that women began sewong at the turn of the 20th Century. The colorful textiles are hot items on the international crafts market. Kuna women creates molas by stitching several layers of cloth together and then cutting patterns through the layers, exposing the cloth underneath. Designs include illustrations of local animals and plants, ritual objects and Christian symbols. Some molas also reflect the increasing contact between the Kuna and the outside world, with designs that include cartoon characters, Coke bottles or other logos.

It takes an hour to reach the islands by air from Panama City. I was surprised when the ticket clerk at the Panama City airport examined my papers and asked for my weight. My weight? The planes to the islands are so small, they want to know what everything weighs. Too heavy and I pay an extra fee.

Our plane first descended into Carti, on the Caribbean coast of Panama. Off shore, I could see red and black coral reefs shimmering underneath the water, teeming with parrotfish, sharks, crabs and lobster. Once we landed, I watched Kuna women in orange headscarves sitting in dugout canoes bobbing in the water at the end of the runway, their shoulders even with the crumbling concrete of the airstrip. Our plane touched down and stopped just short of them. They did not flinch.

The women waiting for the plane were Kuna, who quickly began to load gear, and most importantly, water. There is no natural freshwater on the San Blas Islands. Everyone wore mola blouses and bright sarong skirts and had beads in bright yellow, red, green and blue wrapped tightly from wrist to elbow and ankle to knee.

Now it was time to take off for the San Blas, and as I looked out on smallest runway I’d ever laid eyes on, I prayed a little. The pilot had to turn the plane near the end of the runway in tight circles to get us into position for takeoff, kind of like a nine-point turn in a car to get out of a tiny cul-de-sac.

Our next stop, El Porvenir airstrip, was no larger. Couldn’t they find a bigger island for the airport? I wondered. The runway was exactly as long as El Porvenir island, the largest in the San Blas archipelago. There wasn’t a bigger island for the airport.

As I stepped off the plane, Luis Burgos, owner of the Hotel San Blas, approached me. He had my name on a sheet of paper, and I handed him a receipt showing I had paid for my visit. He was accompanied by another tourist, a Londoner who had arrived on a different plane earlier that morning. They’d been waiting just for me.

“Let’s go?” Burgos asked in English, pointing toward a canoe at the island’s dock at one end of the runway. We’ll be headed to Nalunega, the only island with an official place for visitors to sleep, the 15-room Hotel San Blas.

TO BE CONTINUED >>>> check back for Part 2 next week

From Cacophony to Calm in SE Asia

After finishing 2-week volunteer stint building houses in Chiang Mai, Thailand, it was time to relax a bit with my fellow volunteers and by myself. First stop: Bangkok. Second stop: an elephant sanctuary. Third stop: Cambodia. Fourth stop: islands in the south of Thailand. Final stop: the jungles.

But as I started the vacation part of my 4-week vacation, I couldn’t relax. It was late August 2001, and I hadn’t predicted how this trip would impact me. Yes, I would be in Thailand when the world changed forever as the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by planes flown by terrorists. But that isn’t the only sea-change I would experience in Southeast Asia. The first happened right away, when I was least expecting it.

 THE MARKET   

If Bangkok stirs the senses, Chatuchak Weekend Market purees them into froth.  The market covers several square miles in central Bangkok. One of the largest markets in all of Asia, the place is a cacophony of sound and smell and texture – chirping parakeets, the sssssss of stir-frying vegetables, the pungent smell of boiled eel, rows of silk tapestries in magenta and gold fluttering from stall ceilings, 200-pound granite Buddhas blocking passageways.

But here, in this dizzying place, my ability to soak in my surroundings (something years of wanderlust had fine-tuned) was stunted.  I hadn’t even remembered my notebook; as a writer, this was not right.  All I could think about was Dad.

Several phone calls home that I’d made from my hotel room the day before went unanswered.  Today’s phone calls got the same result — endless ringing.  Nothing could have sounded so awful.

Four months earlier, doctors gave my father less than a year to live. He’d driven himself to the hospital because he felt really tired and worn down, a kind of tired that was so unusual for him that it was alarming. It only took a day of tests to determine his diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia. He’d just turned 68.

Like all cancers, there is no known cure. For AML in particular, no treatment has been found to prolong the lives of those suffering from it.  The disease is an invisible killer, only taking the patient when the diseased blood goes from bad to worse. The destabilization, the doctors say, can happen at any time, and usually kills the patient in a few weeks. It’s like a huge bomb with a hidden timer. It may happen tomorrow, or not for a few weeks, or not for a year.   Prayer and positive thinking were the only things my mother and I had been able to do to help him. For the first month after the diagnosis, I could barely work, barely think.  The emotional blow made writing feel pointless, parties and small-talk chores. For months I’d wake up in the morning and find my eyes filling with tears.

But after the first two months since the diagnosis (and three visits home), I was learning that my writing still gave me purpose, and that seeing friends made me feel good. I realized that sitting home waiting for Dad to possibly die would be the worst possible thing I could do, the worst message I could send him.  On one of my visits home, I brought up my previously-planned trip to work as a volunteer in Thailand.  I was nervous about bringing it up, telling Mom first, then Dad. Without hesitating, Dad said I should go.  He knew I needed it.  He knew getting up and going was who I I always had been, as the a little girl in the back of the Golden Goose, and who I was now.

THE PLAN

I told my parents I wouldn’t feel comfortable being so far away if I didn’t call in at least once a week.  If anything happened, I told them, I could be on an airplane home in a day. With the International Dateline working in my favor, I assured my parents I could be home quickly. I got on the Internet and printed out a map of where I’d be volunteering and where I thought I’d be traveling afterwards.  I was doing anything I could to make it seem that I wouldn’t be so far away. I knew better than to try and fool them, but I tried anyway. They weren’t buying it, but I think they appreciated my efforts.

Deep down, I felt an urgency to volunteer, to help someone else in a tangible way that I couldn’t help Dad.  Both my parents had wanted, in their retirement, to build houses for the poor.  Now my father couldn’t do that, much less get on an airplane to reach the project sites (doctors say air travel is dangerous for leukemia patients).  The whole volunteer project — making cement from scratch, building brick walls, and ultimately giving three families homes – took on new purpose. Houses were something I could see. Thailand I could see, new places and cultures I could see.  I couldn’t see leukemia.  And now, in Bangkok, in the middle of this labyrinth packed full of silk and stir-fried grasshoppers and exotic birds, I couldn’t see anything else but leukemia.

I felt unsteady as I walked, not looking at anything, not really seeing anyone. The technicolor of Chatuchak Market disappeared behind my colorless, worried pupils.  Why hadn’t they been home when I’d called? They were always home. They’re retired. With the time difference, I’d called them at different times of the day – midday, afternoon, late evening. What could two 68-year-olds be doing out at 10 pm?  They must be at the hospital. Dad must be in the hospital.

I couldn’t think, and now I was turned around in the market. The noise of merchants and customers bargaining with each other mixed with the squawking of birds and the boom-boom of the bass from the athletic shoe stalls.  All of it had become an unbearable din.  The Chatuchak Market has thousands of stalls and hundreds of corridors. People flowed in and out from every direction, seemingly all at once, like batter settling in to the grooves of a waffle iron.  I had lost the small group of volunteers I’d come with. I was alone, and even though I’d traveled by myself through several parts of the world, I’d never felt as alone as I did here in the middle of Bangkok’s market.

     Should I be headed to the airport? Was this it for Dad?

I crossed a corridor and stepped into one of the few open spaces I’d seen all day. I felt helpless, wanting to be able at that moment to be fixing Dad.  Here was a man who could fix anything, yet no one could fix him. Not Dad, not the doctors, not Mom, not me. The invisible disease was racing through his body, forwards and backwards, or maybe just settling in somewhere, perhaps in some natural resting place. Whatever was going on, it was scary and unexpected, with no comfortable corner to retreat to.

THE CALL

Headed nowhere in particular, I stepped into the flow of people in a corridor on my left.  I looked up.  Suddenly, without warning, my Thai friend Benjawan, a member of the volunteer group, stood right in front of me and smiled. By sheer luck, she and a few others had stopped at a shoe stall nearby.  I had told her about my Dad.  She took one look at me and pulled out her cell phone. We went into the shoe store.

“Do you want to try home again?” she asked.

It was past midnight in Seattle.  The phone rang, rang again, then my father’s voice came through on the other end:  “Hello?”  I was suddenly aware of where I was, smashed in a corner of a vendor’s stall, surrounded by shoes and glass cases and tee shirts and noise, trying to avoid the bustle. The scene was silly, and I soon learned how much I had overreacted.

Each time I had called over the past two days, my parents had been out shopping or at a neighbor’s or at the Post Office.  I told my father how worried I had been, and he assured me  things were fine.  Barely able to talk over the din of the market, I assured him I’d call back in a few days from a quieter location.

After hanging up, I vowed to find a quieter place within as well.

 THE NEW MODE

After my panic in Bangkok, I began praying for Dad at Buddhist temples wherever I went.  I even kneeled before the Emerald Buddha, considered the most sacred in all of Siam, in the Royal Palace.  I prayed on buses and boats, even as I rode on the back of a motorcycle in Cambodia, a few days after the panic in the market.  Thousands of miles from home, I began coming to terms with the fact that sometimes things just can’t be fixed, even for my father — the man that could fix almost anything. Sometimes you just have to hold on for the ride.

As rice paddies blurred on either side of the speeding motorcycle, I lifted my arms to the sky, letting the warm wind sift through my fingers. I closed my eyes, and prayed.

 

Where it all began: On a hot Nevada highway

 

“There’s no brakes!” my father wailed, pumping his entire leg into the brake pedal.

“There’s no brakes!” lifting his foot, pumping, lifting again, pumping.

“There’s no brakes!” nearly standing up in the driver’s seat.

 

On a hot Nevada highway in 1984, our family was literally speeding out of control, trapped inside a motor home known affectionately as the Golden Goose.  The view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains blurred outside the windows as all seven tons of her hurtled downhill faster than we’d ever felt her go.  My mother tried to steady herself in the co-pilot’s seat as the world zoomed by out the windows.  I sat 25 feet behind them, 10 years old, snuggled into my favorite place on one of the back beds.  This was where I could wave out the rear window to truckers and ask them, with a fist-pump, to honk their horns. Nine times out of ten they saw me, and they did it. When not in school, I traveled in this solid steel box with my parents, crisscrossing North America.  An only child, the back of the Goose was also my place to write stories and poems in my travel journals. But my father’s screams and the window-rattling speed of our giant vehicle made me put down my journal that day, close my eyes, and pray.

The Sierra Nevadas had fried the old Goose’s front brakes, the only ones — we would later learn — that had been working since we had left our home near Seattle on our way to Sedona, Arizona. The back brakes had been defective from the beginning, but my father hadn’t been able to tell.  My father, an electrical engineer, could usually repair anything. 

One of the biggest tests to his fixing finesse was this giant box of metal, built in the 1970’s, and somehow, through a series of events that I never really understood, was left to die on a lonely field somewhere in the middle of Montana. When Dad flew from Seattle, where we lived, to Bozeman to pick her up in 1981, she had chipping blue paint, a broken gas tank, engine problems, turn signals that didn’t work, cooling and heating issues, among other ills. Despite her problems, she was his favorite patient, and after nursing her back to Seattle, she entered intensive care, complete with a paint job at the Boeing aircraft manufacturing plant.  Her faded blue got sloughed off and replaced with shiny beige, gold and tan stripes.  After her makeover, Dad named her the Golden Goose.

Despite Dad’s long hours working on her while she was parked next to our house, on the road Golden Goose got tired sometimes and just quit. On several occasions she needed a tow, but most of the time Dad could figure out how to coax her into one more reluctant start. One of these occasions was when she wouldn’t start after we’d parked her on the beach on a remote stretch of the Washington coast. When we were ready to leave, the tide was creeping toward us.  Before long, waves lapped at the front tires and the whole motor home sunk into the newly-wet sand. The front end tilted down.  Mom and I were ready to get out, but Dad wouldn’t abandon her. He trouble-shooted the engine problem and got her to start – just in time to reverse us out of the encroaching Pacific.

But on that hot Nevada day in 1984, there was nothing Dad could fix, at least not as we were racing down the highway.  For the first time I can remember, Dad couldn’t fix something. That something – the beloved Goose — might kill us.  As the thought kicked in that we all might die, I ran up to the front of the motor home where my parents were. But eventually I retreated to my comfort area in the back, holding on for the ride as the curtains shook and the cabinet doors rattled and my mind froze still.

Seventeen years later, Dad would be diagnosed with leukemia. Here was a man who could fix anything, yet no one could fix him. Not Dad, not the doctors, not Mom, not me. The invisible disease was racing through his veins, in forward and reverse, or maybe just settling in some natural resting place. A leukemia diagnosis is scary and sudden, like brakes giving out on a seven-ton motorhome with only a long, fast downhill as far as the eye can see.

Yet Dad handled cancer with a steady mind – surviving two and a half years when the doctors only gave him a few months. I was just shy of 30 when he passed away, by then a traveler in my own right, making my way into dozens of foreign countries on my own, and, in time, taking others overseas to volunteer. In some ways, my taking the lead, the steering wheel, of sorts — and keeping everyone along with me at least thinking I had some semblance of control – was ingrained.

While defective rear brakes and seared-off front ones couldn’t be attributed to luck, Western Nevada’s geography was indeed lucky for us that day in 1984. The incline bottomed out suddenly and then turned sharply uphill.  Dad steered straight. There were no other cars in our way.  As the road turned upward, the motor home slowed, and then rolled backwards. Oh no — we were rolling backwards. I looked out the back window for oncoming cars as we headed the wrong way down the highway, all the scenery that had whooshed past just a minute earlier now whooshing the opposite way. Eventually, we stopped naturally in the place between hills.  Dad had been steering us close to the shoulder the whole time – in reverse — with a steady set of hands.

The way Dad handled the Golden Goose that day stuck with me.  Like Dad, now I’m the one with the steady hand and mind (well, usually), able to think fast and troubleshoot situations overseas.  I also know life is about risk, and there’s little to no risk in staying home. When things go wrong, there are the times to let go and the times when you just have to hold on and try to steer everyone straight. Even when it feels like your life is going in reverse – and my life has doubled up on itself many times – you’re always moving somewhere. Life has no braking system. None whatsoever.

It’s the giving of yourself that matters, no matter how things turn out.

Windows on the World 02.16.12

Join me in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012 from 5-8pm for the debut of my photo show & sale “Windows on the World.” This will be part of the Kenton Third Thursday Art Walk event, and held at the Kenton Family Wellness Center, a place for art, plants, yoga, acupuncture and massage. Wine, non-alcoholic drinks & appetizers will be served. Children large & small welcome!

Kenton Family Wellness Center

(Gallery Room)

8315 N. Denver Ave.

Portland, OR 97217

I showcase my travel photography nestled in old windowpanes (repainted & spruced up). Each photo-art piece contains 4-8 high-quality photographs in a unique windowpane frame. Prices range from $80-$400. For this show, I’m donating 20% of my sales to Mercy Corps International, a Portland-based global charity that helps the poor rebuild after disasters (created by both nature & war) and works to foster sustainable, small-scale enterprise in developing countries.

Looking forward to seeing you on 2/16.  (If you can’t make the event, my work will be up and for sale at this venue through 3/10, and as always, available through direct-ordering.)   –Colleen

Through women & children, images of an Indian slum

In November 2008, I led a group of Habitat for Humanity volunteers to Bangalore, India. In two weeks, we built five houses in a slum on the far-outskirts of the city. Here are some images of women and children who lived there, who I had the wonderful opportunity to laugh, play, and work with for two weeks. My experience, and the real images I captured, completely transformed the imagined images I’d had of what an Indian slum would be.  Where one lives, I learned, does not entirely define the individuals that live there. In the seemingly most forlorn of places, love, faith and hope remain.   –Colleen

 

Dancing for an Ohlone future

  This is the third and final installment of my story on the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay ….    

Formal U.S. government recognition for the Muwekma is just one facet of the Ohlone revival; other Ohlone individuals and tribal groups are actively working to understand their tribal identity, but haven’t yet or don’t want to seek a formal recognition process.  Whether their bands eventually get federal recognition or not, individual Ohlone are grateful to see the surge in cultural revival activities –  especially for the sake of younger generations.

Linda Rubalcava is one.  Both she and her 12-year-old son, Nacho Serriteno, sing and dance in Amah-Ka-Tura (People of the Land), a dance group led by Patrick Orozco, the Rumsen-Mutsun tribal chairman.  Rubalcava first brought Nacho to dance in the group with her when he was just four years old.  Having performed most of his young life, Nacho now has his favorite Ohlone songs and dances, is hearing many of the old stories from Patrick Orozco (who is a relative) and has a strong sense of his Ohlone background.  Rubalcava says she encourages Nacho in order to honor the legacy left by Frank Marquez, the activist great-grandfather her son never knew.

“All the dances tell a story,” explains Nacho.  “First we sing the deer song. It shows how much respect we have for the deer.”

Though he admits he doesn’t know all the specifics of the song-stories yet (just that there’s lots of animals in them) he does know that wearing his Indian regalia and dancing at various events in the Bay Area is part of a larger Ohlone cultural revival.

“It’s exciting to go out and sing in front of all the people, so they can know we’re still here,” he says. “We’re not dead.  We might not be full-blooded, but we’re still here.”

Thanks to their elders, many young people like Nacho Serriteno are growing up with stronger ties to their Ohlone roots than their parents.  As an older Ohlone, Ruth Orta, who has lived in Newark most of her 68 years, wants to pass along what she can remember about the fruit trees and the struggles of her elders to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  She maintains that her Indian-ness wasn’t lost, even as her native religion, language, and land disappeared as “progress” surged through the Bay Area.  Oral history is still a part of Orta’s life.  She credits her grandmother and especially her mother, Trina Ruano, for passing down the old stories of what mission life was like for Indians at the turn of the century. Today Orta makes a point to tell those same stories to her seven children, 17 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Through this storytelling, she wants to instill in them a strong cultural identity.

“My mother was an Indian before all the others came out of the woodwork,” she says. “She always told us – ‘never be ashamed of who you are. You are an Indian.’”

By “woodwork,” Orta means people who claim to be Indian without firm proof of their family lineage. Orta’s mother, and her grandmother, too – made sure “Indian” was on all of their children’s birth certificates. Both her grandmother and her mother grew up on a Spanish mission near Pleasanton during a time when many Indian tribes were terminated by the government.  Her mother worked as a housekeeper because, according to Orta, it was “one of the only things Indians could do” at the time.  She tells her grandchildren about her proud mother, as well as what she can remember about her own grandmother.

“We want them to know who their ancestors were and where they came from,” she says. “They’re still connected to that.”

Still, Orta says much cultural knowledge was lost.  She admits she is still learning about Ohlone culture from academics like ethnographer and park naturalist Beverly Ortiz. Ortiz runs the Ohlone cultural history programs at Coyote Hills Park.  Part of that program includes the gathering of traditional foods and basket-making materials from East Bay parks (and elsewhere, with permission of private landowners).   Today at the Coyote Hills Shellmound, Ortiz is giving an informal talk about the natural and cultural history of the area.

“Even though it looks very natural, Coyote Hills is an altered landscape,” Ortiz explains to the crowd of about 25, who have gathered around her on logs and on the grass.  “At one time those Coyote Hills were an island.  Marsh was created to sift toxins from the East Bay, but it’s still a rich environment for wildlife and birds.”

Next, Ortiz tells the crowd how as many as 50 independent Indian tribes lived throughout the Bay Area in villages like this one.  She explains that the term “Ohlone” refers not to any particular tribe but to a common language system, Costanoan, spoken throughout the Bay Area, which included eight different dialects. She doesn’t go into detail about how whites mistakenly attributed the tiny Oljone tribal name to encompass all of the Bay Area tribes, and instead focuses on less political matters.

The crowd listens as she tells them that most Ohlone spoke as many as six different languages and practiced distinct arts, ceremonies, songs, and ways of preparing food.  In the past, most of the tribes traded and intermarried with one another.

“Language was not a barrier when you lived in oral societies,” Ortiz says. “From the native perspective, it’s the smaller differences that give you a cultural identity. The Ohlone were never one people, and they don’t see themselves as one people today.”

Reviving the Mutsun language is also important to Ann Marie Sayers, the caretaker of Indian Canyon, just west of Hollister.  Indian Canyon is the only land in the Bay Area continuously inhabited by Ohlone people, possibly as long ago as 10,000 years. Full of oak trees and creeks and a sacred waterfall, the canyon was once a refuge for Ohlone who found mission life restrictive.  The canyon was officially allotted to Sayers’ great-grandparents.  Sayers was born and raised in the canyon, and now lives there with two other Ohlone families.  At one time, hundreds lived in the canyon, but by the turn of the century only five or six families remained.  Though no one knows exactly how many Indians lived in the canyon during pre-contact times, archeologists are now finding out they probably lived well.

“At the entrance of Indian Canyon is the old village site,” Sayers explains. “There was a body that was unearthed recently. It was a 14-year-old boy.  The archeologist, she was just amazed at how healthy the bones were.”

She pauses.  “The canyon provided then, and it’s still providing for us now.”

Indeed, the canyon is once again a refuge for Ohlone — and other indigenous people from around the world – searching for a safe place to perform Indian ceremonies and to connect with the land.  One of the most visible examples of this is during the California Indian Bear Dance, which draws 300 Indians to the canyon each spring.

“The canyon is really a Creation story in itself, because I’ve seen so many of the Costanoan-Ohlone people reconnect with their culture up here,” she says.  “In 1850, to say you were an Indian was suicidal … so it’s exciting. It’s coming alive … honoring the ancestors.  For me, it’s a reason for living.”

Though far from a sacred ceremony like those seen at Indian Canyon, today’s event at Coyote Hills is about re-connection, too – and taking it a step further by teaching others about Ohlone culture.  The Ohlone women emphasize to the Shellmound guests that they must keep their stones, shells and hands wet at all times.  Without water, dust from the scraped abalone shell is toxic.  In the old days, the women explain, Ohlone women scraped abalone under water as they sat along riverbanks. It’s this kind of informal history lesson that makes days like these everything for me.

“The key goal of the program is to make sure there continues to be an Ohlone presence in the parklands and make sure the public is aware the Ohlone are still around,” says Ortiz.

Speaking from her home in Newark, Ruth Orta would agree that an Ohlone cultural revival is in full force.

“We’re going to keep it alive,” she says. “Hopefully the great-grandkids will get involved when they get older. If nothing, they’ll learn from us.”

She pauses, thinking of the Indian housekeeper who never let her forget who she was.

“I know my mother would be really proud of us.”

 

 

 

California’s Ohlone, rising

The continuation of my last post, “A Hidden California”:

Who the Ohlone were and how they saw themselves hundreds of years ago is still largely a mystery.   In step with the cultural revival, some academics are now taking a new look at historical research, especially the early archeology of John P. Harrington.  New partnerships are forming between university scholars, historians, and the Ohlone.  In the midst of all this activity, many Ohlone are just beginning to make sense of the linguistic, cultural – and sometimes political – differences between Ohlone bands.

Enter the Ohlone cultural celebration each October. The gathering draws close to 100 Ohlone people every year from across the Bay Area to share stories, make traditional baskets, eat traditional foods, and to sing and dance.  The rest of the year, though, Ohlone events at the park are more intimate affairs.

A VAST TERRITORY

The Shellmound at Coyote Hills Park is home to reconstructed houses and a sweat lodge that depict what the village might have looked like, but all around, modern civilization looms. West, beyond the fence, beyond the cattails sit two radio towers, Cargill’s salt ponds, the huge concrete Dumbarton Bridge  — and further west, the skyscrapers of San Francisco.  To the east – Silicon Valleu’s office parks, freeways, big-box stores. Jumbo jets fly overhead, on their way to San Francisco International just across the Bay.

At one time, there were thousands of Ohlone villages here. But most of the estimated 30,000 Ohlone people that first inhabited the region disappeared centuries ago.  The land helps tell the story: 80 percent of the wetlands that once fringed the bay are gone. So is much of the game and fish they depended on. Old village sites like the one at Coyote Hills exist all over the Bay Area – underneath the Caltrans line, deep in the hills, buried under parking garages and apartment complexes.  At one time, Ohlone territory stretched from Big Sur in the south to Napa in the north to the eastern edge of the Central Valley. San Francisco Bay, according to historical records, was one of the most densely populated places in pre-colonial America. The built landscape is something that saddens Ruth Orta, an Ohlone who has lived the East Bay most of her 68 years.

“When I was [first] here, there was nothing. It was all cherry trees and prune trees and apricot trees,” she says. “And the creeks were so full of water and fish.”

Depending on the season, Ohlone gathered acorns, hazelnuts, strawberries and blackberries, chia seeds and the seeds of the California buttercup.  They hunted deer, antelope, elk, quail and rabbits, and fished for salmon and trout, clams and shrimp. Ohlone also grew crops, including potatoes. Village life was strong, punctuated by oral literature, song and art.

ARRIVAL OF THE MISSIONS

But the arrival of the Spanish and the Franciscan missions they set up quickly disrupted Ohlone culture, introducing a foreign religion, social structure and political climate that by the year 1800 reached all but the most remote Ohlone villages.  Some Ohlone joined the missions; others did not. But whether they set foot inside the missions or not, by 1850 diseases introduced by the newcomers (measles, smallpox, diphtheria, and cholera, among others) killed as many as 28,000 Indians.  Some escaped into what is now known as the Central Valley.  For those few thousand Ohlone who survived the epidemics, Spanish culture stripped them of their own.

After the Mexican conquest of 1834, the Mexicans secularized the missions.  Large tracts of land once “owned” by the missions, most containing Indian communities, became Mexican ranchos. Though Indians were promised half the rancho lands, they never received any title to them.  Still, Indians stayed to work on the ranchos.  California’s gold rush was next, bringing thousands more European and Hispanic settlers to California.  The Ohlone slipped into a European way of life. They spoke their Costanoan languages less and less.  Many stopped practicing their ceremonies.  Evidence of Ohlone people existing at all was scarce.

In 1927 a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent deemed most California Indians  “extinct “ and illegally terminated 135 bands.  Most of the Ohlone bands fell under that act. A dark period followed for many Ohlone, who grew up not knowing their native language or culture – or worse, knowing it but believing that being Indian was simply bad. As development of the Bay Area surged after World War II, Ohlone cemeteries and village sites were bulldozed to make room for buildings and roads.

But something began to change in the 1960s.  Ohlone people began demand their rights back. The late Rupert Costo, a Cahuilla Indian from southern California, often lobbied on behalf of the Ohlone for access to ancestral village sites.  A hydrologist and surveyor by profession, Rupert founded the American Indian Historical Society and the Indian Historian Press in 1970.  With his wife, Jeannette Henry Costo, he wrote books, including “The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide,” which the press published in 1987.  It was with the help of Costo’s society and the Galvan family of Mission San Jose that the Ohlone stopped the destruction of the mission’s Indian cemetery. The tribe eventually got title to it.  In 1975, another Ohlone cemetery was uncovered during the construction of a warehouse in Watsonville.  As the bulldozing was set to begin, a group of Ohlone organized an armed (but ultimately peaceful) protest that successfully stopped construction.

Frank Marquez was among the Ohlone people fighting to protect his buried ancestors at Watsonville.  Though Marquez died in 1980, his granddaughter, Linda Rubalcava, credits his activism for sustaining her pride in her Indian heritage.  Rubalcava remembers tagging along with him in the late 1970s while he’d visit construction sites all over the Bay Area that had unearthed Ohlone burial grounds. His goal: to make sure the ancestors were treated properly.

“Wherever he went, I wanted to be,” she says. “He used to spend the night out there.”

AFTER A FIGHT, PROTECTIONS

New federal laws protecting burial sites, which required that a “most likely descendant,” like Marquez, be present during any excavation, helped the Ohlone regain some power as more and more construction projects hit Ohlone cemeteries in the East and South Bay.  In the 1980s and 1990s, tribes organized themselves and began to apply for federal recognition. Several Ohlone bands – the Muwekma, the Mutsun, the Esslen, Rumsen-Mutsun, the Amah, the Carmel Mission Band, the Rumsen Mission Carmel Costanoan and the Indian Canyon Ohlone – have petitioned for federal recognition.

Muwekma tribal administrators say they haven’t made any firm decisions on post-recognition projects, but recognition usually means special funding from the government, the ability to develop economic enterprises (including a casino), social services, tribal environmental restoration projects, and the ability for the tribe to buy or petition for reservation lands.

The 526-member Muwekma tribe first approached the U.S. government for recognition in 1989.  Unlike most tribes, who wait up to 20 years to get recognized, the Muwekma did not want to wait for the Department of the Interior. Their impatience coincided with the discovery of a Bureau of Indian Affairs report that showed the tribe was never legally terminated in the first place. After more than 10 years of waiting for recognition, the tribe discovered it hadn’t needed to apply at all. But they’d started the process, and it was too late to turn back. More importantly, though, the report proved — in writing and for the first time — that the U.S. government had known the tribe had “previous unambiguous recognition” but chose to ignore it. So the Muwekma, based on this new finding, filed a lawsuit. Upon winning in 2000, their application went to the top of the pile.

Archeologist Alan Leventhal has helped the Muwekma through the intricacies of the recognition process.  Originally from New York, Leventhal first came to San Jose (fresh off projects in Nevada and northern California) in 1979. As a professor at San Jose State, he took interest in Muwekma history.  More than 25 years later, Leventhal is still at the university, and still digging through dusty archival documents that prove Muwekma ancestry for people who never knew they had it.  He helped find the report that pushed up the tribe’s recognition from a decade away to just a year.  Leventhal says the motivation for his work follows his philosophy that archeological research should benefit the people researched.

“They define what is meaningful,” he tells me.  Still, it’s difficult for Leventhal not to get caught up in the groundbreaking nature of the Muwekma’s fight to get recognized.

“This has never been tested,” he says. “If the Muwekma [case] gets through, they set a precedent not only for other California tribes but tribes all over the country.”

UNTIL RECOGNITION, CULTURAL REVIVAL

But recognition for the Muwekma is just one facet of the Ohlone revival; other Ohlone individuals and tribal groups are actively working to understand their tribal identity, but haven’t yet or don’t want to seek a formal recognition process.  Whether their bands eventually get federal recognition or not, individual Ohlone are grateful to see the surge in cultural revival activities –  especially for the sake of younger generations.

Linda Rubalcava is one.  Both she and her son, Nacho Serriteno, sing and dance in Amah-Ka-Tura (People of the Land), a dance group led by Patrick Orozco, the Rumsen-Mutsun tribal chairman.  Rubalcava first brought Nacho to dance in the group with her when he was just four years old.  Having performed most of his young life, Nacho now has his favorite Ohlone songs and dances, is hearing many of the old stories from Patrick Orozco (who is a relative) and has a strong sense of his Ohlone background.  Rubalcava says she encourages Nacho in order to honor the legacy left by Frank Marquez, the activist great-grandfather her son never knew.

“All the dances tell a story,” explains Nacho.  “First we sing the deer song. It shows how much respect we have for the deer.”

Though he admits he doesn’t know all the specifics of the song-stories yet (just that there’s lots of animals in them) he does know that wearing his Indian regalia and dancing at various events in the Bay Area is part of a larger Ohlone cultural revival.

“It’s exciting to go out and sing in front of all the people, so they can know we’re still here,” he says. “We’re not dead.  We might not be full-blooded, but we’re still here.”

Thanks to their elders, many young people like Nacho Serriteno are growing up with stronger ties to their Ohlone roots than their parents.

A Hidden California

Step into another world with me, as I explore a hidden corner of the San Francisco Bay, where a long-forgotten culture is being revived ….

In a clearing surrounded by cattails, abalone scrapes on sandstone.  Four Native American women, all related and members of the Ohlone, joke with one another as they make pendants the old way, with just two ingredients: water and stone.

The Ohlone are the Indians of the San Francisco Bay, and even though only one of the 50 bands have a reservation, they’re reclaiming their culture, fighting for recognition, and trying to teach others that there was – and still is – a vital Indian culture here.

Save for a small reservation at Indian Canyon near Hollister, Ohlone have no land base here in the East Bay. Today’s estimates put the Ohlone population at about 2,000, though most are not full-blooded Indian. About 1,600 are officially enrolled in various Ohlone bands.

The term Ohlone comes from the name of a small tribe, the Oljon, who lived in present-day San Mateo County.  An Oljon cemetery was known to white settlers, but otherwise it’s uncertain how the name came to encompass all the Bay Area tribes.

I’m here on assignment for a magazine, and I feel really out of place tromping through the wet, reedy trails in a wetland on the edge of San Francisco Bay in the wrong kind of shoes. There’s water underneath us, and I don’t feel so sure-footed.  I don’t have Native American blood in me. I don’t even live in California.  But I want to learn something about how a culture revives itself after centuries of being run over by Caucasian “progress.” I hope they will see my questions as sincere.

The Ohlone are here to celebrate their culture at their 2,200-year-old village site known as the Shell Mound. It sits just a half-mile from Fremont’s Coyote Hills, right inside Coyote Hills Park. The place is tucked behind a gate that’s locked on most days to keep out looters.  Today, though, the gate is swung wide open, and people shuffle through the grass that has filled in a T-shaped trench where, 50 years ago, archeologists pulled out human bones, tools, and thousands of ancient abalone and clamshells discarded by ancient Indians.

The Shellmound at Coyote Hills Park is home to reconstructed houses and a sweat lodge that depict what the village might have looked like, but all around, modern civilization looms. West, beyond the fence, beyond the cattails sit two radio towers, Cargill’s salt ponds, the huge concrete Dumbarton Bridge  — and further west, the skyscrapers of San Francisco.  To the east – Silicon Valley’s office parks, freeways, big-box stores. Jumbo jets roar overhead, on their descent into San Francisco International just across the Bay.

At one time, there were thousands of Ohlone villages here. But most of the estimated 30,000 Ohlone people that first inhabited the region disappeared centuries ago.  The land helps tell the story: 80 percent of the wetlands that once fringed the bay are gone. So is much of the game and fish they depended on. Old village sites like the one at Coyote Hills exist all over the Bay Area – underneath the Caltrans line, deep in the hills, buried under parking garages and apartment complexes.  At one time, Ohlone territory stretched from Big Sur in the south to Napa in the north to the eastern edge of the Central Valley. San Francisco Bay, according to historical records, was one of the most densely populated places in pre-colonial America.

Today is all about celebrating the past. Or so it seems.  A white woman is a yellow baseball cap and black sunglasses approaches one of the tables to get help stringing her abalone necklace.  She asks Lisa Carrier, one of the Ohlone women making a pendant, why Indians gave clam shells rounded edges.  Carrier explains that her ancestors rounded them because they used them as currency.  They used abalone, on the other hand, for religious ceremonies. I ask her to explain why.

“Abalone is considered to be good medicine,” Carrier tells me.  “It has a more spiritual aspect.”

With her own piece of “good medicine” in hand, the woman’s next question is more blunt:

“So, why don’t you have a casino?”

Enter the modern world.  The answer to that question is a complicated one, with national implications. Locally, it reveals San Francisco’s often tenuous relationship with its native population. A Cal-Train once ran through an Ohlone cemetery, and construction unearthed bones.

Lisa Carrier’s answer doesn’t get into all of that. She simply tells the woman that, without reservation lands to build on in the East Bay, there is no possibility of a casino. Carrier, who is a member of the Mutsun band, scrapes diligently at the edges of her abalone shell as she calmly answers the public’s questions.  She’s selling some of the necklaces she’s made already to help support the Mutsun Language Foundation, a nonprofit group she founded with her cousin, Quirina Luna-Costillas.  The foundation now sponsors language classes every six weeks, but at the beginning, just a few of her family members made up the first language class.  But finding attendees proved easy compared to the intricacies of reviving a language whose last fluent speaker died in 1930, and for which only a few partial speakers lived.

“We had no recordings,” she remembers. “So we developed our own phonetic system for our language.”

Carrier has big dreams for her foundation.  She’d like to develop age-specific classes, a teacher-training course, and put lessons on the Internet so that Mutsun living in far-flung places won’t have to travel to attend class.  Her ultimate goal is to build a cultural center where all Ohlone people – not just Mutsun — can come and research their culture and language.

Lisa Carrier is among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of modern Ohlone who didn’t know they had Indian heritage until recently.  Carrier says she grew up thinking she was full-blooded Mexican. Many of the “Mexican” recipes she ate were actually Native American, she later learned. Carrier also remembers having difficulty learning Spanish as a child.  In her early thirties, once she discovered she had Ohlone heritage and began researching and learning the language, she picked up Mutsun words easily.

“My grandma says, ‘It’s your native tongue. It’s what you’re supposed to speak.’”

 TO BE CONTINUED (NEXT WEEK) ….