Redwood Voice’s Persephone Corvid Rose filed a piece last week, Student Activists Accuse CPH of Suppressing Dissent After Harassment & Arrests, and the comments it’s garnered online deserve a response. Those comments, at least on the Facebook pages it’s been shared to, have been mostly negative. Understandable, in our little red county. But one in particular needs to be addressed. In it, the commenter thought they were pointing something out by saying the piece isn’t “reporting,” and that no article should start with a press release. I agree, in a sense, this piece is not “reporting” in the inferred sense the commenter seems to have meant. It has a point of view, takes a stand, and ends with a “call to action” — all things that would have both purists and partisans up in arms if they occurred above the fold in the Times or Post.
Continue reading What Does In Media Res Mean?All posts by Heather Polen
Student Activists Accuse CPH of Suppressing Dissent After Harassment & Arrests
Thumbnail image courtesy of the Redheaded Blackbelt’s livestream of the Jan. 21st protest, taken as a screenshot and edited.
Update, 1:23 p.m. March 7: An anonymous source reached out to inform us that the date for Raymond Evans’ arraignment has been pushed back, before clarifying the case is still being reviewed and the court date has not yet been set. Redwood Voice reached out to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s office to verify, which confirmed that Evans’ court date is still pending. They gave no estimation for when it may be set.
Update, 1:30 p.m. March 20: Redwood Voice reached out to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s office again to check on Maggie Rasch’s court date, and found that her case is also pending review. Evans’ court date is also still pending review.
On the evening of March 1st, Redwood Voice received the following press release via email, from the Friends of Raymond and Maggie:
“Cal Poly Humboldt Orders Arrests of Activists, Seeks to Quietly Criminalize Dissent. Don’t Let Them!”
In their latest flailing attempt to supress any dissent, Cal Poly Humboldt and the University Police Department (UPD) have leveled charges against community members Maggie Rasch and Raymond Evans, accusing the two activists of felony “conspiracy to commit a crime,” “vandalism,” and “unlawful use of a mask” just over a week after a January 21st protest. When Evans asked what vandalism he was accused of, the arresting officer Joseph Conlin stated that he witnessed Evans loading signs, drums, and a wagon into his pickup truck after the protest, and that this constituted criminal conspiracy. Is this a reasonable basis for a felony arrest warrant?
In the week prior to obtaining warrants, police twice appeared outside a local house at odd hours of the night, stalking and surveiling anyone they assumed to be associated with the residence. In the first instance, two UPD officers arrived outside the house around 10 PM, shined flashlights into cars parked on the street outside, and knowingly deadnamed Maggie (a trans woman). In the second instance, an Arcata Police cruiser and a Humboldt County Sheriffs vehicle were spotted around 10 PM staking out a street corner one block from the house. Upon leaving, one friend was tailed by the sheriff all the way home.
Continue reading Student Activists Accuse CPH of Suppressing Dissent After Harassment & Arrests
Rainbow Regent Issues “Royal Decree” Rebuffing Executive Order 14168
The executive DNATL Pride planning committee appointed me to be parade Grand Marshall for our first ever Del Norte and Tribal Lands Pride celebration last year. This title was bestowed upon me through a super serious selection process. (I lost a game of “not it”…) It seemed to me as though the nature of the role called for a more fabulous title, and Heather Polen suggested “Rainbow Regent”, so we ran with it.
In light of recent actions taken and narratives pushed by the current federal administration I felt a responsibility to address the attempted erasure of gender diversity. If the sitting president can declare himself King, why can’t I use my Rainbow Regent title to issue a decree of my own?
Continue reading Rainbow Regent Issues “Royal Decree” Rebuffing Executive Order 14168
Del Norte County Office of Education Hosts Inaugural ‘Building Bridges’ Family Summit
Climbing the stairs that lead to the main entrance of Crescent Elk Middle School feels an awful lot like stepping through a time machine.
It’s not just the building’s 1930’s Art Deco aesthetic that immerses me in nostalgia every time I walk through its doors. I graduated from the school in 1999, sure, but I’ve wandered through those halls for a myriad of reasons over the decades. Most recently, I found myself returning to my adolescent alma mater for an entirely new reason. As the parent of a student, I was invited by the Del Norte County Office of Education and the Del Norte Unified School District to their inaugural “Family Summit” event. This conference, called “Building Bridges”, was an effort undertaken by DNCOE and DNUSD to strengthen student and family connections between home, school, and resources available within the broader community.
Continue reading Del Norte County Office of Education Hosts Inaugural ‘Building Bridges’ Family Summit
Local “Night To Shine” Shines Bright
The stretch Hummer maneuvers carefully between the buildings, getting as close as it can to the main entrance where a knot of people wait expectantly. The big building at the Del Norte County Fairgrounds is already teeming with guests and volunteers; light and music pour from the open double doors. An older woman in a long gown steps from the Humvee and pauses to hike her dress up and show a friend her satin bloomers and fancy shoes.
It’s Del Norte’s Night To Shine — an annual faith-based celebration for the special needs community, a community that doesn’t ordinarily have events like this thrown for them. Part of a worldwide celebration, the Night To Shine was founded in 2014 by the Tim Tebow Foundation, and is celebrated the Friday before Valentine’s Day in 800 cities across the United States, and in other locales as far-flung as Burkina Faso and the Philippines.
Each Night To Shine follows the same script, as the Tebow foundation’s website explains: “Each event is unique to its location, but some cornerstone activities included across all of them are a red carpet entrance complete with a warm welcome from a friendly crowd and paparazzi, hair and makeup stations, shoeshines, limousine rides, karaoke, gifts, a catered dinner, a Sensory Room, a Respite Room for parents and caregivers, dancing, and a crowning ceremony where every guest is honored as a King or a Queen — the way God sees them each and every day.”
Continue reading Local “Night To Shine” Shines Bright
How a Community Dies…
Cherece Norris laughs into the phone, though there remains a hint of something else in her voice.
“Everybody keeps calling and saying they’re waiting for the ‘Ha-ha, I was only joking!’ I wish I was…”
Cherece, along with her husband Eric and their sons, Eric and Brent, run two businesses in Crescent City: Norris Family Kitchen and the Park City Superette. The restaurant began in the tiny building in front of the Superette at the corner of Howland Hill and Elk Valley but quickly became too popular — with their selection of “smash” burgers and Indian tacos — for the location. Two years ago, Cherece moved her restaurant into town, along the 101 corridor, to both better serve her expanding clientele and catch some of the tourist dollars that blow along the highway.
Her son Eric and his wife run the Superette, and have made it a hub in the marginal mixed-use neighborhood on the edge of town, providing the usual selection of small-store fare, as well as some fresh produce and prepared food. Outside the front door is a cabinet in which donated food stuffs are left for the local homeless population to take, free of charge.
If you drive down Elk Valley, past the Superette, the first street you come to on the right is Norris. The short, tree-lined street runs past the Elk Valley Rancheria’s education building and disappears in a knot of houses belonging to tribal members. The street’s name isn’t a coincidence. The Norris family has been part of the Rancheria for decades.
Continue reading How a Community Dies…Activists Organize Local Action For “People’s March”
(Disclosure: this article was written as an editorial piece due to the author’s own personal biases in favor of civil rights, affordable healthcare, empathy, and free appropriate public education.)
While mindlessly scrolling social media sourcing stories for the Redwood Voice Community Newscast, a digital flyer for a Crescent City “People’s March” kept popping up in my feed. Apparently, the data-mining chaos goblins of the Metasphere insisted quite strongly that this post specifically would be of interest to me. I found myself annoyed, first and foremost, at the way the almighty Facebook algorithm prioritizes delivery of content. My annoyance, however, was quickly replaced with a sense of amusement that the event infographic attempted to recruit and rally potential participants with the bold declaration of “UNITED WE STAND!”
“…do we, really?” I chuckled to myself. “ …and for what?”
If you buy into national narratives parroted by political pundits through conglomerated media, you’d believe that we are living in extraordinarily divided times.
The way I personally see it, we’ve all been through so many “unprecedented” circumstances in recent times, that at this point, it seems as though dissociative apathy has just sort of blanketed our political climate like a creeping fog on our collective consciousness. Either way, aiming for unity in this era of American sociocultural history seems like a bit of a moonshot.
Continue reading Activists Organize Local Action For “People’s March”What the Heck Happened to KFUG??
As many in the community have noticed, the FM band at 101.1 megahertz is all static, and not the usual mix of static and music that would signal the low-power presence of KFUG Community Radio. What happened? Where did KFUG go?
There is a certain amount of sorcery involved in the complicated process behind shoving an antenna into the sky and subsequently hearing a voice come out of a paper cone several miles removed. Maybe it’s the panoply of compounding variables that gives broadcasting this numinous quality, but after twenty years of radio-living, I can confidently assert what I have learned: Radio is NOT science. Sure, it incorporates wires and circuit boards and math, but really it’s witchcraft. And just as with Elphaba, this witch’s bane is water.
Continue reading What the Heck Happened to KFUG??Crescent City, CA People’s March 2025
Recorded 1-15-25 for KFUG Community Radio’s “Community Service” segment: a conversation with Lupe Gutiérrez and Kevin Hendrick, organizers for 2025’s “People’s March.”
The Crescent City, CA event will take place Saturday January 18th 2025. Participants will meet at the Cultural Center on Front Street. Doors open at 10:30 AM, with speakers taking the stage at 11 AM. At 11:30 AM participants are invited to march (on the sidewalks) northbound on Highway 101 before crossing at Cooper street and returning south on Highway 101.
Scenes from the 2024 Crescent City Christmas Light Parade
On December 6th, 2024, the City of Crescent City, California and the Downtown Divas held their annual Christmas Light Parade and tree lighting ceremony in downtown Crescent City.