The Autumnal Equinox is this Sunday, which means it’s time for the North Country Fair, an annual gathering on the Arcata Plaza with a history stretching back 34 years. Streets around the town square will be closed to traffic Saturday and Sunday to make way for musicians and dancers, booths manned by artisans selling their […]
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No Native Left Behind
Injustice. That’s what Geneva Wiki and her family have been fighting against for as long as she can remember. Wiki is the great-niece of Raymond Mattz, the Yurok man who refused to pay a fine for gill netting on the Klamath River and successfully appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, eventually […]
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$92 million question
Money is often on the minds of the Yurok Indians, but that’s usually because there isn’t enough of it to go around. In addition to being California’s largest tribe, it is also one of the state’s poorest. And with the tribe’s natural resources, once abundant, now facing an uncertain future, the Yurok can’t just wait […]
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Humboldt Hip Hop
The Father They used to call Garth Culti-Vader "The Humboldt Father" because of his supply of ganja clones. Standing tall with his 14-month-old son Taurean between his legs, he grins and says, "Now it definitely has a different meaning." It’s obvious that Garth is a dedicated dad: At this summer’s Reggae Rising, in front of […]
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Bye Bye Barstow?
Prospects were bleak for the Big Lagoon Rancheria on Tuesday afternoon, over there in Sacramento, where the state legislature was wading through 200-some bills on presumably the last day of its 2007 regular session and nary a one of the bills contained anything whatsoever to do with a Barstow casino. Who knows, maybe some last-ditch […]
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Tower glower
It started with the cement trucks, trundling day and night up Fickle Hill Road and, five or so miles in, turning onto a dirt road. Or maybe it actually started earlier than the cement trucks — maybe the first real indication, if anyone could have guessed it, that a new cellular communications tower was going […]
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Roadside Attraction
Driving to Labor Day destinations amid traffic and road construction can really try one’s patience. So just imagine the lucky drivers who unknowingly happened upon the Four Corners Bake Sale in Whale Gulch last weekend. Instead of rounding the bend and finding more dizziness-inducing roads, they found a welcoming committee of Whale Gulch locals offering […]
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The Weather at CR
Fog hangs like drapery around the outer edges of the campus. The commons is filled with anxious, confident and confused people milling about. It is the first day of classes at College of the Redwoods, and somehow things seem a bit more organized. Registration lines in the Administration Building are being managed (better than emergency […]
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Upward Bound No More
When the noon whistle goes off in Arcata, most people just think it’s time for lunch. But for James Frasche-Russell, a 26-year-old army veteran majoring in computer science and math at Humboldt State University, the whistle brings back bad memories. "It really freaked me out, because that was the get-into-your-bunkers-we’re-being-bombed alarm in Iraq," he says. […]
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Does LSD Kill?
Martin Cotton, the 26-year-old man who died in police custody on Aug. 9 in Eureka, may find himself a permanent resting place in the annals of a medical journal somewhere. Ken Falconer, the doctor who performed Cotton’s autopsy, said on Monday that he and Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager have not quite worked out the […]