On certain parts of the California coast, abalone shells can be found along the shore. The iridescent shells have been used in Indigenous traditions since time immemorial. But now, their populations, and the shells that come with them, are dwindling. In the face of abalone population declines, two people 300 miles away have come together in their efforts to pass down a world with abalone and the traditions that depend on it.
On a beach in Mendocino, I meet Steve Holmes, who once described himself as “a crazy old underwater treasure hunter.” This piece of Northern California shoreline we’re on is where Steve has discovered many of the treasures of his life.
It’s a strikingly overcast day. Out on the ocean, the waves seem to be in conflict — crashing into each other from opposite directions. We’re standing alone in a small cove surrounded by steep cliffs looking for treasure. Iridescent glints start to catch our eyes.
“Bingo! your first piece,” shouts Steve as I pick up one of our findings. As he scans the beach, he doles out exclamations, “Oh, I spy!” — “Huh, isn’t that something? Wow.”
We start to pick them up and drop them into a bucket Steve brought. They’re pieces of abalone shells that have been broken up into bits underwater and washed ashore.
For almost 40 years Steve was an abalone diver — freediving under the surface of the water, to gather up these sea snails — to eat. “If you could still dive for abalone, I'd be here diving for abalone,” he says. This place had been a usual dive spot for him.
In 2017, mass declines in abalone populations drove the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to enact a moratorium on abalone diving.
The year the moratorium was enacted, Steve came back to this beach to go for a swim, and found something very different than what he had been used to seeing over the years. “Shortly after the season closed was when I discovered this huge mass grave, I call it. Not a pile of shells. I call it a mass grave. Because every individual shell represents a life. And then you see a thousand of them.”
Steve says that day changed him, took his breath away.He knew the data showed the abalone were in trouble. “But this was like an exclamation point. If people were to drive down the highway and see piles of deer and piles of bears and piles of, you know, all these wild animals that they're familiar with, they would stop to think, too. I think.”
Abalone populations have been out of whack for centuries. With the fur trade of the 1800s, colonizers on the west coast over-hunted sea otters, a natural abalone predator. Fewer predators led to more abalone. But then, when fishermen discovered this seemingly endless abundance, they fished and fished and fished until the abalone became over-fished. Mix in higher ocean temperatures and declining kelp forests and it’s a tough environment for abalone to reproduce in. That’s why the state put a ban on abalone hunting. The loss of the abalone hit Steve hard. “Having had all these years, 35 years of diving for abalone,” says Steve, “It just hits home. It got him thinking about all the shells he had collected over the years. They’re in his garage.
In his garage in Emeryville, he shows me the shelves of boxes filled to the brim with abalone. “They come in here,” he says, pointing to a corner of his garage that looks like a miniature factory line, with buckets and a sink. “I sterilize the shells, you know, soak ‘em in a little bleach for a little while, and then I soak them in mineral oil,” he says. The mineral oil brings out their shine. After about four decades of diving, he has processed hundreds of shells. He says that other abalone divers have garages that look similar to his — full of shells, and he worries about what might happen to his own shells one day.
“They're just sitting there and – People throw them away. You know, when they move out or — we had friends that moved to Ohio, and when he died a few years ago, she threw out 500 shells because she wasn't a diver. He was,” says Steve. I ask him what he means when he says throw out. “To the dump,” he says.
Steve didn’t want the story of the shells he had collected to end in a dumpster. For decades, the abalone had given him so much life. Surely, he thought, there had to be a better fate for the abalone — at least he had to try to do something.
So he started reaching out to people — scientists, academics, artists — hoping his shell collection could somehow be involved in solving the mass abalone decline. Eventually, someone told him about a person up in Trinidad, on the northern coast of California and said, “I've heard that she needs shell too.”
That person was Shoshoni Gensaw-Hostler — a member of the Yurok tribe who has been described as one of the most outstanding regalia makers of her generation. She needed abalone shells to make her regalia. Steve says he didn’t hesitate. “Call her right away. She answers. We introduce ourselves and in the plan is put in action.
Shortly after, he drove up — car full of shells — to meet her at the Trinidad Museum. “I had a private tour of all her work there in the museum and all the other artifacts and everything there,” he said, “It's like touring with Van Gogh.”
Since then, Steve has been driving up to Trinidad, on occasion, to deliver more shells from his collection. Back in his garage, he points to some boxes of shells. “93 pounds,” he says, “that will be what we take up to Shoshoni, some day.”
A few weeks later, I met him up in Trinidad, where we waited for Shoshoni to arrive. As Steve saw her car pull up to the museum, his face lit up. She brought two of her four children with her. Between her activism, career as a psychologist, and being a mom, Shoshoni’s time is limited — and yet, her energy is present and unrushed.
As we walk inside the museum, she lets Steve hold the baby. Steve tells her he is expecting to be a grandpa any day now.
And then, standing in the small museum, we’re immediately immersed in examples of Shoshoni’s work. Displayed behind glass there’s jewelry, baskets, and dresses — Shoshoni’s dresses. Each one has a unique design — one has flowers, another stripes, a third is argyle — and each is beaded with clam shells, pine nuts, and abalone.
Shoshoni began her craft as a part of a Yurok cultural revitalization movement starting in the late ‘80s She said elders would come to the local schools and teach these skills. But she didn’t fully immerse herself in it until her early 20s. She started with jewelry. Then, an elder from her community came to her with words of encouragement. “They said, ‘you should make these, I bet you could make these!’” says Shoshoni, “And so I tried it and started to make more things and I was able to go to a few museums and look at pieces.”
She started making larger pieces, dresses, skirts – the regalia used in Yurok traditions. But she needs pretty specific things to be able to make them, including abalone. “We need it to pray,” she explained, “because we don't just pray without those things.”
As the availability of abalone has been declining over the years, the need for abalone in the Yurok community has actually been increasing. “There's a lot of families who have been impacted by boarding schools, have been impacted by colonization and the Termination Act,” she says.
In the ‘50s, both the federal and state government implemented policies to strip Native people of their land. “And all of these federal acts,” says Shoshoni, “that were made to reduce us as people.”
She says cultural revitalization efforts are helping Native people re-engage in their culture. But now it is harder to access certain items, and Shoshoni says there are many families who still don’t have them at all. And they need them to engage in their prayers or ceremonies. “Everybody wants to participate. But there isn't what we need to be able to do that because the overconsumption or, you know, just the devastation that's happened.”
She says that the people and systems responsible for that devastation can “just move to the next thing. And it doesn't have an effect on them. But the people who that mean something to are the ones who really get impacted. They've been impacted while it was happening and then they get impacted again.”
Shoshoni says it’s about much more than just abalone. “Sometimes we’re talking about our salmon. Sometimes we’re talking about our lamprey.” The list could go on.
Shoshoni says that as a Yurok, she has to keep doing what she can to protect the non-human lives and environments that we’re all a part of, and to still create her art working within the constraints of the climate crisis. “You see the difference in our regalia. And so changing our prayer items from like they used to be, like when I'm saying like, that is a blue shell abalone and it's not local to this area, but it's what I could get right?” She says, “We still have a responsibility to create and do what we can. So, you know, things will change and the regalia will change.”
Despite efforts to reduce Yurok culture over the years, it is a living culture – and that’s something that Shoshoni wants to maintain through sharing it with her community. “If I don't share it,” she says, “and other people like me don't share it, then we are maintaining a system that we didn't have that we know is set up to work against certain people. And the people it works against the people in my community.”
Shoshoni’s work resists generations of attempts to quell Native culture by continuing to breathe life into it. Steve hopes that the shells he brings her can play a part in that. So we head back outside to give her the shells.
They sift through old fruit boxes stacked up neatly in Steve’s trunk. They admire the blister pearls and the wave-like undulations of the colors on the shells.
And then, the transfer begins. Out of Steve’s trunk and into Shoshoni’s. There’s a lot in there — items for an event later that day. So, it’s a bit of a game of Tetris as they shuffle items around.
And then, with a trunk full of regalia and shells, she’s off. To a school — to help with a traditional dance performance. Continuing to share her traditions — a message for balance and care for the living environments that make all of our lives and traditions possible.
