PENDLETON — The First Draft Writers Series kicks off the new year with a Zoom-only reading with a northern California author, teacher, and elder whose most recent book looks at the history of the Napa Valley.

Louise Dunlap will log on to join guests Thursday, Jan. 16, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. For a link, visit pendletonarts.org and click on the First Draft tab.

Dunlap is sixth generation Californian and 12th generation on Turtle Island. After teaching in the Boston area for more than 40 years, she now lives a mile from her birthplace on land of the Lisjan Ohlone (now Oakland, California).

Her recent book “Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind” tells the story of her family’s early settlement in California’s now-famous Napa Valley during the region’s violent colonization, according to a press release.

Throughout childhood, she spent time and lived briefly on land that her family had held since 1857 at the southeast edge of the valley. There she’d learned to love steep hillsides, year-round creeks, majestic oak trees and wildflowers — without knowing that the place was the unceded homeland of the Mishewal (Wappo).

It took years and the help of many mentors to learn the history of the region and her ancestors, who had been land speculators, policymakers, lawyers and champions of Manifest Destiny. The path led across the country to Massachusetts and the Mayflower, making “Inherited Silence” a national story that “was challenging to write in a way that could lead to healing.”

Dunlap attended Berkeley public schools without ever learning about the Ohlone people who had cared for her childhood home. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she studied botany and literature at UC Berkeley, taught writing for the first time during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and learned from other students returning from Civil Rights struggles in the South.

Starting at UMass Boston, the city’s new (and first) public university, she has taught in a wide range of venues, eventually creating grad school writing programs in urban and environmental policy and planning at MIT, Tufts University and similar departments throughout the country. She also offered workshops in peace, labor and social justice groups around the United States and in South Africa.

She served on the Cambridge Peace Commission and was active with tenant and anti-apartheid groups. She wrote on Indigenous solidarity issues, PeaceWork and helped coordinate peace walks with The New England Peace Pagoda, notably the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage in 1998-99. Her work has been included in several pedagogical anthologies and in Yes! Magazine and OnBeing. In 2008, she published “Undoing the Silence,” a book on writing for social change that is still in use.

In northern California, she hosts two small writing groups, follows a range of Land Return projects in her region and is proud to pay Shuumi Land Tax (a voluntary contribution) to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. She practices Buddhism with the community of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh where she is an ordained member of The Order of Interbeing.