Color the Water x Coastal Quest
Color the Water Marine Protected Area Project 2024
Land acknowledgements are cool, but mean very little unless landback for indigenous peoples is rooted in real, material support. the Chumash are the indigenous tribe to whom this land belongs, from whom this land was stolen, to whom this land should return to. Land back is not a metaphor. You can support the return of this land to the Chumash in very real ways. See below links for organizations to donate to and support their land back efforts.
Organizations that support this work include and are not limited to:
Color the Water MPA Short Film
We documented our experience with this project and Point Dume, the Marine Protected Area we set out to offer access and education to. This is the culmination of months of work from a cast comprised of all Color the Water community members and participants of the program.
Why should we care when it’s not even for us?
This question, though simple in words, carries deep intricate meaning for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and our relationship with nature. Environmental racism, the idea that those most impacted by the harms done to earth are also the ones most impacted by systemic racism, manifests itself in so many way. For us, an organization hoping to provide surf and coastal access to all BIPOC, we see the gap between our people, whose needs are not met and live in a system designed to maintain that deficiency, and efforts toward the preservation of nature. Our relationship is an estranged one, where the beaches we feel safe at are generally dirtier (as part of a legacy of pushing BIPOC away from optimal areas of land like the coast), and when we do find ways to access some of the more beautiful natural spaces of the world, we are reminded by outside cultures as well as our own that that’s not what we do.
With this as a backdrop, Color the Water set out on this project to share knowledge and experiential relationship building with Point Dume, the only Marine Protected Area in Los Angeles (in LA is a stretch, as it’s about as far from LA as you can get along PCH). With a grant through Coastal Quest, we were able to offer educational sessions to interested community members and support and resource access for them to and from Point Dume. At Point Dume our site visits brought the info to life, as we were able to experience the ocean and marine life at a level many of us had never experienced before. We provided surf support for our community as well, as that is our primary form of connection with the ocean. And, as a way of making sure our learnings and experiences lasted long after the project window, we created a short film and guide book for our people, to tell the story of our experience, and offer a tool of reference for those interested in accessing it after us.
The experience itself was as dynamic and varied as could be imagined. On one hand, nourishment of seeing the ocean and coast in as close to a state as we could imagine it being before colonialism and capitalism ravaged it left lasting impressions. Compared to the beaches we normally go to, where it’s mostly Black and brown folks and where we feel safe and have direct access, one of our surfers had this to say:
“To see the beach and coast like this is so important. You forget that it can be like this because we experience the beach at such an advanced level of degradation. But to see it like this, you are reminded of why we need to take care of it.”
In contrast to the enchantment of what felt like the natural world, we also experienced a harsh reality while supporting access to Point Dume: we are not welcome. Localism in surf culture is one of white supremacy’s covert forms of survival, where your frequency or proximity to any given break determine your acceptance and belonging by those with the most access. Our experiences with folks at Point Dume, from the state parks staff to the surfers in the water, made it very clear that we were not accepted. Our project director was asked if he was local while on his very first visit to Point Dume by a state parks staff member before being told irrelevant and unnecessary rules when he answered no, and surfers in the water told one of our adaptive surfers “Welcome to Point Dume. Next time come alone and don’t bring a camera.” This unfortunately was not a surprise to us, as the nicest natural places along the coast are often the most colonized. Between these human interactions and the physical accessibility of Point Dume - a choice between a near 2 mile walk, a 200 step stairs, or a 200 years paddle with variable winds through a sea lion resting area - presented genuine barriers to access for many of our community.
We do hope that at some point we get the chance to access more spaces like this again. We appreciate Coastal Quests vision in funding our access in ways other grants would not (ie. recognizing the genuine barrier to access that exists for participants and offering stipends for both the time and potential resources lost from the commitment as well as the invaluable contribution the input from participants had that justifies the existence of these projects in the first place.)
CTW MPA GUIDEBook
There’s this notion in surfing about sharing information of a surf location. “Don’t blow up a spot,” they say. This type exclusionary gate keeping of information runs in contrast to the veneer of rebuttals surfing has against those who accuse it of racism. “The ocean sees no color, keep politics out of surfing, all you have to do is show up, show respect, pay your dues, and respect the locals” they will tell you. Surfers of Color sit right on the intersection of these contradictions, where we are lured to the idea of an ocean that will not discriminate against us, only to encounter a surf culture that overtly and covertly does. That being said, we wanted our experience and this project to offer tools of access wider and farther than the project window we were allotted. So, inspired by The Green Book of old, we created The Anti-Racist Surfer’s Guide to Point Dume. It is specifically tailored to include information to liberation seeking melanated folks who hope to access the coast with information and awareness designed for them. How to avoid the very real and lucrative parking enforcement triple threat (police, parking enforcement, and state parks staff, with residents as a fourth hidden enforcer), how to access the area based on different needs, what conditions lend themselves to various ocean conditions, and a crucial factor of crowd conditions and surf culture of Point Dume that does not instruct to subscribe to its exclusionary nature. All of this compiled with media of us and by us, creating representation that matters more because it’s combined with power.
*ironically yet fittingly, with our limited funding we chose to translate our book into the languages whose legacy is from the most colonized in the world, English and Spanish. Hopefully one day we will be able to create translations of these into Indigenous languages of the people most excluded from these places!
