Jonah Das
Author, Ecologist, Ally
Gathering stories from our original landscapes and peoples
Dispatches
Impossible Odds in Impossible Terrain: Remembering Another Unremembered “Indian” War
June 4, 2025 – On this day in 1873, another “Indian” war most Americans have never heard of – the Modoc War – came to an end in the...
Requiem for Oaquaga: The Great Law of Peace in the Time of a White Man’s War
Until the mid-1770s, there was a thriving Native agricultural and trading town here – Oaquaga – on a bend in the upper Susquehanna River, in the southern tier of...
War Hero & Martyr on the Salish Sea: Remembering Leschi on the Anniversary of his Judicial Murder
February 19, 2025 – On this sad day in 1858, the great Nisqually leader Leschi – who forged an alliance of nine tribes to resist the seizure of their...
The Great Swamp “Fight?” Gaslighting a Massacre in Dawnland Since 1675
An eagle or hawk flying over what is called “the Great Swamp” in present-day Rhode Island would see more water than woods, a sprawling maze of creeks, brush, ponds,...
Still Standing on the Shores of Ganondegwa: The Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794
CANANDAIGUA, NY - November 11, 2024 - In the northwestern reaches of present-day New York State, winter comes hard and early, scrubbing the long green ridges between the finger...
Requiem (and Resurrection?) for Celilo Falls
March 10, 2025 -- On this day in 1957, 13 miles upriver from the brand-new Dalles Dam on Big River (currently known as “The Columbia”), the ancient fishing and...
The State Champs from the Beginning of the World
This post originally appeared in bioStories The girls from way out on the Makah reservation who won the 2023 Washington state 1B high school basketball championship may be, on...
The Bones of 800 Horses
In the mid-1850s, out on the high desert plateau of what is now eastern Washington state, the highly mobile horse nations of the Yakama, Spokane, Paulouse and Coeur d'Alene...
Coming Home: A Sacred Ritual in the Shadow of Uytaahkoo [Mt Shasta]
A fictional representation of the solemn, sacred ceremony used by Native peoples in the American West to welcome home and finally lay to rest to remains of ancestors stolen...
You Cannot Surf Away Your Demons: Surfing’s Lost Boys Grow Up in Momentum Generation
“All these problems were happening in my life, and the only time I felt really good was when I was surfing,” Shane Dorian says in the somber opening solo...
The Drowned Coast: Review of RC Shaw’s Louisbourg or Bust
Hot off the presses. My review of RC Shaw's surf memoir, Lousibourg or Bust, is in the reviews section in the back, page 123. And because this is a...
Remembering Kurt Cobain, Remembering Everything
Three days short of twenty-five years ago, I was working late as usual, so I didn’t hear the news until I got into my truck and turned on the...
The G-Word: A Review of Jaimal Yogis’ All Our Waves are Water
Here's the full-length version of my review in the current print edition of The Surfers Journal (Oct 2018) Name-dropping in the lineup is always a risky move, especially if...
There’s No Crying in Surfing
There’s No Crying in Surfing: New Film Revisits the Complicated Legacy of Andy Irons One of the now standard shots in adventure film is to start with a solitary...
Andy Irons Kissed by God: TGR’s Tribute to the Vincent Van Gogh of Surfing
From the cutting room floor... Kissed by God also zooms in, right to the edge of discomfort for the subject (and us), on the interior lives of those Irons...
Western Swing
The American West is a blank canvas. It is a vault of sky, an infinity of light, a sun-blanched stage bounded by horizon stretching wide enough to show the...
Requiem for the Dream: Remembering Warren Miller
It was his signature line, usually delivered after a final, rapid-fire sequence of people flying through snow on mountains you had only heard of until then: “If you don’t...
Not Yet, Surfragette: Women Athletes Still Sidelined At Big-Wave Competition
This post originally appeared in The Huffington Post on February 15, 2016. HALF MOON BAY, CALIFORNIA — Despite a regulatory requirement to develop a plan to include women surfers,...
The Ghosts of Ellicott City
This story is from Banjo Lessons, my first (unpublished) novel. I wrote it in 1986, when I was 24 years old, and the countryside, farmscapes, and historic small towns...
