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fifty years later

In the mid-1960s, as the New Left expanded and rose to its antiwar apogee and countercultural movements had begun to stir, a nucleus of poets, politicos, artists and philosophers converged in the culture cradles of the Haight-Ashbury and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whatever they called themselves–Provos, Motherfuckers, Diggers–a leaderless, anarchistic movement found expression on the streets and storefronts of New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam.

Without taking discernible shape, the Digger nucleus radiated creative energy. It published poetry and stories, drafted explorations and manifestos and printed artwork in alternative organs like the San Francisco Oracle and the Berkeley Barb.

Digger working groups like the Communications Company dis-organized spontaneous events on the street and de-materialized Human Be-Ins, the Summer of Love, concerts, screenings, and readings at the Straight Theater and the Fillmore.

Diggers became the progenitors of Free — Free Food in the Parks, Free Stores, Free Clinics, Free City Puppets, 1% Free, an initiative to make one percent of San Francisco’s goods and services free of charge.

Diggers were not hippies. They were not flower children. They eschewed easy definition and media-jacket constraints, but the Diggers were not random. Many had come to awareness in the civil rights and antiwar movements, many just appeared, while still others sprang from a highly evolved avant-garde-turned-radical theater culture with roots in the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Moving from the stage and proscenium, Diggers took theater to the streets and translated it into real life, where every event, every moment had significance. They reorganized reality by capsizing frames of reference. All the Digger world was a stage, and they the players. The audience was invited to take what they could — or join them.

As tour buses invaded the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side, hard drugs hit the streets, the cops raided the Haight and Stonewall, and free concerts were co-opted by the Woodstock syndrome, the Diggers began to feel the urgency to change more than their frame of reference. They decided to put the Digger thing to rest and morph.

After a grand finale street event, the Death of the Digger, the loose confederacy now known as the Free Family generated mass meetings in which they proposed to leave the city and take to the road. Many built fantastical homes on the backs of trucks and buses and began their exodus.

During this circumnavigation of the forty-eight states, Digger truck caravans drifted from commune to commune, sharing news and developing a new vocabulary that spoke to the remarkable advances being made on many fronts — alternative energy sources and social experiments, holistic medicine and organic cultivation.

By the mid-1970s, the Digger diaspora had begun to generate comprehensive worldviews rich with theory and practice. Bioregionalism posited an ancient relationship between man, culture and a homeland watershed, an interspecies relationship uniquely characteristic of each watershed. During the next two decades, ten thousand watershed organizations sprang up across the continent and around the world, inspired by the work of Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Freeman House and other writers and practitioners.

Diggers have always been a group characterized by powerful writing: poetry, plays, manifestos, novels, nonfiction and essays. Many writers who grew out of the Beat Generation journeyed out of the 1950s into the countercultural years of the ‘60s and ‘70s and beyond. Poets Gary Snyder and Diane DiPrima and Ronnie Davis, theater visionary and bioregional practitioner, continue to make strong creative statements that reflected the evolution of Digger.

This year, several Diggers will be releasing new books and plays. This series conducts interviews with Charles Degelman, Destiny Kinal, and Peter Coyote, each of whom will see books released within the coming year that continue a commentary that began with earlier works set in the New Left, the Digger-born Free Family, and a communal and bioregional legacy that dates back centuries. Anthropologist John Salter, who co-authored Mavis McCovey’s Medicine Trails, will reflect on his years recording the Yurok medicine woman’s memoir.

David Simpson, co-founder of the Mattole Restoration Council and one of the earliest successful salmon restoration projects in the world, writes biting social satire theater pieces through his collaboration with choreographer Jane Lapiner. Human Nature’s productions, which have focused in recent years on climate change, arise from material gleaned from the global Climate Conferences attended by Simpson and Lapiner over decades. Simpson’s piece, which will appear here, opens the door for Simpson to talk about the subject without the constraints of objective reportage.

Kent Minault has been performing his one-man show Digger-ee-doo to rapt audiences in Southern California…for free.

Is a new spirit being born that will refresh the tenets of the Free Family as they come together, to age together? Could it be contagious?

On Thursday September 8 and my birthday Friday September 9th, the Penn-York Valley where Barry and I live, suffered from the worst flood in history.

Take a look at the video below (less than 3 minutes.)  You will see why everything has changed, especially in the momentum of our/Reinhabitory Institute’s goals here.  Acceleration!

Penn-York Valley, Susquehanna Flood

A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810 by Randall Milliken

Review by Laura G

Dotted over Northern California are streets, schools, creeks, towns and even shopping centers with names like “Miwok”, “Ohlone”, “Suisun”, “Costanoa”. How many non-native people stop to think about the peoples behind these words? How many have felt, as I have, that the narrative one is taught in California public schools is sorely lacking in substance?  I recently checked A Time of Little Choice out of the Oakland Library. I kept the book until it was overdue and I had re-read many sections. What I found in its pages not only educated me on the subject, and it filled me not only with knowledge, but with rage.

Randall Milliken’s book reminds us that the land that makes up the present day San Francisco Bay Area was once part of a “mosaic of tiny tribal territories” which existed and flourished. Flourished, that is, up to 1769, the time of initial contact with the Spanish.

Milliken has  mined, compiled, compared  and analyzed Spanish Mission and Military records and individuals’ diaries to chart 40 years of “the disintegration of tribal culture”  – from 1769-1810 in what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. There are a couple maps that show the location of over 50  tribes (pp 228, 229). There is also a map showing 8 language groups of native peoples in the Bay Area.

By 1810 these same “tribal territories” were empty of  these tribes. Milliken’s book tells what happened.

When I told some acquaintances about the book, they asked if it was “balanced.” I told them, that I thought the book was a scholarly project to uncover the decimation of tribal culture which was meticulous, but the truth is, there is no “balance” to the history. Whether fully intended or not, the result was near-genocide.

1769-1776

The book quotes passages where the Portola, Fages and other expeditions describe first contact with the indigenous people of the area. The first contacts were experimental. Milliken observed that these people treated the “visitors” and their powerful and new technologies with interest, and sometimes fear, and that gifts were exchanged: beads and food from the Spanish, and baskets and accessories decorated with shells from the  Bay peoples. The Spanish saw that kindness toward the children was noted and appreciated by their native parents, and did their best to foster this. Without editorializing Milliken gives us a glimpse of what the native people were encountering and, while they were trying to learn about these new people and were using the experiences to size up the strangers, nothing had prepared them for what would follow. They had no inkling.

The Missions

In 1776 the Spanish built the first mission in the area and the Presidio at the strategic site of the opening of the Bay. They brought their animals and fenced off land for crops. They “punished” people who “stole” their possessions by whipping and flogging, and finally by demonstrating their power and shooting them.

Spain, competing with the Russians was compelled to do what it could to insure it controlled the California coast.

There is an interesting part where Milliken describes the superstitious worldview of the Spanish: their belief that the world was a setting for the struggle between God and the Devil in which all non-Christian customs and beliefs were actually the work of the Devil and must be wiped out. On the native side, Milliken speculates based on the Spanish observation that there was a practice of respect and of incorporating the new people and their technology into their own belief system.

The ideological framework of the Spanish missionaries was backed up and enforced by the army. The priests wooed the peoples, and at first children and teenagers went to the Mission to be baptized. Once baptized the priests felt they were responsible to guard the “Christian Indians” and had a  (god given) right to keep people from returning to their “savage” ways. Sometimes they would allow children to continue living with their parents, but the older people who were baptized would be forcibly brought back by soldiers when they left the Missions to go back to their villages.

A Time of Resistance

A Time of Little Choice also unearths the fact that as time went on, in this period there was repeated resistance by the peoples of the area to the Missions, and that this resistance was always met with brutal and overwhelming force. The Spanish implemented a divide and conquer method to set the “Christian Indians” against the “heathens”. The patterns of Indian villages changed as some moved closer to the missions for protection, or convenience, and others were entirely absorbed. Milliken says that this was not “forced” but that is too generous an interpretation, as the lands were overrun, and the native food sources compromised, there was an occupying force of priests who used whips and soldiers who used guns, a much higher technology than the weapons developed by the tribes peoples. There was also the important ideological takeover of the culture by the Spanish, who preached Christianity, damnation, etc.

Milliken documents increased resistance over years as the new generations now knew what the Missions and mission life brought about. There was especially prolonged and fierce resistance from the Saclans. But the different tribes did not unite to resist and thus stood no chance of defeating the Spanish. Milliken notes that the loose and informal structure of these peoples’ societies did not lend itself to unity. And before the Spanish came the different tribal groups did not see themselves as “Indians” but as separate peoples who had some relationship to each other through trade, marriage, etc.

The book also gives a chilling and detailed account of the mass death that escalated over the Mission period.  Epidemic outbreaks of diseases that the Europeans were immune to, outbreaks of syphilis, and the food and water diseases brought by the Europeans and their animals and concentrated in the overcrowded conditions in the Missions. One particularly horrible detail that sticks in the mind is that when Indians were dying of these diseases in the Missions, some of them ran miles away to native villages in outlying areas to try to escape the epidemic, thus spreading it to those villages and killing many more.

A Time of Little Choice is an important contribution that deserves inclusion in any course on California history. Not only an in depth look at the “disintegration of … culture” this book is a detailed and chilling record which vividly exposes the Mission Period as a criminal one, guilty not only of crimes against indigenous people, and but against humanity itself.

Sic transit gloria:  And so passes one of the most intriguing, profoundly influential men I have met in my life.

I first met Peter Berg in the spring of 1967 at the Digger’s Free Store in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco, where radical politics met the counterculture.

My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the Susquehanna and the Chemung Rivers. this community refers to itself as “The Valley,” and has a culture everyone who lives here understands. Judith was visiting here for a handful of days to let me take her on a tour to help her understand this community where I have been organizing for the past 26 years. Our organization is in the earliest stages of starting Project GROW! to involve young people from both sides of the border to learn how to grow and process food, an art form that was widely practiced in East Sayre and throughout the Valley until just a decade ago.

We visited the Ukrainian Community Center in East Sayre on the last day of August. Judith agreed with me: the center is an ideal place to organize from. Our infant Project GROW!- for disaffected and unemployed young people not going to college–could have its first garden right in the backyard of the vacant lot that comes with the building. We’d call it The Grange Hall and share offices there with other 501c3’s working in the community like Carantouan Greenway, the river organization I founded 16 years ago.
We’d invite collaborators when we had a better grip on how to get control of the building and purchase it with the State’s help. “These deals can take years to put together,” I had told Dan Polinski, representing the Ukrainian church community in the sale of the building. “We’ll all have to be patient.”

Dance floor and stage on the first floor, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, the center had allowed us, Carantouan Greenway, to host several successful spaghetti suppers there. We’d featured the gardens of East Sayre on our annual Garden Tours where men of Italian and Ukrainian descent raised vegetables in the rich soil at the foot of the levees, in their backyards, canning for big extended families.

I’d had my eye on the community center for a decade. When it came on the market recently, I began laying plans to acquire it for the community. The bricks-and-mortar project was admittedly down the scale of priorities behind, 1) getting at least one garden on the ground by summer 2012 and securing funding to put kids to work in it during the growing and harvest season, with paid jobs. Training a new generation of leaders was slated for the winter of 2011-2012, to take over from aging shrinking boards and pick up fresh ideas for the Valley and run with them. The dozens of people I had interviewed mentioning this piece of our plans will smile reading this. I was candid with them; that community center was a perfect place, in the old ethnic neighborhood of East Sayre with its gardening tradition, right next to the river. We’d reinaugurate the summer festivals that spilled out onto the side lawn: Christmas tree lights, tables, beer garden, music.

Judith and I toured the center with Dan Polinkski’s back up the last day of August. We stopped down to meet with Tim Phinney then, Sayre’s genius at packaging public private deals, who opening his calendar on his desk at the Enterprise Center suggested we see it Thursday morning 9/8, after Labor Day weekend.

A long Labor Day weekend passed. In the Valley, it started to rain and was still raining on Monday. Reports of flooded bridges and section of I-86 closing started to circulate. [Read more…] about Susquehanna flood, community organizing: Underwater in East Sayre