Sunday, March 17, 2024
View on the IHS YouTube channel.
A presentation by Dot Brovarney
Dot’s book, Mendocino Refuge: Lake Leonard & Reeves Canyon, is a multifaceted story of the people, plants, and animals who inhabited the wild Reeves Canyon on California’s North Coast. In this presentation, Dot takes us through the experiences of several of the book’s characters in order to explore the interplay between the small world of an isolated North Coast canyon and the larger world outside. These include a Native Pomo who inherited the traditional role of singing doctor, and another who lobbied Congress to honor the government’s 1851 peace treaty. Of the two homesteaders who settled the lake at the head of the canyon in 1874, one sold out to Eastern capitalists, while his partner refused to do the same. Other characters include the engineer who ran the canyon mill, logging its old growth redwood in the 1870s and 80s, and the women whose 20th century efforts saved the last of the canyon’s original redwoods and Douglas fir.
Dot Brovarney lives in Northern California’s Mendocino County, where she works as a historian and author. She holds an M.A. degree in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1998). Dot’s background as a professional museum curator informs her continuing projects as an independent public historian and writer. Through her business, Landcestry, she has developed exhibits, walking tours, and books. Besides this book, her most recent, published in 2022, she has edited and published The Sweet Life: Cherry Stories from Butler Ranch (2016), and co-authored Remember Your Relations (1996), a book about Pomo basket weavers, which American Indian Art Magazine noted “set a standard of style, scholarly accuracy and compassion for the humanity of the subject matter to which future scholars should aspire.”
