The Coast Mi wok people have lived in Tomales Bay for thousands of years. Even now, cabins that belonged to the Felix family still stand among the bishop pines along the foggy shoreline of Tomales Bay among, in full view of the passing sea lions and leopard sharks.
At Point Reyes today, the European settlers’ ideas of wilderness and ranching are celebrated, but the story of the Mi wok people has long been missing. Since September 2021, however, Harlan, the founder and director of the Alliance for Felix Cove, has spearheaded the effort to reclaim her family’s legacy and secure a future for the Coast Mi wok people in Tomales Bay.
High Country News caught up with Harlan recently to talk about family and contemporary Indigenous history — the themes that fuel her determination to push the Park Service to recognize Felix Cove. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: Your efforts have been a declaration that family and connection to place matters — that family history matters, especially in the context of recognizing contemporary histories of Indigenous people. Can you tell us about your background and your family’s history at Felix Cove?
Theresa Harlan: During my childhood, I spent a lot of time looking at my mom’s photo albums. When our family would come to visit, they always talked about these stories of the bay and how the Felix Cove house was filled with laughter and lots of funny stories and kidding and joking. They never talked about the eviction.
My sister had visited the house at Felix Cove while she was a toddler, but I had never visited the house with my mom. And a lot of my older relatives, who are now gone, they just didn’t want to see the house again, because it was not their home the way that they remembered it. Eventually, I visited the house after my mom passed. My husband and I would go back to visit, look at the house, think about it. My older cousins wanted to know: When can they go back? When can they go inside? They wanted to know about our house. And then a friend told me that the new (park) superintendent was coming: “You should invite him to come see the house and invite him as your guests.” I gathered family members, and we invited Superintendent Craig Henkel to visit the house.
I started building a relationship with the superintendent, but I realized that I needed more than just one single voice. We really needed an organization. We really needed an alliance; we needed allies. That’s why we created the Alliance for Felix Cove last September.
HAN: Point Reyes National Seashore is a unit of the National Park Service and a place where a more colonial agriculture and ranching heritage is remembered. What specific actions would you like to see the Park Service take to protect and Felix Cove’s Mi wok history? And what is at stake if they don’t?
TH: I would like to see a Felix Family Historical District that would include both Felix Cove and Marshall Beach, because our family had homes, and Marshall Beach — my mom’s aunt lived at Marshall Beach. My great-grandpa built houses at Felix Cove and two homes at Marshall beach.
We want the house and its interior to be restored. We want to have access to the house, to have gatherings at the house. We want to establish a living history center and ecological garden.
The park, at one point, had a plan for an Indigenous archaeological district, but they shelved it and have since pushed forward with a historic ranching district. So all these commercial ranches — where we get organic milk, organic cheese — they have the historic-district status. They get the tax write-offs, they get the benefits of our taxpaying money for support for their roads, the fences, their buildings. I would like to see the ranches out of there because they are not compatible with the protection of ancestral grounds. They’re not compatible with the protection of our plant and animal relatives.
We hope that someday we can sit around the table and talk about the future of the family home. In the meantime, we want to tell our family story and create ways in which people can build relationships with land and water.
HAN: As an Indigenous woman, could you talk a bit about why it’s important to tell the contemporary history of the Coast Mi wok peoples? What are the consequences of only talking about Coast Mi wok or other Native peoples in the deep past?
TH: It’s so important to tell the story of contemporary lives because it’s our reality. It’s the real, lived experience. My mom was born and raised there. I was raised on those stories. My cousins were raised on those stories. And my family, my Uncle Vic, fought for that house.
That story matters because it shows how California Indian people, Tomato people, pushed and persisted and lived. They just lived as best they could, raising their families. And that’s the importance of our story. As a photo curator of Native photography, I’ve always said family albums and the pictures they hold are so important.
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