With sadness, I share news of the passing of my friend Phil Klasky on April 12, 2022. From the start, Phil guided Mojave Project through informal conversations and as a humanities expert during the project’s development phase. In addition, Phil contributed a remarkable first-person dispatch of his direct involvement with the Ward Valley campaign organized to stop a proposed nuclear waste dump. The fifteen-year, multi-Tribe occupation led to the protection of this sacred Mojave Desert landscape near Needles, California. Please read and listen to Phil’s account at this link.
Philip M. Klasky, November 20, 1953 – April 12, 2022
Phil Klasky, a lifelong activist and teacher, made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent most of his career at San Francisco State University, where he taught American Indian Studies and Race and Resistance Studies from 2003 to 2020. At SFSU, he served for more than eleven years as the director of the Ethnic Studies Student Resource and Empowerment Center and as one of the longest-serving mentors with the New Leader Scholarship, inspiring his students to change the world around them. In 2010, he worked closely with SFSU and CSU East Bay students, the International Indian Treaty Council, and The Cultural Conservancy to create a multi-media exhibit about the historic American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island entitled, “We are Still Here.” The exhibit, was first shown at SF State and then subsequently received an invitation from the National Park Service in 2011 to be exhibited on Alcatraz Island, where it is now permanently displayed. Just a few years before his retirement, he designed the very popular course, Race, Activism, and Climate Justice. Phil was also a long-time activist in the California Faculty Association, acting as the SF State chapter media coordinator for many years.
Phil held an unwavering commitment to social justice. Prior to teaching at SF State, he was the founding director of The Storyscape Project of the Cultural Conservancy (TCC), where he worked to protect ancestral lands and preserve endangered Native American stories, songs and languages. This project repatriated more than 600 legacy recordings of endangered languages from more than fifty tribes throughout the US. Phil became an executive producer of TCC’s award-winning film, The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together, which documented the historic gathering and healing ceremony at the Sherman Institute boarding school for the children who never made it home.
Phil’s Storyscape work grew out of his involvement in the successful fifteen-year campaign to stop the proposed nuclear waste dump at Ward Valley, land sacred to the five Colorado River Indian Tribes. During the campaign, Phil worked with Ft. Mojave tribal leader Lewellyn Barrackman to preserve audio recordings of the Mojave Creation Songs, which documented Ward Valley as central to the tribe’s culture and history. Phil co-founded the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition to fight the proposed dump and in 1995 the organization successfully sued the federal government, resulting in preserving 6.5 million acres of critical habitat for the endangered Desert Tortoise, which included Ward Valley, and later helped secure the passage of the 2002 California Radioactive Waste Control Act.
As a geriatric social worker at the Salvation Army and Tenants and Owners Development Corporation (TODCO) in the 1980s and 1990s, Phil worked with community members to fight for senior and disability rights. He also served as an international observer and human rights advocate in Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. Phil served on the boards of the Agape Foundation for Nonviolent Social Change, the Institute for Deep Ecology, the Escalante Wilderness Coalition, and Community ORV Watch.
Phil had a profound love of nature and could state the scientific name of any flower or plant. He loved to work in his garden and the gardens of those he loved. Phil had a warmth and true love for his family and friends that was expressed in a wide number of ways most often by listening, talking, writing, telling jokes and giving warm hugs. He will be remembered for his beautiful smile and joyous spirit.
Phil is survived by his wife, Catherine Powell, sisters Ilene Marwick and Nancy Klasky Gribler, his niece, and a wide circle of friends. Donations in his honor can be made to Greenpeace, Democracy Now, Planned Parenthood, and Doctors Without Borders.