10 18 09 Open The Coast Back Up! Lester Pinola, Chairman - Kashia Rancheria, Kashia Tribe August 5th 2009  (Mp3 400kb 2min) At the October 2nd, 2008  North Central Coast MLPA  Hearing in Santa Rosa, with the Lt. Governor present, members of the Kashia Tribe in Sonoma County, and the Seaweed Stewardship Alliance of Mendocino County, halted the hostile takeover of traditional and commercial seaweed beds by the MLPA-Initiative group. This overlooked constituency by August 2009 had become an overun constituency. At the December 12th, 2008 hearing, another attempt was made to secure continued traditional rights to access and ceremony, the plants and shellfish of the language of oral traditions passing on tribal wisdom and experience. Fucus News Audio Excerpts: Available soon! Seaweed Rebellion 1   Seaweed Rebellion 2   Seaweed Rebellion 3   Seaweed Rebellion 4 Thirty years ago, several families of hippies, with respect and committed involvement to supporting native rights, and the tribes of the North Coast region began to eat and harvest seaweed on the north coast. These were times born out of the recent decades of struggle from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier, Big Mountain, the cross border tribes along both sides of the US and Canada border, and the indigenous peoples of Central America. Books like "Touch The Earth", "Bury My Heart At Wouded Knee", "Incident At Oglala", were on everyones bookshelves and in the many local community schools that sprung up. The local northcoast environmental movement, which throughout it's beginnings, did sweat lodges and ceremony with tribes, reminded the dominant culture of a spiritual connection with the land. There was a common language of the land and heart, we voted with our feet. These days,  Big Green  tosses aside Indigenous Cultures and traditional land uses even easier than the corporate agenda. Just attend any of the MLPA hearings. Big Green* representatives sit on one side, Fishers, Tribes, Ocean food harvesters on the other. Telling as it was, I laughed when I heard Kaitlin Gaffney, of the Ocean Conservancy, blurt out at the 080509 hearing in Woodland that "We're not environmentalists, we're conservationists"! So much has changed. And then nothing has... It was only 90 years ago that the last 'massacre' of indigenous people in Humboldt occured. The Massacre at Needle Rock The Sinkyone were one of several Indigenous people who inhabited southern Humboldt County and the extreme northwestern part of Mendocino County. Some fifty Sinkyone villages were spread along the Eel and South Fork of the Eel Rivers, and nearly twenty others dotted the coastal area near present-day Shelter Cove. Before goldrush days the Sinkyone numbered over 4,000 people. By the end of the 1860s they were almost totally wiped out. Disease contributed to the annihilation. So did starvation, as native people were displaced from their villages, salmon creeks were choked with logging and mining debris, and as fences and property "rights" of white settlers kept native people from hunting, fishing, and gathering in their accustomed places. But a large part of the destruction of the Sinkyone was the result of murder. Supported by a community fearful of the "Indian menace" and greedy for Indian land, legitimized by newspapers that extolled the "manifest destiny" of the white race, groups of men throughout northwestern California formed "volunteer armies" that swooped down upon Indian villages, killing men, women and children indiscriminately. After such raids the men, often a ragtag troupe of unemployed miners, would present expense vouchers to the state and federal governments for actions against "hostile Indians." In 1851 and 1852 California authorized over $1 million for such excursions. It was nothing short of subsidized murder. Malcolm Margolin, The Way We Lived: California Indian In 1983, EPIC, The Environmental Protection Information Center in Garberville, filed the first of 2 victorious suits to protect Sally Bell old growth redwood Grove in the Sinkyone. By 1984 there was the EF! organizing presence in Mendocino & Humboldt counties around the Sinkyone Wilderness and Sally Bell grove battles and dozens were arrested. The Sally Bell Grove was finally included in the  Sinkyone Wilderness. Astral Arts Mendocino registered as a Mendocino County business in the Spring of 2003. All artwork, media, audio, video, projet series names and individual titles are Copyright Protected ©2003 ©2004 ©2005 ©2006 ©2007 ©2008 ©2009 Author: Thomas DiFiore. All business logos and product line artwork, are marks with specific fonts used in the identification of goods or services as used in commerce, and are trademarks of the author or Astral Arts Mendocino.