ARCHIVED COMMUNITY WEBSITE: The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project (CLMP) was...
Read MoreActivists,
Back-to-the-landers
and Hippie Innovators
Do you have materials to share with our archive?
Attention Funders!
Help save these histories, celebrate Humboldt’s counterculture and
join the struggle for community organizing, the arts and the environment!
Spectrum of Dissent July 12
Wrangletown Cider, Arcata
Join us on July 12 at Wrangletown Cider Company for Spectrum of Dissent: Panel, Performances, Music, a celebration of Humboldt’s counterculture and back-to-the-land movement.
Here in Humboldt County, groundbreaking actions born in counterculture seeded economic development, environmental protection and cultural inclusiveness.
At our July 12 event, people like the Berkeley professor Greg Castillo, Sunshine Cereceda – we will add to the list soon! – will help make the case for conserving and understanding this history.
Our archive documents the people who risked it all to make changes with national as well as local impacts. What happened here was bold. It changed the natural landscape, helping to save Headwaters Forest, among others. It changed our daily lives, like what we eat and how we shop at Wildberries Marketplace, Eureka Natural Foods Murphy’s Market or the North Coast Co-op.
Panel discussion followed by performances and music.
Free to all. Beverages and food available.
Questions? Contact us!
Rural Reverb'3
Genesis of The Pure Schmint Players, Review of The Magic Bus
This week’s Rural Reverb’ introduces Southern Humboldt’s Golden Age of original theater with a glimpse of The Pure Schmint Players’ genesis and a review of their first show, The Magic Bus. This is part one of three.
The Pure Schmint Players were part of the counterculture surging out of the Sixties. Radical forms of improvisation and revived traditions, some influenced by psychedelic drug use, revolutionized theater and dance across the planet. Examples in the Humboldt Bay region include Jane Lapiner and David Simpson’s, Human Nature Theater Company, The Feet First Dancers, the Mateel Community Center-based Recycled Youth, and Dell’Arte International in Blue Lake.
The origins of Southern Humboldt’s illustrious mad-cap hill-hippie theater company – including its strange name – The Pure Schmint Players are particularly inspirational for our time. Imagine, (or remember) life with no computer, no TV, no mobile phone, no phone at all. Not even a radio or record player. For the hundreds of Southern Humboldt hippies camping and homesteading their first lean-to’s in the 1970s, making their own music was a popular, and even common, escape from the loneliness of backwoods life.
Focus on Art
The Joan Schirle Collection
HAPA is thrilled to present a curated selection of its Joan Schirle collection. Joan Schirle was the founding artistic director of Dell’Arte International. She was an actor, playwright, director, deviser, teacher, and arts activist, whose acting work was recognized with a 2006 Fox Foundation/TCG Resident Actor Fellowship for professional development. In 2004 she was honored at the 16th Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival as a leader in the field of experimental theatre. She served as director of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre from 2003 – 2011.
Joan Schirle passed away on February 1, 2022 at her home in Blue Lake, Humboldt County, California.
Focus on Community Resiliency
Go back to 2010 in Northern California. The “What’s After Pot” (WAP) collection reflects a community working to develop a collective vision in the face of profound transformations.
A large binder with 225 pages of “What’s After Pot” archives was donated by Anna Hamilton to HAPA in 2022.
HAPA has digitized the binder for public access.
The HAPA minute
Focus on Strengthening our Democracy
Civil Liberties Monitoring Project
HAPA is giving access to its Civil Liberties Monitoring Project (CLMP, pronouned climp) collection. CLMP is a non-profit organization, founded in southern Humboldt County in 1983, relying on community support to continue its efforts. CLMP monitors, documents, advocates for & educates about civil liberties issues in Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Its goal is to encourage public awareness of constitutional rights and involvement of the whole community in preserving and protecting them.
Archived websites
More video evidence here.
Freeman House, author and activist on Mattole salmon restoration in “Les Diggers de SF” (1998) by Céline Deransart and Alice Gaillard.
Douglas Fir, Southern Humboldt new-settler community leader and cofounder of HAPA, speaking in 1988 on trees and moving to the land in an outtake from Expedition Alerce: Lost Forest of the Andes documentary.
1983 Larabee Valley (Southern Humboldt) CAMP bust and onsite community huddle to respond.
