To walk down main street in Point Reyes Station with Dewey Livingston is to peer through a pair of bifocals, as past and present come into simultaneous focus.
Marin County’s foremost local historian, Mr. Livingston traces the ghost lines of the old railroad era, when the town revolved around a depot, a saloon and a hotel. He reads the landscape like an archaeological site, each stratum revealing the accretions of another age.
“Part of what fascinates me about this place is that, on the surface, it looks like it’s looked for 100 years,” Mr. Livingston said. “But if you look deeply, its inner workings are entirely different.”
Mr. Livingston has spent four decades documenting those layers. This week, he released a new book, “Point Reyes and Tomales Bay: A History of the Land and Its People,” a 400-year survey that spans prehistory to the 1970s. Richly illustrated with archival images and maps, the book focuses on patterns of settlement and displacement, agriculture, and conservation. It pays particular attention to how humans have shaped the land since the arrival of settlers in the mid-1800s—and how the Coast Miwok have remained in the story, even when written out of it.
“I wanted to tell the history of the Coast Miwok people in a more complete and fair way than had been done,” Mr. Livingston said. “In a typical book, the first chapter is about the local Indians, and then you move on to talk about the pioneers and you never go back. But Tomales Bay was a place the Coast Miwok continued to live, even if their existence was marginalized.”
Most students learn history as a fixed narrative, a process that reinforces the idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, authoritative account. Mr. Livingston resists that model, working instead from a set of humbler assumptions: every history is incomplete, every historian has a point of view that is partial and prejudiced, and every source is imperfect. Rather than strive for a definitive history, Mr. Livingston accepts the impossibility of one.
When he moved to Inverness decades ago, Mr. Livingston said he was quickly “sucked into the vortex of local history” by the late historian Jack Mason. Not long after, then–Point Reyes Light publisher Dave Mitchell hired him to write a recurring column. Since then, he has built a career mining small incidents and obscure lives to explore broader cultural themes.
Self-effacing and soft-spoken, he defines himself as a storyteller more than a historian. He has authored dozens of publications for the National Park Service, along with numerous commercial and oral history projects. The Light sat down with Mr. Livingston at his Inverness home to discuss his book, the product of nearly a decade of research and the culmination of more than 40 years living in and learning from the landscape.
Sophia Grace Carter: I want to start at the beginning, Dewey. You’ve lived in West Marin for nearly half a century. I’d like to know what brought you here, and where you thought you were going.
Dewey Livingston: I’ve lived here since 1983, but my brother moved to West Marin in ’73, and I became a regular. I was in my 20s, which were quite varied. I was moving around and living in communal housing in San Anselmo, Oakland, Berkeley. I was in a cult for a while.
Sophia: Wait, I want to hear about that.
Dewey: You know, I was just doing the typical 1970s person-in-his-20s type of stuff.
Sophia: At one point, you wanted to be a filmmaker. I’m curious how history became your lens for understanding the world.
Dewey: I credit my parents. We weren’t the kind of family that flew to Hawaii or took big vacations—they took us on road trips in our funky old car that would break down in the desert. Early on, we’d stop at historic places, and I always liked that.
I grew up wanting to be a television and film cameraman, and I went to college for a year taking filmmaking courses. But 16mm film was too expensive, so I only made a couple of shorts. When I moved to Oakland, I got a job at Laney College, first as a theater technical manager, then later as an assistant professor teaching camera work. I wanted to do cultural projects. My dream job was to direct “Live from the Metropolitan Opera”—I was really into opera, classical music, choral music—you used the score to determine how you framed your shots. Then I co-made this 20-minute documentary called “Old Oakland” for the Oakland Museum of California in 1982. That’s what really hooked me into history.
Sophia: Were you always good at remembering names and dates?
Dewey: It’s more places. I was interested in places—and the people that shaped them. That’s why I called the book “A History of the Land and its People,” because the land, to me, has the utmost importance. And the people who live on it have everything to do with what happens to that land, and how it sustains them. That’s what’s always fascinated me about West Marin: The people here were so much more connected to the land. Whereas being a kid growing up in the suburbs, your connection to the land is about the streets and the backyards.
Sophia: There’s this E.H. Carr quote: “Before you study the history, study the historian.” You’ve studied this place for decades, but you’re also part of it. How does that proximity affect how you write about it?
Dewey: Writing this history is sort of writing a little bit about me and my life. I came into this community as a newcomer, but I’ve always been a believer that if you live somewhere, you ought to know what’s over the next hill, where your water comes from, what kind of trees grow there, why this big open patch is the way it is, who your neighbors are and what their stories are. I think that really enhances your appreciation, even your love, for a place.
Sophia: And yet, when you live somewhere, it’s easy to get myopic. A historian’s job is to zoom out and see the wide-angle view. How do you toggle between scales?
Dewey: I’ve always been focused on the little stuff. I really learned about the importance of broader context when I started working for the park service. I don’t have a degree in history—I don’t have a degree at all—but through that work I came to understand that it’s not enough for something to just be old for it to be historic. It has to have some contextual bearing in the general history of the area.
That might be a criticism of the book—it doesn’t often address what was happening elsewhere in California or the country. And it might have benefited from more of that. But again, I’m not a scholar. I think I’m more of a storyteller. I learn things from whatever sources I can and try to present it in a way people can connect with.
Sophia: This book in part was born out of this impulse to examine your own blind spots and fill in gaps in this place’s history—especially the Tamal-ko and the ways their story has been erased and forgotten and misrepresented.
Dewey: When I first saw Point Reyes in 1969, it was like looking at everything from a distance, which is what I think most people do. They come here and they kind of look at the view, and they get a sense of the place from afar. But since I was into maps, I quickly focused in on the details. And I’ve always been drawn to the old timers and their stories.
I was long aware of a little bit of Coast Miwok history. Then, in starting to study the history of this place, it always felt like there was way more history to learn. As far as narrative history, there wasn’t much available. But I didn’t feel like I should be the one to do that. It didn’t feel appropriate. This was decades ago, so I couldn’t exactly call myself an old white historian….
Sophia: You were a young white historian.
Dewey: It just felt like it wouldn’t be respectful for me to jump into that—that was their story to tell. But over time, I realized that anyone responsibly telling the history here has to include that story, no matter who you are.
It helped that I was encouraged by Indigenous people and descendants of the folks who grew up here, including the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin and Theresa Harlan. I interviewed Theresa’s mother when I worked for the park service, and it opened my mind to the fact that I can participate in telling those stories, and that the Coast Miwok are not gone. Not only are they still here, but there’s a renewed interest in their history and their homeland.
I’m not here to insinuate myself deep into their world, because I still believe that I need to be respectful, but I’ll do whatever I can to help. But I need to acknowledge that I’m an old white historian and I grew up in a California school system that talked about the missionaries being the guiding light of civilization.
Sophia: And even if we push back on what we are told, dig for a deeper knowledge, will we find out, in 20 years, that the “real” story has changed yet again?
Dewey: That’s why oral history is so important. I regret not doing more of it—partly out of shyness. I still want to support families in talking to their elders and not have some stranger come in with a recorder.
Sophia: Because it feels extractive?
Dewey: Yeah. But I will say, in all the interviews I’ve done with ranch families and longtime residents, I’ve almost never had someone say no. People are often just grateful that someone cares about their life, their family, their contribution. That’s one of the joyous things about this work: to sit in somebody’s kitchen and feel their pride in who they are and who their family is.
Sophia: I’ve seen you do that—reflecting with a family, telling their stories as if they are your own. There’s something so beautiful about having an outside person who will bear witness.
Dewey: It often takes the stranger coming in to do it. Because we can all say, ‘Oh I wish I talked to my grandfather about this or that or asked my father more things.’ But we’re in the family, so we hear the stories and take them for granted. I like to think of what I do as supporting families, as a gift for them to have at least part of their story protected and preserved. And you’re only going to get the tip of the iceberg, but just to capture a voice on tape or to make sure that some pictures in a family album are protected in case the house burns down one day.
Sophia: When I was a kid, I went around Brooklyn with a camcorder, filming my mom, my grandmother and her childhood best friend. We visited the house she grew up in, her school, the places she played hooky. It’s one of my favorite memories.
Dewey: See, that will really imprint on you because that’s part of you.
One of my favorite things in the book is the section on the Velloza family, an old family here. After Dick Velloza died, I spent a lot of time with his wife, May, recording her. I learned that their son, Mike, when he was a teenager, interviewed his grandmother on video. She grew up at Millerton, and her memories went back to the turn of the century. We all know Millerton, but not many remember the ranch that used to be there. It was torn down in the ’70s. A few pages in the book are based entirely on her recollections.
That’s the thing with history—you’ll learn a lot about some things, and other things stay elusive. The book’s a little uneven that way, but it’s meant to offer snapshots, glimpses of life as it was.
Sophia: Inevitably our view of the past will be fragmentary. I wonder if your embrace of oral histories, your emphasis on everyday lives—do you think that has to do with not coming through academia?
Dewey: I never had an interest in being an academic. I want to be closer to the people and the way they speak and communicate. I purposely didn’t footnote this book. I don’t want people distracted by these all the little explanations of where this came from and all that. Everything in the book is true, but I wanted it to be a narrative of the people.
Dewey Livingston’s book, “Point Reyes and Tomales Bay: A History of the Land and Its People,” is available at Point Reyes Books and from the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History. He will attend an official book launch from 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 6, at the Dance Palace Community Center, and he will speak at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 13 at the Tomales Regional History Center.
