TRIVIAL PURSUIT?
Admittedly, this is a trivial activity in the context of what’s happening with the Covid-19 Virus. How many people will die today and when will it end? But then we are a perpetually agitated species who initiates projects continually. Life goes on and to pursue it is to foster optimism and faith in a future.
I hope this helps, in some small way, to accent the positive. Engagement’s always better than despair. We all have our favorite platitudes and mine is “Doing is Honest Philosophy: Talk is Cheap” - Richard Stine
Yesterday I attended a meeting online and was surprised how rewarding it was to get social. Remember, we’re actually physically distancing, not social distancing – don’t surrender your social nature to fear. We're staying home in our 325 square feet space and have been in our pajamas for several days now.
When I first heard the term “Landscape Acknowledgement” I thought it was a paean to the landscape in the style of John Muir. I thought that it recognized and honored the landscape under discussion, but I was wrong. A Landscape Acknowledgement is actually a recognition of the indigenous people who were the original inhabitants of the landscape. Recently I was asked to participate in the writing of a Land Acknowledgment and because all of my paying jobs are now cancelled, I also had the time to wander in the language of landscape as it were. So, I'm digging deep to contribute a few words to an acknowledgement that's worth putting forward.
A landscape is more than an image mediated by some tiny device. Landscapes are huge and interconnected to everything around them. They vary with elevation and ecosystem. Within the Yuba and Bear watershed there are expansive views from the Sierra Nevada summit from Castle peaks or Mount Lola, entirely different from the views at Graniteville, located on a ridge in deep conifer forest, or Downieville on the North Yuba in a steep forested canyon. Landscape, in addition to the biota, also includes geology, climate, colors, smells, sounds, the quality of light, prevailing winds and people.
Landscape has physical, biological and metaphysical dimensions so the task is how to use language well enough to allow the essence of a landscape to radiate or emerge. Cultural ecologist and environmental philosopher, David Abram says, “There is something eerie about the ability of the written word to shrink the elemental power of a place.” Perhaps using language, less as crafty sentence construction and more as a minimal conduit, allows place to insist on itself – to be. Sometimes poetry is a better tool for this and sometimes science says it best. I’m with Iris Murdoch who said, “We must not be tempted to leave lucidity and exactness to the scientist. Whenever we write we ought to write as well as we can… in order to defend our language and render subtle and clear that stuff which is the deepest texture of our spirit.”
The landscape itself can functions as language or symbol and is often a repository for history which informs the present. Keith Basso, an anthropologist who worked with the Western Apache helping to record their cultural landscape wrote, “Long before the advent of literacy, to say nothing of “history” as an academic discipline, places served humankind as durable symbols of distant events and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them – and this convenient arrangement, ancient but not outmoded, is with us still today.“. Every landscape is a mosaic of habitats or patches that provides sustenance, usefulness, beauty and solace to its residents and annual migratory callers.
Basalt projectile point
Mellissa Button studied the nearby Sutter Buttes from geographical, archaeological and ethnographic perspectives and found that by naming and mapping a space it becomes a place invested with meaning containing individual and cultural identity. Places or landmarks can become repositories of memories, experiences, and stories, including creation myths. Places are transformed into an entity that helps people see, explain, understand and know their surroundings as well as themselves. Places are centers of human meaning. Some archaeologists, are critical of Native American interpretations of their own sites, insisting that the past is not the same as the present, while the indigenous people “of this place” feel that views of the past have survived and can be known in the present.
Oral tradition has its own power. The late Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota activist and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement, said, “I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.”
Some places appear to be more potent than others but the case for the wonder of paying attention to any place, from microscopic to grand is made over and over again in science and art. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the State University of New York's College of Environment and Forestry asks, “Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.”
Fairy Falls in the rain- Dry Creek - Bear River
The indigenous Nisenan, Konkow, Maidu, Washoe and the unnamed peoples who preceded them, occupied the Yuba River watershed while actively imposing their version of a desirable landscape. This was no garden of Eden. They integrated themselves into ecological processes by burning, tending and respectfully coaxing nature’s inclinations, eventually becoming part of the natural cycle. Their knowledge was deep and their vision spanned generations ahead. Huayan Buddhists call it interpenetration and the Rarámuri of Chihuahua, Mexico call it kincentric. Nan Shepard, who spent most of her life hiking in the Cairngorms, a mountain range near her home in Scotland, discovered that “The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”
All people use the land they’re on with cultural values dictating the attitudes underlying use – even unconsciously. Popular food journalist, Michael Poulan, correctly observed that, “To act in nature is to stain it with culture.” In the 1980s I was in Russia (then the USSR) and was listening to a conversation between American and Russian students when one of the Russian women remarked, “I don’t know what you mean by 19th Century American expansion – is that the same thing as the elimination of the native population?” Here we have the same event viewed from different perspectives that doesn’t even voice the opinions of the people most affected. Americans believed that Westward expansion was a process ordained by their god and the land was a frontier. But, historian Patricia Limerick says, “… the West is a place of many complicated environments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge.”
Deer Creek
Indigenous land use is not purely extractive and it’s seldom one dimensional. Anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero worked among the Yanesha of the Peruvian Amazon where he observed how history is written into their landscape. To express this connection, he created the terms, topograms and topographic writing. Topograms are elements of the landscape created by human or superhuman beings while topographic writing is the knowledge of historical, personal and mythical events that occurred at a place and therefore is written into a landscape and refreshed in the retelling of these events. Although the Yanesha’s children now attend schools their traditional system of topographical literacy still exists.
Closer to home, Stephanie Lumsden, who is Hupa, reminds us that, “The cultural practices that accompany the traditional environmental knowledge of California Indians are more that common-sense strategies for sustainability; these are expressions of indigenous cosmologies which center on belonging to the land.” From the European perspective the landscape must be used for (personal) gain. No one lights up the difference better than Kiowa elder, N. Scott Momaday when he writes, “You say that I use the land, and I reply, yes, it is true; but it is not the first truth. The first truth is that I love the land; I see that it is beautiful; I delight in it; I am alive in it.”
Basalt projectile point - red ochre
Traditional kincentric participation and total immersion in the landscape is unhurried yet deliberate and intelligent, informed by centuries of experience. Indians worked intermittently rather than steadily, because most of their food was seasonal. Acorns and grass seeds ripened in their time, salmon arrived twice a year and grasshoppers were abundant in a wingless stage at a particular time. Typically, men hunted while women gathered and stored food for lean times. Then they rested and loafed in accordance with appropriate rhythms because their ecosystem could not tolerate intensive, accumulationist exploitation. This pattern created what anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, calls "affluence without abundance." They worked less than people with an agricultural adaptation, maybe ten to fifteen hours a week excluding rituals, and produced only what was needed for food and shelter, with a work rhythm dictated by the environment.
Vernal pool - South Yuba River
Indigenous “best management practices”, as the Forest Service would put it, were rooted in tradition and were proficient and graceful. If we were to mimic their behavior today, we would probably require chainsaws and tractors, without the benefit of appropriate songs (not to mention too much male energy). Here are a few examples highlighting their skills:
• Some plant communities covered small land surface areas and harbored useful and varied plant life. These low-growing blue dicks, brodia, blue camus, and miraposa lilies, known collectively as geophytes, grew in montane meadows, lower foothill savannahs and other places. Ethnobotanist, Kat Anderson calls these patches of wildflowers “edible landscapes.” All these plants have swollen roots or stems that, as a group, provide abundant food. They were maintained in a holding pattern by thinning, tillage and burning rather than being allowed to succeed naturally into a new plant community type.
• People of the North Central Sierra Nevada were knowledgeable about using fire as a tool. For example, they burned large communities of mature ceanothus and manzanita that were impenetrable for deer browse. Burning off the patch assured nutritious browse, spread over a large area, for years come.
• The pruning, coppicing and propagation of willow not only provided basketry materials, but willow also shades small streams and cools the water for desirable fish species.
During the most productive times of the year the people of the North Central Sierra Nevada foothills practically lived on trails studded with strategic and comfortable campsites. They knew where there were abundant and reliable patches of clover, yampah and blackberries. They gathered nutritious and delicious nuts by climbing gray pines at lower elevations and sugar pines in upper montane forests. They knew where the deer congregated and when the salmon were coming. Also, various oaks in different habitats yielded tremendous amounts of acorns, and they could be stored.
People all over the world routinely identify themselves as “of this place.” A local example is the Koyoomk’awi (aka Koncow) the indigenous people immediately to the north of the foothill Nisenan. Their homeland consists of grasslands and savannah extending north and northeast toward Oroville and Chico. It’s a landscape typified by “koyoo” or meadow/grassland.
Lizzie Enos (1881-1968) lived on the ridge between the Bear River and the North Fork of the American River at a place called Cyk’ampakan, or “Brodeia Spring.” Pakan means spring in the Nisenan language. Pampakan, another Nisenan settlement, was situated south of the main stem of the Yuba River and Elelepakan was south of the South Fork of the American River.
Bedrock mortars
ENTER THE AMERICANS
Two hundred years ago, just a few years before the Valley Nisenan were devastated by malaria introduced by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Koncow, Nisenan, Maidu and Washoe were living in ways that were rewarding – life was good. Their traditional practices had worked exceedingly well for centuries, but drastic changes were in store when Americans began to arrive in 1846. With these energetic, determined and relatively well-armed newcomers came the notion that the land was theirs for the taking, for it was so ordained by their god. This preposterous idea came to be known as Manifest Destiny and it powered the relentless move westward, across the American continent for decades to come. Generally, they took what they wanted but initially they were fearful and wary because they were outnumbered by the (peaceful) native population.
At the time California was part of Mexico but the Americans showed open distain for Californios. They hated them because they were Catholic; they also saw them as lazy and corrupt and they, heaven forbid, intermarried with the Indians. Americans saw California Indians as filthy, degraded and stupid.
Thanks to an unnamed Indian guide, Jonas Spect, a white man, found gold on the Yuba River at Rose Bar in June of 1848. In September of the following year, Camp Far West was established on the north side of Bear River to protect the 49ers from what Captain Hannibal Day called "a miserable race of savages … armed only with the bow and arrow."
Among the many adjustments that had to be made by the indigenous population was the concept of the enclosure. Of course, they were already aware of the corral, a Spanish word for an enclosure of cattle, sheep, horses or pigs but the mining claim was more difficult to comprehend. It was a hell of an adjustment to be forcibly barred from land that was tribal for as long as anyone could remember. Another abstraction that made land easier to take from the Indians was the U.S. one-mile-square “Township and Range” arbitrary grid system, established by the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. It was an integral part of the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 because it relied on land bounded “regularly and arbitrarily, with no consideration of water availability, local topography, arability, or grazing potential.”
Bedrock mortars - Sweetland Creek - Yuba River
As late as 1887 the Dawes Act authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots when Indians were struggling with the notion of owning land. The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native American Indians into mainstream U. S. society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions. This marked the end of tribal lands and was an attempt to eliminate tribal thinking. One of the most hated aspects of this law was the establishment of boarding schools where Indian children were taken from their families, were not allowed to speak their languages and they were “taught” menial tasks.
BACK TO THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
To devise a real acknowledgement of the original inhabitants of this landscape we have to first sidestep a body of eco-bureaucratic jargon that comes with grant writing, non-profit visioning statements, conference/workshop language and semi science that strives for objectivity but dilutes flavor. I think we should try to communicate in plain English with respect and courtesy. We don’t want to appropriate an imagined Indian oratorial style nor do we want to swiftly deliver a memorized paragraph like a warranty for a vacuum cleaner. According to Yolanda Bonnell, an Ojibwe/South Asian performer, playwright and poet from Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay, Ontario, “It feels like many institutions are checking their box. It’s on their to do list, which negates the point entirely.”
After reviewing many comments from Native Americans about the value of Land Acknowledgements the remark that surfaces a lot is “I think it serves a purpose in terms of education.”. This is right on and I’ll give you an example: I have worked as a historian and archaeologist in the North Central Sierra Nevada for over 40 years. Admittedly I’ve been tightly focused on the Yuba, Bear and North Fork of the American River watersheds. I thought I had read most of the standard references that cite disease, violence and loss of habitat (starvation) as the primary reasons for the decrease in population. But until I read Benjamin Madley’s fastidiously researched, An American Genocide, I had no idea how savage and demented the violence was and the degree to which local, state and federal governments were complicit in the “elimination” and “extinction” of California Indians. The word genocide was not used yet, but it certainly applies in retrospect. Additionally, indentured slavery, the kidnapping of children and sexual slavery were commonplace and seldom, if ever, prosecuted.
Here is a single example from Madley's book – a newspaper article from the Daily Alta California of June 26, 1859: “More than three-fourths of the red men living in 1849, in the State north of latitude 36° – that is in all those districts where white men are numerous – have been killed off. That the extermination will continue, no reasonable men can doubt.”
North Yuba watershed
I’ll never again read anything on 19th century California history without the shadow of these events lurking in the background. Madley is to be commended for meticulously substantiating the sickening details of this book which should be the basis for decommissioning place names and the names of buildings, streets, monuments and memorials all over the state.
Right now, the virus has us preoccupied, but we will be revisiting the Land Acknowledgement process very soon. Here’s what I have so far: “We respectfully acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the Nisenan, Konkow, Maidu and Washoe people.”
California Yew - Little Deer Creek - the Nisenan made bows with it
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abram, David. Becoming Animal. Pantheon. 2010.
Anderson, Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. University of California Press. 2005.
Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque. 1996
Button, Melissa. Multiple Ways of Seeing One Place: Archaeological and Cultural Landscapes of the Sutter Buttes, California. MA Thesis in Anthropology. California State University. Chico. 2009.
Eatough, Andrew. Central Hill Nisenan Texts with Grammatical Sketch. Linguistics, Vol 132. University of California Press. 1999.
Limerick, Patricia. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, W. W. Norton & Company. 1987.
Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. Yale University Press. 2016.
Lumsden, Stephanie. Settler Law. from Notes from Native California, Summer. 2014.
Momaday, N. Scott. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. St. Martin’s Press. 1997.
Sahlins, Marshall. The Original Affluent Society, in Stone Age Economics. 1974.
Salmón, Enrique. Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship. in Ecological Adaptations.2000
Santos-Granero, Fernando. Writing History into the Landscape: Space, Myth, and Ritual in Contemporary Amazonia. American Ethnologist. 1998.
