Weed-Fatigue and an Event This Wednesday
We, the dedicated crew at the Humboldt Area Peoples Archive (HAPA), are delighted to offer a regular column in Redheaded Blackbelt. Each is based on materials exclusive to our collections and research farther afield. To learn more about HAPA – and support our work – please check out our website.
Left: Unidentified horseman 1948 July 4th parade, Humboldt Historical Society and Right: 1979 Redwoods Rural Health Center boogie fundraiser photo by Suzelle
DISCLAIMER: Views in this dispatch are
those of the writer, not the Humboldt Area Peoples Archive.By Scott Holmquist, co-founder Humboldt Area Peoples Archive
Way back in the 2000s I complained informally to a top Humboldt Historical Society officer, someone I liked and knew personally, about the Society’s failure to offer much of anything after 1960. Why nothing on the massive invasion of hippies in the 1970s, for instance?
He sympathized. He agreed. And then he said the Society needed desperately to raise money to repair its roof. It needed new members and sponsors. It needed to process dozens of boxes of material. How was it supposed to deal with another half-century?
In that missing half-century, Sixties Counterculture in the form of enviro and other community activism, theater and art, back-to-the-land settlement, alternative businesses and the cannabis economy reshaped Humboldt County.
If these histories are absent from mainstream local institutions, anti-hippie bigotry is not to blame. The people who made local counterculture-related history have not done what it takes to assure its preservation and promotion. So far, there is no hippie, dope grower, or enviro equivalent to the Eureka High School teacher, Cecile Clarke, who sold her family’s sheep farm in 1960 to finance the Clarke Historical Museum.
If you see a lot about logging history at the Humboldt Historical Society, it’s because loggers and logging enterprises have provided the photos and support.
This week, HAPA, a group I formed with retired Cal-Poly archivist Edie Butler and Southern Humboldt community leader Douglas Fir, will host a discussion and performance in Arcata to make the case for not forgetting this missing half-century and its impact.
As far as I can tell, our modest event, not at the university or any institution, but at a fermented-fruit beverage joint, will make history. (For event details see here.)
For the first time an organization dedicated to preserving local history will invite the public to consider how Sixties Counterculture transformed the Humboldt region, bringing together scholars from a major university and people who made, and are still making, some of that history.
Why bother?
Since the 1970s, the people and ideas that emerged from Sixties Counterculture have changed the politics, the culture and the economy of the Humboldt region more any single historical force.
A short incomplete list:
The North Coast Co-op (1972), Eureka Natural Foods (mid-1980s) and Wildberries Market (1994), are hippie inventions or spinoffs. The Open Door Clinics and Redwoods Rural Health Center, were hippie initiatives, so was the credit union now called Vocality, originally the Mateel Community Credit Union.
The Southern Humboldt hippie homesteader David Katz established one of the first national solar power retailing businesses, Alternative Energy Engineering (AEE), becoming a major local employer, seeding other hippie businesses that engineered and locally manufactured off-grid power technologies. Homesteading hippies Leib Ostrow and Linda Dillon founded what became the largest national producer and distributor of music for children, Music for Little People.
The story of local LGBTQ+ liberation, in its current form, is rooted in Sixties activism and sexual openness. There was a lesbian back-to-the-land “neighborhood” in the Southern Humboldt hills in the 1970s. Recently deceased Eureka activist and artist Richard Evans found community as black gay man first among Bay Area hippies, then among their homesteading brothers and sisters in Southern Humboldt in the 1970s.
Today, thousands of acres of forest are protected thanks to hippie organizing, litigation and protest led by organizations like the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), founded by radical Southern Humboldt activists in late 1970s, and its sister org, the North Coast Environmental Center founded in Arcata in 1971.
Then there’s cannabis. The counterculture blessing and curse that put Humboldt on the world map in the 1970s and kept it there for decades.
Archiving v. Action & Weed-fatigue Syndrome
The Sixties Counterculture people most capable of building institutions and businesses have always been more concerned with saving the planet and their fellow human beings, or developing products that may do the same, than stacking and sorting the records of their history.
When I tried to convince a forest activist in the Petrolia area that saving records of his work was important, he huffed, “So, how many trees will that save?!”
Another more complicated factor which has impeded local history is weed-fatigue syndrome.
Many women and men who built and maintained local hippie institutions and businesses that had protected and benefited from the cannabis economy eventually regretted their success. There was even shame associated with it. For decades, among the hippie elite, one could not be, “Just a grower.”
Shame and regrets associated with weed, among other divisions, crippled what had evolved to be an often fiercely united network of communities in Southern Humboldt. Their failure to coalesce around a strategy to prepare for legalization is one consequence of this weed-fatigue. Another is the reluctance among those best positioned to record and preserve the region’s history, because to tell the story in full, weed’s shameful prominence is unavoidable.
Humboldt Historians
I’ll guess weed-fatigue likewise could explain why among the writers featured at a recent fundraiser at the Clarke Historical Museum, “Meet the Humboldt Historians!,” none has written explicitly about Humboldt’s counterculture since their lineup’s star, Ray Raphael, cranked out his 1984 chronicle, Cash Crop.
Raphael’s latest book, I Like It Here: Life Stories of Humboldt’s Bob McKee, as told to Ray Raphael (2022), indirectly about local counterculture, is a tour-de-force oral history of the ‘Godfather’ of Southern Humboldt hippie homesteaders, the man singularly responsible for the high concentration of counterculturists in the region. But in what appears to be another case of weed-fatigue, the book completely elides the cannabis economy’s importance to McKee’s life story. From this book you will not know illegal cannabis grown by the people McKee set up in the hills was, from the start, the engine of the local economy that kept chugging for two generations. You won’t even know there was a weed economy.
To write local histories of Sixties Counterculture impacts, for good and ill, we need evidence and people who understand its value. The historic discussion and performance in Arcata this week may help.
Join the discussion! For rules visit: https://kymkemp.com/commenting-rules
Comments system how-to: https://wpdiscuz.com/community/postid/10599/
Massive invasion? Please. A few thousand people at most.
Terrific, you must some kind of proof to say “few thousand”! We’d love any supporting documents, or memories. Even if I wrote “massive invasion” in jest, for some just three hippies moving into the neighborhood’s an invasion. And, in fact, by 1980 invading rural hippies outnumbered anyone else in the SoHum’s hills.
This will make a lot of people sad, to see what used to be and what is occurring now. But the core people are still here. The ones that invested time and energy into the community. The volunteers, the people still active in the community.
Though I do feel people should have seen the decline coming.
All things pass.
First, that’s utter nonsense about logging being prominent inn history because “ loggers and logging enterprises have provided the photos and support.” It was prominent because probably 80-90% of working people in Humboldt Co made their livelihoods from some aspect of logging, sawmills, equipment, services to their employees, etc. Everyone knew a logger, a logger’s family. Young people started earning by pulling green chain in a mill. People retired from there It supported the county literally. .
Documenting that aspect is fine. It existed. It was even important. But don’t trot out the Open Door Clinic as representative of the importance of hippies to Humboldt. The importance of hippies was always to themselves, was part of a nationwide movement not localized in Humboldt, and was not more special here until the logging industry was pretty much done in and left a vacuum they filled. The prominence of “hippies” was pretty much a drag on the economy until the green rush created wealth for themselves, which they mostly kept for themselves while they were still being financed by the public they derided. At least until pot became a boom industry. And are you going to document the murders, environmental damage, crime, drug addiction, etc that was part and parcel of that too? Well, it was always a self centered society and apparently their view of it still is.
Thanks for your point about logging. I agree. That’s why, so many, as I wrote “ loggers and logging enterprises have provided the photos and support.”
I also completely agree that facets of counterculture, under “follow your bliss,” often justified extreme selfishness. This won’t be news to activist hill-hippies who struggled over the decades to squeeze a few bucks outta their big-grower hippie neighbors, whether for a cause or shared-road repair!
I regret my use of the word “hippie” for all counterculture-influenced people seems to make you reject the singular importance of how their influence is distinct – whether you think overall good or bad – from those of the original settler economies and cultures.
How could the pre-green-rush “prominence of hippies” “be a drag on the economy”? Hippies on welfare made local grocery stores owners richer. And the ones who worked, well, they worked. And original hippies were very few among those cashing in on the green-rush. In fact, their grower org, HUMMAP, fought it. I assume you mean the recent green-rush that just ended and not the 1st, back ’77-83?
As for crime, environmental damage, addiction, etc, associated with counterculture, these have been much better documented than the history of hippie natural-foods practices that have had much greater ongoing impacts on Humboldt. TV producers have tricked local activist hippies into legitimizing trashy hit series like Murder Mt by recording hours of footage on their organizing and community building never broadcast. Because a few murders, three, over fifty years, makes better entertainment that saving forests, building health centers and community parks.
Still, despite their exaggeration, I agree, to the extent crime, enviro destruction, and the rest, result from aspects of Sixties Counterculture, they are part of what should be remembered. Just as the extensive destruction of habitat by old-school logging should be remembered. My own work on local hippie histories began with documenting weed-related deaths among 2nd generation back-to-the-landers. I quickly learned was there is much more to the story.
I’m not sure what you mean by 3 over 50 years, unless thats some stat from the movie I never saw.
There were many more murders than that, directly related to weed grower/dealer culture founded unintentionally by hippie tolerance and wishful thinking.
I agree, and I think you’re honest to focus on the shame and embarrassment some altruistic hippies felt as the capitalist cannabis culture destroyed the dream and became a status-quo boom and bust not much different than priors.
It’s a hard web to escape, economics, and I don’t have the answers.
we all once claimed we could do it better if we just grabbed the wheel.
Turns out it’s not that easy.
On the whole, many good times,
but a little refer sadness now
as full blossom fades into its sunset..
Let small towns be small towns again.
How it began
Thanks for your comments and reflection, Canyon Oak.
The “few” killings I mentioned only refers to those identified and examined in the Murder Mt series, not the total weed-business related homicides.
That’s a bizarrely angry response to some people seeking to collect and archive historical documents about a particular sub culture from recent history.
And it seems the anger closed your reading comprehension. The author didn’t claim that logging was prominent in local history because of the industry sharing material, he claimed that it was prominent in material at the humboldt historical society because of efforts to share material. Which seems pretty reasonable, archives won’t contain things that aren’t shared with them.
And this project isn’t event aimed at documenting the cannabis industry specifically, although the author mentions that aversion to acknowledging the role of cannabis may be contributing to the reticence to share archival material, it’s about documenting the back-to-the-land/hippy subculture as it existed in Southern humboldt. That’s not the culture I come from so I can’t claim any expertise, but it sure seems like they were a pretty civically minded group what with the development of a community radio station, a community center, a community health clinic, a number of small newspapers, and a number of small rural schools.
No culture exists independent of its economic aspect.
The back to the landers were a weed growing and exporting culture almost completely dependent on black markets before the dust had even settled.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad.
I am asserting that a subculture(that made wild claims of sovereignty and ingenuity and independence) cannot be separated from its economic racket.
Weed was that racket, and it will be the necklace and the albatross that tattoos the history of the our local hippie culture.
Turns out it’s not all roses to join the ranks good old boys..
But it honest to see it for what it was
Absolutely, I read that as the point of this letter. That this subculture, which was perhaps the most impactful on our area over the last half century, has not had its history collected in some part because of an aversion to be fully honest about the role and impact of the weed economy.
Thank you, Thatguyinarcata.
In fact, HAPA’s focus is on all counterculture-related phenomena since the 1960s, these include the hippie back-to-the-land movement.
1970s Jesus freaks, and the Jesus Movement, were also products of Sixties Counterculture, and if we can find material concerning these locally, we’d welcome it.
Sixties Counterculture describes something more like a storm of historical factors that shaped and hurled out varieties of literature, music, theater, spirituality, politics and life style. There is no single hippie or counterculture “sub-culture.”
A great Humboldt example of un-acknowledged counterculture: The Kinetic Sculpture Race, launched, accidentally, in 1969, by a back-to-the-country anti-war artist, Jack Mays, and Hobart Brown.
I applaud your efforts and can’t wait to enjoy the results. I don’t have a connection to this area that far back, but I’m hopeful that you’ll get a nice flush of material as the young adults of that time each the end of their lives and their families begin to sort their belongings. There must be wonderful troves of photographs out there
Transference of anger much? I was not angry. I just don’t think pot (nor “back to the land” people for that matter but for different reasons) were ever that important until other sources of income dried up. It was only after logging was minimized that outlaw growers started making their presence felt as an alternative economic influence.
Sorry you took it personally but those inside the grower “community” were never as important as they saw themselves. Like all criminal subcultures, their fear of the law created a social isolation in which they stayed unconscious of the larger public. It was defacto segregation. All they knew was others like themselves and were unaware of the size, variety, challenges and sheer volume of the rest of the world. Which sadly lead them so far from reality of what legalization meant. They were warned but, due to the pretty total lack of having experience in legal business and how government taxation and regulation, along with legal competition, virtually creates the marketplace, they discounted it. Now they are indulging in the typical rewriting of the past, indulging in nostalgia and creating the myth of a Golden Age of pot growing in which the ugly details are forgotten and confusing their own youth with the times. They are creating a sort of Gone With the Wind narrative of their history out of what was in reality pretty ugly.
Weed fatigue? More like boomer burnout.
I lived in Miranda in the 60s. We would hitchhike forty miles on a rumor that someone had a roach. We always wished weed was easier to get and was legal. Be careful what you wish for because Humboldt has become the poster child of Unintended Consequences. Awash in bad drugs and drug-related social issues now.
Thank you. Important story.
Hippie is really a misnomer, as most of the ‘back to the land movement came from the Berkeley, political left, organized, YIPPIES. (See Berkeley in the Sixties). There was always much more to the counterculture than growing pot. I would add other organizational wonders, KMUD Community Radio, The Vietnam Veterans Restoration , Sending a Little League Team to Cuba, Year of support for the International Indian Treaty Council. The cannabis boom and bust had a dark side, as boom towns do, so well described by Woody Guthrie’s hometown, Okemah Oklahoma Oil Town bust. I would say a clear example of how the ‘yippies’ affected Southern Humboldt was the intense lobbying and bus caravan to Sacramento to restore school bus funding. There’s a lot to be proud of.
Thanks, Karl Verick. Agreed, counterculture is much more than growing dope. And for all that you list I have material. They’ll be future subjects of dispatches here. If you check out my previous Rural Reverb posts, you’ll see only one concerns weed, and then only in the context of the debate raging in the 1970s.
The word “hippie” today is the best available all purpose monicker for all things counterculture. Please say if you got a better one.
True, the late 60s split between life-style counterculturists, “hippies,” and New Left radicals, “politicos,” and the famous 1967 “Death of Hippie” action in the Haight staged by the Diggers, are reasons enough to resist “hippie.” But I’ll argue for its appropriation the way queer was appropriated by the gay movement before the cumbersome LGBTQ+.
Yes, but gay or queer is an ongoing thing. Hippie was a media categorization, and it would be hard to argue that “hippies” still exist (if they ever did). They are more like hobbits.