Malcolm – who died this week in Oakland at the age of 84 – was gifted with a uniquely consequential life. Immigrant to California from the East Coast establishment (Boston Latin School, Harvard), as a young man he discovered out here what mattered to him, and he stayed and started a publishing house. Heyday Books has for decades concentrated on Malcolm’s priorities – Native American culture especially, but also environmentalism, civic engagement, political activism, and California history and literature.
The important, epoch-making book Malcolm wrote, in the seventies, was The Ohlone Way, a reconstruction of the day-to-day lives of the Native people of these local beaches and forests. It’s a classic, still assigned everywhere in college and high school classes. For it’s a delight to read, short and bright, bringing a peculiar new intimacy to anthropology, taking a point of view as if he himself were an observant family member among the people who lived here before the arrival of Europeans. Malcolm’s values and ethics have taken hold and become a part of the infrastructure of the California book community, and beyond, and we’re proud to have been his friends.