Support for Intertribal Gatherings
In California the year does not begin in January. It begins when the rain does. Everything here — the creeks, the marsh, the salmon, the singing — waits on the first storm to come in off the Pacific.
This site is waiting too. When the rain comes, so does the rest of it.
Who this is for
Everyone alive is downstream of somewhere. The water you drank this morning fell as rain, ran through a place with a name, and is on its way to a sea — and on the way it passed people you will never meet, and it will pass more after you.
That path has a name. It is called a watershed, and you live in one whether or not you have ever thought about it.
Most of the ways we are told we belong to a place were drawn by someone — borders, deeds, citizenship, all decided and all changeable. A watershed was not drawn by anyone. It is simply where the water goes, and it puts you in relation to everybody upstream and everybody downstream, permanently, whether you like each other or not.
We are not citizens so much as we are participants in a waterway. A watershed. It changes how you think of your relations to people upstream and downstream.Neil MacLean
What the rain brings
Most tribal groups hold songs for water — songs to different fish, songs to particular places, songs about what happened there. The people who spend their lives on the water are the ones who know them.
Water Songs is not a collection of those. It is a call for new ones. For people to be moved in the present, and to sing on the water, at the place where nearly everything California drains goes out to sea.
Five watersheds flow through the Golden Gate into the Pacific. In 2029 we propose three months on the beach there — a replica village, a Big Time dance gathering and bear ceremony, an art exhibition, and a watercraft expedition paddling down from the Sierras to come ashore at the Gate. 2029 is the sixtieth year since the end of Tribal Termination, which began when the Indians of All Tribes took Alcatraz in 1969.
If you sing, there will be a place for you. If you do not sing, there will be a shore to stand on and something to hear. You do not need to be a musician, and you do not need to be from here.
Who is holding this
We produce cultural events, hold ceremony, and organise to restore Indigenous culture in San Francisco — working since 2008 through the Ohlone Profiles Project, so that Ohlone people can return publicly to this city and show their own history.
Water Songs is brought by the Golden Gate Canoe Family: Mary Jean Robertson, Neil MacLean and Robert Rogers.
If any of this reaches you — as someone who might sing, someone who might listen, someone who might paddle, or someone who might support the work — say so now rather than later. We would rather know you before the rain than after.