Support for Intertribal Gatherings · An invitation to invest
In 2029 the era that began when the Indians of All Tribes took Alcatraz turns sixty. We are asking you to put a three-month tribal artist's residency on the beach at the Golden Gate to mark it — and we have marked every decade of that era since 1999.
The water brings a fluidity and the power of being outside stolen land — which is an advantage for our creativity.Neil MacLean, co-director
Most tribal groups hold water songs — songs to different fish, songs to particular places, history songs about what happened there. The people dedicated to watercraft are the ones who know them.
Water Songs does not collect those. It commissions new ones. This is a call for people to be inspired in the present, singing on water, at the place where most of California leaves the continent.
The proposition
A tribal artist's residency in Yelamu — at Crissy Field, at the Golden Gate — proposed for 2029 by the Golden Gate Canoe Family: Mary Jean Robertson, Neil MacLean and Robert Rogers.
Built on the beach, and standing for the season. It is the ground the other three elements need, and a place that can hold ceremonies our Pomo and Mi'wuk neighbours bring — and displaced tribal groups too, such as the Cherokee, whose Going to Water Ceremony belongs in a village on a shore.
The most sacred Ohlone ceremonies, held at the village — with the Ohlone, if they agree, as our hosts. This is not a performance programme. It is the return of ceremony to a shoreline it was removed from.
Paddling down the water and in through the Gate, with a coming-ashore ceremony at the end. Which craft is genuinely open — Chumash tomols, a thirty-foot tule craft, canoes from Cherokee country, Hawaiian or Polynesian outriggers, Salish dugouts — and the openness is the invitation.
Online and in a gallery at the Presidio, on the theme of Interdependence and Mutual Respect — including a challenge to the Nisqually cultural department to make work celebrating sixty years of it.
The place
At the Presidio you can see an entire watershed at once — ridge, spring, wetland, marsh, tide, all in a single view. Two of those creeks reach the salt marsh, and those two are the ones this project honours.
Then there is the other scale. Say the Golden Gate and you no longer mean a marsh — you mean most of a state, from Mount Shasta to the southern valley. Five watersheds flow through the Gate into the Pacific.
Twelve or thirteen of the treaties signed with California Indians in 1851 and 1852 were signed on water that comes down and goes out through here. Those eighteen treaties would have set aside a seventh of California as Native homeland. The Senate refused to ratify them and ordered them kept secret; they stayed buried for fifty years. The water that ran past those signings still arrives at this beach, every day, and has never stopped.
That is what a residency at the Golden Gate can say that a residency anywhere else cannot.
We are not citizens so much as we are participants in a waterway. A watershed. It changes how you think of your relations to people upstream and downstream.Neil MacLean
The record
Support for Intertribal Gatherings was formed to bring Ohlone culture back to San Francisco. Its founders have marked each ten years of the era that began at Alcatraz — publicly, in the city, with Ohlone people leading.
Trudell spoke on We All Come from Tribes. Mary Jean Robertson was in the audience and afterwards asked Neil MacLean whether he would honour the Ohlone people who are the original inhabitants of this city. He agreed on the spot, and that partnership has produced events, art exhibits, film projections, radio shows and Ohlone-led ceremonies ever since.
Five Ohlone artists co-produced five short films, projected onto one of San Francisco's most prominent structures, with the audio and live interviews with Ohlone leaders broadcast from the tower's parking lot over Mary Jean Robertson's radio programme. Coit Tower stands above Pier 33, where the ferry leaves for the Alcatraz Sunrise Ceremony — so the people waiting for that boat looked up and saw Ohlone films on the skyline.
Support for Intertribal Gatherings hosted the Pajaro Valley Ohlone Indian Council and members of the Sacramento Intertribal Mi'wok at Aquatic Park, where Salish canoes and a tule boat launched to mark fifty years since the end of Termination.
Three months at Crissy Field. Four elements. And through those months, support for other tribal ceremonies, art, history and cultural education — widening the ties between Ohlone people and tribal groups across the region, including from Salish territory.
Already committed
In July and August of 2026 we brought thirty members of the Shingle Springs Rancheria and the Pajaro Intertribal Indian Council north to the Canoe Journey potlatch at Medicine Creek, hosted by the Nisqually, so they could witness the ceremony practised there. By the last night in the potlatch campground, all thirty had agreed to join the Golden Gate Canoe Family.
The preparation is already running. Culture Camp with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz. A dance arena and bear ceremony at Rob Hill Campground in the Presidio. Big Time at Shingle Springs Rancheria. A three-day Water Songs vocal rehearsal at Ya Ka Ama this autumn. In 2027, a paddle from the Sierra foothills to Crissy Field, with support expected from Rios to Rivers — the group that trained the Klamath expedition.
We say plainly what we bring and what we do not. There are no federally recognised Ohlone tribes. The Mi'wuk and Pomo groups are small beside the Nisqually, the Lummi, the Quinault. We come wanting to learn, and asking for companionship as we take our next steps with watercraft and with cultural presence as tribal peoples.
Where your investment goes
Four things carry cost, and each one is a place a funder can stand. Singers, dancers and culture-bearers are paid for their work; they are not volunteers.
Building the replica village on the beach and holding it for the season, and paying the culture-bearers who bring the Big Time dance and the Bear Ceremony to it.
Figure attaches from the development budgetCraft, training, safety, transport and crew for the paddle down from the Sierra foothills and in through the Gate — and the coming-ashore ceremony at the end of it.
Figure attaches from the development budgetCommissions to tribal artists, gallery costs at the Presidio, and the online exhibition that carries the work past the three months and past the city.
Figure attaches from the development budget2026 and 2027 are not warm-up. They are the gatherings, the rehearsals and the relationships that make a three-month residency in 2029 possible at all — and they need support now, not in 2028.
Figure attaches from the development budgetFigures are held in the project's development budget and attach to a proposal rather than a web page, so that every funder sees costs current to the year they are giving in. Ask and we will send it the same week.
The invitation
At this stage we ask three things, in this order.
Know our intentions. That alone matters — a project of this length survives on people who understood it before it was fundable.
Invest in the preparation, not only the event. The 2029 residency is built out of what happens in 2026 and 2027. Support arriving now buys more than the same support arriving later.
Consider joining the expedition. Funders are welcome on the water. This is a project you can be inside rather than only underwrite.
It is from the Salish journeys that we learned the healing power of watercraft, and we want to call for its support as we pull into the future.