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Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California
A chronicle of fifty years of deep hanging out in California’s Indian country!
"Deep Hanging Out is a vibrant testament to one man’s commitment to nurturing community and dancing with change." —Terry Tempest Williams
Writer and publisher Malcolm Margolin has been "deep hanging out"—or immersing himself in a social, informal way—in California's Indian country since the 1970s. This volume collects thirty articles, introductions, and other pieces he wrote about California's diverse Indian country (well over one hundred tribes), drawn mainly from the quarterly magazine he cofounded in 1987, News from Native California. He shares with his readers the experiences, knowledge, and cultural renewal that California Indians have generously shared with him, often after years of friendship, from the erection of a ceremonial enclosure in Northern California—built to fall apart within a generation so that the knowledge of how to construct one is always current—to a visit by aboriginal Hawaiians in diplomatic recognition of native Southern Californian tribes. He draws on both archives and interviews with elders in longer reports about leadership traditions, pedagogical techniques, and conservation practices in various parts of the state—fascinating glimpses into worldviews very different from those of contemporary America. Filled with insight and affection, as well as some of the most gorgeous writing,Deep Hanging Out will appeal both to newcomers and to those whose roots and hearts reside in the state’s Indian country.
"Deep Hanging Out is a vibrant testament to one man’s commitment to nurturing community and dancing with change." —Terry Tempest Williams
Writer and publisher Malcolm Margolin has been "deep hanging out"—or immersing himself in a social, informal way—in California's Indian country since the 1970s. This volume collects thirty articles, introductions, and other pieces he wrote about California's diverse Indian country (well over one hundred tribes), drawn mainly from the quarterly magazine he cofounded in 1987, News from Native California. He shares with his readers the experiences, knowledge, and cultural renewal that California Indians have generously shared with him, often after years of friendship, from the erection of a ceremonial enclosure in Northern California—built to fall apart within a generation so that the knowledge of how to construct one is always current—to a visit by aboriginal Hawaiians in diplomatic recognition of native Southern Californian tribes. He draws on both archives and interviews with elders in longer reports about leadership traditions, pedagogical techniques, and conservation practices in various parts of the state—fascinating glimpses into worldviews very different from those of contemporary America. Filled with insight and affection, as well as some of the most gorgeous writing,Deep Hanging Out will appeal both to newcomers and to those whose roots and hearts reside in the state’s Indian country.
- GenresIndigenousNonfiction
264 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 6, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 19, 2023
Greatest Hits. This is a collection of Malcolm’s most eloquent and influential essays, mostly originally published in News from Native California.
December 6, 2021
Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California is a truly wonderful collection of Malcolm Margolin’s forewords to books he’s published at Heyday, selections from his own books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, and many of his articles and interviews from News from Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to California’s Indigenous peoples, founded by Malcolm, David Peri, and Vera Mae Fredrickson in March of 1987.
“Ah, Berkeley, a place of bookstores, libraries, coffeehouses, and (at that time) surrounded by large amounts of open space,” he waxes. A marvelous jumping-off place and welcoming hearth for his many meanderings and meetings in between 40 years leading Heyday, the independent nonprofit publisher and cultural institution which he founded in 1974 when he self-published his The East Bay Out: A Personal Guide to the East Bay Regional Parks, and his now maybe even more marvelous dot-org, California Institute for Community, Art & Nature.
Born in 1940, Malcolm Margolin came to Berkeley with his wife Rina in 1970 after two years hippieing around North America in a VW bus, and has been here ever since. He had grown up in a Jewish section of Boston where the older generation spoke Yiddish and “Jews, like Indians, have a long history of being rejected and oppressed…have experienced genocide…practicing a spirituality and using a language not readily available to others…Food and other traditions bound us together; a sense of tribalism prevailed.”
He says, as well, “I was constantly surprised,” as he “hung out” with N. CA Indians; probably because people could sense his kindness, honesty and curiosity; speaking to him in ways they would not have spoken to others; revealing themselves because they knew he would represent them clearly and fairly.
But represent them, he does; and by doing so, as well as researching news reports, ethnographies and settler histories; he is mirroring thourselves as colonizers more clearly back to us in contrast, often demythologized of Savior and Lone Ranger heroics. In the belly of the Hearst Museum with three regalia-making Indian families among the “woodpecker-feather headdresses, obsidian blades of great size and rare color, white deer skins, civet-skin kilts, dentalia necklaces,” of his article on “Wealth and Spirit (1993),” for example, he gently and patiently explains:
“It is difficult for outsiders to understand regalia (ceremonial/ritual/dance adornments) and the role it plays in the lives of the Native people of northwestern California. The dominant culture does not have anything quite like it, and the language and thought structures by which outsiders attempt to describe regalia never quite fit.”
And then he goes on to do so, using the descriptions of the Indians’ responses, the regalia itself; its uses, “being” and “aliveness” in the social contexts of tribal life and spirituality; his feelings and observations as they share, touch, examine “material culture” in the Hearst as Julian Lang explains how “The wealth system of northwestern California brings together the earth, nature and spiritual enlightenment.”…Ending with “a reminder that “we are descended from a people who made beauty and who used that beauty, to fix the world.” Aho!
Reading these pages is like getting 200 miles out of town at night, pulling over, turning off the car, walking out into a meadow, hearing nothing but the wind and looking straight up at the thousands of stars in the sky. We are nothing. We are tiny. We are just a piece of a cosmos that barely cares if we snobby, over-mechanized and material-acculturated humans live or die.
Remember that? We have emotional, biological, neurological and ancestral memories of how that was in the thousands of years we spent in hunter-gatherer times. When life in nature itself was awesome. And being in a small, well-known community of interdependent humans who knew we had to depend on each other and follow the sharing traditions and earth conservation so it all would go on and we could survive. For Native Americans, them, (we/them) it wasn’t that long ago.
If only the missionaries/ settlers/miners had had Margolin’s curiosity, humility, respect, breadth of mind!…The Native Californians even share their grief with him of “What Has Been Lost,” the magnitude of “damage done to traditional culture…” and how “to rebuild the self, one first must come to terms with and acknowledge the fullness of loss.”
They carve out of the darkness, not only with courage, but with song, strength and humor. “Deal with what we have and work with what we have…sense the presence of the ancestors” “standing around saying ‘Listen, they’re singing that song again! Isn’t it great? They’re so cute; they’re singing it all wrong, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. It’s so wonderful.’ In that way, you do have to be careful about how you use the songs and ceremonies. But there’s also that element of intent that is so important in connecting back.”
And in dealing with anger, Greg Sarris tells him what Mabel McKay said, “You’re going to let holes grow in your heart, hatred and poison will grow there, and you’re going to poison yourself and you’re going to poison other people….You have another choice. All the things that have happened to you,” she said, “could become medicine. This is an opportunity to doctor." And more, and more, and more.
From his obvious respect for the individuals, cultural and historical backgrounds of Native Californians; the persistence and generosity of his research, listening to, recording and elegantly writing about their worldviews, experiences and resounding “stories;” I have no doubt of his sincerity and humility in this project. Others may “play Indian,” snatch fragments for the marketplace, further colonize and insult by appropriating and profiteering, but not Malcolm. He could not have heard all this from them without “walking his talk.” By listening, and by choosing so ably what and how to share.
As Vincent Medina told him, “We learn with the heart.” Tappe ta-ak hin-nan. And as he says, “I feel that the Indian world has a great deal to teach the rest of us…Beauty and wisdom abound.”
“Ah, Berkeley, a place of bookstores, libraries, coffeehouses, and (at that time) surrounded by large amounts of open space,” he waxes. A marvelous jumping-off place and welcoming hearth for his many meanderings and meetings in between 40 years leading Heyday, the independent nonprofit publisher and cultural institution which he founded in 1974 when he self-published his The East Bay Out: A Personal Guide to the East Bay Regional Parks, and his now maybe even more marvelous dot-org, California Institute for Community, Art & Nature.
Born in 1940, Malcolm Margolin came to Berkeley with his wife Rina in 1970 after two years hippieing around North America in a VW bus, and has been here ever since. He had grown up in a Jewish section of Boston where the older generation spoke Yiddish and “Jews, like Indians, have a long history of being rejected and oppressed…have experienced genocide…practicing a spirituality and using a language not readily available to others…Food and other traditions bound us together; a sense of tribalism prevailed.”
He says, as well, “I was constantly surprised,” as he “hung out” with N. CA Indians; probably because people could sense his kindness, honesty and curiosity; speaking to him in ways they would not have spoken to others; revealing themselves because they knew he would represent them clearly and fairly.
But represent them, he does; and by doing so, as well as researching news reports, ethnographies and settler histories; he is mirroring thourselves as colonizers more clearly back to us in contrast, often demythologized of Savior and Lone Ranger heroics. In the belly of the Hearst Museum with three regalia-making Indian families among the “woodpecker-feather headdresses, obsidian blades of great size and rare color, white deer skins, civet-skin kilts, dentalia necklaces,” of his article on “Wealth and Spirit (1993),” for example, he gently and patiently explains:
“It is difficult for outsiders to understand regalia (ceremonial/ritual/dance adornments) and the role it plays in the lives of the Native people of northwestern California. The dominant culture does not have anything quite like it, and the language and thought structures by which outsiders attempt to describe regalia never quite fit.”
And then he goes on to do so, using the descriptions of the Indians’ responses, the regalia itself; its uses, “being” and “aliveness” in the social contexts of tribal life and spirituality; his feelings and observations as they share, touch, examine “material culture” in the Hearst as Julian Lang explains how “The wealth system of northwestern California brings together the earth, nature and spiritual enlightenment.”…Ending with “a reminder that “we are descended from a people who made beauty and who used that beauty, to fix the world.” Aho!
Reading these pages is like getting 200 miles out of town at night, pulling over, turning off the car, walking out into a meadow, hearing nothing but the wind and looking straight up at the thousands of stars in the sky. We are nothing. We are tiny. We are just a piece of a cosmos that barely cares if we snobby, over-mechanized and material-acculturated humans live or die.
Remember that? We have emotional, biological, neurological and ancestral memories of how that was in the thousands of years we spent in hunter-gatherer times. When life in nature itself was awesome. And being in a small, well-known community of interdependent humans who knew we had to depend on each other and follow the sharing traditions and earth conservation so it all would go on and we could survive. For Native Americans, them, (we/them) it wasn’t that long ago.
If only the missionaries/ settlers/miners had had Margolin’s curiosity, humility, respect, breadth of mind!…The Native Californians even share their grief with him of “What Has Been Lost,” the magnitude of “damage done to traditional culture…” and how “to rebuild the self, one first must come to terms with and acknowledge the fullness of loss.”
They carve out of the darkness, not only with courage, but with song, strength and humor. “Deal with what we have and work with what we have…sense the presence of the ancestors” “standing around saying ‘Listen, they’re singing that song again! Isn’t it great? They’re so cute; they’re singing it all wrong, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. It’s so wonderful.’ In that way, you do have to be careful about how you use the songs and ceremonies. But there’s also that element of intent that is so important in connecting back.”
And in dealing with anger, Greg Sarris tells him what Mabel McKay said, “You’re going to let holes grow in your heart, hatred and poison will grow there, and you’re going to poison yourself and you’re going to poison other people….You have another choice. All the things that have happened to you,” she said, “could become medicine. This is an opportunity to doctor." And more, and more, and more.
From his obvious respect for the individuals, cultural and historical backgrounds of Native Californians; the persistence and generosity of his research, listening to, recording and elegantly writing about their worldviews, experiences and resounding “stories;” I have no doubt of his sincerity and humility in this project. Others may “play Indian,” snatch fragments for the marketplace, further colonize and insult by appropriating and profiteering, but not Malcolm. He could not have heard all this from them without “walking his talk.” By listening, and by choosing so ably what and how to share.
As Vincent Medina told him, “We learn with the heart.” Tappe ta-ak hin-nan. And as he says, “I feel that the Indian world has a great deal to teach the rest of us…Beauty and wisdom abound.”
December 30, 2021
Such a wonderful book, I love Malcom's writing. I read The Ohlone Way many years ago when he wrote it, having grown up on unceded Ohlone land. Reading about indigenous culture has been a life long interest of mine. I am grateful for all the work the author has done over the years, supporting CA's indigenous peoples.
November 10, 2021
This book would get three stars on my usual rating scale: one for timeliness, two for organization, three because I'm fascinated by what Margolin learned over his many years with Amerindians of the west coast. I give a forth because the author actually shared his insights with us all. I loved much of what he wrote. But the articles from News from Native California were quite variable in quality and I found myself skimming. It is odd to me that with 19 rave review quotes at the beginning that there is only one review here on Goodreads. Were the reviewers simply devoted fans or did they really think the book over the top good?
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews