REACH Cohort member: Humboldt Area Foundation
Client Partner: Stepping Stone Consulting

In 2015, after a storied history of working in movement building (as early as when he was 12 years old, attending his first civil rights demonstration in the 1960s), Ron White took a job at the Humboldt Area Foundation (HAF) with a charge to develop community leadership in the rural Humboldt County and North Coast in California. White was no stranger to small towns. He went to high school in a rural town in northern Wisconsin, where he was one of two Black students. White remembers that the town “actually still had the sundown law” when he lived there.

Humboldt County, his new home, White describes, “has a reputation of liberal libertarianism. People are ecologically conscious.” But as a colleague quips, white residents’ response to racial tension often runs the line of “I recycle. How can I possibly be a racist?” White people still make up about 70% of the population and lead public agencies and local institutions, including HAF. On the other hand, like many parts of the U.S., Humboldt has had and continues to have a significant Indigenous presence. The populations of people of color are also growing, especially the Latinx community. White also remarks that he’s seen an uptick in violence against Asian and LGBTQ people.

Credit: Barry Evans
Caption: This National Historic Landmark plaque on Woodley Island, with Tuluwat Island (formerly Indian Island) in the background, merely refers to “Indian/Gunther Island, Site 67.” No mention is made of the 1860 massacre.

Melissa Meiris, Co-Director of Stepping Stone Consulting, a close collaborator with HAF in their racial equity work, says, “Humboldt County and the North Coast in general has historically been behind the curve relative to the rest of California in racial equity issues. There were small clusters of people who were interested in doing the work, but it was slow to pick up. A larger portion of the County was pretty green at the idea at the time. Ron [White] and the Humboldt Area Foundation were really at the cutting edge of that. They were starting to convene groups of people to build capacity for racial justice in the region.”

To further racial equity work in Humboldt, HAF began to host a series of public education forums on racial equity, the first of which was kicked off by noted law professor john a. powell. The series attracted more people than most expected in a rural environment like Humboldt, and the attendance increased during the series, including some heavy hitters from local public agencies. These institutions were key to culture change in this area because, as White says, they serve the majority of the population in the County, including some of the most marginalized communities.

HAF “leaned heavily into local history” in this political education. White says, “People just don’t realize how government has disadvantaged people of color. White people just think, ‘We made better choices.’ I do think history is really important. If folks don’t understand the origins of the conflict, they have their own story about it. Most of those families who were living on the land were profiting from it, even Humboldt Area Foundation. Folks just don’t even bother to understand how that happened. Maybe a decade or so, someone would mention the massacre that happened in Tuluwat Island, ¹

but it didn’t go very deep and was mainly told from the point of view of ‘it’s a horrible history but what can you do now.’ Same way with the expulsion of the Chinese up here.²”

These historical incidents were not just acts of racist individuals but were sanctioned by state, media, and business interests. The vestiges of this structural violence persist today unexamined.

Credit: Eddy Alexander/City of Eureka
Caption: The Wiyot tribe celebrates the land return in a ceremony on October 21, 2019.

“Getting to that [racial equity] conversation has to begin with historical context, and it has to be told by people who it actually happened to,” says White. “And as people began to claim those stories and say those stories out loud, at least we understand that race is an issue. We also understand that it’s structural. We built on that as a basis.”

For this, White and HAF look toward Indigenous worldviews on restoration and renewal. He explains, “I have nothing but admiration for the tribes up here. They have a method of dealing with conflicts and woundedness. Most of the tribes engage in world renewal ceremonies. In order to participate in those ceremonies, people have to enter into them with a balanced slate…You have to make it right before you can enter them. How can you heal the world if you’re actually moving in broken relationships yourself?

“So their attitude towards the past was, everything that happened was horrible. It was tragic and white people did this to us, first for gold, and then timber and land. They also recognize that we’re all in the same basket. Our health affects your health. Your health affects ours. Our joint health affects the rivers. The river’s health affects the land’s health. We’re all in one basket.

“In a Humboldt State documentary on local Native history, the Wiyot tribal chairman says, ‘They wanted our gold, they wanted our fish, they wanted our timber. If they had asked us, we probably would’ve shared it with them, but all they did was take and kill because they just assumed that we were just like they were.’

“When the Natives here talk about ‘land back,’ they don’t talk about it in terms of ‘give us the land back and get out’. Rather, we’re all stewards of this place. We need to have the ability to actually keep this place healthy. That’s all of our job. They want a say over how things are developed, how the rivers are taken care of, what plants should grow here, and which areas are sacred and should be left alone. Some people did sign over their property to the Wiyot tribe on their own. Others, like Humboldt Area Foundation, pay an honor tax. The Wiyot tribe has never asked for it, but they accept it. It’s really a matter of how you can be good guests to people who have stewarded this land since time immemorial.” ³

Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Caption: Thousands of protesters and members of Native nations marched in Washington, D.C. to oppose the construction of the proposed 1,172 mile Dakota Access Pipeline that runs within a half-mile of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota on March 10, 2017.

The principles of shared governance and stewardship that drive the racial equity work of HAF and its consultants have their roots in these ancestral wisdoms.

Centering Indigenous worldviews led to material changes in HAF leadership, too. White says, “Our Native Cultures Fund, which we’ve started with an endowment to fund Indigenous issues, has been moved to the center of our work. The Program Director of that fund is now the VP [of Strategy, Program, and Community Solutions] for the Foundation.” Two Indigenous people now serve on HAF’s board of directors. White acknowledges this is a substantive turnaround for the Foundation, which for many years did not fund Native projects “because they just assumed the government took care of them.”

The Co-Directors of Stepping Stone Consulting, Melissa Meiris, and Aristea Saulsbury, met in 2017 at an HAF training on racial equity consulting, but they both had been engaged in this work prior to the training. While HAF employed a racial justice framework from Lakeshore Ethnic Diversity Alliance (LEDA) in Michigan, Meiris and Saulsbury used a storytelling strategy to incorporate local and personal histories to make the racial equity work more meaningful to local leaders.

In their workshops and publications on racial equity, Meiris and Saulsbury combine data about policing, education, and health with history of the North Coast, especially “how folks of color have been here and how they have been excluded from this community for generations.” Meriis explains, “ We both bring in our own stories and examples. For Aristea [who traces her ancestry to the Yurok tribe], a lot of the examples have to do with what it was like to be the only Native kid in her class when she was growing up, and the different ways that she has been tokenized…The one feedback that we regularly get is, thank you so much for bringing in the local focus because it makes it so much more meaningful for folks working here.”

Years of pushing racial equity work through political education have started to bear fruits. The involvement of public agencies in the forum series led to Stepping Stone consulting with the Department of Health and Human Services in 2019. Over time Stepping Stone’s work begins to diffuse through different branches within the department, which has about 1,200 staff, accounting for half of County employees in Humboldt.

White says, “It’s just been a huge uptick in terms of people’s comfort talking about race,” Even though the forums did not target local media outlets, White observes that the tone of the media coverage about race has also shifted: “Suddenly they were featuring more people of color. They were talking about not just negative stories, but positive stories. They were talking about history.”