What I Learned About Black & Native Kinship While Canoeing in California

how identity shapes the act of travel

Hey y’all,

When I received the pitch for this story from Keli Dailey, this week’s author, she said, “mainstream travel media rarely acknowledges how identity shapes the act of travel,” and I knew from there I wanted to publish whatever she was planning to write. I started my travel blog for this very reason, to write stories from the intersection of Black womanhood and travel. Not stories from me as a traveler who happens to be Black. For Keli, she realized that Black-Americans and Native Americans have a shared history, one meant to be more intertwined than separate. So, she set out on the Klamath river in Northern California and found more questions than answers, annoying white women, and a new Native friend.

Enjoy the read,
Anayo Awuzie
EIC of Carefree Media

Adventures Unknown: The Klamath River Knew Our Names

by Keli Dailey

It was around the time I lost faith in travel. My U.S. passport sat in a drawer, untouched, reminding me of hard trips—the racist funk in Belarus and South Africa, the handsy dudes in Nepal and Mexico. Even remote California had provided me with trailing eyes and "All Lives Matter" signs. Which is why, long after a Covid booster, I hadn’t let the adventurous spirit within me loose.

Until the idea of Black and Native unity sparked a journey.

Messages about our similarity really began to resonate in April. Watching Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes on HBO, I was struck: we were both the jacked peoples, taken from our rightful lands by racist colonizers and owed something. That June, I attended Arizona State’s “Cultivating Black and Native Futures” conference continuing the solidarity drumbeat. The event logo—a raised fist clasping a feather—made me wonder: What other symbols could represent our identities? Fry bread and fried chicken? I logged off, not with the digital friends I’d hoped for, but a question: How could we team up today?

By August, the Los Angeles Times praised a new canoe tour led by California’s largest tribal nation, the Yurok. Maybe I can clasp a feather in my fist, I thought, speeding 400 miles up from San Francisco to Klamath.

I veered off Highway 101. Just shy of the Pacific’s salty drama, Klamath—a foggy, tree-choked Californian speck—hosts coastal redwoods like no other place on Earth. Some form the Redwood National and State Parks on Klamath’s outskirts. In town, a wine-colored redwood stands like a joke—the Klamath Tour-Thru Tree—where $5 lets you drive through its tragically hollowed-out trunk.

But you know why I was there. I came for the Yurok, for the salmon people, for their redwood canoes that carve through the Klamath River. This is solidarity, I thought, as our shuttle van blurred past the reservation’s man-made landmarks: the Yurok’s hotel-casino, the gas station that is their only grocery. Then we ran over a dog. It felt like a bad omen for our "bon voyage," and I realized it was Friday the 13th.

“That’s never happened before,” said Josh, our tour manager, swiveling in the driver’s seat. Even from the back row, I saw his kind, hydrated 48-year-old face. His carob eyes asked forgiveness.

Between frames of Exterminate All the Brutes, a question lingers: What does repair look like? Not just acknowledgment. Something deeper, entwined with Black and Native survival, that one might even call “decolonial.” I wasn’t sure it looked like a Black Gen-Xer showing up on some allyship mission on a coastal reservation, though.

Clouds bunched overhead as our canoe was unhooked. Josh took off, leaving our captains—two reserved, 20-something Yurok men—with me and another middle-aged woman, but white. I tumbled into the hand-carved vessel. Then the river moved forward, and so did we.

“Are there any canoes left from your grandfathers’ time?” the white tourist asked. Between paddle strokes, one relaxed skater-like guide, Zechariah, answered: we were riding in “Big Baby,” recently carved from a fallen redwood. Then he pointed out a silver willow.

“You could make a baby rattle to help with teething,” he told the two of us women entering menopause. I felt anxious. On the bushy riverbank, a great egret picked over rocks with its bony black feet. Beneath our canoe, the greenish Klamath River wobbled. It looks calm, Zechariah said, but the water has lingering problems. Old fisheries, dams, and capitalist exploitation had devastated the Ney-Puy (Chinook salmon) and the tribes who depended on them.

“You were saying,” the other tourist began, “how there’s hardly any salmon anymore. So what do you think about the salmon season?” I worried she would turn this into a Yurok Q&A.

“Back in the day,” our quieter guide, Julian, finally said, “you’d catch 200 to 300 Ney-Puy in a day. Now, if we get 20, it’s really good.” Better could be coming: Because after two decades of Yurok-led protests, four major dams were slated for removal, restoring 400 miles of fish passage and Native sovereignty. “The river will soon be free,” Zechariah said.

“Wow! Miracles do happen!” the white lady exclaimed.

When she asked about activism, Zechariah cut in: “We don’t use that label. Because it’s our lives.”

After two hours, the canoe journey was over, but also something else was beginning. Josh collected us at the boat ramp. On the shuttle back, I pulled out my notebook to capture the trip—the river sights, the dam protest stories—but also my frustration at how connection had slipped through my fingers. Josh caught me when I disembarked. “So you’re a journalist, huh?”

“Yup.” I didn’t notice Josh’s eyes widen until I was already in my car, pulling away.

A few days later, he found my tour registration info and wrote, “If I didn’t have another tour right away, I definitely would’ve spent more time talking with you. I almost emailed the next day, but I thought I should wait a week to see if you were still on my mind. And…yep, not in a weird way, but I remember you pretty clearly.”

We exchanged emails about Native representation in media. Then I invited him to my journalism class. Josh Zoomed in from his home, a wood-burning stove behind him, to discuss media’s extractive, colonizer-like tendencies in Native communities. My students listened intently and I reconsidered writing about my trip.

Soon after, a package arrived: freshly harvested lion’s mane mushrooms and smoked Klamath Ney-Puy that Josh cured and canned himself. While eating the pinkish spears, I thought of my own culture’s deep tradition of preserving and jarring heritage foods. How I come from an okra people.

At the Black and Native solidarity conference, they urged us to gather in radical joy. So when Josh invited me to a Harry Potter play with his youth group, I showed up—pockets full of contraband candy, hoping to be the fun auntie. But it wasn’t just the kids I wanted to win over. I wanted Josh’s friendship, too.

Looking back, my approach to the Klamath trip was strange. Was I searching for a Native friend, like those post-George Floyd white people hunting for a Black friend? How much cultural alliance did I expect from a two-hour canoe ride? Real connection takes time.

Since then, Josh has visited regularly for work. We’ve laughed over meals, and shared dreams over walks. We trade Spotify playlists, gifts, and the occasional call. However I show up, he’s always receptive. While writing this, I texted Josh out of the blue, “Do we have a decolonized friendship?”

“Hmmm,” he replied. “I believe we do. I’m actively working to unlearn the ideas of friendship I was taught early on—most of which reinforce patriarchy and male privilege.”

As a Black woman, I welcome that perspective. I hope to return to Klamath when the weather warms up, but for now, our growing friendship reminds me that Black and Native people can find each other.

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Keli Dailey is a journalist, comedian, and professor with experience at the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, TIME magazine, and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. A 2014 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, she also received a First Look Media fellowship for her 2015 comedy-news web series News Hangover. She teaches at Mills College at Northeastern University and the University of San Francisco, focusing on storytelling and media literacy. Her essay, “Atonement: What Reparations and Racial Justice Look Like on TV’s Atlanta,” appears in Race, Representation, and Satire (Lexington Books).