Green Gal

Happy Earth Week! I was invited to speak at my high school, Amador Valley High School, in celebration of Earth Week today. It's been awhile since I visited the place where I spent four years of my life learning and exploring my identity as an environmentalist. I actually started this blog while attending Amador Valley High School! Below is the text of my speech that I used as a reference this afternoon. What I actually said varied slightly, but here's the gist: Hello, my name is Melissa Ott, and I graduated from Amador in 2010. I’d like to thank the organizers of Earth Week for inviting me to speak to you all today. Before I begin, I would like to a take a moment to acknowledge that we are standing on indigenous land and honor the Muwekma-Ohlone people who cared for this beautiful valley for generations before it was settled and renamed Pleasanton. The descendants of the Ohlone are still alive today, some of them in the Bay Area working to gain recognition and access to their...

Tule rope braided at camp. The white rope is made solely from the interior fibers of the tule plant, and the green ones are from the outside part of the plant. Experimentation in rope-making during lunch! Valley oak gall toys. The one on the left is a deer, made by Green Gal. The one on the right is a turtle, which was tragically abandoned by a camper at the end of the day. I rescued it and put them on my shelf, next to the tule rope. The native people of this area used to make toy animals out of Valley oak tree galls, like these pictured. The kids had a blast at camp making helicopter toys, hats, snowmen, and fun animals with their oak galls. What do you make from nature's arts and crafts supply?

It's only the second day of nature camp, and as a counselor I have already spent many hours of my free time after work studying things that I have missed so much during the past school year of papers and assigned readings... Last night, I studied Ohlone culture for an hour or two, taking notes for a lesson that I am facilitating on Friday about technology (mortar and pestle, bow and arrow, nets, snares, hot rocks, etc.), the natural landscape as it was 200 years ago in my hometown and surrounding area, and medicinal and useful plants. These are topics I avidly studied in high school on my own, back when I had more free time. Once I create the lesson plan for Friday, perhaps I'll post it here so others can use it, too. Tonight, I spent some time re-reading the biography of Opal Whiteley, an inspiring American nature enthusiast and writer who at the age of 5 began writing a nature diary in the woods near her home in Oregon. She was a remarkable person, and I remember being ve...

I have been visiting the Alviso Adobe Community Park in Pleasanton, CA, since it opened in 2008. This video documents my amazing journey of learning experiences there, and it also serves as a way to share about the park's history and beauty. I have written a lot on this blog about my experiences at the park. Please click here to view those posts.

I'm currently writing a History of Art and Visual Culture essay on Native American photographic representations in the early twentieth century, so I've been reading through old essays and notes I have from various American Studies courses I took last year. As I was reading through this paper I wrote for a Native American studies class, I realized I hadn't posted it to my blog, so I figured I'd share it now. When the Ohlone Native Americans of the Monterey and San Francisco bay areas first encountered Spanish explorers like Captain Pedro Fages and missionary Juan Crespí in the 1770s (Brown 1), they had never before seen such “light-skinned creatures” (Margolin Ohlone 158), nor their glass beads, metal or mules; they concluded that the Europeans were “children of the Mule—a…powerful animal-god” that “had blessed them with stupendous magical powers” (158). Years later, the Ohlone recounted this initial impression to missionaries. By then, they had for years been virtually ...

At nine o'clock this morning, I put a pair of binoculars around my neck and stuffed a small red notebook into my pocket before setting off with a group of four other UCSC students led by UCSC Museum of Natural History curator Chris Lay. I had signed up for this Natural History of the UCSC Campus one-day class last quarter, but it had been cancelled due to rain. Today, even with the threat of snow, the class was still on. It was chilly but fortunately not raining as we set off from the UCSC Recreation Department toward the East Field. After introductions, Chris asked if there was anything we particularly wanted to see. An environmental studies major named Shannon, who I talked with throughout the hike, said "any mammals other than deer and ground squirrels." We all laughed because moments before we had seen about 25 ground squirrels on the hill by Stevenson College, and deer are ubiquitous throughout the campus. Chris said he hoped today's hike would take us places w...

In my many years of encounters with the performing arts, I had never experienced hip-hop theater before Sunday night when I attended a performance at The 418 Project on Mission Street in downtown Santa Cruz. The theatrical performance, entitled FreeLand , took place during the second half of a benefit evening for Black Mesa/Big Mountain Dine (Navajo) Native residents in northeastern Arizona. I'm hesitant to write about the Black Mesa situation, as I know very little about it. Essentially, the United States has been trying to relocate the Dine people for thirty or so years in order to access coal deposits under their homes. It's highly controversial, and these people have refused to leave their land. A group of people working with the Black Mesa Indigenous Support group is caravanning to the Black Mesa/Big Mountain reservation this month to provide support to the people who live there. I'm going to research the situation so I have a better understanding of what happened and...

It's raining in Santa Cruz this morning. Outside is foggy and wet, while I'm nice and warm in my dorm room. Perfect for story time! Last Wednesday, I received an email from a woman who works with the Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz. I had learned about the museum while searching online, and was planning on riding my bike there on Thursday anyway, so her timing was perfect. She'd come across my blog and thought I'd be interested in volunteering and helping with a project. She wrote, You might want to consider volunteering with us. We are going to be creating an Ohlone garden with CA native plants that grow locally and were used for food, dye, basketry, medicine. So we need to make a list of such plants and their uses. Any help you might give us would be appreciated. Let me know if you would like to work on such a list. Of course, I told her I'm interested, so I met with her on Thursday when I visited. She gave me a tour of the Ohlone exhibit in the museum, which...

It's been quite rainy here in Santa Cruz this past week, and tonight's rain has been quite talkative...whispering drip-drops and pitter-patters all over the ground for hours. In a world devoid of concrete, the noises rain makes would be quite different. Living in a small dwelling like an Ohlone tule hut would bring you right into the middle of the rain. We live in houses with hard, thick surfaces that create drumming noises and separate us from the world of rain. A tule home would muffle the falling drops' noises, and the damp earth all around would cushion the rain's landing. The smells would be so pungent. Imagine falling asleep in warm deerskin and furs, hearing and smelling the rain as it falls right outside the thin walls of your tule home. Many years ago, before students dwelled on this forested hill, people lived like this, closer to the rain and in some ways, more in tune with that cycle of rain, nourishment and growth. Many people see the rain for its wetness, ...

I always forget that I know how to draw and that I actually enjoy it. When I was little I drew like crazy, but as I got older I drew less and less. Every once in a while I draw something and remember that I can. It's not that I can draw really well (as my sister PawPrint can), but I can at least get my point across sufficiently. So yesterday after I posted the drawings I'd made in December , I thought I might as well take pencil to paper and make another addition to my Miwok Picture Language Book. I brought my Native American and Miwok books downstairs to our coffee table and began sketching, looking up words and images when needed. I copied the roundhouse from a drawing in a book published through Columbia Junior College called "Miwok" that Alexys's grandmother let me borrow. I collected the words from various sources: Alexys's knowledge of the Miwok language, the internet , Deeper Than Gold , the "Miwok" book, and a pamphlet from the Stanislaus Na...