Carolyn Dale McNulty and the Bodega Miwok Smiths
Carolyn Dale McNulty and the Bodega Miwok Smiths
By Beverly R. Ortiz
Thinking back on all of the Native California elders I have been blessed to get to know over the past four-plus decades, I am flooded with so many affecting and moving memories of so many gracious and extraordinary people, and so many remarkable and unexpected moments, that it’s all but impossible to encapsulate what exactly makes each one such a treasured and honored gift to their immediate and extended families, tribes, communities, and the broader world, even if that broader world is largely unaware of that great gift. Some combination of innate disposition and cultural, tribal, historical, and lived experience makes each one exceptional and irreplaceable in their own right, including some who are the type of person who knows what other people need before they themselves even know it.
Carolyn Dale Peri McNulty (Bodega Miwok, born 1943) is just that type of prescient individual, someone who, like her grandmother, models a non-judgmental tolerance for all people, the sole criteria of her friendships being the goodness of a person. Carolyn is also a proud and devoted mother, daughter, grandmother, granddaughter, cousin, friend, and member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (FIGR). She has served on FIGR’s Tribal Lands Committee, a testament to her passion for gardening and knowledge of its intricacies. Carolyn is the daughter of Albert “John” Peri (1912–1984) and Freda Thelma Williams Peri (Bodega Miwok, 1914–2005). Freda was the youngest of four children; her oldest sibling was Carolyn’s beloved “Auntie Vernie,” then Lloyd and Dorothy Florine “Flossie.” For her part, Carolyn was the youngest of two; her brother was the late David Wayne Peri (1937–2000), co-founder with Malcolm Margolin and the late Vera-Mae Fredrickson of News from Native California, within whose early pages David served as Dr. Coyote.
The legacy of Carolyn’s determined strength of character is perhaps best understood against the backdrop of the historical upheavals that shattered the well-established lives of her people, the result of several centuries of geopolitical machinations by the governments and commercial interests of Spain, Russia, Mexico, and an ever-expanding United States that led to the eventual colonization by each one of the place now known as Bodega Bay. In 1775, Peruvian-born Spanish sea captain Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra embedded his name in the form of Punta Bodega on the place now known as Tomales Point, immediately south of Bodega Bay, and in 1790 English sea captain John Colnett moored at Bodega Bay for ship repair. The Spanish made a feeble effort to occupy the area in 1793, and would later record the tribe’s name as Yoletamal.
By the time a Russian ship anchored at Bodega Bay in 1808, the periodic arrival of Eurasian ships must have been unsurprising to the Bodega Miwok, no matter how unnerving. This new one brought with it 40 Russians, 130 multiethnic Alaskan sea otter hunters, and 20 Native women. By the close of February 1809, the construction of buildings had commenced at Bodega Bay, along with the commercial hunting of sea otters there and further afield for the Russian American Company (RAC). In August of 1809, the Russians and Alaskan hunters sailed away with two thousand sea otter skins.
Not coincidentally, from 1808 to 1817, Spanish missionaries refocused their attention on the area, resulting in a small number of Yoletamal baptisms. With the 1817 founding of Mission San Rafael, Yoletamal baptisms increased.
While nothing would ever be the same for Carolyn’s people, her great-grandparents exemplify the eventual triumph of Bodega Miwoks over a history intended to annihilate them bodily and culturally. Carolyn’s maternal great-grandfather, William “Bill” Smith, was the son of Massachusetts sea captain Stephen Smith (1782–1855) and his common-law wife Tsupu (ca. 1815–1890).
In 1844, the Mexican government granted Stephen Smith the 35,487-acre Rancho Bodega, including buildings left behind when the RAC abandoned its Ross Colony and the unincorporated community of Bodega (aka Bodega Corners) near the sawmill Smith had established in 1843, the same year he brought Peruvian Manuela Torres, his third wife, and her mother, to the area. Today, one can only imagine the kind of fierce and resilient woman that Tsupu must have been in becoming the common-law wife of Captain Smith, doing whatever she needed to do to secure her family’s and her people’s future, given the shattering changes wrought by colonization in her lifetime.
Despite Tsupu’s best efforts to keep her children safe within their ancestral homeland, her son William would later be force marched with his first wife Walla Walla to the Round Valley Reservation. Eventually, William Smith made his way home, where he met and married Rosalie Charles, with whom he had ten children. As explained by Carolyn’s cousin Kathleen Rose Smith in her book Enough for All: “William Smith was a traditional clamshell-disk bead maker, generous, beloved, and respected by all who knew him, from Bodega Bay to Lake County. He became a prosperous fishman at Bodega Bay with his six sons…, helped in the business by their five sisters (the oldest Mary Martin, the daughter of Walla Walla). Together they founded the commercial fishing industry in Bodega Bay, starting out with a rowboat that the boys built, and soon owning three commissioned fishing vessels, the Smith Brothers No. 1 and No. 2, and the Santa Rosa, Uncle Eddie’s boat. Their mother, Rosalie, said that when her boys started fishing, she sang prayer songs that they never would die at sea. Despite several close calls, and the sinking of Eddie’s boat at the mouth of Tomales Bay, the sea took none of her boys.”
Sarah Smith Williams Ballard (1881–1978), Carolyn’s grandmother and one of the five sisters, would go on to nearly singlehandedly preserve the Bodega Miwok language through her dedicated work with linguist Catherine “Cathy” Callaghan (1931–2019) in the 1960s, culminating in their 1970 Bodega Miwok Dictionary, currently the basis for language preservation efforts by FIGR.
“I always liked Catherine,” Carolyn recalled, as she reflected on the ten summers that Catherine and other linguists worked with her grandmother at her parents’ Santa Rosa home: “They’d start in at eight in the morning, break for lunch, then continue until five in the evening, Monday through Friday. My grandmother always referred to Catherine as ‘Mrs. Callaghan.’”
Today, one can only imagine the quiet, dignified, understated, and humble joy that Sarah might feel knowing that her very loving and diligent work would make possible Catherine’s TAMAL MACHCHAWKO: Normalized Coast Miwok Dictionary, the basis for FIGR’s language classes, supplemented in part by tape recordings of Sarah with Richard Applegate made four years before her passing at age ninety-six. Among the first students: Carolyn and her late cousin Young Ernest “Pinky” Smith Jr., the son of Young Ernest Smith Sr., one of the six sons of William Smith. About those early classes, Carolyn recalls telling a reporter, “I am humbled by my grandmother’s gracious thinking ahead so that tribal members can now share and speak the language that was so dear to her.” Sarah and her sisters Margaret, Rosalie, and Aileen were the last fluent speakers of the Bodega Miwok language, with Aunt Rosie also serving as a linguistic consultant. As for other FIGR cultural classes, Carolyn’s cousins Charlene Moratto and Nancy Napolitan participate in its basketry classes.
Carolyn grew up enveloped in the love of her gentle-spirited, generous, kind, and self-effacing parents, who, during their forty-nine-year marriage, instilled in her an expansive love, caring, and empathy for all people and the values of faith and service to others. Carolyn has, in turn, instilled these values in her two sons, Adam (born 1965) and Blake (born 1969), and her four grandchildren.
Carolyn’s father Albert “Al” Peri worked in his family’s market, nurturing his love for plants by running the produce department. After bigger grocery stores and chains displaced his family’s store, Al worked for Espindola’s, then Traverso’s, run by a family to which he was related by marriage.
When young, Carolyn’s mother Freda worked as a waitress. When Carolyn was twelve, Freda went to work for Rosenberg’s Department store in the gift department, well suited for sales due her lack of pushiness. Despite satisfaction with the job, Freda left it in 1965 to spend time with her three grandchildren, first Adam, then the late Mia (David’s daughter), then Blake.
In many respects, Carolyn’s childhood was very similar to that of her peers, filled as it was with dollhouses, paper dolls, coloring, drawing, painting, and a toy kitchen, with its one bulb oven and toy ironing board, all of these fully engaging for a child who loved creating things on her own. But unlike her peers, Carolyn had a heart murmur that restricted her ability to participate in physical activities.
Carolyn spent her early summers at the Moretti Ranch (aka Circle M Ranch) in Alexander Valley, where Aunt Flossie’s husband, Ernest “Papa” Moretti, ranched sheep. When Carolyn was five or six, she began going to the henhouse to gather the chicken eggs, despite her very real fear of being pecked. She also helped her grandmother pick and wash the vegetables that grew in a huge garden, including fruit and nut trees, surrounded by chicken wire, about three football fields in extent. “I so loved to go to the garden with Grandma,” Carolyn recalls. “She spoke of the plants and animals as sacred. They were to be cared for and never harmed. One should only kill animals used for food. Grandma certainly had the greatest respect and love for anything living. I termed it as being God’s creatures, even if it was a fig tree. To me God made it. She didn’t talk about God. She would sometimes mention everything came from the Great Spirit. She was a very, very gentle soul.”
Carolyn likewise enjoyed interacting with and tending the rabbits, lambs, sheep dogs, and horses, giving each one her own unique name. “We were taught that we needed to be aware of the coyote, the mountain lion, and the rattlesnake. This was their home first. Grandma, Papa, and Auntie Flossie, all three of them would make that very clear. We weren’t to try and hurt them. By all of the doors, there was a supply of snake sticks. You never left the house without a snake stick in your hand, like a walking stick, because rattlesnakes could be right by the house.
“So, I would say we had a regard for the rattlesnakes, the mountain lion, and the coyote. I only encountered a mountain lion when I was about ten. I was heading by myself to the area we called the waterfall. I just had a feeling something was looking at me…. I looked up and there was a big rock…, and on top of the rock was a mountain lion looking down on me…. I just froze, and every once in a while, I would glance up to see if it was still there…. He was beautiful and looked so regal like sitting on a throne.”
Since Carolyn was three, cats of all kinds have always been a part of her life. As she puts it, “I never went out to get a cat. A cat or cats would always find their way to me.” It’s obvious after spending time with Carolyn and her feline friends that Carolyn’s cats are both loved and respected. Carolyn’s dad would say, “She spoke cat language, and they all followed her like the Pied Piper.” In so saying, he relayed the image of la strega, the witch of Italian folklore, and he likened his daughter to “the good witch.”
From kindergarten through eighth grade, Carolyn attended St. Rose Catholic School in Santa Rosa. After Carolyn graduated from high school, her father insisted that she should learn accounting, since it would be something to always fall back on, whether for work or personal use. Eventually, she decided to enroll in the business program at Santa Rosa Junior College.
Personable, warm, easy-going, and engaging, Carolyn entered the job market in 1970 and received offers of employment everywhere the Unemployment Department sent her. The one she accepted took her to a previously unfamiliar community for the interview, Benicia. Intrigued by Benicia’s quaint, waterfront charm during that fateful interview, Carolyn learned that while the city had long had a planning commission, it had only recently hired its first city planner. Now they were looking for a second individual to serve as secretary and administrative assistant, processing project applications. Realizing that Benicia would be a “nice place” for her boys to grow up, Carolyn accepted the job.
Despite a busy homelife and a work schedule that included night-time city council and commission meetings, Carolyn’s love of handwork led her to knit, crochet, sew, and to embroider dish towels, which to this day become unique gifts. Time permitting, Carolyn sold this handwork at fairs, along with glycerin soap into which she incorporated blossoms from her yard. Notes Carolyn of her inspiration, “Grandma was grateful for everything. For me she was like a saint on earth, so that’s where I get my love of nature and people and creating…. I always think it’s Grandma’s hands guiding me.”
As for Carolyn’s cultural legacy, William Smith and his half-brother Tom Smith (Tomas Comtechal, 1838–1934) had a history of service to their communities and families, as well as to broader efforts to preserve their cultures. Of the two, William was the more reticent, apparently concerned that “it won’t help us people too much” if certain topics were discussed with outsiders. Nonetheless, he shared kinship terms and some spiritual practices with three anthropologists, including Isabel Kelly.
Tom Smith, a well-known Indian doctor, by the 1930s had returned to live at the Bodega Wharf with his half-brother’s family. From 1931 to 1932, he also shared with Kelly knowledge that he held about all aspects of his culture, including ceremonies, reputedly feeling that since his people and ancestors were all gone, it could not hurt them for him to do so.
As for William’s sons, they worked hard fishing for rock cod, halibut, salmon, and other fish. Always hospitable, they offered fresh fish to Carolyn’s parents after visits. It was a good, if difficult, way of life, one that would eventually end due to commercial competition and the brother’s aging.
As Arthur “Tooch” Columbo, grandson of the brothers’ sister Rosalie, recalls of the fishing operation, with which he was raised: “They were poor. They had lots of lovely fish, but they couldn’t afford to go to the store…. I went out with them in the ocean. When the boat went up high on a big wave, you could see forever. Then, when it would go into a trough, you’d be surrounded by water, with thirty-foot-high waves. It was exciting. They’d go in the wheelhouse and leave in the early morning, and because it was foggy [and dark], they couldn’t see anything…. They had a clock and a compass right there where they steered the boat…. They never looked or went aground in the mudflat. That’s how good those Indian captains were.”
Tooch recalls of the brothers themselves: “They were gruff and hostile. They were OK to family, but not too kindly to outsiders, as people looked down their noses at Indians…. They were a great family, but they did not care too much for white folks. They did good. They made do.”
Aunt Margaret “Maggie” was the family cook, with a pot of coffee and stew or soup always kept warm and ready to serve. She was likewise the one who cleaned mudhens for the family table. As recalled by Tooch: “Aunt Mag lived in a little house. In the middle of the yard, there was a little shack, really…. About fourteen people could eat at the same time. She was a good cook, and the Indian gals canned everything…. They [canned] albacore that made the tuna you buy at the store taste like cat food. It was like big, white flakes.”
While Carolyn remembers Aunt Maggie as “the den mother,” always taking care of everyone, she remembers Aunt Aileen as “social,” and Aunt Rosie as both “elegant” and “social”: “She and my grandmother would laugh and giggle, and if Aunt Aileen joined them, the three of them were sheer happiness…. They [also] had lots in common with their handwork. We had beautiful hand-crocheted blankets from my Grandma. We would pick the colors and she would lovingly make them, always with a shell stitch…because it looked like a shell from the ocean. That was her way of keeping us near the bay and keeping us warm.”
Carolyn’s grandmother was the local midwife, travelling by horse and buggy, and never losing a mother or a baby: “Uncle Tom I would say was a healer, but my Grandma’s hands had a healing, soothing touch, too…. I heard when Grandma came, she would talk the women in labor through it. They immediately relaxed.”
Although the brothers and sisters kept quiet about their heritage for self-protection, when asked they would speak of it with pride. Perhaps the most public expression of that culture: the family’s Thunder Bear narrative, as told by Aunt Rosie, was made into a 1975 coloring book for an annual Fisherman’s Festival. About this book, says Karen Rogne DeCarlo, Aunt Aileen’s granddaughter, “Since I volunteered for the Native American committee at Hurlburt Field Air Force Base, we organized and conducted presentations and demonstrations of Native American culture throughout the base. Each year that I was on the committee, I took my ‘Thunder Bear’ booklet to show the illustrations and read the story to children in my Native American regalia, to continue our Coast Miwok legacy from my Great Aunt Rose.”
Another public expression of heritage: Rosalie Smith’s efforts to oppose the building of houses on an ancestral cemetery. As a result, the cemetery was fenced, and Rosalie signed a cemetery exemption form. When her grandson Tooch Columbo was twenty or twenty-one, she asked him to assume responsibility for it, which he did for some fifty years, cutting the grass, repairing the fence, and otherwise tending it. Today the property is in the name of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
The grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren of William Smith have lived in a different time with a different post–Civil Rights Era ethos. For instance, while there was little that the brothers and sisters could do to keep non-Indians from looting their ancestral sites (including Bodega Head landowner Rose Gaffney, notorious among the Smiths as the worst of the early looters), changes to federal and state law have enabled some of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to serve as Most Likely Descendants and site monitors. Notable among them: Geraldine Lucille “June” Dollar, Kathleen Rose Smith, Eugene “Gene” Buvelot, and, on the Tom Smith side of the family, Grant Smith. Kathleen and her niece Cynthia “Cyndee” Smith have also served as archaeological technicians. For his part, Gene became one of the first three members of FIGR’s Sacred Sites Protection Committee, continuing to serve on it to this day.
Among the family authors, ethnographers, and ethnographic film makers: the late David Peri and Kathleen Rose Smith. The college professors: David Peri (Sonoma State University) and the late William “Bill” Smith (Santa Rosa Junior College and SSU). Bill Smith’s sister Kathleen likewise served as a lecturer on Native American art at SSU, as did Bill and Kathleen’s nephew Steven Russell “Steve” Smith, who lectured about Native American history, literature, and art at the SRJC and SSU.
In other educational realms, Kathleen has served as cultural interpreter at Point Reyes National Seashore, and as a cultural demonstrator and instructor of ancestral Native foods for the general public and her fellow tribal citizens. Kathleen’s niece Verna Smith served as education coordinator at the Marin Museum of the American Indian. Another extended family cultural demonstrator: flintknapper Gene Buvelot.
The Smith family also includes two museum directors and curators: Bill Smith, who founded the SRJC Jesse Peter Memorial Museum (now Jesse Peter Multicultural Museum), and his daughter Sherrie Smith-Ferri, who has served as director and curator at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. Bill’s younger brother Merle Douglas “Doug” Smith assisted in the creation of museum exhibits at the JC, including the building of a roundhouse. More recently, Doug’s nephew Bruce Smith created a complex metal sculpture of a fishing basket in the newly established ethnobotanical garden at the Grade Hudson Museum, the garden project having been nurtured into existence by his cousin Sherrie.
Among the Smith family activists: June Dollar, who helped fundraise for the unratified treaty claims cases; the late Young Ernest Smith, who served as Sonoma County’s Alcatraz Occupation fundraiser; and Kathleen Rose Smith, who designed the founding logo of the National Women’s History Project. Other family members helped found Ya-Ka-Ama Indian Education, Inc. in Forestville, including David Peri and one of the youngest generation Steven Smiths, this one serving as an early director, board member, and, like his father Russell Smith, farm manager. Steve Smith’s sister Sandra “Sandy” Smith also later served on the Ya-Ka-Ama board. More recently, Gene Buvelot began serving on the board of the Miwok Archaeological Preserve of Marin, including as its president.
In the realm of Indian health: Young Smith served as the first chairman of the board of the Sonoma County Indian Health Project (SCIHP); his son Matthew “Matt” Smith currently serves as the tribe’s alternate representative. On a statewide level, Young served as interim director at different clinics for six or seven years, helping to shepherd these clinics through leadership transitions. For his own part, after attaining a degree in hospital administration and planning, Steve Smith worked for a time for an Indian health program in Phoenix.
Those who have served their larger tribal community in varied committee roles with FIGR: Matthew Smith currently serves as chairman of its Citizenship Committee, a role that his father Young Smith previously held. Matt also serves as a member of FIGR’s election board, and, in the past, on its GEDA Board. Matthew has also been involved for five years in FIGR’s youth development by running a workshop where he facilitates the Native American Youth Action Team by teaching work readiness and financial literacy. Kathleen Rose Smith, Nancy Napolitan, and Carolyn have all served on FIGR’s Tribal Lands Committee; Kathleen on its Tolay Advisory Group; and Tim Moratto on its GEDA Board. Tina Lanzavecchia serves as staff for the Citizens Department and, as written about in a previous article in News, comes from a family that, like Matthew’s, participated in the Alcatraz Occupation.
Gene Buvelot has the distinction of being the longest-tenured councilperson of the Federated Coast Miwok, now FIGR, primarily as its treasurer, but also as its vice-chair. He began in these capacities in 1992, when the tribe reconstituted itself following the earlier, illegal termination of the Graton Rancheria, and stepped down from the council in 2019. Tom Smith’s great-great-grandson Greg Sarris and Gene’s cousin Kathleen Rose Smith, soon joined by many others, were at the forefront of FIGR’s reconstitution.
As for the younger generation: this year Joshua “Josh” Buvelot became one of FIGR’s first four interns, with Josh’s internship focusing on casino operations, part of the tribe’s development of next generation of leadership.
These are but a few examples of the cultural involvements of the younger generations of Bodega Bay Smiths, with much more to come into print in the future. Young Smith suggested some five or six years ago that the time had come to put together the larger story past to present of the Bodega Miwok Smiths, and requested that I assist. Since then Young’s son Matt has organized several “cousins” gatherings to initiate that work, with Carolyn a prominent attendee. As nationally and internationally recognized author Greg Sarris has noted about the progress of these collective efforts to tell that story, “The Bodega Smith family has done a remarkable job documenting their history. Their history, with all its twists and turns, is a microcosm of California history itself.”
As for the future, here’s Carolyn’s advice for FIGR citizens to come: “To honor basically what our ancestors worked so hard to preserve, because their heritage, their culture, and what their parents brought forth I consider sacred. In today’s world there are very few people that really honor what is sacred, and family and their traditions and culture, that is sacred…. I just want it to be acknowledged that it’s sacred…, and that many of our ancestors gave up their lives for it, so it’s never to be made light of.”
