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Articles by Greg Sarris
He’s wine country’s reluctant casino mogul. His new novel is rich with Native history
On the Shelf The Last Human Bear By Greg Sarris Heyday Books: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Before her death in 1993, Mabel McKay — one of the last living dreamers of the Pomo Indian people — shared a prophecy while driving through the Sonoma hills. One day, this paradise would burn. “Everything is going to go dry. Everything will burn.
Greg Sarris on Telling the Stories of California’s Native Communities
Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of The Last Human Bear Greg Sarris’s first novel, Grand Avenue, an urban Indian story set in Santa Rosa, California, was published in 1994, during the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, which included first novels by Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine), Sherman Alexie (Reservation Blues), Mona Susan Power (The Grass Dancer) and David Treuer (Little).
‘Out of My Way!’
Greg Sarris must own a closetful of hats. Author, teacher, tribal leader, historian, eco-warrior, cultural eminence, film producer, professor (now UC Regent), policy adviser, Native American spokesperson, business and community magnate—the man can also discuss California’s topographic and agricultural histories as intimately as he can the histories of the state’s Indigenous and immigrant human inhabitants.
Event Recap: Greg Sarris’s ‘Grand Avenue’
Introducing Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue, published in 1994, at the start of the program, California Book Club host John Freeman called the novel in stories “one of the most dazzling feats of narrative embroidery I have read in the last 50 years of my life. It has aged extraordinarily well.” He asked Sarris to talk about how he became a storyteller.
A Grand Avenue Runs Through It
A roadway runs through the heart of Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue, but don’t let the title fool you. For while the stories assembled here form a novel set in and around Santa Rosa, specifically in the neighborhood of South Park, and we pass Grand Avenue many times in these pages, the real map of this book isn’t made of asphalt. It is made of water. The way Grand Avenue moves tales within its tales is a lot like the way a river is made of currents.
Read an Excerpt from Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue
My name is Jasmine, but I’m no sweet-smelling flower. Names are just parents’ dreams, after all. I’m thirty pounds too big and even more dull-faced than my mother, since I make no effort to camouflage it with powder and lipstick. My cousin Ruby is pretty, but it’s not the kind of pretty boys see. She’s thin and clothes hang on her just so, like her mom, my Auntie Faye. Us Indians are full of evil, Auntie Faye said. She told lots of stories about curses and poison. We call it poison.
Why Greg Sarris Writes-and the Story Behind “Grand Avenue”
I never read a book until the 11th grade. It was The Old Man and the Sea. I felt sorry for the fish. Inauspicious beginning for an English professor. Not for a writer. The teacher—I still remember his name, Mr. DeSoto—challenged me not only to finish the book but to understand it. I was one of some 35 juniors in Santa Rosa High School’s remedial English class, composed mostly of students like me—truant, disaffected. “OK, tough guy, see if you can read this book and get its meaning,” said Mr. DeSoto.
Why You Should Read Greg Sarris’s “Grand Avenue”
Without Greg Sarris’s 1994 “novel in stories,” Grand Avenue, recent Native American literature would have a very different look. Sarris, after all, was among the first writers to turn their attention to the lives of so-called urban Indians, who lived not on rural reservations but in city neighborhoods.
Greg Sarris in conversation with Blaise Zerega
City Lights, ALTA Journal, and Heyday Books celebrate the publication of The Forgetters: stories by Greg Sarris published by Heyday Books Also celebrating the paperback release of Becoming Story: A Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors by Greg Sarris published by Heyday Books Celebrated storyteller and tribal leader Greg Sarris offers a contemplative and enchanting story cycle in The Forgetters, a collection that blends into an unsuspected harmony shimmering dream trance with...
Greg Sarris on Writing to Remember Our Responsibility To Each Other
Greg Sarris’s gritty, dramatic, and innovative novel-in-stories, Grand Avenue , follows the exploits of members of an urban Native American community in Santa Rosa, Northern California, (as does the HBO miniseries based on the book, which he wrote and executive produced with Robert Redford).
A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird – Greg Sarris
Writer Greg Sarris is an award-winning author and Tribal leader serving his sixteenth consecutive term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. His books include Becoming Story, How A Mountain Was Made, Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Watermelon Nights, and Grand Avenue, which was adapted into an HBO miniseries.
Celebrate Indigenous Literature With These 13 New Books by Native Writers
The invented Western history of Thanksgiving, the one often perpetuated as early as elementary school and idealized in broader American culture, is a harmful myth. Here at Electric Lit, we want to use this day to draw attention to the many stories and experiences of Indigenous people and remember the true history and legacy of settler colonialism.
If Oprah Were an Oak Tree
Excerpted from Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors (2022) by Greg Sarris. Reprinted with permission from Heyday Books, © 2022 Greg Sarris. I am learning about “sudden oak death.” Specifically, I am learning to see it outside my window: I understand the crimson-colored bleeding canker on the trunk of the magnificent three-hundred-year-old live oak in the middle of my garden indicates lethal infection, presages the tree’s imminent death.
Review: Tribal leader Greg Sarris educates and enchants in memoir of California
Greg Sarris is the author of “Becoming Story: A Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors.” Photo: Heyday Books The late, lauded conservationist Aldo Leopold famously wrote: “We can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in.” That creed drives Bay Area author, teacher and tribal leader Greg Sarris’ explorations of his Northern California home and its complex history in his pensive, lyrical new essay collection “Becoming...
How California’s Waterways Gave Life to Indigenous Communities
Remember a place along the river. Recall the season, the time of day, how the sun shone on the water, the trees’ shadows. Wohler Bridge. 1972. Midsummer. Midday. On a sandy beach where the river bends just before meeting the bridge. I am twenty years old, alone. Clear water ripples like beveled glass; small fish, no doubt carp, tease and dart at the shore. But what’s caught my attention is a single silver osprey, a bird I’ve noticed coursing the river countless times before, hovering now midair above me.
California Voice: Online gambling measure would hurt Indian tribes
For the past 20 years, California voters have repeatedly stood with Indian tribes as we’ve sought to authorize and uphold gaming on tribal lands. Indian gaming has promoted tribal self-reliance – supporting education, infrastructure, health care, housing and other vital resources for our people. In return, Indian tribes have upheld our commitment to California – operating well-regulated gaming on tribal lands to benefit Indian peoples and all Californians.
Online sports betting would hurt California tribes, and voters should ban it
For the past 20 years, California voters have repeatedly stood with Indian tribes as we’ve sought to authorize and uphold gaming on tribal lands. Indian gaming has promoted tribal self-reliance, supporting education, infrastructure, health care, housing and other vital resources for our people. In return, Indian tribes have upheld our commitment to California: Operating well-regulated gaming on tribal lands that benefits Indian peoples and all Californians.
Opinion: California and its Indian Tribes Would Be Losers if Online Gambling Is Permitted
Photo via Pixabay For the past 20 years, California voters have repeatedly stood with Indian tribes as we’ve sought to authorize and uphold gaming on tribal lands. Indian gaming has promoted tribal self-reliance — supporting education, infrastructure, health care, housing and other vital resources for our people. In return, Indian tribes have upheld our commitment to California — operating well-regulated gaming on tribal lands that benefits Indian peoples and all Californians.
Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors
For the first time in more than twenty-five years, Greg Sarris—whose novels are esteemed alongside those of Louise Erdrich and Stephen Graham Jones—presents a book about his own life. In Becoming Story he asks: What does it mean to be truly connected to the place you call home—to walk where innumerable generations of your ancestors have walked? And what does it mean when you dedicate your life to making that connection even deeper?
How a Mountain Was Made: Stories
By Greg Sarris In the tradition of Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Greg Sarris, author of the award-winning novel Grand Avenue, turns his attention to his ancestral homeland of Sonoma Mountain in Northern California.
Oakland Native
Elena Seibert By the end of the first chapter of “There There,” Tommy Orange’s debut novel, I experienced a familiar feeling. It last struck me when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, “The Sympathizer,” a thrill that comes from two simultaneous realizations. First: This book is important — socially, culturally, even politically. Second: Forget importance — this is great writing, period. “There There” follows the intersecting lives of Native Americans in Oakland.
The Legends of Sonoma Mountain
Wildfires whipped by hurricane-level winds in Northern California this month destroyed woodlands and homes on Sonoma Mountain, the ancestral land of Coast Miwok and Pomo Indians. As fires and wind blackened slopes and forced evacuations Greg Sarris, award-winning novelist and tribal chair of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, was just publishing his new book, How a Mountain Was Made, inspired by creation tales of his people. There are lessons here for us all from this story for all ages.
Greg Sarris & Robert McNally - An Evening in Conversation (Corte Madera Store)
In the tradition of Calvino's Italian Folktales, Greg Sarris, author of the award-winning novel Grand Avenue, turns his attention to his ancestral homeland of Sonoma Mountain in Northern California.
Native American Perspectives: featuring Greg Sarris & Robert Aquinas McNally
East Bay Booksellers welcomes Greg Sarris (How a Mountain Was Made) and Robert McNally (The Modoc War) to discuss their recent works on Wednesday, May 2nd at 7pm. About How a Mountain Was Made In the tradition of Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Greg Sarris, author of the award-winning novel Grand Avenue, turns his attention to his ancestral homeland of Sonoma Mountain in Northern California.
The Charms and History of Tolay Lake Park
Before visiting Tolay Lake, check details with Sonoma County Regional Parks A relative told me that when she saw Tom Smith’s charmstone, she was temporarily blinded and felt instantly faint—its power was that overwhelming. The charmstone, an oblong, smoothly carved rock figure, about an inch and a half in length, was loosed from Tom Smith’s “doctoring kit,” which had been stored in a drawer at UC Berkeley’s Lowie Museum for decades following his death in 1934.
The Last Woman From Petaluma
Detail of a photo of a young Pomo woman | Photo: Edward S. Curtis Her Indian name, or at least one of her Indian names, the only one any of us know, was Tsupu. She was my great-great-grandfather’s mother, or my great-great-great grandmother, and, again as far as any of us know, the last native of Petaluma, not the city we know today, but the ancient Coast Miwok village of the same name. Certainly, she was the last to pass down any memory of the place.
Close to Home: Dismayed by promotion of deputy in shooting
The entire Tribal Council of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and I were shocked and dismayed to read that Erick Gelhaus, the Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy who shot and killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez in 2013, has been promoted to sergeant. There are still enough unresolved questions about the shooting to make any promotion of Deputy Gelhaus premature if not outright wrong.
Slavery extended to Indians as well as Africans
Slavery extended to Indians as well as Africans When we think of slavery in America, we think of Africans stolen from their homeland. But Indians were enslaved as well, in what has become a hidden chapter in our history.
Tribal Sovereignty is an Inherent Right
Tribal sovereignty is not something the U.S. government invented or bestowed upon tribes. It is an inherent right that existed long before European contact. For instance, hundreds of years ago, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of six tribes in what is now New York and Canada created their own “Great Law of Peace,” which established principles of tribal interaction, justice and civil authority, by which all still live.
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