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Emergence Magazine Podcast

Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 1

Emergence Magazine Podcast

Emergence Magazine

Spirituality, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.7628 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place.  As she tells her family's story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home? In Episode 1, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay—an uprooting which ended her family’s time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:01.0

Good morning everyone.

0:02.0

Welcome to the land of Tamalhuay, Coast Miwok people.

0:07.0

I am Teresa.

0:12.0

My blood is indigenous.

0:15.0

It flows from Kiwa Pueblo, Laguna Pueblo, Hamas Pueblo from New Mexico.

0:20.0

I was born in San Francisco and raised from birth by my adopted Coast Mewalk mom.

0:26.6

Today is my mom's birthday.

0:29.6

Yeah.

0:31.6

She would have been 96 years if she lived.

0:35.6

But tomorrow the park turns 59 and the possibility of 20 more

0:41.7

years of ranching hangs over us my sister and I were raised on family stories of

0:48.0

life on the bay my mom loved to dig clams open them up wash them off in the bay and swallow them down she loved to dig clams, open them up, wash them off in the bay, and swallow them down.

0:56.0

She loved to pick wild strawberries.

0:59.0

She loved to pick wild teas.

1:02.0

My mom prepared me for what my life might be as a dark-skinned, native child, and woman.

1:08.0

She would tell me, the bigger they they are the harder they'll fall.

1:17.6

In the 1950s, my family was evicted by ranchers, Lundgren and Turney. My uncle Big fought back.

1:28.8

He and his attorney, William Weissick,

1:31.0

had verbal testimony that the Felix family was here

1:35.1

before the ranchers.

1:36.6

They were here at a time when San Francisco was Yerba Buena.

1:41.9

The eviction ended our time at the cove, but it did not sever our connection to the bay.

...

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