Heritage In-Between

Seeing Native Histories in Colonial California

Tsim D. Schneider

ABSTRACT: Conventional accounts of missionary and settler colonialism in California have overemphasized the loss experienced by Native Americans. For indigenous Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people of the San Francisco Bay Area, a story of loss contrasts sharply with their casino—a symbol of prosperity—established in 2013. Each narrative is anchored to highly visible places that commemorate either loss or suc- cess. These places, examined here using two case studies, also conceal an important “heritage in-between”—that is, the critical time period, spaces, and things that reflect native resilience and transformation—that might serve to better contextualize both narrative projects.

KEY WORDS: heritage, archaeology, photography, Coast Miwok, California

Introduction In 1958, the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo community of Graton Rancheria was terminated under the California Rancheria Termination Act. This act removed the rancheria from federal trust and ended all federal services to the people affiliated with the rancheria. Forty-two years later, in 2000, the tribe regained federal rec- ognition as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, and a few months later, tribal citizens gathered privately at Kule Loklo, a reconstructed Coast Miwok village located in Point Reyes National Seashore. The following year, on a rainy winter day huddled together in the smoky interior of the semi-subterranean Kule Loklo round- house, the newly restored tribe celebrated their history, their families, and their future as a sovereign tribe.1 In 2013, one decade after plans for a casino were originally announced,2 Graton Rancheria opened the $800 million Graton Rancheria Casino in Rohnert Park, California. “It’s a game-changer,” said former Rohnert Park Councilman Jake

1 Greg Sarris, “First Thoughts on Restoration: Notes from a Tribal Chairman,” News from Native California, Spring 2001, 12–15. 2 Michael Flaherty, “Tribe Faces New Casino Fight,” Marin Independent Journal, August 21, 2003.

THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN,Vol.41,No.1, pp. 51–63 (February 2019). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.1.51.

51 Mackenzie.3 In just one week after the casino’s grand opening, the City of Rohnert Park netted $2.6 million as part of a never-before-seen revenue-sharing agreement designed by Graton Rancheria to ensure that city police, fire departments, and public schools all benefited from the new business.4 Somewhere in between the fanfare surrounding the opening of a controversial and highly visible symbol of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo success and the story of termination and loss attributed to colonialism is a somewhat less-obvious history and heritage. Heritage can include physical places and objects, as well as the innumerable “intangible practices” people use to preserve and commemorate things.5 Moreover, as anthropologist Paul Shackel argues, heritage “is often about memory and struggle between groups to choose a usable past ...heritage is usually displayed and celebrated by those who control the official history, but there are subordinated views that also find ways to create explicit or implicit forms of heritage.”6 This article aims to bring together two interrelated projects addressing the persistence of native places and communities in colonial California and what I call a “heritage in-between.” In-between or out of place for some, this heritage is also central to the family and community histories of others; “secret histories of unexpectedness ...worth further pursuit, for they can change our sense of the past and lead us quietly, but directly to the present moment,” as Philip Deloria put it.7 To better define the space and tensions between the story of a casino versus the story of colonial dominance, as well as the explicit and implicit ways Coast Miwok assert their heritage, I introduce two case studies centered on Tomales Bay in western Marin County and between Kule Loklo and Graton’s casino. The first project is primarily an archaeological study of a nineteenth-century trading post where Coast Miwok people and their native and non-native kin lived and labored in the years following missionization. I then turn to a photographic project doc- umenting a beached fishing boat and the overlooked heritage of the late-1800s and early-1900s indigenous landscape.

3 Jeremy Hay, Mary Callahan, Randi Rossmann, and Martin Espinoza, “A Full House as Graton Resort & Casino Opens,” Press Democrat, November 5, 2013. 4 For further discussion of Native American gaming, sovereignty, and the formation of political and economic alliances between tribes and nonindigenous communities, see Jessica Cattelino, “Florida Seminole Gaming and Local Sovereign Interdependency” in Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900, ed. Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 262–279. 5 Rodney Harrison, “What is Heritage?” in Understanding the Politics of Heritage, ed. Rodney Harrison (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 9. 6 Paul A. Shackel, “Working with Communities: Heritage Development and Applied Archae- ology” in Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology, ed. Paul A. Shackel and Erve J. Chambers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 10. 7 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 14. In-between or “unexpected” heritages as critical spaces of discourse resonate with the “third space” concept of indigenous sovereignty: “the active, ambiguous, and yet persistent post-colonial location of indigenous people’s politics.” Kevin Bruyneel, “Politics on the Boundaries: The Post-Colonial Politics of Indigenous People,” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 1, no. 2 (2000): 89.

52 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 Native Histories in Colonized Lands North of San Francisco, the Marin Peninsula is the ancestral home of Coast Miwok-speaking hunter-gatherer-fisher people who inhabited numerous small village communities, each with distinct territories and cultural identities. For instance, Olema, Echacolom, Segloque, and other groups along Tomales Bay—a long, narrow bay straddling the San Andreas Fault—inhabited lands that included bay tree and redwood forest, grasslands, riparian habitat, wetlands, and intertidal zones along the bay and rugged Pacific Coast. Coast Miwok managed this landscape and it provided all of the foods and raw materials needed for subsistence, domestic life, ceremonies, and commerce. It is also a storied landscape interwoven with Coast Miwok identity and oral history and a source of power for Coast Miwok people who continue to live there and interact with their home places. It was a Coast Miwok medicine man named Tom Smith, for example, who in a contest with another medicine man caused the 1906 earthquake that demolished San Francisco and temporarily drained Tomales Bay.8 Permanent colonization of the San Francisco Bay region beginning in 1776 threatened Coast Miwok connections to their communities and lands. Over the next one hundred years, Coast Miwok experienced disruptions to their social, political, and economic way of life from Franciscan missions, Russian mercantilism and the maritime fur trade, the Mexican-era rancho economy, and the Gold Rush and American belief in manifest destiny. Focusing on the period of time between 1776 to the 1830s, six missions, a military fort, and civilian towns were established in the San Francisco Presidio District between the present-day cities of Santa Cruz and Sonoma. In the spring of 1783—seven years after Mission Dolores was founded on the San Francisco Peninsula—a Coast Miwok couple from a village near present- day Sausalito traveled to the mission with their two children to have them baptized. They were the first Coast Miwok-speakers to enter the mission system. By the end of the mission period in the 1830s, the names of 2,828 Coast Miwok people were entered into the baptism records at San Francisco, San Jose,´ San Rafael, and Sono- ma missions.9 With missionization, the combined effects of physical violence, malnutrition, displacement, and high mortality rates greatly altered the fabric of California’s indigenous landscape. At Mission San Jose,´ nearly 54 percent of the 390 baptized Coast Miwok speakers died between 1817 and 1829. Such tremendous loss of life usually guides interpretations of the Native American experience at missions to the near-exclusion of native agency, refuge-seeking, resiliency, and other forms of

8 Greg Sarris, “When My Great-Great-Grandfather Tom Smith Caused the 1906 Earthquake” in The Dirt is Red Here: Art and Poetry from Native California, ed. Margaret Dubin (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books), 65. 9 Randall Milliken, Ethnohistory and Ethnogeography of the Coast Miwok and Their Neighbors, 1783–1840 (San Francisco, CA: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Cultural Resources and Museum Management Division, 2009), i.

Heritage In-Between 53 persistence.10 The “Coast Miwok” chapter appearing in the Handbook of North American Indians, for instance, reflects the fatal impact of colonialism for the native occupants of Marin: “A number of persons today have some Coast Miwok blood but apparently no knowledge of native culture and no interest in it. Effectively people and culture have disappeared.”11 Seeing is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, the eyes of anthropologists were unaccustomed to seeing native people of the San Francisco Bay region outside of particular time periods and places. Coast Miwok, writes another historian, “were not well-suited for adjustment to a drastically new culture which demanded severe sacrifice of old beliefs.”12 While anthropologists and historians penned and circu- lated these and other “terminal narratives” of indigenous extinction or “severe” cultural loss,13 the landscapes around San Francisco Bay also transformed. Farmers, hobbyists, archaeologists, and others swiftly dismantled the villages, gathering areas, and other sacred sites that recorded native histories and provided social anchors for native communities for millennia. Most of the several hundred shell- mounds once recorded around San Francisco Bay,14 for example, are now de- stroyed. In such a heavily urbanized landscape, these large mounds of dietary remains (e.g. shell and animal bone), artifacts, and indigenous cemeteries were demolished to make way for buildings and roads or repurposed as fertilizer for agricultural fields and gardens. For archaeologists, the pieces that remained of these places were prime locations for building archaeological chronology. Yet, the absence of many native sites tampered with the telling of indigenous histories. Due to a biased archaeological record, few people view shellmounds as anything other than “prehistoric” sites and certainly not places of continued relevance for native people during and following the mission time period.15 Missionization and site destruction define the Native American experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as expectations about where native people can be found, studied, and commemorated.16 Just as shellmounds have been over- looked as places to research indigenous responses to colonialism, it is also assumed that Coast Miwok communities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be found on federally allotted rancherias and not living along Tomales Bay partici- pating in free market trade or developing a commercial fishing industry.

10 Tsim D. Schneider, “Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California,” American Antiquity 80, no. 4 (2015): 695–713. 11 Isabel Kelly, “Coast Miwok” in California, vol. 8, Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 414–15. 12 Charles C. Colley, “The Missionization of the Coast Miwok Indians of California,” California Historical Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1970): 143–62. 13 For more discussion of terminal narratives, see Michael V. Wilcox, The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 11. 14 In 1907–8, archaeologist Nels C. Nelson recorded 425 shellmounds around San Francisco Bay. 15 Schneider, “Placing Refuge.” 16 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.

54 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 Sir Francis Drake statue on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. (Photo by author)

A casual drive reinforces the historical silences that continue to inform public perceptions of colonial and indigenous histories in Marin County. The county’s busiest thoroughfares are emboldened by monuments to colonial dominance and presence, as exemplified by the Francis Drake statue and the reconstructed Mis- sion San Rafael chapel (figure 1). Indigenous loss is rehashed by a handful of nature trails and park names that bear the name “Miwok,” as well as by Kule Loklo,the very place where citizens of Graton Rancheria returned to celebrate their stagger- ing persistence. Just as the highly visible Francis Drake statue communicates a dominant colonial history, so do the semi-subterranean roundhouse, bark houses, milling features, and granaries of Kule Loklo—visible interpretive tools that set Coast Miwok culture in “ancient amber.”17 Seeking to better understand Coast Miwok communities in the decades after missionization, the following examples address the overlooked heritage occupying the in-between time and space discussed so far.

17 Jennifer Sokolove, Sally K. Fairfax, and Breena Holland, “Managing Place and Identity: The Marin Coast Miwok Experience,” The Geographical Review 92, no. 1 (1992): 31. The structures are permanent; however, the public can view California Indian dancers and other demonstrations during the annual Big Time event at Kule Loklo.

Heritage In-Between 55 Archaeology at the Toms Point Trading Post Closer inspection of the Marin landscape reveals places that trouble the tidy story of colonial presence and indigenous loss. These persistent places, I have argued, include sites of refuge, memory, and ongoing history and power for native peoples.18 Such places also have the potential to reveal an obscured heritage in-between the colony and the casino that can recontextualize colonial histories and foreground indigenous resilience and placemaking in the decades following the missions. The archaeological record offers one source of information to begin filling in the details of this place and time period. With permission from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and land owner Audubon Canyon Ranch, two seasons of archaeological fieldwork have been completed at Toms Point, Tomales Bay, the site of a trading post established by George Thomas Wood during the mid-1800s.19 An American who jumped ship off of the coast of California in the 1840s, Wood married a Coast Miwok woman and recruited Coast Miwok and other native laborers to work for him. Situated near the mouth of Tomales Bay, Wood’s trading post capitalized on merchant ship traffic that would periodically anchor nearby and trade worldly goods for tallow, hides, and other Californian materials such as abalone shells, which were highly prized by Europeans as a lustrous mother-of-pearl material for creating jewelry and buttons. Nicknamed “Tom Vaquero,” local histories boast about Wood’s can-do attitude, entrepreneurship, and larger-than-life personality, including his battles with grizzly bears and “marvelous skill in horsemanship and unerring precision in hurling the riata.”20 The same histories also shed light on the Native American community that made the trading post profitable for Wood, “by the aid of his Indians,” and an important site of resiliency and redirection.21 Another account describes the Toms Point trading post as a “rendezvous of all of the Indian tribes ...[and] among them were carpenters, cobblers, cooks and blacksmiths. Some of the younger Indians had fairly good voices and would sing the Latin hymns taught to them by the padres while altar boys.”22 This brief passage speaks not only to the skilled trades Coast Miwok adopted at former missions, it also suggests that they were particularly adept at reapplying those skills in other colonial operations established in their homelands after the missions ceased.

18 Schneider, “Placing Refuge.” 19 Research at Toms Point is co-directed with Dr. Lee M. Panich and funded by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS 1558987 and 1559666) and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. 20 J. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Marin County, California (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), 402. 21 Ibid., 123. 22 Charles A. Lauff with Laurie Thompson and Brian K. Crawford, eds., Reminiscences of Charles Lauff: Memories of an Early Marin County Pioneer (San Rafael, CA: Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library, 2016 [1916]), 54–55.

56 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 Archaeological and historical research supports the idea that the trading post was very much an indigenous space, or “rendezvous.” Historic maps of Tomales Bay during the 1860s depict the L-shaped trading post surrounded by several triangular structures interpreted as native-style conical bark dwellings.23 The archaeological assemblage includes a large collection of animal bone from native and domesticated species, shellfish, native plants, groundstone fragments, obsidian and chert artifacts, glass beads, flaked bottle glass, and metal hardware, fixtures, and stove parts.24 Although this collection is still being analyzed, these items further speak to the continuation of native subsistence and technological practices in post-mission times. They are also evocative of the kinds of assertions and creative pursuits that are not usually associated with the heritage of nineteenth-century California Indian communities. Archaeology is one way to relocate and understand the lives of native people who faced colonialism and found ways to overcome it. As a citizen of Graton Rancheria researching the places where my ancestors lived,25 I am compelled to look for other ways of knowing the past apart from that which can be learned from mixed assemblages of locally sourced and mass-produced artifacts. My self- reflection is particularly relevant because a “Great Divide” in archaeological practice continues to separate “prehistoric” and “historic” people, sites, and the kinds of evidence archaeologists normally study to help understand life on either side of the temporal divide.26 This artificial barrier inhibits long-term perspective on Native American cultural continuity and transformation before and after colonization. Further reinforcing this divide are the anthropological narratives of colonial-era indigenous cultural loss, which undermine the idea of native people as fully capable of maintaining resilient traditions while simultaneously participating in the modern world. Here, I echo Barbara Voss who observed that still other “things” come into focus when considering the materialities associated with racialized communities in late-1800s California. In addition to the portable personal belongings of Chinese railroad workers, the buildings of Stanford University, Voss says, are “one of many Gilded Age materialities that should be

23 Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, and R. Scott Byram, “Finding Mid-Nineteenth Century Native Settlements: Cartographic and Archaeological Evidence from Central California” Journal of Field Archaeology 43, no. 2 (2018): 158. 24 Tsim D. Schneider, “Making and Unmaking Native Communities in Mission and Post- Mission Era Marin County, California” in Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California,ed. Kathleen L. Hull and John G. Douglas (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 100. 25 For discussion of indigenous and community-based archaeologies, see Sonya Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Ian J. McNiven, “Theoretical Challenges of Indig- enous Archaeology: Setting an Agenda,” American Antiquity 81,no.1 (2015): 27–41; and Joe Watkins, Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2000). 26 Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, eds., Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

Heritage In-Between 57 credited to Chinese workers.”27 What other materialities hidden in plain view tell the story of Coast Miwok people living at this same time?

Other Ways of Seeing: The Point Reyes In 2015, I started a project that seeks to document Tomales Bay communities of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a time when Indian families still “seemingly lived on every cove on the bay.”28 For this project, I combined historical research with object photogrammetry and Agisoft Photoscan software to produce three-dimensional models of two extant features of Tomales Bay: a single structure within a small hamlet called Laird’s Landing and the Point Reyes, a shipwrecked fishing boat and the focus of this discussion.29 Here I see photography as a tool for documenting and minimizing impacts to places threatened by vandalism and sea level rise, as well as a proven technique for eliciting stories and memories about people and places during oral history interviews.30 In another example of a com- munity-based archaeology project with a western Canadian Inuit community, three-dimensional models showed great potential to engage tribal citizens during oral history interviews, draw out knowledge of the not-so-distant past, and help preserve precious places.31 The knowledge and “fierce pride” that flows from studying images of family members and meaningful places and features on the landscape is especially relevant because there are people who continue to identify with this heritage and care for it in the present-day.32 It’s the incorruptible link between Coast Miwok cultural livelihood and the sea that connects the archaeological work at Toms Point and my motivation to study the Point Reyes fishing trawler (figure 2). The beached Point Reyes epitomizes the misunderstood or, at best, marginalized heritage I seek to explore. A highly visible icon photographed by just about everyone who travels to Tomales Bay, its physical

27 Barbara L. Voss, “The Historical Experience of Labor: Archaeological Contributions to Interdisciplinary Research on Chinese Railroad Workers,” Historical Archaeology 49, no. 1 (2015): 18. 28 Christy Avery, Tomales Bay Environmental History and Historic Resource Study: Point Reyes National Seashore (San Francisco, CA: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service Pacific West Region, 2009), 112. 29 This research was funded by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature “Small-Scale Economies” project directed by Dr. Junko Habu. I thank Dr. Michael Ashley for his help processing images with Photoscan. 30 Tsim D. Schneider, “The Role of Archived Photographs in Native California Archaeology,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 1 (2007): 59–60, 64. 31 Colleen Haukaas and Lisa M. Hodgetts, “The Untapped Potential of Low-Cost Photogramme- try in Community-Based Archaeology: A Case Study from Banks Island, Arctic Canada,” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 31,no.1 (2016): 40–56. For another example of indigenous com- munities using photographs for “explaining their heritage [and identity] to outsiders,” see Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 225. 32 Amy Lonetree, “Visualizing Native Survivance: Encounters with my Ho-Chunk Ancestors in the Family Photographs of Charles Van Schaick” in People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879–1942, ed. Tom Jones, Michael Schmudlach, Matthew Daniel Mason, Amy Lonetree, and George A. Greendeer (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011), 14.

58 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 The Point Reyes in 2015. (Photo by author) location—on a narrow beach in Inverness between a private business and federally managed waters—amplifies its liminal status as heritage in-between. With its star- board side partially buried in the sand, worn paint, and the dramatic backdrop of Tomales Bay extending to the horizon, the shipwreck’s aesthetic outweighs con- sideration of its origins while unifying the community of artists seeking to com- memorate the ship with their cameras and paintbrushes. “All photographers are memorialists,” writes photographer Austin Granger, who views the Point Reyes as a monument for reflecting on the passage of time, or “a weathered limestone sepulcher, a vessel for the next life.”33 “Coast Miwok” does not immediately spring to mind when viewing the Point Reyes. Where did the boat come from? Perhaps it was a troop transport used in the San Francisco Bay during the Second World War, as an employee at the adjacent Dixon Marine Services suggests?34 According to some, the boat was ostensibly the prop- erty of Andrew Romanoff, the grandnephew of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of

33 Austin Granger, Elegy from the Edge of a Continent: Photographing Point Reyes (Novato, CA: Goff Books, 2016), 37. “Someday,” Granger writes prophetically, “[the Point Reyes] will be gone. Someday I’ll come around that bend on Sir Francis Drake Highway—the spot where the trees open up—and I’ll look down there and my boat will have disappeared. It is certain. Someday she’ll be towed off, or torn apart in a storm, or else, through some destructive urge, reduced to a smoldering heap. And then I’ll photograph that too.” 34 Samantha Kimmey, “Iconic Inverness Boat Burns,” Point Reyes Light, February 25, 2016, https://www.ptreyeslight.com/article/iconic-inverness-boat-burns.

Heritage In-Between 59 Russia.35 Still other heritage claims emerge as comments by members of the Rocca family on photographs of the boat posted to the Internet. These more-subtle digital claims suggest other forms of memory and validation—heritage as “self-conscious tradition ...performed in old and new public contexts and asserted against histor- ical experiences of loss.”36 On a photograph by Julia Wahl titled “Stranded” orig- inally posted to Panoramio in 2009, Sandra Rocca Racine stated with pride that her father, Merrel Rocca Sr., built the boat in 1951 and that he came from a “long line of fisherman.”37 The Roccas of Tomales Bay and another mixed-ancestry (Coast Miwok and Euroamerican) family from Bodega Bay, the Smiths, operated fishing boats beginning in the early 1900s. Credited with establishing the commercial fishing industry at Bodega Bay, by the 1940s the Smith Brothers Fishing business operated a fleet of twelve boats and “made enough money on shark livers to build themselves a wharf.”38 Troubled by the derelict state of the boat—one of the very characteristics that attracts the community of photographers—Sandra added: “certain things bother me whenever I see the boat because I knew he was very particular on keeping it well maintained.”39 Commenting on another photograph posted to Panoramio, Sandra restated her connection to the ship. “I have fond memories growing up on this boat. It was my dad’s pride and joy ...He would be proud to know the Point Reyes is still creating a lot of joy for people.”40 The “joy” and countless visits to the boat are inscribed as graffiti on the hull of the ship (figure 3). Yet, although the boat was constructed and operated by the Rocca family, a shared heritage and visual con- sumerism continues to shade the longer histories of attachment and persistence I seek to understand. As photographer Alexis Coram, erroneously suggested, “while it has always been difficult to track down the full backstory on how this beauty came to rest here, it’s never really mattered.”41

35 Granger, Elegy from the Edge, 36. 36 James Clifford, “Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska,” Cur- rent Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2004): 6. 37 The Panoramio website closed in November 2016; however, Racine’s original comments on Wahl’s photograph were copied as historical background for another photograph of the Point Reyes uploaded to a photography blog: “Point Reyes Light Painting,” Cedric Sims Photography, http:// cedricsimsphotography.blogspot.com/2012_04_14_archive.html. 38 Gaye LaBaron, Young Smith, and Kathleen Smith, “Smith Brothers Fishing in Tomales and Bodega Bays,” digital recording of presentation at Point Reyes National Seashore (Point Reyes Station, CA: Point Reyes National Seashore Archives, November 11, 2011). Similar to Sandra Rocca Racine’s statement, Bill Smith once stated that his family “has been fishing on Bodega Bay ‘almost ever since there’s been a bay here.’” Mike Pardee, “Bodega Bay Crab Fishermen,” Press Democrat, March 4, 1951. 39 Cedric Sims Photography, “Point Reyes Light Painting.” 40 Again, since Panoramio no longer exists, photographer Tony Immoos copied Racine’s nar- rative in his comment on another photograph of the Point Reyes uploaded to Flickr: Darvin Atkeson, “Dream Boat—Point Reyes Shipwreck,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/liquidmoonlightcom/ 7671001350/in/set-72157606176842739/. 41 Emphasis added. Alexis Coram, “A Beloved Icon Lost to Fire—The Point Reyes ‘Shipwreck’ Destroyed,” Huffington Post, February 29, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/post_11024_ b_9303502.html.

60 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 Close-up of the Point Reyes hull from orthophotograph. (Photo by author)

Since taking my photos of the Point Reyes, the boat accidentally caught fire. At 4 am on February 22, 2016, firefighters extinguished a fire that had been sparked by photographers using a technique called wool spinning to create long-exposure photographs of the wooden boat set among fiery arcs of burning steel wool.42 The boat’s stern was completely destroyed (figure 4). Surprisingly, the photographers posted their work to Instagram, providing short-lived social capital and also pro- viding law enforcement some indication of who was involved.43 Yet, an investiga- tion is not likely to happen. “This was already a derelict vessel,” Fire Chief Jim Fox said, “I don’t know how you can damage something that’s already broken.”44 More intriguing than the story of the boat’s damage was that the news of the fire quickly spread and ignited conversations that positioned the vessel as the focal point of a heritage debate and contested memory between locals, tourists, artists, the National Park Service, and the family who once owned and operated the boat. The

42 Kimmey, “Iconic Inverness Boat Burns.” See also Michael Zhang, “Shipwreck’s Fire Likely Caused by Light Painting Photographer,” PetaPixel, February 23, 2016, https://petapixel.com/2016/02/ 23/iconic-shipwrecks-fire-likely-caused-light-painting-photographer/. 43 Paul Payne, “Did Instagram Photo Lead to Destruction of West Marin Shipwreck?,” Press Democrat,February25, 2016, http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/5289579-181/did-instagram- photo-lead-to?artslide¼0. 44 Paul Liberatore, “Inverness Locals Burned Up Over Fire That Damaged Iconic Fishing Boat,” Marin Independent Journal, February 22, 2016, http://www.marinij.com/article/NO/20160222/NEWS/ 160229942.

Heritage In-Between 61 The Point Reyes in 2016. (Photo by author) boat is “kind of famous,” Jim Fox commented, “People have practically made a living photographing it and painting it. For a derelict vessel, it’s a local institution.”45 For those self-identifying as locals, the boat fire represented the worst of tourism and the unwanted transformation of places and things like the Point Reyes into just another “cool photo opportunity.”46 Still other reactions suggest that photographers were especially troubled by the act of vandalism. For one, the burned boat represented an existential crisis: “I cannot tell you that my children will be able to stand on this sandbar one day and see with their eyes what I have seen with mine ...instead, they will have to rely on photographs to remember what once was. What a sad moment.”47 Here, we see colonial narratives of loss merge with cultural appropriation, or the adoption and sense of ownership that comes from coopting aspects of someone else’s culture. It is also at this intersection where heritage operates as an engine for “sustaining local identity and a sense of place, especially by those communities and

45 Ibid. 46 Kimmey, “Iconic Inverness Boat Burns.” In the Inverness Almanac, a photograph of the burning Point Reyes was published alongside a thirty-question “tourist test” seemingly designed to distinguish insiders, or those with local knowledge, from outsiders. Ben Livingston, Katie Eberle, Jordan Atanat, Nina Pick, and Jeremy Harris, eds., Inverness Almanac, Volume Four (Inverness, CA: Mount Vision Press, fall 2016, winter 2017), MAR05/06-MAR07/08. 47 Coram, “A Beloved Icon Lost to Fire.”

62 The Public Historian / Vol. 41 / February 2019 / No. 1 locales that are threatened by transformations in the global economy.”48 Viewed as “broken” heritage to some, the boat is seen by the Rocca family as a link to the family members and history underpinning their heritage. Sandra Rocca’s sister, Sheilla Rocca-Moore, shared her disappointment after the fire: “I am really sad that some- one would do this to the Point Reyes.Mydad...owned and took very good care of this boat for 54 years, and it makes me very sad that people are so mean.”49 Although the damage cannot be undone, the photographs I collected represent the last thor- ough record of Merrel Rocca Sr.’s craftsmanship, the Point Reyes, and the ship’s now- missing stern. This is especially significant because of continued uncertainty about who is responsible for managing the damaged boat. Eventually, when used as tools in oral history interviews or just passed around at family gatherings, the photographs and 3D models of the Point Reyes may one day evoke memories and lessons of native resilience and ingenuity during a time when being Indian was a liability.50

Conclusion The examples of the Toms Point trading post and the Point Reyes ship lend to new ways of seeing what I have called the heritage in-between. Popular imaginings of Coast Miwok people are processed through such obvious and accessible places as the reconstructed precontact village of Kule Loklo and Graton Rancheria’s success- ful casino and resort. These sites, as well as narratives of indigenous loss at missions and the destruction of archaeological sites, can also mask critical and ongoing histories of placemaking and social relations. Even as native people confronted various colonial programs and made do with sweeping changes taking place in their communities, fishing and shellfishing may have brought stability to precarious lives and, ultimately, recourse and direction for families like the Roccas, Smiths, and many others who translated those skills into new ways to make a living. As Charles Menzies, a Gitxaała citizen and anthropologist, observes, “it is only in the context of colonization that our memories have been challenged.”51 The heritage in-between reveals knowledge that has always been, was always practiced, and always known.

Tsim D. Schneider is a citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

48 Shackel, “Working with Communities,” 10. 49 Liberatore, “Inverness Locals Burned Up.” 50 Digital photographs of the Point Reyes have been copied to an external hard drive and will be shared with the National Park Service and Rocca family. For an example of audio- and video- recordings as heirlooms and critical “forms of discursive practice” among tribes, see also Robert E. Moore, “Disappearing, Inc.: Glimpsing the Sublime in the Politics and Access to Endangered Languages,” Language & Communication 26 (2006): 297. 51 Charles R. Menzies, “Revisiting ‘Dm Sibilhaa’nm Da Laxyuubm Gitxaała (Picking Abalone in Gitxaała Territory)’: Vindication, Appropriation, and Archaeology,” BC Studies: The British Colum- bian Quarterly, no. 187 (Autumn 2015): 150.

Heritage In-Between 63