Reluctant casino mogul Greg Sarris turns to Native lore

Greg Sarris’ – Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and supervisor of Graton Resort & Casino, has spent years translating the legacy of Sonoma County’s Pomo people into his new novel, “The Last Human Bear.” Inspired by Mabel McKay’s prophecy abo

When Greg Sarris drives through the Sonoma hills, he still remembers what Mabel McKay told him before her death in 1993. “Everything is going to go dry. Everything will burn. That’s my latest vision,” she said, gesturing to the paradise around them.

Sarris, then a writer trying to understand what could be done, asked what it meant and what could stop it. McKay’s answer was blunt and strangely calming: “You live the best way you know how.”

In the years since, Sonoma County has endured some of the most destructive wildfires in California history in 2017, only for another, more destructive fire to surpass it a year later. Sarris has carried McKay’s words forward into “The Last Human Bear,” his first novel in 28 years.

At 74. Sarris sits in a sleek office at the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Rohnert Park on a Monday morning. Diplomas and academic certificates cover the walls. A framed poster for the 2023 film “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” hangs nearby, because Baez is a close friend. Outside the window, an American flag ripples in the summer heat.

Sarris has served as chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria for more than 30 years. He is also the writer overseeing a multibillion-dollar tribe-owned casino just up the road: Graton Resort & Casino.

“I had never been in a casino. I have a PhD in modern thought and literature from Stanford. ” he said. describing how unusual it still feels to be at the helm of a gambling operation. “How does an accomplished author find himself at the helm of a multibillion-dollar casino enterprise?” remains a question he says puzzles him.

But he laid down a condition when he agreed to take on the role. “I told them if we can raise our people and become a platform for social justice and environmental stewardship to benefit Indian and non-Indian alike, I’ll do it.”

Before this reluctant pivot into casino leadership. Sarris had been a prolific author and university professor at UCLA and Sonoma State. In 2023, he was appointed a regent of the University of California by Gavin Newsom. Over his career, he published six books, and his novel “Grand Avenue” became an HBO original film in 1996.

Now, with “The Last Human Bear” (384 pages, published by Heyday Books at $30), Sarris is aiming at something broader than literary return. The book revisits California’s Native history by centering a Pomo woman from Sonoma County across more than a century, from Prohibition through the 21st century.

The novel’s opening line—“I’m curious why you want to know about me”—sets the tone. Mary Hatcher. a Pomo shape-shifter in the story. tells her life in the first person. narrating horror and heartbreak over decades. Sarris says the book unfolds like oral storytelling tradition. and that he “painstakingly” crafted the voice so it would feel like a conversation he was still having.

“The voice comes. I have to call it, almost like a spirit,” he said. “I wanted it to feel like an oral story.”

In Hatcher’s world, survival requires transformation. Sarris describes her as thorny and complicated—cunning, scheming, and unforgiving—while also pressing back against a Hollywood habit of flattening Indigenous identity.

“California Indians have always been left out of the picture,” Sarris said.

He explains that Hollywood, in his view, has repeatedly erased California’s Native people by treating the public imagination as something tied to Plains Indians or Southwest imagery. “It’s easier for Americans to access Buffalo Bill,” he said.

Hatcher dodges prejudice by passing as Mexican in the novel. because in the early chapters she gets a job on a ranch by doing domestic work that. Sarris says. Indians were forbidden from taking as housekeepers. The story follows the tension of that deception through forbidden love that sours. with the emotional temperature he compares to Brontë novels.

Acclaimed Northern California writer and activist Rebecca Solnit—who has authored 17 books and is a friend of Sarris—said she was especially fascinated by the way Sarris renders female life in “The Last Human Bear.” Solnit was also moved by what she called the book’s depiction of California’s tragic history.

“It’s shocking. given how rich California’s Indigenous cultures were — 99 different language groups. mythologies. belief systems and linguistic traditions. ” Solnit said. describing her surprise that every North American Indigenous language family is represented in California. “It’s weird how this history has been erased, and how horrific what happened was.”.

Sarris links that erasure to the present in a way that doesn’t read like a lecture. He argues that climate change and ecological disaster have made Indigenous perspectives more vital than ever. “I think Indigenous people have been hugely influential in giving us a point of view in which we were never separate from nature. ” he said.

To Solnit, the renewed attention isn’t accidental. Sarris’ novels are part of a broader resurgence of interest in Native culture.

Sarris also said the novel aims to illuminate an uncomfortable history of Sonoma County that remains largely invisible. “The novel offers ‘a history of this county that a lot of people haven’t seen,’” he said.

He put it in stark geographic terms: “There were more Indian people right where we’re sitting per capita than anywhere else in the entire New World outside Mexico City, which was the Aztec capital,” he said. “The genocide was so horrendous.”

The themes—identity, revenge, and a search for home—echo Sarris’ own life, especially the decades-long question of who he is and what belonging looks like.

In 1952, Sarris’ teenage mother gave him up for adoption. The family hoped to avoid “the embarrassment of their Jewish daughter becoming pregnant by a Native American Filipino man.” Sarris grew up in a white family in Santa Rosa with three siblings.

His adopted father, George Sarris, became abusive, and Sarris said he fled the house with his adopted mother’s blessing. “God bless her. She let me go out and live on ranches and run with other people to get away from him.”

Those formative years led him toward a different kind of education. Sarris said he felt a mysterious pull toward Native American people in Santa Rosa, and that the stories people told him while he was “paying attention” on the streets became fuel for his writing.

He also described Indigenous healing ceremonies happening on the fringe of town—practices he said were frowned upon by white Catholic families in the suburbs. “When I was 15, I met Mabel McKay, who I wrote the book about. I knew she did some of those strange things that I heard about, but I liked her,” he said. “I had no idea that I was related to these people. I thought I was a mixed-blood Mexican or Spanish.”.

At age 30, Sarris uncovered the identities of his birth parents and learned of his Native heritage. He learned his birth mother was buried in a pauper’s grave at the Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Santa Rosa, with “nothing to mark her grave but an upside-down horseshoe that has her name in it.”

In the opening pages of the novel, Sarris dedicates the book to her: Bunny Hartman.

After he presented proof of his Indian heritage to McKay, he said she reacted with indifference. He showed her a photo of his father, and while he thought it would be a big deal, she told him later: “You’re never any more Indian than your experience.”

For decades, Sarris lived with the legitimacy questions he says followed him. Being adopted by a white family. he said. left him feeling rejected—first by the Native community. later by his own sense of not being fully enough. “I keep thinking maybe I just got in with this group of people and my Indian relatives so that I would feel rejected again. ” he said. “We gravitate towards what we know as home emotionally.”.

He said he didn’t grow up on a reservation. “I’m fair-skinned,” he said, adding that adoption fed into that feeling of not being good enough. “Illegitimacy is a medicine in the end.”

In the Native American literary community, he said he has often felt excluded from discourse. But he says he keeps returning to one argument: his role in the tribe.

“Who among them have done this much for their people?” he asked. “Who among them has given this much time and sacrificed a writing career for their people?”

His work has also brought him into public alliances. Jane Fonda—two-time Academy Award-winning actress and activist—said she struck up a friendship with Sarris through a shared cause. “We met during the campaign to secure health and safety setbacks that would finally prevent oil wells from being drilled within 3. 200 feet of a community. Greg and the federated tribes helped us win that fight against Big Oil,” Fonda said in an email.

Fonda later added that she sees something in his books and his community work. “I can tell from his books and my time with him that he embodies indigenous wisdom and beliefs,” she said. “I see Greg Sarris as a man who embodies the best of two worlds — the mercantile culture of Western civilization and the indigenous world that knows we are part of nature and interdependent with it. It’s a rare and valuable combination.”.

Still, the casino that funds many of those community programs remains part of a polarizing story.

Graton Resort & Casino, launched by Sarris over 12 years ago, now plays a vital role in supporting the Pomo Indian community. Sarris said he promised early on: “roof over everyone’s head, an insurance policy in every pocket and a college degree paid for.”

He said the casino gives $2.5 million a year in perpetuity to the University of California so all California Indians can attend tuition-free. He also said the casino has funded theater programs, youth writing intensives, and revenue sharing with neighboring tribes.

In the casino, he moves with a familiarity that he says contradicts how others might imagine him. On the car ride to the casino. he riffed on his friendship with Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart. who bought him a quarter horse as a gift. Inside. he greets employees enthusiastically and points out blown-glass flower sculptures—an embellishment he said he once saw at the Four Seasons in Paris.

He also walks past the baccarat room where he hosts high rollers from Beijing, boasting that they “play $100,000 in a hand.”

When the casino was first built, Sarris said, controversy rippled across Sonoma County. He described death threats against his life, fueled by concerns that a casino would invite debauchery into a wine-centric community.

“There were more Indian people right where we’re sitting per capita than anywhere else in the entire New World outside Mexico City, which was the Aztec capital,” Sarris said earlier when describing how much was lost. On the casino controversy, he pointed to a different kind of fear.

“Beyond whether gambling is right or wrong, what is implicit is their privilege and elitism,” he said. “People were getting scared because these brown people, who were the poorest in Sonoma County, are suddenly going to have power.”

Sarris acknowledged that wealth inside the tribe hasn’t come without costs. “Admittedly, Sarris says their newfound wealth has not been without repercussions in the tribe,” he said. “People who have been traumatized with generational poverty are the most vulnerable to the lure of materialism,” he added.

In the final chapters of “The Human Bear. ” the protagonist looks back at a lifetime and recalls: “Human Bears often like to even the score before they die.” Revenge. she decides. doesn’t help. “Revenge is futile,” she concludes. “If I was going to avenge our people, I would have to poison nearabout all of history.”.

Sarris said he had a similar epiphany speaking with McKay. He explained that Pomo Indians believed each action had a consequence. “Ethnographers always said we’re a culture predicated on black magic and fear,” he said. “No, we were cultures predicated on profound respect for the complexity of all life.”.

Then, he said, “white men came and seemingly bent the laws of natural order.” McKay, he said, described them with a Kashaya Pomo word for white people—“miracles”—because they arrived, killed everything, and “did all these things. Nothing could come back to them.”

But Sarris said McKay also shifted his thinking about what comes next. “Look, there’s no water. There’s no air. Everything’s poison,” he told her, gesturing around them to a broken world. Then, he said, McKay’s idea lingered: “It’s all come back. It just took time.”

Outside the office, the flag still moves in the heat. Inside, his work keeps returning to the same promise he heard from McKay in the Sonoma hills: that what matters is living the best way you know how—especially when everything seems headed toward dry ground and fire.

Greg Sarris The Last Human Bear Graton Resort & Casino Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Mabel McKay Pomo Sonoma County wildfires Native history Indigenous literature Jane Fonda