Gregory Sarris | |
---|---|
Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria | |
Assumed office 1992 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Santa Rosa, California, U.S. | February 12, 1952
Education | University of California, Los Angeles (BA) Stanford University (MA, PhD) |
Gregory Michael Sarris (born February 12, 1952) is the Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (since 1992) and the current Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. [1] Until 2022, Sarris was the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Creative Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, where he taught classes in Native American Literature, American Literature, and Creative Writing. He is also President of the Graton Economic Development Authority. Sarris is currently the Distinguished Chair Emeritus at Sonoma State University. [2]
A notable scholar and activist, Sarris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. [3] Sarris has authored six books, the best known of which is Grand Avenue , a collection of autobiographical short stories about contemporary Native American life. Named after a real place in Santa Rosa's South Park district, Sarris was a co-executive producer of a two-part 1996 HBO miniseries adaptation, shot entirely on location.
Greg Sarris was adopted shortly after his birth by a middle-class white couple, George and Mary Sarris, who believed they could not have children. Shortly after, they conceived the first of three biological children, which complicated life at home with his alcoholic father. Sarris was frequently the target of his father's abuse. In an effort to keep him out of harm's way, he was sent to live with various white and American Indian foster families. At the age of 12, Sarris met Pomo basket weaver Mabel McKay, who taught him about American Indian customs and tradition. According to Sarris, McKay's guidance provided him with a sense of purpose. [4]
After graduating from Santa Rosa High School in 1970, Sarris attended Santa Rosa Junior College. In 1977 he graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English from UCLA. He went on to complete his graduate studies at Stanford University, earning a master's degree in creative writing in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature in 1989. [5] Sarris is slated to receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (LHD) degree from Sonoma State University in June 2024. [6]
Greg Sarris’ mother, seventeen year old Mary Bernadette “Bunny” Hartman, of German, Jewish and Irish descent, came from a wealthy family. She was sent to Santa Rosa to deliver her child, which was not uncommon for unwed mothers at the time. She was inadvertently given the wrong blood type in a transfusion after giving birth, and died shortly thereafter. Sarris’ father was not named on the birth certificate. It wasn't until the early 1980s as a graduate student at Stanford that Sarris learned that Emilio Arthur Hilario, of Filipino, Miwok and Pomo descent, was his biological father. According to Sarris, he learned the identity of his great-great-grandparents from his grandfather, Emiliano Hilario. Hilario's grandmother, Reinette Smith Sarragossa, was the daughter of Emily Stewart, a woman of mixed blood ancestry, and Tom Smith, a well-known healer of Pomo and Coastal Miwok blood. [18] [ non-primary source needed ]
Marilee Montgomery and Stop the Casino 101 Coalition dispute Sarris's claim to have Pomo and Miwok blood. [19] Sarris was at the forefront of the controversial Graton Resort and Casino project which was strongly opposed by Stop the Casino 101 Coalition.
In the early 1990s, Sarris worked to have the Coast Miwok and Pomo Native Americans gain recognition as a tribe. He co-authored the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, 25 U.S.C. §1300n (Act) with California Indian Legal Services. [20] President Clinton signed the Act into law on December 27, 2000, officially granting the tribe status as a federally recognized tribe. [21] The Act mandated that the Secretary of the Interior take land in the tribe's aboriginal territory of Marin or Sonoma Counties into trust as the Tribe's reservation.
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has generic name (help)Cloverdale is a city in Sonoma County, California, United States; it is both the westernmost and the northernmost city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad reached the area in 1872. The Cloverdale Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California is headquartered there. The population was 8,996 at the 2020 census.
The Pomo are a Native American people of California. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to Clear Lake, mainly between Cleone and Duncans Point. One small group, the Tceefoka, lived in the vicinity of present-day Stonyford, Colusa County, where they were separated from the majority of Pomo lands by Yuki and Wintuan speakers.
The Miwok are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family. The word Miwok means people in the Miwok languages.
The Coast Miwok are an Indigenous people of California that were the second-largest tribe of the Miwok people. Coast Miwok inhabited the general area of present-day Marin County and southern Sonoma County in Northern California, from the Golden Gate north to Duncans Point and eastward to Sonoma Creek. Coast Miwok included the Bodega Bay Miwok, or Olamentko (Olamentke), from authenticated Miwok villages around Bodega Bay, the Marin Miwok, or Hookooeko (Huukuiko), and Southern Sonoma Miwok, or Lekahtewutko (Lekatuit). While they did not have an overarching name for themselves, the Coast Miwok word for people, Micha-ko, was suggested by A. L. Kroeber as a possible endonym, keeping with a common practice among tribal groups and the ethnographers studying them in the early 20th century and with the term Miwok itself, which is the Central Sierra Miwok word for 'people'.
Sonoma State University is a public university in Sonoma County, California. It is part of the California State University system. Sonoma State offers 92 bachelor's degree programs, 19 master's degree programs, and 11 teaching credentials. The university is a Hispanic-serving institution.
Native American studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the history, culture, politics, issues, spirituality, sociology and contemporary experience of Native peoples in North America, or, taking a hemispheric approach, the Americas. Increasingly, debate has focused on the differences rather than the similarities between other ethnic studies disciplines such as African American studies, Asian American studies, and Latino/a studies.
The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria is a federally recognized tribe of Pomo people in Sonoma County, California. They are also known as the Kashaya Pomo.
The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok, is a federally recognized American Indian tribe of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Indians. The tribe was officially restored to federal recognition in 2000 by the U.S. government pursuant to the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act.
The Lytton Band of Pomo Indians is a federally recognized tribe of Pomo Native Americans. They were recognized in the late 1980s, as lineal descendants of the two families who lived at the Lytton Rancheria in Healdsburg, California from 1937 to about 1960. The tribe now has around 275 enrolled members. It has a casino in San Pablo, California, and has proposed to build housing for tribe members, plus a winery and a hotel, just west of Windsor, California, in Sonoma County.
The Graton Rancheria was a 15.45-acre (62,500 m2) property in the coastal hills of northern California, about two miles (3 km) northwest of Sebastopol. The site is about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) southwest of the hamlet of Graton, population 1,815 in 2000. The area is a few miles west of Santa Rosa, the largest of Sonoma County's nine cities and the County seat, population 147,595 in 2000. It was a former rancheria for Central Coast and Central valley tribes, including the Southern Pomo, a Hokan-speaking tribe, and Coast Miwok.
Essie Pinola Parrish (1902–1979), was a Kashaya Pomo spiritual leader and exponent of native traditions. She was also a notable basket weaver.
Kenneth Morrison Roemer, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, an Emeritus Fellow, UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and a former Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Scholar Professor, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author or editor of four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity, nominated for a Pulitzer, and three books on American Indian literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). His collection of personal essays about Japan, Michibata de Dietta Nippon (2002) (A Sidewalker’s Japan), was a finalist for the Koizumi Yakumo Cultural Prize. He is the project director of a digital archive of tables of contents of American literature anthologies Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons.
South Park is residential neighborhood in the city of Santa Rosa, California. It is located in south Santa Rosa, east of U.S. Highway 101, south of Bennett Valley Road, west of the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, and encompasses 60 blocks. The community is known for its old houses and artistic murals in the area, and notorious for its history of an above average crime rate and gang activity. South Park was also once a settlement for African Americans during the mid-1900s and was a center of Santa Rosa's Black community. Today, the neighborhood is mainly Latino. It has around 1,500 residents.
Graton Resort & Casino is an Indian casino and hotel outside Rohnert Park, California, that opened on November 5, 2013. It is owned and operated by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. The casino has 3,000 slot machines, 144 table games, and a poker room. In November 2016 it opened an adjacent hotel with 200 rooms.
The California Rancheria Termination Acts refer to three acts of Congress and an amendment passed in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the US Indian termination policy. The three Acts, passed in 1956, 1957, and 1958 targeted 41 Rancherias for termination. An additional seven were added via an amendment in 1964. Including three previous terminations, 46 of the 51 targeted Rancherias were successfully terminated. Through litigation and legislation, over 30 Rancherias have been restored and at least five are still working to be.
Gaye Theresa LeBaron is an American newspaper columnist, author, teacher, and local historian of Sonoma County, California. She wrote more than 8,000 columns for The Press Democrat from 1961 until her semi-retirement in 2001. She also co-authored two books on the history of Santa Rosa, California.
Tsupu, also known as Wild Cucumber, Maria Chekka, and Maria Chica, was a Coast Miwok elder. She was the last native of the ancient village of Petaluma, which was east of the Petaluma River and about three and a half miles northeast of the present city of Petaluma, California. It was part of Lekatuit Nation and had around 500 residents. "Petaluma" means "sloping ridge" in the Coast Miwok language.