With the holiday season in full swing, people begin to turn towards reflection and gratitude. In that spirit, it’s worth acknowledging the deeper history of Marin’s land, shaped by Native communities long before European colonization.

For thousands of years, the Coast Miwok (the first inhabitants to call Marin home) and other Native communities have carefully shaped this region into what it is today. Their relationship with the land was guided by a deep knowledge and realization of interconnectedness, the idea that everything from the plants, animals and climate connects with the way humans function within society. This association reflects an advanced worldview in which humans were a part of nature instead of being separate from it. 

From Oct. 6–28, College of Marin hosted an art exhibit featuring works made by Duane BigEagle, a professor of Native American Studies at the college and a founding board member of the Northern California Osage. His exhibit, “An Osage Sees the World,” includes poems and paintings centered on Native culture.  

“My art comes from trying to recognize what I see in the world – it’s how I talk about it, how I see it,” BigEagle said. “[My art is] both modern and traditional. Tradition is being reinvented every day.”

He went on to talk about how Native influence and presence was very strong in pre-Columbus America, but has waned since.

“I wish that there were more Native influences [visible today],” BigEagle said.

Tradition and Native remembrance are embedded in Marin’s culture, though it may not be obvious to most residents. For example, according to the Marin County Free Library, Marin was named after Chief Marin, an 18th-century leader of the Licatiut tribe, a branch of the Coast Miwok. 

Redwood was also proposed to be named “Licatuit,” after the local tribe, though the proposed name used a common misspelling, according to the Marin Independent Journal.

There was also an ancient Coast Miwok burial ground just down the road from Redwood. That archaeological site sat beneath what is now the Rose Lane Housing development, across the street from Hall Middle School. Its contents were reburied at an undisclosed location after consulting the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria during the development’s construction in 2014.

The site highlights the extent of Native presence in the region, specifically on the land where Redwood is built.

“There were around 600 villages in Marin County. Indian people were everywhere. If you look right in your backyard, Indian people walked past there,” BigEagle said.

Native communities also played a major role in shaping California’s natural landscape and agricultural productivity. Long before controlled burnings became a recognized firefighting tactic, Native Americans used them routinely.

“In the fall, [Natives would] burn areas lightly so the sun could strike the blackened ground and start regeneration right away,” BigEagle said. “You didn’t have to wait for leaves to rot and decompose months later. It also prevented the buildup that causes catastrophic fires today.”

Another method was maintaining healthy rivers and creeks, which were commonly used for resources such as freshwater, food, materials and even medicine. These natural highways were also a way for tribes to connect through trade and travel. 

“You were expected to maintain your part of [the river or creek]. If you didn’t, the people downstream wouldn’t trade with you, or the people upstream wouldn’t. So [the tribes] were really interconnected,” BigEagle said.

That interconnectedness also shaped Native people’s relationship with the land and the animals on it. Instead of using domestic livestock techniques like fencing and pastures, they used hunting and gathering strategies, which better preserved the ecosystems they lived in.  

“Their idea was, ‘don’t fence your food in – create a world where your food comes to you,” BigEagle said.

BigEagle’s points echo the work of M. Kat Anderson, a researcher who spent her career studying how California’s Native people managed their land. In a PBS SoCal Plus article,  Anderson writes that Native communities actively shaped the landscape through practices like coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning and selective harvesting. These methods “encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities.”

She also writes that California Native people didn’t draw a hard line between “wild” land and “managed” land the way we do now. In many tribal languages, “the word for wilderness is absent… as is the word for civilization.” 

Anderson pushes back on the way early European observers misunderstood what they were seeing. When John Muir described California as untouched wilderness, she argues that he was actually looking at “the fertile seed, bulb and greens-gathering grounds of the Miwok and Yokuts Indians, kept open and productive by centuries of carefully planned Indigenous burning, harvesting and seed scattering.”

She also writes that many Native people today use the word wilderness negatively, to describe land that hasn’t been cared for by humans for a long time. She wrote, “a hands-off approach to nature has promoted feral landscapes that are inhospitable to life… California Indians have never advocated leaving nature alone.”

This practice of actively engaging with nature not only helped Native communities thrive but also had beneficial effects on the environment.

According to a 2023 study done by the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Review, forests managed by Native people collectively removed the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s annual emissions from fossil fuels. On the other hand, forests not managed by Native people collectively contributed to increased carbon in the air due to significant forest loss.

In discussing ways to address today’s environmental challenges, BigEagle emphasized the value of learning from the past. 

“We can’t go back completely in time, but we can take ideas that people had. We always do that. Human beings are remarkable creatures – we take ideas from everywhere and try them out,” BigEagle said. “So I think it’s time people start thinking a little more carefully about how we relate to our environment… and I think [Native American] culture would have at least a few ideas.”

Overall, minimal land in California is untouched by Native stewardship. When examining their history, modern society can learn from their ecological knowledge and understanding of how humans fit within natural systems, potentially utilizing these practices in the future.

“A lot of the modern perception of Native Americans is shaped by a biased history,” BigEagle said. “We need to realize that maybe these people know something we don’t.”