San Rafael’s Canal, meeting what is now the San Francisco Bay shoreline, has been occupied by humans for tens of thousands of years, migrating by water from the Siberian north, by water, occupied by the Coast Miwok “since time immemorial”, and today by more recent descendants of European, Asian and Pre-Columbian cultures. 20,000 years ago there was no bay here, the shoreline ~20 miles west by the Farallon Islands. It is a story with hidden chapters. We are creating it over two miles of the San Rafael Shoreline Path on the San Francisco Bay, an interactive timeline, a history of the people and their relation to the land and water, in the voices of its occupants, through archeology, written and spoken evidence, and creative imagination. This is a collaboration of survivors, historians, scientists, artists, writers and the living community of the Canal.

The story will be told on twenty interactive exhibits – to both adult and youth readers,  each step, five years, each tenth of a mile a new chapter.