It’s been awhile since my last post because I’ve been working hard helping my friend, Tanis Thorne, finish her most recent book, Nevada City Nisenan. Collaborating on this book has been demanding, but illuminating, and worth every hour invested.
Nevada City Nisenan is the story of an Indigenous population’s survival in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. A story that underscores the importance of place and the resilience of Nisenan Cultural institutions. It tells how the Nisenan of Oustomah (Us tu ma) and Wokodot, living in the watershed now known as Deer Creek were able to remain in their ancestral homelands. The topographies here, with the advent of gold mining, were penetrated by shafts, adits, tunnels and trenches. Hills and canyon walls were dissolved by high pressure water cannons, sending everything but gold downstream. Waterways were stripped of vegetation and wildlife, filled with siltation, dammed and diverted and contaminated, while life-giving salmon choked on opaque and muddy water
The topography today retains its industrial features but is softened by attrition, landslides, precipitation, wind and vegetation, which with needles, leaves and litter begins to create soil to cover the rawness and memories of violence to the geography and ecosystems. A landscape/garden that was subtly, but effectively and with respect, cultivated to yield desired results.
The campy mythology of the superior and rugged individual moving westward and opening the frontier is still very much alive in Nevada City, a town that, today, depends on tourism. The frontier thesis was fostered by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the late 1890s in his influential book, The Frontier in American History (1921). In it, he explains how the availability of very large amounts of nearly-free farm land promoted agriculture, pulled ambitious families to the western frontier, and created an ethos of unlimited possibilities.
In 1987, historian Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest:The Unbroken Past of the American West in which she reveals that this is a privileged white male perspective that sees the West as a land of conquest and open opportunity. Furthermore, she points out that the frontier is more than a concept but a place with, “many complicated environments occupied by Natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge.”
The Nisenan, who had lived here for thousands of years, had deep and enduring relationships with the land and an awareness and delight in belonging to this place. So skillful were their manipulations and enhancement of their habitat that virtually every invasive explorer, trapper and gold miner was fooled into thinking that the land was a wilderness unaffected by humans. Stephanie Lumsden wrote in “Settler Law” (Notes from Native California, Summer 2014), “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.”
Those early gold seekers who made the arduous journey to California had no intention of settling here. The goal, for most, was to make a “pile” and return home better-positioned to attract the most desirable wife available – for others getting rich was sufficient. But the easy to find surface gold was gone by 1852 requiring new technologies, like hydraulic mining, that involved earth moving and water contamination on a scale never before imagined. This was not a folk industry, but rather progress in its most virulent form: environmentally destructive mining on an industrial scale.
These two perceptions of land use could not have been more different. Why and how the Nevada City Indigenous community survived into the twenty-first century is noteworthy, Nevada City was no remote outpost, but viable mining ground, rich in gold with international financing attracting some of the best minds of a generation – the foothill town and mining district became an internationally known center of engineering and innovation. Today there is no gold mining in Nevada City but the Nisenan are still here.
Find out more about the availability of this book and an upcoming book signing at:
http://tanisthorne.com
