Kule Loklo

Kule Loklo means Bear Valley. The village a short walk from the Bear Valley Visitor Center is a re-creation — bark houses, a sweathouse and a semi-subterranean roundhouse — begun in the mid-1970s by the Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin and the Park Service with bicentennial money, and raised with digging sticks, baskets and traditional materials rather than machines.

It was meant as a tribute to a people many non-Indians in Marin believed were gone. A teacher who brought students to help build it later recalled asking whether any local Miwok had been consulted, and being told by the ranger in charge that the Miwok were extinct. A Coast Miwok elder remembered standing behind a tour group at the seashore years afterward and hearing a ranger say the same thing. The federal government had said it too: the California Rancheria Act of 1958 terminated the Graton Rancheria, and with it the Coast Miwok's standing as a tribe. Coast Miwok families had never left. On December 27, 2000, federal recognition was restored to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo together.

An arsonist burned the roundhouse in 1992; the community rebuilt it larger the next year. The Big Time festival held here each July, with Graton Rancheria as tribal partner, ran for decades. Organized programs have been suspended in recent years, but the village is open to walk through.