You weren't there!

So many internet rumors flew around the world while I was happily in the woods. From a few days before spring council started until the end of cleanup I was surrounded by helpful loving family working together to take care of everything with which we needed to deal.  

I had the privilege of working with many people I had barely known before this year and now are my life-long favorite gatherers. People I had known for years stepped up in major ways to feed family, communicate with those outside the gathering, helped with cleanup, and lent a hand where ever help was needed. Thank you to everyone on the land for creating such an amazing if unique experience.

IMHO, the major negatives of this year's gathering were all the people who weren't there spreading rumors and slandering those of us who were gathering. It breaks my heart to think that people are outside the gathering spreading vicious rumors about things they knew nothing about. Not to mention the hateful things some people said to locals in the area and the indigenous people who were on gathering related Facebook pages and Zoom calls. This is horrible to me. How can we be a peace and healing gathering if people talk shit online?

Luckily for me, most of the shit talkers were hiding behind keyboards and I was in the woods with kind and loving people. However, the face gatherers presented to the world did not earn us a gold star.

I understand how difficult it is to not be on the land with your family when the rumors starting flying around and you don't know what to believe and what not to believe. All I ask is that you trust your family on the land. Trust that we are walking in a peaceful and loving manner. 

Now that "we" is a problem because some of "us" are still learning the way of peace and love and may be stuck in patterns of hate and fear. Remember, they are humans who need to heal even though I desperately want to give some of my family time out until they learn their manners. Unfortunately, some gatherers were horrid to people on-line and I feel that we need to address this as a family.  

All this being said, here is a high-level timeline of how things unfolded.

After fall council, people started meeting regularly on Zoom to discuss fire safety and tribal relations. These two separate efforts met weekly until spring council.  For a high-level update on the Tribal Outreach Project, click here.  

Fire Safety

Smoking tins to prevent forest fires were widely distributed at both meadows. Most kitchens came prepared to cook on propane and when the fire restrictions came into effect, the gathering was ready and rocking on propane.  Thank you to everyone who adapted to the climate crises. As we said on the land, Darwin's theory of evolution is that those who can adapt, survive.

People created new and original ideas on what a "bliss pit" is and were able to make sacred space without burning wood.  Was it easy and smooth?  Hell no!  Lots of discussions, disagreements, and drama but we did it. We gathered without fire, just like we did in Arizona in 1998.  We got this my beautiful family. After all IMHO, being together is more important than burning wood.

Wondering when various NorCal forest implemented fire restrictions?  Check out these links:

Plumas National Forest Stage 1 Fire Restrictions - June 24, 2024

Plumas National Forest Stage 2 Fire Restrictions - July 12, 2024

Tahoe National Forest - July 1, 2024.

El Dorado National Forest - July 3, 2024

Stanislaus National Forest - July 9, 2024  

Sierra National Forest - July 10, 2024

Shasta-Trinity National Forest - July 12, 2024

Modoc National Forest - July 16, 2024

Lassen National Forest - July 17, 2024

When I was a young'un, California fire season usually started the end of July or early August and went through October. As of 10:10 AM on 7/26/24, here is the CalFire incident map for 2024 to date.  

Granted, the Plumas National Forest, especially in Meadow 1, had a lower fire risk July 1-7,  and I am guessing the fire restrictions came in early because of the gathering.

 

Meet and Greet

On June 22nd we had a Meet and Greet for the community at Memorial Park in Susanville starting at 6 PM. Unfortunately, one of the gatherers who showed up early was not well versed in the ways of peace and by the time I arrived just before 6 PM, the meeting was nothing but shouting and yelling. This one gatherer turned what could have been the opportunity for create connections between gathering participants and the community into what I would call a shit show. I am asking my family who cannot stay in their peace path no matter what comes to them to not attend Meet and Greets anymore. The damage that was done was huge. While at this time I can't prove that it lead to the closure order on Meadow 1, it sure didn't help. Plus this same person continued to be disrespectful on-line.   How do we as a family prevent one person from destroying the connections we worked so hard to create?   At what point do we stop tolerating this behavior?  I don't have the answers, but hard work by many, many people was blown out of the water by one wingnut.

Tribal Relations

As mentioned above, a lot of work was put into tribal relations. I believe that the only other gathering in which family put so much effort into tribal outreach was South Dakota in 2015. 

We connected with the Winnemem Wintu in the spring and had positive conversations about the Antiques Road Show in 2015 as well as scouting efforts for this year's gathering.

Thanks to everyone's hard work, we had an in-person meeting with the Pit River Tribal Council in Burney, CA on May 28th and then had the pleasure of Pit River Tribal Members joining us for Spring Council on the land on June 15th. While both meetings involved stern language from the indigenous communities, the Pit River Tribal Chair thanked us for coming out of respect to meet with them. 

The folks who came to Spring Council shared their heartsong with us and much learning and growth took place between indigenous and non-indigenous folks.  This was a huge and positive outcome since in 1984 and 2004 that gathering took place on the land of the Hammawi band of the Pit River Tribe.  The Pit River Tribe was very angry about those gatherings and made it clear both times that they did not want is there. While they did not want us to gather on their land in 2024, they are open to maybe re-evaluting in 20 or 40 years how they feel about us gathering on their homelands.

We had a working relationship with the Susanville Indian Rancheria (SIR) -- a confederated tribe of Pit River, Washoe, Paiute and Maidu peoples.  We met with them multiple times and had great conversations about what a gathering is, how we clean up, and other important topics. We were asked by a staff member to stay out of the upper meadow at the first gathering location and we honored that request. A staff member from the SIR did a walk through of both meadows 1 and 2 at the end of cleanup and indicated he was "satisfied" with our cleanup efforts. He thought everything looked good. 

Despite outreaching to the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu people in February, March, and June, individual communication did not happen. This led some members of the Greenville Rancheria to feel that we ignored them.

We totally missed the existence of the Maidu Summit Consortium (MSC) until late on June 17th, after we had landed on Meadow 1. This is very unfortunate. However, this non-profit has on it's board of directors individuals from the Greenville Rancheria and Susanville Indian Rancheria. Perhaps we broke protocol by not contacting MSC directly, yet it seems that there was a communication breakdown not only between the Tribal Outreach Project and the MSC, but within member tribes of the MSC. 

Vision Council on the land wrote a letter to the MSC. Despite numerous attempts to deliver it in person, the MSC has not yet responded to our request for an in-person meeting (originally made on 7/11/24) to deliver the letter (as of 7/26/24). Therefore, the letter was left under the door of the MSC offices in Chester and a copy was emailed on July 12th. You can find the text of the letter here.

Folks on the Tribal Outreach Project gave every person we contacted our personal contact information but trying to get busy people to engage with us was very challenging.

Scouting

Thanks to the hard work of people who went scouting this year. 

At spring council, we had three sites in California on the table. 

The site from 2004 (see tribal relations rap above), a small site near Lake Davis in Plumas National Forest, and the middle sized site above Janesville (at just under 7,000 foot elevation) in Plumas National Forest.  

As a reminder, the consensus from 2023 was "We invite all to gather, on the land currently known as California. If no safe and viable location can be used there, we invite all to the Ouachita National Forest or the Black-Kettle National Grasslands. If no viable option can be found there, we invite all to gather on the land currently known as the state of Washington." 

Because we had plenty of snow and rain coming into June, we had to push back the spring council dates by five days to allow folks with boots on the ground to walk some of the sites since they were under a lot of snow.  Then an unseasonable and long lasting heat dome landed over the central part of California in early June and things dried out much quicker then they would have otherwise. However, the site near Janesville we selected was moist and green with low fire danger even on July 15 when I was last there. 

Folks at Spring Council wrote an Interim Operating Plan.

Spring Council reached consensus to go to the Janesville site now know as Meadow 1 on Monday, June 17th. That evening a copy of the Interim Operating Plan and instructions on how to obtain the exact location of the gathering were faxed to the District Ranger at the Mt. Hough district of the Plumas National Forest.

How we got to Meadow 2 is outside the scope of this blog post as I don't have that information yet and was not involved in the movie since I remained on Meadow 1 for a minute. I do know that folks managed to stand up an entire gathering in less than 48 hours. Family rocked it!  Everyone worked together to make the best of the new site, set up kitchens quickly, and the gathering rolled on.

Meadow 2 was the site of the Beckworth Complex fire in 2021 and was covered with living and dead trees, all of which had been burned somewhat. It was also lower elevation just under 6,000 feet and very hot most days.

The USFS had no interested in meeting with gathering participants on the land at any point. We never had a circle with them like normal, they never brought their concerns to any circles of people with the exception of one person who they spoke with every day.  Unfortunately, this created the impression of a "leader" to the USFS.

Meadow 1 Closure Order

On June 26th, Forest Supervisor Chris Carlton issued a closure order prohibiting people from being at the Meadow 1 area. 

Two days of heartsong counciling occurred on June 26th and 27th during which people shared their individual perspectives on the legal system and what the USFS would or wouldn't do.  Many of us who received tickets are planning on fighting the tickets and taking legal action. This will end up being a separate blog post.  IMHO, what we should have done was come up with a collective strategy on how to respond and a collective strategy on how we wanted to message the situation to family not yet on the land. IMHO, we failed miserably on both counts. I am as much to blame as anyone for this failure. 

A couple of theories about the closure order. One is that Jason Ingram is running for re-election and was grand standing to prove he could stop the gathering (he didn't). Some of us think he has a close relationship with the Plumas National Forest Supervisor Chris Carlton and pressured him to try to shut us down.  Another theory I have is that Carlton is so proud of his logging operation in the Plumas National Forest for which he proudly told me is the only forest in the nation to get a grant to remove trees.   This was a breaking issue as we gathered. Learn more from the folks at Feather River Action.

If you want to see a video regarding June 28 how the USFS started enforcing the closure order for one person from Meadow 1.  In the end, the only people who were arrested were those who refused to give their names and contact information. Most of us got tickets -- some of them were mandatory court appearance and some are not.

Thank you to the folks for making these videos!

Video About the Ticket Giving on June 28th.

Loving Gathering Meadow 2 

If you missed the amazing people who co-created a loving and beautiful gathering in just two days, check out this great video that will do more than I ever can to share with you the love!

I will share some cleanup photos in a separate post another day as this post has gone on long enough!

I love each and every one of you who did the work of co-creating two amazing gatherings in California.  If you have suggestions, please act on them next year!