Mark and Caleen’s singing was flowing in solemn drifts from the prayerhouse, and I stood outside, under the sleepy Easter sun, listening intently but out of view.
The Winnemem had re-acquired the skull of an ancestor, which apparently had long been languishing in the possession of a collector or museum, and now Mark and Caleen were laying down prayers and blessings as they prepared to return the skull to its home in Winnemem territory, to “repatriate it” as Mark put it.
Even though my presence here at Tuiimyali has been accepted, there are times I’m not sure if I should be asking questions or if I should even be present. And, whether reasonable or not, I had a foreboding sense that day to keep my distance from the prayerhouse, so I lingered outside, hoping a little insight might wend my way like a cool wind to a sweaty brow.
Some days at Tuiimyali are so rich in story and poetry that they alone could be worth their own novella. On Easter, not only was Mark and a couple of compatriots heading up a mountain to return the skull, but another contingent of young Winnemem, and a few stragglers such as myself, were climbing Two Sisters mountain to lay down prayers and post a flag at the summit to remind the spiritual and physical world that the Winnemem still remain.
The Winnemem have lost so much in the past 150 years, but what’s hard to understand without living here is how often they’re reminded of this, how often what once was theirs is dangled cruelly in front of them and just out of their reach, like a tall bully holding a stolen toy high above his head.
The Smithsonian, for instance, possesses thousands of Winnemem cultural items that are currently vaulted away in storage, and there is apparently little interest in returning them. On the McCloud River, private fishing clubs and the Hearst family own traditional Winnemem land. The Hearsts deigned to name their original property Wyntoon after the Indians who once lived there, but don’t deign to allow the Tribe to access the sacred sites on their property. All they have left is 42-acres of a territory that stretched from Redding to the Oregon border, and they still have to get permits to collect wood for their sacred fire, permits to hold a ceremony and permits to receive eagle feathers (well, until that right was recently stripped from them).
Easter, thus, was a day about reclaiming what was rightfully theirs, to assert their existence in a world that continues to deny it.
Two Sisters is a pine-quilted mountain with a scabrous stone forehead that looms over the tribe’s Coming of Age ceremony site on the McCloud Arm of the Shasta Lake. About a dozen of us made the climb, including myself; Debbie, the new tribal administrator and an environmental justice advocate; and Dion, a cousin of one of the Winnemem’s girlfriends.
The journey was beautiful as we made our way through moss-coated boulders and copses of big oaks that rose up around us like nature’s fingers. But the soil was loose and the rocks beneath our feet would slide. At one point, the ground gave way beneath me, and I slid a few meters down a steep incline.
A few minutes after I came to my feet, Dion appeared holding my bound notebook, which must have slipped out of my back pocket.
“Hey, I think you dropped this,” he smiled. “Looks important.”
It contained a full seven months of diary entries, notes and random thoughts, and I was extremely grateful. I hadn’t met Dion before this climb, but I decided I liked him.
After we climbed the steep rocks of the mountain’s forehead, we gathered on a rock-ribbed precipice and looked down at the McCloud River canyon, an awe-inspiring view of verdant mountains, silver-tongued sky and the emerald waters of the McCloud. This portion of the river is called the McCloud Arm of Shasta Lake because, though riverine in shape and dimensions, it is regularly swollen by water releases from Shasta Dam. Below us the water was stagnant and almost green, not clear, cold and rushing river it was meant to be.
Even on this beautiful day, the Shasta Dam’s presence crept into our view.
Jesse planted the flag, a gray wolf howling into a blue sky, and we each smoked some tobacco and laid down a prayer.
The descent was far more treacherous, as it was a steep decline and many of the rocks were loose. Debbie and I had to slide most of the way down from the summit on our rears, and by the time we got back to a small creek about a mile and a half from the road, the less experienced mountaineers were well exhausted. But at least we were close to camp, and Easter barbecue.
That was when Dion fell. We were scattered on different sides of the creek, and I turned around in time to see him tumble some 15 or 20 feet and crash to the ground behind a veil of shrubbery. I heard strange gurgling sounds coming from the brush, and I was momentarily paralyzed, fearing the worst.
“He’s having a seizure!” Debbie yelled. “Someone put a stick in his mouth.”
A couple of the young Winnemem were by his side within seconds, cradling Dion in their arms, as two others, Jamie and Nick, dashed towards camp to get help.
After the seizure stopped, Debbie and I headed after them. Being the slowest among the group, and Debbie desperately needing a rest, we relayed information as reinforcements passed us on the way to the scene.
I drank some water at camp and then returned to the mountain with Caleen, who brought her doctoring chest. When we arrived, there was a crowd of nearly dozen watching over Dion who was wrapped in a blanket, drinking water and, his short-term memory totally shot, asking the same questions over and over again.
Caleen sat next to him, took a small green clover-like leaf and placed it under his nose.
“Breath this in,” she said.
Then she took her pipe, and blew tobacco smoke upon his cheeks and atop the crown of his head.
As the night grew colder, Dion was enveloped in coats and sweaters that had been collected at camp, and when the search and rescue helicopter arrived, Caleen held him around the shoulders and looked into his eyes, speaking words of comfort, as the chopper’s blades deluged us with a fierce, biting wind and drowned out our voices with its sonorous motor.
Eventually the search and rescue team decided it was too dark to try an airlift, so they helped Dion walk down a fairly rugged path to the road.
They took Dion to the hospital, and the next day we learned that he was fine, he didn’t even have a concussion. But many of us were still debating how and why it happened.
Some thought he must have been tired and simply lost his grip while others thought he might have been affected a car crash the previous week. Some mentioned that because we hadn’t left early enough for the climb, we hadn’t been able to visit another sacred rock on the mountain that’s a protector.
Several Winnemem believed the accident was perhaps rooted in something spiritual, and I can understand why some of their minds would turn to the protector they left behind.
When the world denies your existence, danger exists in most things you do, especially in reclaiming what you believe is rightfully yours.
Jason plays in the mud at Tuiimyali with his younger brother Nate
After I finished graduate school six months ago, I turned down a job offer, lied about it to my parents and moved into a small trailer at the village of Tuiimyali, the obsidian-laced home of about 30 Winnemem Wintu.
I wrote my thesis about the small tribe’s journey to New Zealand to sing to the genetic descendants of their salmon, and I wanted to write something deeper, something more meaningful. To do so, I had to live with them, to I had to intimately know the lands to which they are so bound, I had to feel what they felt.
After the prerequisite “Dances with Wolves” joke, people ask me what it’s like living with the Winnemem, and honestly, after my first half-year at Tuiimyali, it’s started to feel normal, routine even.
But, every now and then, there are sudden moments that jar and enlighten me. They come at the strangest, most unlikely times, like lightning bursting from a clear sky.
A few month ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table in the main house when 11-year-old Jason came up to me brandishing one of his trademark guns, which he fashioned from old broken pipes. He had attached a flashlight on top of it with electric tape so he could have “night vision.” For certain periods of my time here, I’ve rarely seen him without one of his homemade weapons, yet curiously I’ve never seen him pretend to shoot one.
Jason is an ebullient, inquisitive soul, always interested and rarely disappointed. He’s a bit of anomaly on the ranch because, while many of the young people can be quiet especially among people they don’t know well, Jason can be a chatterbox..
One day near Christmas, he came up to me and unleashed a full 20-minute torrential soliloquy about his family’s trip to the Lego store. It was a tale of fastidious detail, every Lego set he encountered assiduously described and having its own story arc. If it’s not the Lego store, it’ll be his new Mario game on Nintendo DS or a new Playstation shoot-em-up.
“That sounds really cool,” I say, my usual response after being blindsided by a rush of effusive Jason enthusiasm.
“I knooooooow!” he always replies back.
This day, however, he looked a little forlorn, his moist black eyes focused on the floor and his face not harboring a single trace of a smile.
“What are you doing, Dadigan?” he said. “I’m bored. There’s nobody around.”
I told him I was working on a story about something I called “tree equity”, this idea that poor urban areas don’t have as many trees as rich neighborhoods. I explained how researchers are increasingly finding good health outcomes attached to denser “tree canopies” in people’s neighborhoods.
He nodded, and then his gaze met mine squarely, with a self-assuredness that surprised me.
“The people don’t understand,” he said. “They suck up all the water, they throw trash on the ground, and they cut down all the trees. They’re hurting the Earth because they don’t understand.”
“They don’t know water. . . They don’t know Earth.”
This Jason before me bore no resemblance to the one I had known for most of my time in the village. I hadn’t the foggiest idea how answer him, so I kept looking him in the eyes, and he continued to look back.
“I know, Jason,” I said. “I know. You’re right. They don’t know.”
The truth is I should have said “we” instead of “they.” Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I was so disconnected from nature, and really had no concept of what it was and what it needed. Or what we needed from it. Even a lot of us who grow up camping and enjoying the “outdoors” see it more as a big, picturesque backyard.
Think of the word “environment,” and how we use it: environmental law, environmental reporting, environmental studies, environmental justice. What does that do but perpetuate this myth that Earth is a separate entity, something that’s not connected to every action we take in this life.
It’s the world we live in, it’s everything we have, and yet we’ve turned Earth into something to be compartmentalized like education policy or real estate law.
Jason was right. We don’t know Earth. We don’t even call it by its name.
After a while Jason became his old self again. He seemed to be seeking an answer from me that wasn’t coming, and had given up.
“They’re also making zombies,” he said. “Like in Call of Duty. That’s why I’ve got night vision for my gun.”
He slipped so easily back into his childhood world, his more American world, that it was hard for me to follow the transition.
The complexity of Indian identity is often narrowed into this simplistic metaphor of “walking in two worlds.” But in my life with the Winnemem, that metaphor seems inaccurate. It implies that if they were able to, they could simply choose to stop walking in one world and spend all their time in the other.
Can those two worlds be so easily separated? I envision them more like eddies that swirl, blend and filigree for most of their existence below the surface, and as I immerse myself deeper into the Winnemem’s lives, the more often I find myself suddenly jerked free from my tethers by the unseen currents.
On a couple dark evenings, I’ve seen Jason wandering around the village with a big flashlight or carrying a lantern. The village is far from the incandescent fog of city lights, and from a distance Jason was rendered a small spectral orb of light floating through the black.
“What’re you doing?” I asked him one of these times.
“I’m looking for spirits,” he said, matter-of-factly. He explained that he had seen a relative of his that night, and now he was looking for more spirits.
There is something utterly confusing and beautiful about facing the limits of what you can understand, and that is me here in Tuiimyali: a little, helpless human adrift on a river bounded by the this Winnemem world, a world strangely familiar and foreign like a half-remembered dream .
Last night, I took my headlamp in my hand and walked around the village, wandering through the black scabrous tendrils of manzanita and oak for reasons that slipped away from my memory like steam through my fingers.
Maybe I was looking for spirits.
Or maybe I simply wanted to know if the spirits were looking for me.
Cameron has compared this scenario to a “real-life Avatar“, and I’m glad that he’s standing behind the message of his movie (artistic merits of the film non-withstanding) and taking action.
Still, I found it strange he was willing to travel to the Amazon for this good work when he could support the Winnemem’s struggle against another mega-dam just a few hours north of his Palo Alto home. I’ve written about this for the California Progress Report.
But this latest story included a video from Amazon Watch, the first image of which shows none other than Arnold Schwarzenneger shaking hands with an indigenous man. Apparently, he and Cameron are working together on this campaign, and the hypocrisy of the former Governator in this situation is hard to overstate
I suppose it’s easier to intervene on behalf of the indigenous when it’s another state’s so-called development that will be impeded by respecting basic human rights. Yeah, I know. Those internationally agreed upon human rights – what a drag!
But I’ve noticed since I began working with the Winnemem that most people seem far more interested and concerned about the indigenous in foreign countries than about the indigenous at home.
Why is this? Is it because we hear the word “indigenous” and envision people more like the Navi from Avatar, with loin clothes and makeshift huts and bows and arrows?
Is it the casinos that have made people cynical of American Indian causes?
Is it an unwillingness to confront the atrocities that we’ve committed? Is it easier to condemn those same atrocities in other places than where we live?
I ask these questions genuinely because I’m not sure.
For most people, I think this phenomenon stems from something unconscious or from plain old indifference.
But Arnold’s actions in the Amazon could not be more contrived or deliberate. The Belo Monte is the cause du jour in Hollywood, and apparently Arnold is happy to join the bandwagon.
While it’s frustrating the Winnemem’s case receives so little attention, I’m glad the Amazonian people are having a spotlight shone on their plight.
But when there’s light, you’re bound to attract some moths.
It’s hard not to relish the irony in this widely covered story: a Berkeley physicist pegged by conservatives (and even funded by the increasingly notorious Koch brothers) to debunk the evidence of global warming has done exactly the opposite.
Robert Muller fostered a reputation as a vociferous critic of Al Gore and co., arguing that their data is flawed and that their conclusions are “alarmist”.
But at a recent House hearing on climate change, Robert Muller presented his research team’s initial results, which closely mirrored the data from scientists who’ve concluded global warming is fact.
So the climate change skeptic’s own research shows he shouldn’t be so skeptical.
Doh!
It’s nice this story had a happy ending, but it’s also representative of a disturbing strategy that’s been especially prevalent in salmon restoration debates here in California.
No longer are anti-environment, anti-conservation forces simply content to deny or ignore science. Rather they’re trying to replace it with a version of “science” that’s palatable to their interests. It’s an ostrich strategy in disguise, a false justification for unjustifiable indifference.
With climate change, they latched on to a lonely contrarian and hoped his twisted narrative might come true. The efforts here in California are more sophisticated; they’re trying to change the narrative altogether.
At the center of this scientific subterfuge is the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta, a sprawling estuary that is vital for the wild salmon’s life cycle: it’s there where many of the young smolts stay to feed and grow big before heading out to the more dangerous waters of the ocean.
Big Ag and Southern California also rely heavily on water from the delta, which is diverted through huge pumps, sometimes in such volume that rivers that feed into the estuary have reversed direction.
Endangered runs of Chinook salmon and Delta smelt need healthy water in the delta thrive, and they’re often disoriented or killed by the water pumps. The National Academy of Sciences have weighed in on the body of research, and concluded water diversions and pumping from the Delta must be restricted for the fish to be appropriately protected under the Endangered Species Act.
But if you listen to people from the Department of Water Resources or others representing the interests of Big Ag, they’ll claim it’s pesticides, adverse conditions in the oceans, invasive predators like the striped bass or even zooplankton that threaten the salmon.
And they’ll say the “science” is on their side.
Unfortunately, science literacy is a huge problem in America, and if you’re science illiterate and you’re given two options of “science”, aren’t you likely going to pick whatever is the most convenient or even advantageous for you?
Or if you’re a Big Ag baron who stands to lose a lot from a widely accepted and proven scientific conclusion, it would make a lot of sense to try to replace it with your own “science”, right?
As Don Draper said, “If you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.”
I think part of the problem stems from expectations: Science, many seem to think, should be infallible, and if it’s not, then it stands to reason it must be completely malleable.
The truth, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle.
Science is a relatively young phenomenon; I read recently that about 95 percent of history’s scientists are alive today, which, whether verifiable or not, is a nice reminder we haven’t been doing this for so long, and there’s still a lot we don’t know.
Winnemem war dancers protest a salmon hatchery on their river in the 1870s, a prescient move considering how much damage hatcheries have done to salmon fisheries.
One reason I wanted to write about the Winnemem and their salmon project was because of their use of traditional knowledge, what they might call indigenous science and what others refer to as the indigenous way of knowing.
Before the Shasta Dam was built, the tribe spent thousands upon thousands of years on the McCloud River harvesting the salmon as well as dancing and singing for them. They’ve been conducting direct observation of salmon from the beginning of their history, and that is a knowledge even the most staid biologist should respect.
Unfortunately, the Winnemem have had to work their way into the conversation about California salmon restoration, and it’s a common problem for indigenous people throughout the world. The U.N.’s summit on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan didn’t have a single representative from the indigenous community. Very often, these are the people who have the most intimate and detailed knowledge of the species we’re trying to save. And they’re not even included in the conversation? How much sense does that make?
Undoubtedly, the answer to that question is agog in undercurrents of racism, classism and colonialism, but, most simply, there are probably even fewer people who understand indigenous knowledge than there are who understand science.
And just as there are people falsely claiming possession of science, there are those who do the same about indigenous knowledge. Just a few months ago, a woman named Kiesha Crowther who claimed to be a “Sioux Siletz shaman” was exposed as a fraud. But only after she had recruited thousands of predominantly white followers and reaped in possible millions in payments for her “expertise.”
Charlatans like Crowder help spread an Avatar-esque notion of indigenous knowledge: that it’s all metaphysical, abstruse and rooted purely in the spiritual, more philosophy than concrete, applicable knowledge. It’s an unfortunate misconception.
Take a look at the Winnemem’s salmon plan: It makes a lot of sense, a lot more than snorkeling biologists picking pea-sized salmon eggs by hand and transferring them to another river as they’re currently doing in California.
Respecting and heeding both science and indigenous knowledge will be vital in staving off climate change, the water crisis and widespread extinctions.
Unfortunately these days, it’s really easy to say you’ve got science or indigenous knowledge without really having to back it up.
It’s up to us to dig a little deeper, to separate the charlatans from the experts.
If the day comes when all the polar ice melts and our coasts are suddenly consumed by the oceans, we don’t want that to be the moment we to discover we’ve been ostriches, our heads blithely submerged beneath the sand as the world falls apart around us.
Winnemem Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk-Franco speaks at the Wild Salmon Summit this past winter. (about 3 minutes in)
His name was Leon, and he was a short, wiry man, wearing just a flannel shirt and a vest jacket on a cold day. Age had spun a well-distributed gossamer of wrinkles across his face, which crinkled at the corner of his eyes and in all the places that made him look even more like a tender grandfather.
I knew we would chat the moment he sat next to me.
“My dad worked on that,” he said wistfully staring out through the expanse of glass several yards away from our seats.
The Scripture According to BOR (in the foreground is a model of the head tower used to build the dam)
We were at the Shasta Dam visitors center outside Shasta Lake city in Northern California. The BOR and a pair of local historical societies were holding a presentation on the dam’s history and future, and we were among the more than 180 people who attended.
In front of us was all 602-feet of the Shasta Dam, 2/3 of a mile long and containing enough concrete to build a sidewalk around the Earth’s equator. Lacy ribbons of water from the dam’s reservoir cascaded down the spillway as snow-sprinkled mountains loomed above, wreathed in roiling winter clouds.
“Man, what a beautiful day for this,” he said. Leon, a retired dentist, went on to tell me how his father worked on the dam as a bookkeeper and a variety of other jobs. He was in elementary school then, and his father would drop him off at Toyon, one of the temporary communities that was built for the dam’s workers, where he’d play with their children.
The pride that suffused his conception of the dam, even the way he looked at it like an adult child that’d done him proud, disrupted my own little dam-obsessed reverie.
I had read about this presentation in the local newspaper and knew they would be spreading the BOR’s mythology about the dam. It would ignore the story of the Winnemem who were evicted from their homes on the McCloud River to make way for the reservoir, and it would also ignore how destructive the dam has been continues to be to the local ecosystems.
It’s often touted as what has “saved” Redding and the local communities from the Sacramento’s pernicious and unpredictable flooding. However, a river’s flooding has a purpose. Geologists, for instance, are now considering artificial floods to mitigate the effects of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Grand Canyon, and the Sacramento’s riparian fauna is a mess. I’ve seen the cleanup efforts myself.
I had come, thus, armed with a brimming cache of outrage, imagining myself standing up during the Q and A, and making an impassioned speech on behalf of the tribe. “Until you tell the Winnemem’s story,” I envisioned myself saying. “You’re spreading mythology, not history.”
After my chat with Leon (he told me some more how young dentists need a lot more handholding than they did in his day), my delusions of grandeur dissipated, and I stayed silent during the presentation by a BOR representative.
She presented the usual old tropes, of how the dam is an engineering marvel, and how it was designed and built without computers. “Picks, concrete and pencils” were the vital tools of that day, none of the modern world’s “doodads,” and the graybeards in the audience inevitably chuckled in agreement.
Would Leon ever care about the sacred places beneath these waters?
It was funny listening to the old-timers, many of whom I’m guessing had a parent or relative involved in the dam’s construction. They’d laugh or “hmmm” to themselves at particular and predictable moments, as if they were watching a beloved old black-and-white, like the Wizard of Oz. They found comfort in the old maxims and the familiar facts as we might in a well-worn and sun-soaked hammock.
I realized that, in a way, the Shasta Dam serves as the genesis place for these people; in the scripture according to BOR, it stopped the floods, it tamed the river, it provided the water for the agriculture that dominates the region’s economy. Without the dam, life as they know it wouldn’t exist.
The Winnemem bubbled into creation from a spring on Mount Shasta, a mountain less than an hour to the North. They know where they come from and go there every year.
I imagine this is something that all of us newcomers are lacking, something for which we’re instinctively looking to replace. I can understand, given the stories the BOR and local historians tell to these communities, how the dam could fill that void.
After the presentation, I approached another grandfatherly-looking fellow who was with the historical society, and I shared my concerns.
When I asked him to tell me why the Winnemem shouldn’t at least be mentioned in a presentation like this, his face contorted in consternation. “That’s a good question,” he said.
It seemed as though he genuinely had never considered it, and promised to see about providing a venue for the Winnemem to share their side of the story.
When I told him someone at the BOR must have at some point consciously made a decision to leave the Winnemem out, he got defensive. It was likely an oversight, or just a lack of knowledge or something “subconscious,” he seemed to think.
I felt a little shiver of the outrage I’d been conserving. The Winnemem performed their H’up Chonas on the grounds of the dam, and effectively declared war on the BOR because of their proposed dam raise. I’m sure the BOR knows who they are.
I let it go. I nodded at him, looked him in the eyes and told him, “Thanks for listening.” I smiled and left.
I moved in with the tribe because for this book I want to feel what they feel, and, as much as I can, understand what they understand.
The way the Winnemem have been deleted from history is something that angers me greatly, and I’m sure some of that has been absorbed from my life at Tuiimyali. But Leon reminded me that this anger doesn’t belong to me but to the tribe.
The anger I feel is not my own. The anger is not mine to keep.
This past week, I published an op-ed in the California Progress Report, in which I try to help readers understand the value of the salmon to the Winnemem, and why, without their sacred fish, they can never truly recover from the destruction the Shasta Dam wreaked against their culture.
As someone who knew very little about salmon before beginning this story, I’m shocked to see how often salmon advocates use job numbers and revenues to justify the need to save the salmon from extinction. The cultural and spiritual value of salmon is never mentioned, and I believe this is at the root of many of our problems. We’ve lost sight of how to appropriately value the world and creation, and many of us barely bat an eye at the prospect of losing another species, even one as iconic as salmon.
I begin the piece with a brief season from the hatchery in New Zealand, which, for me, was the first time I truly understood what the tribe had been missing all these years, the first time I felt the void their missing salmon had left in their collective heart.
This December the tribe’s leaders attended the Wild Salmon Summit in Half Moon Bay where Congressman Mike Thompson exhorted that salmon must be saved because they “mean jobs. Thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.”
While several fishermen, chefs and businessmen discussed how salmon declines had affected their incomes, the tribe’s Spiritual Leader and Chief Caleen Sisk-Franco was given three minutes to speak.
“Just as the salmon story goes, so does our story,” she said. “In order for us to recover, we must have the salmon back in the McCloud River.”
An old Winnemem prophecy states that “once there are no salmon, there will be no Winnemem”. There are now only 123 traditional Winnemem remaining, and they are struggling to stave off extinction just as the dwindling Pacific salmon are.
Salmon, Come Home – A forthcoming nonfiction novel
Since the time of creation, the Winnemem Wintu's survival had been intertwined with that of the chinook salmon, the nur, which spawned in Northern California's McCloud River every season.
The bond was broken during World War II when the Shasta Dam was built, flooding the tribe's villages and sacred places as well as blocking the McCloud salmon from ever returning home.
Rendered homeless, destitute and without the salmon that had sustained them for generations, the Winnemem, who now number 123, have struggled to stave off extinction ever since.
But decades later, a salmon lost became a salmon found. A stable fishery of salmon in New Zealand's Rakaia River were, the tribe recently discovered, descended from eggs exported from the McCloud.
Salmon, Come Home, currently being written by an author who lives with the tribe, will chronicle the Winnemem's iridescent journey to New Zealand, where they restored their connection to the salmon, and their subsequent quest to return their sacred fish back home to the McCloud.
