01/03/2026
Help us Bring Beauty, Art & Nature into 2026!
Dearest Friends and Family of California I CAN,
We send our warmest New Year greetings to you all with best wishes for a year of beauty, creativity and community as well as way more peace and sanity in the world.
Thank you so much for being part of the California Institute for Community, Art & Nature in 2025. We truly appreciate all the love and feedback that we receive on social media, from email and in person at our public events. It has meant so much to us to know that you have faith in our efforts and we hope you will continue to support our work in the coming year.
https://californiaican.org/donate/
As you know, 2025 was a year of deep loss for our organization. Our beloved and infinitely creative founder, Malcolm Margolin, passed away on August 20th after two decades of valiantly fighting back against the increasing challenges of Parkinson's disease. In spite of the diminished physical capacity, Malcolm stayed actively involved in the work of California I CAN, continuing to offer up seemingly endless fabulous ideas for events, projects and collaborations, all of which we aimed to fulfill. Malcolm kept moving forward right up until the end, leaving a legacy of major accomplishments completed in our organization's first 9 years.
As we posted at the time of Malcolm's passing:
Malcolm was a spectacularly energetic and creative individual who helped bring the beauty and resilience of California Indian culture in general, and Ohlone culture and history in particular, to public awareness. A true force of nature, he founded the California Institute for Community, Art and Nature to promote three ideas: the importance of supporting California Indian sovereignty and life ways, the unique contribution of the City of Berkeley to social, political and cultural innovation and change, and the critical connection between nature and the arts.
All of us at California I CAN are deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to work with Malcolm for much of the past decade. We look forward to carrying on with our ongoing California I CAN projects together with trusted advisors and our best ideas and energy. We will continue to produce our two annual festivals, engaging evenings with local authors, and to pursue Malcolm’s various projects that were in the works as a living tribute to his legacy and vision .
Please note that an online Zoom Celebration of Malcolm’s remarkable life will take place in 2026 and is being planned and organized by California I CAN.
Date, time, speakers, and link will be publicized once they are confirmed.
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As we enter our 10th year, it's worth looking back at our progress over the past 9 years:
1) We organized 6 California Native Ways Festivals curated by Northern Sierra Mewuk Basketweaver Jennifer Bates (in collaboration with the Friends of Ohlone Park) and 4 Berkeley Bird Festivals (in collaboration with the Golden Gate Bird Alliance) for a total of 10 festivals between 2019 and 2025. These two popular festivals offer one-of-a-kind contributions to the City of Berkeley and the greater Bay Area, drawing 1700+ individuals in attendance per year between both festivals, for a total of over 17,000 participants since we began. In 2021, when we pivoted to produce our festival streamed live online during Covid, our online videos of California Indian arts and culture demonstrations that we posted have since received over 13,000 views.
The offerings and programming of each festival expands every year and we are pleased to announce that, in 2026, our California Native Ways Festival will return to its home location in Ohlone Park in Berkeley after this year's detour to Live Oak Park. Our Festival Curator, Jennifer Bates, is working with us to make this 7th Anniversary event an extra special one, so please save the date and plan on joining us there.
The 5th Annual Berkeley Bird Festival will take place, as always, at the David Brower Center and all around town. This festival expands every year to include new partners and family-friendly activities bringing the joy of birds into participants of all ages. You won't want to miss it.
SAVE THESE DATES:
Saturday, June 13th, 2026, 7th Annual California Native Ways Festival
Sunday, October 18th, 2026, 5th Annual Berkeley Bird Festival
2) We completed two major projects to preserve the archives of critically important California Indian Artists - Karuk painter, sculptor and poet Brian Tripp and Paiute/Maidu/Achomawi photographer Dugan Aguilar.
Our work, in partnership with professor emeritus Mark D. Johnson of California State University, San Francisco, led to two exhibitions at the sites where the archives of each artist are now housed - with Brian Tripp's work at California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt and Dugan Aguilar's archives at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). In 2025, we organized a number of outings to the major exhibition of Dugan's work at the OMCA - "Born of the Bear Dance—Dugan Aguilar's Photographs of Native California", led by Malcolm, to the OMCA to bring folks to experience the beauty and depth of Dugan's work. Although the exhibition closed on June 22, 2025, the OMCA is continuing with their project to produce a catalogue of the exhibition and integrate Dugan's work into the permanent collection. We will keep you posted about the future release of the catalogue of Dugan's work and the potential development of a book of Brian Tripp's paintings and poetry. Is it worth note that this project was begun with an initial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities back in June 2020. It goes without saying that many thousands were able to visit the OMCA to view Dugan's work and experience the culture of Native California through his eyes. Malcolm considered this exhibition to be a major triumph of his many collaborations over the year with the OMCA. We are so grateful that he was still with us to experience and revel in the culmination of this project.
3) We produced dozens of public educational events including topics on the West Berkeley Shellmound, author events featuring new and interesting writers and publications, and evening "salon" sessions with Malcolm as a part of our occasional "Mondays with Malcolm" series.
These events, drawing over 3500 participants and 4 dozen presenters over the past 9 years, have taken place at various locations in Berkeley including the West Berkeley Public Library, the David Brower Center, the East Bay Media Center, Cafe Leila, Talavera Ceramics and Tile, the Hillside Club, Earth Island Institute, Pegasus Books, the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA), the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, et al, as well as Toby's Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station and the Mechanics' Institute in San Francisco. Featured speakers over the years at our various public events have included Native American authors, artists and culture bearers Deborah Miranda, L. Frank Manriquez, Gregg Castro, Julian Brave Noisecat, Vince Medina, Louis Trevino, Eric Wilder, Corrina Gould, Ruth Orta, Jennifer Bates, Frank LaPena, Val Lopez, Lorelle Ross, Theresa Harlan, et al. Additional authors and presenters have included Peter Coyote, Anna deLeon, Fredrika Newton, Obi Kaufmann, Frye Gaillard, Robert McNally, Nora Bateson, and the late David Harris, Wes Nisker and Susan Griffin (partial list)
We are in the process of planning a number of exciting events and panel discussions for 2026, stay tuned for further information about upcoming featured authors, films and artists.
4) After 9 years of actively supporting the successful effort of the Sogorea Te Land Trust and the City of Berkeley to secure the Historic West Berkeley Ohlone Village and Shellmound site and place indigenous lands back in indigenous hands, we continue to support the next steps towards restoring the land, daylighting the creek constructing an Ohlone community education and cultural center that will be an essential resource for Berkeley and beyond.
As Malcolm stated at the time of the victory: "The planned development had much to offer the city—increased tax base and much needed housing—but the invigorating vision that Corrina Gould and Sogorea Te' have proposed in its stead is a thousand times more valuable by any measure: gardens, daylighting of Strawberry Creek, educational exhibits and programs and—importantly for the local Ohlone community—ceremonial spaces. The return of a part of their original lands to the Ohlone people represents an historic turning point, not just for Berkeley but for the entire country. Finally, the Indians win one."
As you can see by this letter, we intend to continue the work with our heart and soul. Our goal is to keep the legacy of Malcolm's great ideas and commitment to creating community moving forward on into the future.
Your financial support not only helps keep the lights on, but also provides critical general support funding that helps to cover staff costs for programs for which we have received grants that only cover direct project expenses, but not core staff or ongoing day to day costs.
General support donations such as yours, are a golden gift to small non-profits such as California I CAN. We deeply appreciate the flexibility that general support donations give to our organization's ability to manage the day to day operations that support our program work. We could not do the work that we do without them.
We also appreciate your participation in our projects, so please do write to us at [email protected] if you have an idea for a program or would like to get involved more directly in our work.
As in previous years, many of our efforts are engaged in supporting the preservation and continuation of California Indian arts, culture and sovereignty with the balance focused on projects related to the intersection of the arts and the environment and creating events that highlight the unique cultural contributions of the City of Berkeley, our home base. Our greatest joy comes from building community around these initiatives.
We are, as always, extremely busy - finding creative ways to be efficient and productive - realizing big ideas with a small staff together with our highly skilled advisors, interns and volunteers.
It will be a different and bittersweet year for us, continuing on without Malcolm's inspirational (and occasional trickster) presence; but he began California I CAN back in 2016 with a great vision, and we are honored and privileged to keep it going.
We would love to receive your year-end gift to support our work on into 2026.
https://californiaican.org/donate/
On behalf of the entire California I CAN Team, we offer our deep appreciation, and our warmest regards and sincere wishes for a New Year of health, happiness and peace for all.
Claire Greensfelder
Executive Director
