2026

This work begins with a specific creek. Lagunitas Creek in Marin County is one of the only places left in California where wild coho salmon still return to spawn each winter, moving upstream through old growth redwood and bishop pine, through fog and dark water and root systems that have been holding this hillside together for centuries. 

The Coast Miwok indigenous peoples have lived in relationship with this exact landscape for thousands of years, and their understanding of the forest, water, and fish as an interconnected living system is something Western science is only beginning to catch up to. 

The redwood shelters the creek from heat that would kill the young fish. Its roots hold the streambed and create the shallow pools where salmon rest and spawn. When the salmon die, they in turn feed the trees, the soil, the birds, and generations of their own kin beyond. The natural world, of which we are a part, has been in conversation with itself across deep time, and Indigenous stewardship is part of what has kept that relationship known and tended. The near disappearance of salmon from these waterways and the dispossession of Indigenous communities through the Mission system and colonial land seizure are connected histories, and they carry a lesson we have not yet fully learned.