Remembering Malcolm Margolin (1940-2025)
California Natives Have Lost a Trusted Ally
Toby McLeod – August 26, 2025
Malcolm Margolin
Ally to Native Californians, mentor, author, and intellectual giant Malcolm Margolin passed away last week. We mourn the loss of our good friend. As fate would have it, we had just completed a new podcast episode using our 2018 interview with Malcolm, which was the last film interview he did before his speech began to deteriorate due to Parkinson’s disease. After listening to the final cut of the podcast earlier this month, Malcolm said, “I loved it!”
For more than five decades, Malcolm Margolin was a fixture at the heart of Berkeley’s intellectual community. As the founder of Heyday Books, he was instrumental in publishing hundreds of titles. Most significantly, in 1978 he published his own groundbreaking book, The Ohlone Way, which woke an entire region up to the amazing natural and human history of the greater Bay Area. Malcolm helped establish many cultural revitalization projects, including Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, Heyday’s groundbreaking magazine, News from Native California, and most recently the California Institute for Community, Art & Nature (which shares our office).
In our podcast episode, I talked with Malcolm about writing The Ohlone Way, the lessons he learned from Indigenous peoples, and the battle to protect the historic West Berkeley Shellmound and Village site. We hope you listen and enjoy it as much as Malcolm did!
“The world wants to be beautiful.
People are here to serve the world
and its desire to be beautiful.”
—Malcolm Margolin
We originally planned to release this podcast episode in October, to celebrate Malcolm’s 85th birthday, but with his sudden passing we’re making it available early to honor his life and legacy.
In 2018, Malcolm worked with U.C. Berkeley’s Phoebe Hearst Museum to display Ohlone artifacts that had been taken by archaeologists from the shellmounds of the East Bay (photo at right). We collaborated to make a short film about the exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, Our Story Lives Forever. A half dozen California Native artists were on hand to demonstrate various techniques and tell stories to the standing-room-only crowd (photo below).
At the 2024 press conference celebrating the Berkeley City Council’s transfer of title to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (STLT), Malcolm was front and center with his helper David Scortino. Mayor Jesse Arreguin, now a state senator (at center), and former City Councilmember Sophie Hahn (to the right of the mayor), were invaluable allies during the eight year battle to protect the site from development. Also present at the celebration were Peter Walker (far left, green sign), STLT Board Chair Melissa Nelson, Kataly Foundation’s Nwamaka Agbo (gray coat), Chris Walker (holding sign), Lenore Goldman (masked), Ariel Luckey (in back), Cheyenne Zepeda with her baby, Claire Greensfelder (blue sign), and STLT Land Team Member Victoria Montaño (at far right).
Some of the Ohlone artifacts displayed at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2018, as photographed by Dana Davis:
My favorite piece of West Berkeley Shellmound public education, by Chris Walker and Awest:
