Heidi Walters

Mel Stokes, with graying dark hair and a mischievous grin, wears a fine, rust-colored felt hat and sits, at this moment, on a picnic table at Sumeg Village. He is a Yurok from the Pecwan and Swregon villages on the lower Klamath River, reached by a road that dead-ends at a place called Johnsons. "They call it a highway, but I call it Indian Road 1, or Yurok 1," says Stokes. "I've been reading those Tony Hillerman books, and the Navajo, they've got the ‘Navajo Road'."

His heart is still in those places, Pecwan and Swregon. But, he says, he sleeps in Eureka." Stokes has subsistence fished at Moore Rock all of his life. Moore was his grandmother's maiden name. "It's two miles up from Pecwan Creek, way up [on the Klamath River]. I used to go down there and set my net and catch salmon. And I'd go to the mouth of the river for eel, and also dip for candle fish. Each fish that comes in from the ocean comes in at different times. January and February it's the eels. The salmon, there's three seasons: spring, summer, and the hookbills [King salmon, in the fall]. We have a name for salmon: nepuy. But that's like the generic term; each kind has its own name, too."

Stokes' daughter Stella--long sandy hair in braids, pale blue eyes--sits quietly on the picnic table next to him, listening to him talk to the stranger. She seems a little bored, a little too cool for all this--but patient. She just finished performing, with a number of other young Yurok women and men, some slow, hypnotic traditional dances, the women in white hide dresses stitched with white shells that tinkled as they moved.

Now she's changed back into teenager clothes, and she wants to talk about Harry Potter. She's obsessed with Harry Potter. She has a button bearing his visage on her purse, and a button that says "UK." Because of Harry, she's obsessed with punk rock. She wants to live in the UK (because of Harry)--or San Francisco, having gotten hooked on the place on a recent Girl Scout trip where she "bridged" from one scout level to the next by walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, far above the ocean.

But Stella has been doing the traditional Yurok dances and dress walks since she was eight years old. Even so, she says, until today the last time she did a dance was probably last year.

"Now I'm not being as active in my culture as much," she says. "Maybe it's because I'm busier, or lazy. Now I have school and friends. And Harry Potter. But now that I'm growing up, I'm going to see if I can balance that better."

The question of the ocean elicits a shrug from her. She shares a conundrum: "Even though I'm aquaphobic--I'm afraid of being in water--the ocean is where I am, who I am," she says. "I've lived here all my life, so I'm sort of adapted to it."

It's true the younger generation has more distractions, more things to pull them in away from their culture. At the same time, there's significant activity within the tribe, including language and culture lessons in the schools, to help them maintain their ties to home. And the older generation is helping with that.

Dale Ann Frye Sherman is a border daughter--half Yurok (from the Klamath River) and half Tolowa (from the Smith River, some 70-plus miles upcoast). For her, the ocean is "identity."

"It's our boundary to our Yurok world. And it's place. It tells us where we are in the world.

"In Yurok, all the rocks were named. The rocks up the river, up trails, and off the coast. So we always knew where we were in the world. And the ocean is one of our boundaries. And it's a source of life.

"I curate at the Clark Historical Museum [in Eureka] and teach at Humboldt State University--Native American cultures and history. And I also teach a female warriors class. I talk about balance in the world. Women have a place and roles in the world. We move in and out of these roles--sometimes we're warriors, and sometimes we're not. I encourage people to be aware of what's around them. It's so easy to walk through life and not see what's around you.

"Humboldt County, Del Norte--this was a paradise before Euro-Americans. We Yurok and Tolowa people don't believe that we're separate from the environment. We're part of the environment. We're here to be stewards. And we're not able to do that with the coming of the Euro-Americans.