Mateel Nation Cultural Anecdotes

The Mateel is not a place on the map with that name, Mateel is a recent concept of place, the reinhabitation of that place. As an anthropologist, how would you describe and define it?

Jentri: What I like to do when people ask me a specific question about Mateel is to quote the poet who invented the name. His name is Deerhawk. And there was this very poignant moment a few years (1978) ago at one of the Fireman's Hall meetings where Deerhawk read a poem, and he explained that he and some other people were trying to think of what would be a good name for our particular area (you would say now, bioregion), so they decided that word could be the names of the two rivers put together, those two watersheds: Mattole and Eel. He presented this idea and used the name "Mateel" in a very beautiful poem called "The Song of Twelve" (now titled "The Mateel Naming Poem") in which he described the value system of the culture of the Mateel. Very soon after, that name was adopted as the name of the community center.

Later on there was a big ruckus when the community center burned down and people were trying to come up with the funds to rebuild it. There was a move to drop the name Mateel and just call it "The Community Center." And a lot of people responded very negatively to that because they liked what the name stood for. In the middle of that ruckus, Deerhawk stood up in a meeting and said, "The name Mateel is representative of a system of values." That was how he described what the word is.