About Jonah Das

Jonah Das is an author, musician, and restoration ecologist based on the land of the Esopus / Lenape (Algonquian) people in the Catskill Mountains of present-day New York State. He has lived on and worked to restore native habitats on the land of the Ute and Cheyenne (Colorado); the Multnomah and Clatskanie (Oregon); and the S’Klallam and Chemakum (Olympic Peninsula of Washington state).

Jonah’s most recent book is Tillikum River, a novel about a mixed-race family on a Native reservation that infuses contemporary tribal politics and race relations with the mostly untold history of the Pacific Northwest. As a child, Jonah regularly encountered archeological evidence of the Onondaga / Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) people in the woods surrounding his home, and by middle school he was playing lacrosse with their descendants from the reservation two towns west. He wrote Tillikum River while living and working on a native tree and plant farm on the land of the S’Klallam and Chemakum, on the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington state.

Jonah is also the author of Dudeville, an adventure novel about the spiritual dimensions of mountaineering and bittersweet transformation of the American West into an outdoor sports playground; and That Golden Shore, a musician’s “road novel” about the myths, landscapes, and indigenous peoples of present-day California.

He is also the editor of Illahee Rising, a geographic information nonprofit that documents Native historic sites missing from or misrepresented on current maps.Much of the historic material available on this site was developed as part of Jonah’s research for Tillikum River and is also available, along with geo-locations, at illaheerising.org.