My father Dr. Melvin Seeman had a long and very distinguished academic career at UCLA, specializing in the empirical and cross-cultural study of the sociological concept of alienation. Before he passed away in 2020, he had been working on a collection of his professional publications, with the goal of summarizing and sharing his lifelong intellectual journey. My sister Dr. Teresa Seeman and I took on the task of finishing this project, and here at last is the result. The hard copy will be available in August, the eBook is available here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-07218-5?sap-outbound-id=A67419A6790B77587F9D793A7C7D2DE94C45141B

Southern California steelhead teeter on the brink of extinction. Southern steelhead serve as crucial indicators of watershed health and river ecosystem integrity. Historically, Southern steelhead thrived, with tens of thousands of them swimming through Southern California rivers and streams. Today, it’s rare to see them in double digits. Their dwindling numbers stem from habitat loss, fragmentation, and the encroachment of urbanization. We must act urgently to prevent the irreversible loss of this species.

In 2021, conservation nonprofit CalTrout submitted a petition to the California Fish and Game Commission to fully protect Southern steelhead as endangered under California’s Endangered Species Act. Listing these fish as endangered would promote actions to protect them including removing obsolete dams, improving habitat, securing instream flow, and restoring watersheds. All of these actions would also benefit human communities. For example, improving aging infrastructure would reduce the risk of flooding and increase public safety and holistic watershed restoration would enforce and build strong relationships throughout the community.  

In January 2024, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife submitted a peer-reviewed species status report to the Fish and Game Commission. Their extensive review came to the same conclusion as CalTrout’s initial petition – the Commission found the petitioned action to list Southern steelhead as an endangered species under California’s ESA to be warranted.

We need your help! The Fish and Game Commission needs to hear that allowing this species to disappear is not acceptable. Sign the letter below to tell the Commission that you fully support listing Southern steelhead as endangered under California’s ESA.

Archaeologist Terry Jones of California Polytechnic State University acknowledges that the Malibu Lagoon Chumash could have encountered Polynesian master navigators, who gave their tomol building skills to the Chumash.

The Chumash called themselves “people of the tomol.” They called their canoe a “house of the sea.” For the Chumash people of the Southern California coast, the sewn-plank canoe, or tomol, was an all important part of their lives. Alfred Kroeber talks about the possible Chumash-Polynesian connection in his 1939 book:
“There is a definite climax in [the southern California] area among coast and island Gabrielino and Chumash, whose culture was semi-maritime, with seagoing plank canoes. Although this climax culture was likely to have been further developed locally once it had taken root on the Santa Barbara Islands, its spontaneous origin on the mainland coast and growth to the point where it could reach the islands are hard to understand on the basis of either a Californian or a Sonora-Yuman culture basis. There is therefore a possibility that its impetus came in part either from the Northwest Coast or from across the Pacific, to both of which regions there are sporadic but fairly specific parallels: harpoon, canoe, round shell fishhooks, psychological cosmogony…..but the abundant archaeological evidence shows that this puzzling local climax culture as a whole far antedates any Caucasian contacts.”
(Handbook of California Indians, Alfred Kroeber, 1939:44-45)

Among North American Indians, only the Chumash, and later the neighboring Gabrielino, built sewn-plank canoes. In the Western Hemisphere, this technology is otherwise known only from the coast of Chile and among Pacific Islanders. The tomols were able to carry large loads for long distances which could allowed for navigation across the Pacific.

See also,

Please consider signing the petition to change the Channel Island names back to their original Chumash – https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/rename-the-northen-channel-islands?source=direct_link

From the petition: “Honoring the Chumash and other California Indigenous peoples takes many forms. Officially recognizing original place names is one example of how the contributions of Indigenous peoples can be incorporated into constructing inclusive historical narratives. The recent renaming of Patrick’s Point State Park to its Yurok name of Sue-meg began the healing and repairing process by acknowledging the rightful and last standing name of this important cultural landscape, a landform critical to the identity and function of the Yurok people. The Northern California Channel Islands in all their beauty should be referred to by their original names as Chumash ancestors did for thousands of years.

Fortunately, the Chumash documented numerous place names in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, including the Northern California Channel Islands. Therefore, we the signed below request that the Northern California Channel Islands be changed from Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel back to their Chumash names of ‘Anyapax, Limuw, Wima, and Tuqan respectively.”

The recent search warrant executed at Paul Manafort’s residence has generated a lot of speculation about how much evidence of criminal wrongdoing there must have been behind the search warrant affidavit justifying the search. But as the Washington Post  points out, what few systematic studies of the search warrant process there are suggest what most police officers, defense attorneys and  prosecutors will say: in most jurisdictions, it’s incredibly easy to get a warrant. Most judges exercise little to no scrutiny at all, and the few who do can be circumvented. You just take your affidavit to another judge. The federal process is described by former prosecutor Ken White:

“In the federal system, federal agents present search warrant applications to United States Magistrate Judges for review. Magistrate Judges aren’t nominated by the President and confirmed by Congress like United States District Court judges — they are appointed by other federal judges for set terms, and have a reduced level of authority and responsibility. They do a lot of the unglamorous day-to-day work of the federal judiciary.

The magistrate judge reviews the search warrant application and, almost always, signs the warrant approving it . . .  I think that magistrates can be a little rubber-stampy at times. But probable cause is a pretty low bar.”

As the article’s author points out, the impression that warrants for no-knock raids are carefully scrutinized and waged against only people for whom there is a significant amount of incriminating evidence just isn’t true.

The New York Times reports that of the 23 cases in which the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit has asked judges to free defendants who were wrongfully convicted by their office, only a handful have asked for anyone to be held accountable. The Aug. 8 article by Alan Feuer recounts the case of Jabbar Wsahington, who spent 20 years in prison after a prosecutor intentionally withheld evidence and coaxed a witness into giving testimony that was purposefully misleading; in court, the chief of the Conviction Review Unit said: “There’s a lot of — perhaps blame is maybe the wrong word — but responsibility that goes around on that,” he said. Feuer says:

“It might seem like an obvious step for prosecutors seeking to reverse a tainted conviction to declare in open court who in law enforcement had a role in compromising the case. But assigning blame, at least in public, doesn’t happen often — even in troubled cases.”

One hopeful note in the article is that prosecutorial accountability has become an issue in the DA race in Brooklyn. Ama Dwimoh, one of six challengers seeking to defeat Eric Gonzalez, the acting district attorney, called for a sweeping review of how Mr. Gonzalez has handled bungled cases. And at the end of July, Ms. Dwimoh, who once worked in the district attorney’s office, accused her former employer of never holding anyone accountable for the many botched convictions it has helped overturn.

And, of course, accountability does not necessarily mean criminal liability. Professional discipline could be a powerful disincentive as well. And there is this:

“The accountability thing is often what stops people from embracing this process,” said John Hollway, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who studies wrongful convictions. “They think that accountability means punishment, but it can also mean improving the system.”