The Invisible People

“Listen: A man with no family has no history and no eyes to see the future. He goes about blind.”

--Tom Smith, last known Coast Miwok medicine man and dreamer, 1898

*

On a coolish morning in the late spring of 1992, Rita Carrillo sat at her kitchen table and stared at the local morning paper. “Hey, Dule!” she called out to her sister Dula. “Come and look at this!”

There in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat was an article about a Pomo Indian named Jeff Wilson who was applying for reservation land at Marconi Cove. Marconi Cove contained not only some of the most stunningly scenic and valuable land on the entire Marin County coastline--maybe in California--but it was also smack in the middle of Coast Miwok Indian territory.

That didn’t sit right with Rita. She and Dula and six other brothers and sisters are Coast Miwok, grandchildren of Maria Copa, a Miwok matriarch studied by anthropologists from UC Berkeley in the ‘30s.

“Hey, Dule!”

Dula wandered into the kitchen in response to her sister’s call. Rita pointed to the article.

“He can’t just go and do that, can he?” Rita said with a toss of her Rita Hayworth hair. “Are we going to let him do that?”

Dula stared at the paper, then shrugged her shoulders. “What can you do?”

The truth was, whenever Rita or Dula were asked to fill out a questionnaire, under ethnicity they always wrote “Pomo.” There was no point in writing “Miwok,” especially on a government questionnaire. Although there had been Miwok Indians living for 30 centuries in the territory stretching from Alcatraz Island to the northern edge of Sonoma County, as far as the U.S. government was concerned, the Miwok didn’t exist. So to write “Miwok,” in the government’s eyes, was like saying you were a Martian or something. No. It was worse. It was like saying you were nothing.

Rita gazed once more at the newspaper, then set it down. “Yeah,” she said. “What can you do?”

Two days later, Rita received a telephone call from another Miwok, Greg Sarris, who had also read the article. “I think we should get all the Miwok families we know together for a meeting,” he said. “If anybody has that land, it should be us.”

For years the Miwok had made do with no land and no Bureau of Indian Affairs benefits. Now some upstart tribe said it was going to take what rightfully belonged to the Miwok. “Right is right,” Rita said finally. She agreed to do the calling.

On June 13, 1992, the first meeting of the Federated Coast Miwok assembled inside the main room of the Sonoma County American Indian Senior Citizens’ Center. Four of the Carrillo sisters filed in together and placed themselves in the middle of the room. Grant Smith, an 80-ish Miwok elder, resplendent in an electric turquoise Windbreaker and abalone shell bolo tie, sat near the front, the better to hear what was about to happen. Violet Chappell, daughter of the renowned Kashaya Pomo medicine woman, Essie Parrish, sat at the back with her cousin Anita Silva, their expressions fierce and watchful as twin hawks’. By the time the front doors were closed and the meeting was called to order, nearly 200 people had filled the center, their mood contentious and anticipatory. Before the meeting could proceed, the Miwok needed a tribal chairman.

Two people were nominated. The first was Young Smith, a 60-ish retired postal worker with a quiet demeanor. The second was Greg Sarris, the 40-year-old Miwok who had earlier called Rita. At first glance, Sarris was a less obvious choice than Smith. With a pumped-up body by Gold’s Gym poured into a pair of perfectly distressed Levi 501s and black alligator Tony Lama cowboy boots, he seemed more Hollywood than tribal. His razor-cheekboned face, media-genic blue eyes and thatch of dark hair, drooping Huck Finn-casual over his forehead, gave Sarris the look of a daytime soap star. The impression wasn’t far off. An actor/model turned tenured professor of English literature at UCLA, with one book of academic essays under his belt, Sarris was often courted by Hollywood types who hoped he might be writing the next “Dances With Wolves.”

In a show of hands, Sarris got all but three votes. Even Young Smith voted for Sarris.

Finally, the new leader got up to speak. He glanced to the back of the room at his “aunties,” the hawks. Violet Chappell gave him a nearly imperceptible nod. The soap star persona receded and Sarris morphed into a firebrand war chief.

“What we are doing here is political,” said Sarris after a breath. “But its effect will be much, much greater. We have always been Indians. But we have been separated in some ways for a long time. If we join together, we can reclaim histories. We can reclaim our souls.”

Then, as if by predetermined signal, the front door of the center opened. Heads swiveled as Jeff Wilson, the executive chief of the Makahmo Pomo of Cloverdale, strode to the front of the room. Wilson is tall, curly haired and charming, with a glittery smile that he uses to punctuate his speech.

“I’ve come to offer the Miwok people an historic opportunity,” he said, unfolding the smile along with a map detailing what he had determined were Miwok and Pomo trading territories.

Wilson’s “historic opportunity” was the plan previously outlined in the newspaper: Wilson intended to apply to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for land at Marconi Cove, where he proposed to establish a reservation for his newly federally recognized tribe, the Cloverdale Pomo. According to Wilson, the reservation would include tribal housing and perhaps a cultural center. It would also include a hotel, a casino and a “tribal golf course,” all to be funded by a Japanese developer. Local zoning normally would prohibit the building of a major resort complex in pristine Marconi Cove. An Indian tribal claim, however, would allow for a neat end run around Marin County’s strict agricultural and environmental ordinances--an advantage not lost on the Japanese developer.

There was, however, one impediment to Wilson’s “historic” plan: the Miwok. Wilson knew that the land he was claiming as his potential Pomo reservation had traditionally belonged to the Miwok, and he had come to the meeting in hopes of heading off counterclaims by soliciting their support.

“Remember. We are all one. We are all Indians,” Wilson said as he talked about the large profits to be made in the name of Indian unity.

Sarris stared at Wilson. “Why did you do this without consulting us?” he asked. “This is not the Indian way.”

“It’s us against the white man,” replied Wilson. “We can’t fight among ourselves. Anyway,” Wilson said, his smile abruptly snapping shut, “you need me. My tribe is federally acknowledged. And yours is not. So the truth is you need me!”

After Wilson stalked out, there was much discussion in the room. Sarris waited for quiet.

“He wants to own us,” Sarris said when the crowd had settled down. ‘But if we get federally recognized, we will own our own identity. We will have the power to negotiate with the rest of the world. We will be able to say who we are. We will need nobody.”

*

The history of contact between Europeans and the more than 100 language groups of hunter/gatherers who, for at least 30 centuries earlier, had made their homes in what is now California, is a variation on the basic theme that runs throughout the history of all native peoples of the Americas--land seizure, religious and cultural subjugation and genocide. Beginning in 1769, when the Spanish Franciscans established the first mission in California, intending to convert souls and establish farming and stock-raising communities to fill the coffers in Madrid, through roughly the next 60 years, known as the Mission Period, 70% of all Indians in California were wiped out. Some were murdered. Others died of European diseases or malnutrition. By 1910 a staggering 90% of the state’s indigenous peoples had vanished.

The history of the native people who now gather under the banner of the Federated Coast Miwok has a couple of additional, unlucky twists. In 1850, when California became the newest star on the U.S. flag, the American government set about making treaties with Indian groups throughout the state. Although no Miwok ever signed a treaty, the tribe nonetheless came to be bound by Treaty P, one of 18 California documents that officially extinguished aboriginal land claims and, in return, set aside 8.5 million acres for reservations. However, the U.S. Congress never ratified Treaty P or any of the other 17 California treaties.

The California Gold Rush was then in full swing, and there was widespread popular objection to “giving” potentially useful land to the Indians. So although the federal government took the California Indians’ land, the tribes were given nothing in return. No reservations were established as promised. To cover this embarrassing behavior, the U.S. Senate promptly sealed the treaties, keeping them out of public view for the next 50 years.

Fortunes took an upturn for some California tribes in 1910 when, in response to ever-shifting political winds, Congress began appropriating funds to purchase land for homeless California Indians. But it wasn’t until 1929 that a local BIA agent named L.A. Dorrington set out by car from Sacramento for a meeting with the Coast Miwok at Tomales Bay to discuss a potential land purchase for the tribe. En route to the meeting, Dorrington’s car broke down. When the car was repaired, rather than continuing on to Tomales, Dorrington made the decision to head back to Sacramento. Without ever meeting or speaking with a single Miwok, Dorrington wrote a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs recommending strongly against the land purchase. “There is no necessity for the purchase of land for the band,” wrote Dorrington. “They are quite happy to continue in their present status....”

Twenty-five years later, the Miwok status slid even lower. In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower Administration, acting on a recommendation from the Hoover Commission, came to the conclusion that “mainstreaming” Indians into the general population was the best way to solve the so-called Indian problem. In 1958, H.R. 2824 was signed into law, officially “terminating” 41 California tribes, the Miwok among them. The Miwok were officially wiped off the federal rolls and denied public assistance. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, the Miwok no longer existed.

Without a tribal designation or a land base to bind them, the Miwok drifted as ghost Indians for decades. The ceremonies and oral histories that gave the tribe a sense of pride and place were forgotten.

*

It was ironic that the coast Miwok had chosen Sarris to lead them in their struggle for identity. Until recently, his own identity had been a dark tunnel into which he was unable to shine any light. Sarris’ personal story begins in the affluent, all-white enclave of Laguna Beach, circa 1950, where a 15-year-old debutante named Bunny Hartman told a whispering gaggle of her girlfriends (one of whom was a young actress named Elizabeth Taylor) that she had fallen in love with an amazing boy named Emilio. It was a dangerous love, she said, one that her parents would never understand. Bunny’s father, Howard Hartman, was a wealthy May Co. department store scion. Bunny’s mother, Bernadette, was a starlet turned socialite who had once been engaged to actor Randolph Scott.

Bunny was known to her friends as a sensitive, dreamy girl who loved horses and longed for a more vivid and adventuresome life. She found it in Emilio. ‘At 15,” Elizabeth Taylor would tell a mutual friend years later, “Bunny had the passion of a 30-year-old for that man. We were all in awe.”

Emilio Hilario was indeed the stuff of a sheltered girl’s fantasies. The half-American Indian, half-Filipino star of the Laguna Beach High School football team, Emilio was wild, exotic and charismatic. “When Emilio would walk into a room, everyone would turn and look,” remembers Bunny’s then-best friend. “He was so electric.”

A few years later, Emilio went on to play football at USC. He became one of the first Indian pro boxers--once even knocking down Floyd Patterson in a sparring match. Before he died he used to brag that he’d slept with 7,000 women.

However, as a half-Indian living in the white-bread Laguna Beach of the ‘50s, Emilio had a view of his destiny that was more tragic than romantic. At 14 he sat at the back of the ninth-grade homeroom and carved the number 13 on his arms with a pocketknife, to represent what he believed to be his unluckiness. Then, when he got home, he rubbed ink into the open cuts to tattoo the numbers permanently into his flesh.

In time, Bunny became pregnant by Emilio. Her mother did what many upper-class matrons in the early ‘50s would under such circumstances: Bernadette told no one outside of the immediate family and arranged to take a five-month “vacation” with Bunny, now 16, until the matter could be “taken care of.” Bernadette arbitrarily chose Santa Rosa for Bunny’s seclusion. It was far enough away that she felt reasonably assured that they would see no one the family knew.

On Feb. 12, 1952, Bunny had a healthy 8 1/2-pound baby boy who was quickly put up for adoption. Two days later, Valentine’s Day, Bunny was given a blood transfusion to “pep her up” in anticipation of her release. Midway through the transfusion, Bunny’s doctor noticed that Bunny was breaking out in hives--an indication of a possible allergic reaction. The doctor stopped the transfusion and frantically asked for a check of the blood types. It confirmed that Bunny had mistakenly been given the wrong blood. By the end of the day, her kidneys had started to shut down. Toxic uremia set in. She died eight days later.

Bernadette buried her only daughter on the 25th of February in a pauper’s grave at Santa Rosa’s Calvary Cemetery. It was raining heavily. No other family members were present. Bernadette then went back to Laguna Beach and told the rest of the world that Bunny had died in a fall from a horse.

Bunny’s baby was adopted by George and Mary Sarris. Seven years earlier, Mary, a sheltered Catholic girl, had fallen head over heels for George, a naval officer whom she thought of as dashing and heroic. This initial impression soon proved to be false. Two weeks after their wedding, Mary Sarris’ husband got drunk and knocked her down.

Mary hoped a baby would help her increasingly troubled marriage, but after years of trying she was unable to get pregnant. She and George decided to adopt a baby through a family doctor who knew of a young girl who wished to place her soon-to-be-born infant with a good family. When Mary brought the 4-day-old, blue-eyed, obsidian-haired baby home, she noticed that the hospital had forgotten to cut off the ID wristband, which read “Baby Hartman.” A few days later she happened across the name Hartman in the obituary section of the local paper, and she remembers wondering how the mother of her new baby had died.

Almost as soon as the adoption was final, Mary became pregnant, the first of three times. With blond-haired, fair-skinned children of his own, George Sarris began visiting his violence on Greg, the son who didn’t look like him.

Like his blood father before him, Sarris grew up feeling like an outcast. As a young child, he was often parceled off to other families in order to keep him out of the way of his adoptive father’s physical abuse. As he got older, he took to the streets, gravitating toward the working class or poorer Indian families--most of them Miwok and Pomo--who lived near lower 4th Street in South Park, the roughest of Santa Rosa’s neighborhoods. “I was an angry, mixed-up, frightened kid, always in trouble,” says Sarris. “‘When I showed up for my high school reunion, everyone was amazed. They fully expected me to be either dead or in prison.”

*

In a life already replete with coincidence, the account of Sarris’ relationship with an American Indian healer/artist named Mabel McKay is perhaps the most fantastic. One day when he was 12 years old, he followed an Indian classmate home. The friend’s mother, a middle-aged woman named Mabel, was sitting at the kitchen table with a second Indian woman named Essie Parrish. The friend disappeared and Sarris was left alone with the two women.

“They talked as if I wasn’t there,” he says. “They were saying something about a sacred mountain.”

The next day, Sarris’ Indian friends told him that Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish were Indian doctors--witch doctors, some said. Miracles were mentioned. And unbelievable stories about spells, cures and exorcisms.

Almost in spite of himself, Sarris kept coming back to see Mabel McKay. “I knew I had met somebody different,” he says. “I was in awe of her. In her presence, I felt peaceful.”

For the next 10 years, McKay became the most important figure in Sarris’ life. He sat at her table after school listening to her spin stories about the rules of the universe, about history and magic.

“The stories became mnemonic pegs for me,” Sarris says, “ways for me to understand the people and the land around me. She was my anchor in a mad, mad world. You couldn’t be around her two minutes without knowing that she was a sacred person.”

Indeed, McKay’s “sacredness” was known well beyond the Indian world. Although she made her living working six days a week peeling apples at a Santa Rosa cannery, McKay was regarded as one of the great Indian basket makers of this century, her work in permanent collections at the Smithsonian and California Indian Museum. She was also known throughout Sonoma County as one of the last two living Pomo “dreamers” and “sucking doctors”--powerful healers who would place their mouths on the victims and draw out their pain. Even Pope John Paul II had heard of McKay and asked to meet her when he came to Northern California in 1987. The other dreamer was Essie Parrish.

McKay and Parrish, while both Pomo, were born of different bands. McKay was a Cache Creek Pomo from Lake County who, in the mid-’50s, had been adopted into the Kashaya Pomo as Parrish’s spiritual sister and co-dreamer.

The Kashaya Pomo held a unique position among the Northern California Indians. With a reservation in the middle of a redwood forest, five miles inland from the tiny coastal town of Stewart’s Point, the Kashaya live in relative isolation. Like that of the Hopi in the Southwest, their seclusion helped the tribe keep its cultural/spiritual structures intact. The Kashaya were the last of the California Indians to practice the bole maru, the traditional “dream dance” religion, and thus served as spiritual touchstones for the rest of the Northern California bands.

Among both the Miwok and Pomo, the dreamer visualizes the dances used at ceremonies, dreams ways to doctor the sick, and presents prophesies and spiritual direction for the tribe. Over the years, Parrish and McKay had become de facto dreamers for any Indian in the Santa Rosa area who wished to avail themselves of traditional ways and healings. Everyone knew the story of how they had even dreamed their relationship with each other, “meeting” in dreams for 20 years before they met in the flesh.

In the beginning, McKay’s influence on Sarris showed itself in ways more practical than spiritual. He began studying instead of getting in trouble in school. Before long, he had moved to the top 10% of his class. After a quick stint at Santa Rosa Junior College to raise his grade-point average to 4.0, he enrolled at UCLA. Still, he would come back to McKay. She frequently brought him to the Kashaya reservation, where he met his ‘aunties” Violet and Anita, Parrish’s daughter and niece. To the Kashaya who knew him, it seemed that McKay had in effect chosen Sarris for some fate, the nature of which only she was aware.

Sarris at first studied business. But McKay’s stories kept running in his head, along with the other stories he’d heard from the Miwok and Pomo families he’d grown up with. Gradually Sarris began writing the stories down. Before long, he changed his major to English literature. “Mabel became my barometer for everything I met in the world,” Sarris says. “I would measure everything against her, and it didn’t measure up.”

There were times when Sarris would attempt to deviate from the internal trajectory shaped by McKay’s influence. He tried out life in the Hollywood fast lane, getting work as an actor on such shows as “CHiPs” and running with a glitzy crowd. After a few years, McKay’s stories won out. Sarris dumped the acting career, applied to Stanford’s writing program and got his master’s degree. He then took time out to establish a writing program for Native Americans and other ethnic minority students at UC Santa Cruz, before returning to Stanford and completing a doctorate in modern thought and literature in 1989.

Although Sarris was gaining acceptance in academia and and Hollywood, at a deeper level he still felt adrift. More and more he attributed his malaise to the fact that much of his own story was still a mystery to him. In the fall of 1986, with McKay’s encouragement, he decided it was time to find out who he was.

Sarris already knew his biological mother’s name from conversations with his adoptive mother. After getting a cooperative nurse to show him the closed hospital records, Sarris persuaded a private detective friend to help him on the next leg of his genealogical journey, which eventually led to the doorstep of Bunny Hartman’s younger brother, Butch.

“Bunny would never say who the father of the baby was,” Butch Hartman told Sarris, “but you remind me of this big, good-looking guy on the football team. He was Hawaiian or something, and I think his name was Emilio.”

Sarris began making periodic trips to Laguna Beach to flip through high school yearbooks, looking for dark faces. One day, as he went down yet another list of names, he came to an Emilio. “I looked at the picture,” he says, “and I was looking at my own face.” By the spring of 1987, Sarris had tracked down anybody who might have known Emilio, eventually interviewing more than 20 people. “Not too many people remembered my mother, but everybody remembered my father,” he says. “He was legend.”

Finally the trail of interviews led to Emilio’s father--Sarris’ grandfather--who told him that Emilio had died in May of 1983. The grandfather, a Filipino, had married an Indian woman from Santa Rosa--the granddaughter of a man named Smith. Tom Smith.

Bingo. It seemed to Sarris that nearly half the Miwok he knew claimed Tom Smith as a relative. “From the stories I’ve heard,” Sarris says, “he fathered 20 children.” Moreover, Tom Smith was also known to have a ‘wife” up at Kashaya. “They called her Old Grandma Rosie,” he says. “She was Essie Parrish and Violet’s ancestor.”

The information was shattering to Sarris. Not only did he suddenly have a mother, a father, a family, a history--he was an Indian. And not just any Indian. He was connected by blood to both the Miwok of his youth and to the Kashaya Pomo of Parrish and McKay. The two groups who had already become his family in spirit turned out to be family for real.

Once Sarris had his personal history back, knowing that the Miwok people--his Miwok people--had been robbed of their collective identity became intolerable. But what was to be done? The Coast Miwok were a bunch of isolated individuals and families strewn around Santa osa and beyond. They knew precious little about each other in the present, much less about their mutual history.

Then the article about Wilson appeared.

*

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has a set of hoops through which a tribe aspiring for federal recognition must jump: Genealogies must be traced, historical records produced and proof of a continuous tribal culture firmly established. For the Miwok, the last two hoops were the hardest. Their history and culture are like beads of a necklace long ago broken, its pieces lost. Now it was up to Sarris and his newly elected tribal board to attempt to restring those beads.

Tribal peoples, including the Miwok, have usually relied on oral histories as a method for recording events and keeping traditions intact. But how does one retrieve a lost oral history? To begin the process, the Miwok held a series of potlucks at Rita and Ula Carrillo’s house, asking members to bring old photo albums and any family tales they could recall. At the first potluck, everyone milled nervously in the living room, hardly mixing. But when Sarris and a few others broke the ice, the stories spilled out. With each successive potluck more Miwok showed up, bringing more pictures, more stories.

The effect on those who attended the potlucks was clearly profound. “My father used to tell us the most fantastic stories about his family, things so fantastic they were like fairy tales,” said Kathleen Smith, a computer operator turned artist, as she stood drinking coffee after the third potluck. “Like he’d tell us how his family did a bear dance for him when he went away to Indian school at 15, and other crazy stories like that. Now that we’re meeting, I’ve gotten to see that the stories weren’t fairy tales. They are part of the real history of our people. All these years we’ve had a need in ourselves to acknowledge and be acknowledged. Finally, that’s happening.”

Each potluck evening, Sarris played the professor, floating from kitchen to living room and back to the kitchen, pointing out how the individual stories connected and overlapped. “We are curing ourselves,” he would say. “Our stories are like parts of a body which, when put together, make up a whole living body. Our stories are what will heal us.”

For several years, Sarris had been working on a group of short stories based on contemporary Indian experience--his own and that of his friends--all laced with the tales he had heard at McKay’s kitchen table. Now these linked stories were part of a manuscript that Sarris called ‘Grand Avenue,” named for a street in the poor area of Santa Rosa where he had hung out as a kid. The stories are full of poisoners and curses, healing rituals and miracles, struggles for meaning in a harsh and rejecting world and the curative powers that wait for discovery in even the most difficult of family relations. On Grand Avenue, Sarris writes, ‘everyone’s connected to everybody.”

*

Meanwhile, there was still the matter of Jeff Wilson. By the close of the summer of 1992, Wilson had secretly gone to the BIA and made a separate application for the disputed reservation land. He then went to the press with statements that the Miwok territorial claim was spurious and irrelevant. Sarris countered with his own statements to the press and calls to the BIA. For months the published accounts and calls produced little more than a standoff.

“Grand Avenue” was published in September 1994, a little more than a year after Mabel McKay’s death. Hyperion, Sarris’ publisher, was enthusiastic about their Indian chief-slash-writer and sent him on a multi-city book tour that included several well-attended readings in Santa Rosa. The resulting publicity had a curious effect. In the eyes of both press and government officials, the Miwok had increased in legitimacy. Even the BIA was suddenly friendlier. “Sure, I know who you are,” said an agency official when Sarris called one day, “I heard you talking about your book on National Public Radio.” A month and a half after the book was released, with the BIA approval irrevocably stalled, Wilson’s Japanese investors pulled out. The Marconi Cove project was officially dead.

The question of tribal recognition, though, was very much alive. In January 1995, the Federated Coast Miwok submitted their statement of intent to petition for acknowledgment to the BIA. Although official recognition is expected to be at least five years away, everyone is optimistic. By then, Sarris felt it was time to step down as tribal chairman. Dula Carrillo’s son Gibb Olivarez was elected his successor; her sister Rita’s son Dean was elected the tribe’s treasurer.

Now the Miwok lack only one thing. They are still technically without a dreamer. Yet, if viewed from a broader perspective, perhaps the dreamer has already come. “Grand Avenue” was recently turned into a two-part, three-hour miniseries, executive produced by Robert Redford in his first foray into TV production. (It airs for the first time on June 30 on HBO.) Sarris wrote and co-produced the film, which was shot in Santa Rosa with nearly 70 Miwok and Pomo as extras. Rita Carrillo and Anita Silva each had small speaking roles.

A few weeks ago, Sarris played a rough cut of the miniseries for 50 of his Miwok and Pomo friends and family. For the duration of the screening, there was much elbowing and whispering as people guessed which character was based on which real person. As the credits rolled, everyone cheered. But beneath the elbowing, the whispering, the guessing, something more subtle was taking place: a healing, you could call it.

Through Sarris’ written words, the stories, the memories, the history of the people known as the Federated Coast Miwok were finally becoming visible in a way far more profound than any federal stamp of approval could offer. “The dreamer’s dream is useless until it’s enacted in the world,” McKay would always tell Sarris.

So perhaps that is what he had done. He had taken his dream--and his alienation--and enacted them in the world. He had taken his own quest for identity and used it to ignite the Miwok quest. And then he sang about it all--on paper--and again on the screen. He made the stories live again. And, in doing so, the past and future of both the man and the tribe were brought home.