Greg Sarris

Greg Sarris is a college professor, author, screenwriter, and current Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He was chosen in 2005 to fill the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. The Chair was endowed by his tribe.

He was formerly the Fletcher Jones Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles; and a full professor at UCLA for ten years.

Life

Sarris was born in 1952 in Santa Rosa, California. He was adopted by a local couple, George and Mary Sarris. Sarris' claims Native American heritage.

Sarris described how he learned about his birth parents in the early 1980s in his book "Mabel McKay" (pp139-42). He says that he learned that his natural birth mother, Mary Bernadette "Bunny" Hartman was an unmarried, 16-year-old white girl from Laguna Beach, in southern California. She died a few days after his birth from a mismatched blood transfusion. He states that the birth certificate had no name for the father, only the entry "non-White".

According to Sarris in "Mabel McKay", Bunny claimed that the father of her baby was the Mexican stablehand who worked where she kept her horse, but her brother disputed this (based on Sarris' looks) and suggested that the father was more likely to have been a boy called Emilio. Sarris describes looking through yearbooks from his mother's school to locate him:

:Then I saw it. The name. Emilio Hilario. I looked at the picture and saw my face. Darker, yes. But my face all the same. I ended up interviewing over twenty people, and, yes, they confirmed that Emilio was my father. Other girls had gotten pregnant from him also. 'Oh, your mother lover him so, even as wild as he was,' her best friend told me. "Mabel McKay", p. 142.

Sarris located Emilio's Filipino father, who told him his wife had been Indian. He said her mother's father was named Tom Smith. Emilio's mother Evelyn was indeed part mixed Coast Miwok/Pomo (there is European and Hispanic blood in the family lineage), and according to government records of the period,Fact|date=September 2008 Evelyn's father was a white man. According to genealogical records submitted to the federal government by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria,Fact|date=September 2008 Evelyn would have been 5/16th mixed Coast Miwok/Pomo. Her son, Emilio, would have been 5/32d Coast Miwok/Pomo. Assuming that Hilario were Sarris' father, Sarris' blood quantum would be 3/64th to 5/63th mixed Coast Miwok/Pomo, depending on the ancestry of his great-grandmother, Emily Stewart.

Sarris attended local schools through Santa Rosa Junior College, and received a B.A. in 1978 from UCLA, where he also played football. He worked in Hollywood as a model and actor before going to graduate school. He earned a Ph.D. in modern thought and literature at Stanford University in 1988, and returned to UCLA to teach in 1989. [http://madrid.usembassy.gov/irc/gregsarris.pdf "Greg Sarris & the Native American Literature",] "Contemporary Authors Online," The Gale Group, 2000.]

The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria

Sarris began organizing what would become the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in 1992. According to the FIGR website:

"In 1992, when Greg was beginning his teaching career at UCLA as an assistant professor, he got word of a tribe attempting to establish a casino at Tomales Bay. This tribe was not Coast Miwok or Southern Pomo ("note: It did purport to be Southern Pomo, a gneral classification as large in breadth as "Sioux", and encompassing many, many different tribes".)and was well out of its territory. Greg immediately notified and consulted with Tribal elders, and soon after called the first meeting to reorganize the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria." ( [http://www.gratonrancheria.com/tribalcouncil.htm Greg Sarris bio] ]

The tribe he organized in 1992 was called the Federated Coast Miwok. Renamed (in 1997) the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (FIGR), an act of Congress gave it recognition in 2000. The biography continues:

"He then led the push for restoration of the tribe as a federally recognized American Indian nation, co-authoring a bill (H.R. 5528) with California Indian Legal Services, which President Clinton signed on December 27, 2000 officially granting the tribe status as a federally recognized tribe."

(Note: H.R. 5528 was the 2000 Indian Omnibus Act, and Sarris never co-authored this Act. H.R.4434, later H.R. 946, the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, which Sarris claims to have authored,Fact|date=September 2008 was included in H.R. 5528. It was one of several bills that the Clinton Administration questioned. in a letter to Kevin Gover. Since Clinton no longer had the power of the line item veto, the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, along with the several others in question, threatened the entire Omnibus Act.Fact|date=September 2008 It is a fact that Gover ignored the findings of the Office of Tribal Services historians, who stated not once, but twice, that they could not support restoration of Graton Rancheria as the group (the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) could "not demonstrate ties to the terminated tribe."Fact|date=September 2008 This opinion never changed, and in fact, these comments were read into the record by Gover at the May 2000 Hearing on the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act.Fact|date=September 2008

California 6th District Representative Lynn Woolsey introduced the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, on August 6, 1998 (105th Congress, 2d Session, H.R. 4434, [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.4434.IH:] later H.R. 946, [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/T?&report=hr677&dbname=106&] ultimately H.R. 5528.)

California Senator Barbara Boxer literally took Woolsey's bill off the floor of the House, introduced S. 2633, which included gambling rights, in the Senate on May 25, 2000. [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:SN02633:@@@L&summ2=m&] The bill was ultimately passed and signed by President Clinton as Title XIV of Boxer's Omnibus Indian Advancement Act (Public Law No. 106-568).

Representative Woolsey's original bill would not have permitted the FIGR to have an Indian casino.Fact|date=September 2008 However, Senator Boxer removed that prohibition when she included Woolsey's bill in the Omnibus Act. In 2003, when the FIGR announced its plans to open a casino in conjunction with Station Casinos of Las Vegas, Senator Boxer's son, Doug, was a member of Kenwood Investments, which sold the option on convert|2000|acre|km2 of Southern Sonoma County land to Station Casinos for a casino site.Fact|date=September 2008 Kenwood Investments consisted of Democrat heavy-hitters Darius Anderson, Chris Lehane, Stuart Sunshine, and Doug Boxer. According to newspaper reports of the time, Doug Boxer made $8 million in legal fees.Fact|date=September 2008

Writings

;Novels
* "Watermelon Nights" (1998)

;Short story collections
* "Grand Avenue" (1994)
* "The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: a Collection of New California Indian Writing" (1994) (as editor and contributor)

;Nonfiction
* "Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts" (1993)
* "Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream" (1994)
* "Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich" (2004)

Further reading

*Elvira Pulitano, "Toward a Native American Critical Theory" (2005). Sarris is one of six authors whose work is surveyed.

Other work

* Executive producer (with Robert Redford), "Grand Avenue" (HBO).

ee also

*List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas

References

*"Tribe Donates $1.50 Million to SSU", "The Press Democrat," Santa Rosa, California, December 9, 2003.
*"SSU Gift", "The Press Democrat," December 10, 2003.