This Land Was Their Land
Here in the Pacific Northwest, acknowledgments that recognize Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of the land have become de riguer. They are spoken at the beginning of public and private gatherings, from live performances to sporting events to town halls.
Before actors take the stage at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, for example, a spokesperson announces: “We would like to acknowledge that today we gather on the land of the Takelma and Shasta peoples, recognize the many tribes and bands who call the Klamath Basin region their ancestral territory, and highlight the continued sovereignty of nine tribes of Oregon and the Northern California tribes who have ties to this place.”
Such acknowledgements, of course, do not address, in real terms, the extermination of Native peoples locally or across America. Indeed, Indigenous anthropologists reportedly worry that land acknowledgements may sanitize the trauma of dispossession rather than being taken for what they are: a starting point for justice.
Truth is, the Native genocide goes beyond words. Prior to Columbus’s arrival in 1492, America boasted thriving indigenous populations totaling more than 60 million people. A little over a century later, that number had dropped to 6 million.
History tells us that European contact brought with it not only war and famine, but also smallpox and other diseases that decimated local populations. Indeed, a recent “quarternary science” study shows that those deaths occurred on such a large scale that they led to a “Little Ice Age”: an era of global cooling between the 16th and mid-19th century. As the indigenous population disappeared, large swaths of vegetation and farmland were abandoned. The trees and flora that repopulated this unmanaged farmland started absorbing more carbon dioxide, removing enough greenhouse gas from the atmosphere that the planet’s average temperature dropped by 0.15 degrees Celsius (Science Alert, Feb. 11, 2019).
Where disease left off, the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act took over, expelling Native peoples to reservations barely fit for habitation, out of sight and out of mind. By 1900, the Native American population in this country hit rock bottom—237,000 people—though it has rebounded since to approximately 6 million (with a good portion being Alaska and Hawaiian Natives). That Indigenous people survived at all seems extraordinary.
Earlier this month, Columbus Day welcomed a new partner, Indigenous People’s Day. It is an ironic pairing.
Grandma Aggie
When I lived in New England, I knew little about the history of the Mahican, Wampanoag, and other local tribes. In the home of the Pilgrims, the story was notably lopsided.
When I moved to Southern Oregon three and a half years ago, my curiosity about who was here first led me to a local legend. “Grandma Aggie,” as she was known across the Rogue Valley, was a Native American spiritual elder from nearby Grants Pass. The oldest member of her Takelma tribe, Agnes Baker Pilgrim was a living treasure to many, perhaps best known for her invocations to all of us to bless the water from which we are made. She co-founded the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, an alliance of female elders who promote the protection of the earth and awareness of Native culture worldwide.
“The greatest distance in the world is the fourteen inches from our minds to our hearts,” she liked to say.
I wrote Grandma Aggie on the hopes we might meet, but she died several months later at the age of 95.
Amanda’s Trail
Most of the little I know about the dispossession of Native tribes here comes from hiking along the Oregon and Northern California coasts with Tony. Our favorite hike, Amanda’s Trail, tracks the last four miles of a 75-mile forced march by a runaway Native woman, Amanda De-Cuys. In 1864, she and a band of other Native fugitives were rounded up by the U.S. military and returned to the reservation they had fled.
Amanda’s Trail starts at the at the seaside town of Yachats (pop. 553) and climbs 800 feet to the tip of Cape Perpetua, a forested headland halfway up the 360-mile Oregon coast and once part of the Coast Indian Reservation, established by a federal treaty in 1855 with the Coastal Tribes of Oregon.
Stretching 120 miles through rugged territory, the reservation was supposed to be a place where the “natives” across the region could live in peace—on land no white men wanted. Volunteer militias known as the “exterminators” began to round up the tribes of southwest and central Oregon and confine them to this new reservation on the Pacific.
Over the next decade, tribe members routinely ran away from the reservation, fleeing abuse and starvation at the hands of U.S. Indian Agents. The job of gathering up the run-aways—the “squaws and the bucks” as the enforcers put it—and marching them back to confinement fell to the U.S. military.
In the spring of 1864, one of the “squaws” in these coastal round ups included a Coos woman named Amanda.
Middle-aged and blind, Amanda De-Cuys had set up housekeeping with a white settler in Coos Bay, 75 miles north of the Coast Reservation. When discovered, the U.S. military forced De-Cuys to abandon her seven-year old daughter and join dozens of other Native runaways on a forced march back to the reservation, through dense vegetation, rocks and ravines, and more.
Several days into the trip, the Army corporal leading the march, Royal Bensell, wrote in his journal about leaving all the women behind as a cost-saving measure. “Only walking 10 miles in the day, so slow and solemn did we go,” he said. When the band reached the sharp basalt shoreline near Cape Perpetua, he noted that Amanda ‘”tore her feet horribly over these ragged rocks, leaving blood sufficient to track her by.” Ten days later, when Bensell turned over the captives to Indian Agents, Bensell said “we all left relieved”—and proud of their mission.
Amanda’s fate is unknown, but that of the Coast Indian Reservation is not: by 1875, the entire reservation had been transferred to white settlement and the remaining tribal population removed to the Siletz and Grand Ronde Reservations to the north.
In Yachats, this history remained quiet for generations until 1984, when a trail planner with the Siuslaw National Forest discovered the story and decided to name a proposed trail after Amanda, dedicating it “to the memory of the Native Americans who were marched along the same coastline more than a century earlier.”
The first time Tony and I hiked Amanda’s Trail, grey mist slowed our steps. Last July, we hiked the trail again, this time starting from the top of Cape Perpetua. As we reached the trailhead, the fog lifted and shafts of sunlight bathed the Redcedar and Douglas Fir trees that surrounded us. I looked up at the two-to-three hundred foot tall canopy, now outlined against the blue sky, and almost fell over backwards. Ten thousand cathedrals rolled into one, I thought.
“Watch out for the roots,” Tony kept cautioning me as we headed down the trail.
The Yurok Indians
For much of the summer, the water wars between farmers and two Indian tribes along the Klamath River to our south drew my—and national—attention. Demand for water often exceeds supply in the Klamath Basin, which runs from Klamath Lake in southern Oregon through northern California and into the Pacific. When drought strikes, feuding often follows.
This summer, with the worst drought on record, tensions exploded. In May, the federal government cut irrigation water to the farmers to preserve two endangered species of sucker fish sacred to the Klamath Tribes at the river’s start, and to protect the coho and chinook salmon at the river’s mouth, essential to the Yurok Indians who have lived there for centuries.
Although the farmers called foul, longstanding water agreements awarded the Klamath Tribes first rights, followed by the Yurok and ending with the farmers. At the height of the dispute, protesters affiliated with the rightwing anti-government activist Ammon Bundy took up the farmers’ cause and threatened to unilaterally open the headgates of the reservoir. The farmers, to their credit, walked away.
In early October, Tony and I spent two days in the town of Klamath, where the river meets the Pacific and the summer drought had yielded the lowest salmon count on record, threatening the Yurok tribe’s income and entire way of life. Curiosity led me there, wondering what I’d find.
No trace of fishing lined the riverbanks as we crossed the mouth of the Klamath. Indeed,there was little settlement in sight, beyond the Redwood Hotel and Casino with its half-filled parking lot. The historic Requa Inn where we were staying had advised us to bring our own food, since their dining room, closed for COVID, would be the only source of dinner that night in 20 miles, beyond a Quick Break at the gas station. We checked in and dried out from an enroute hike in the rain, up Fern Canyon, a narrow creek bounded by 50-foot fern-covered walls (a World Heritage Site that made a cameo appearance in The Lost World: Jurassic Park).
The next morning, we headed to the nearby Redwood National and State Parks to hike the James Irvine Trail. Named after a prominent California real estate developer, the trail wound for five miles—ten miles in and out—through an ancient coast redwood ecosystem with some of the planet’s most majestic trees.
Here too, it was the invisible understory that knocked me over.
The Yurok Indians, I learned, were and still are the largest federally-recognized tribe in California, now down to about 6,300 enrolled members. They originally inhabited a half million acres. An 1855 “treaty” confined the tribe to a reservation that covered less than a fifth of that expanse, or roughly ninety thousand acres that ran inland 45 miles from the where the Klamath River joined the Pacific. The federal government subsequently appropriated most of that land too, opening it to white homesteaders, gold seekers, and loggers. The Forest Service even helped itself, creating the Redwood National Park through which the James Irvine Trail climbed.
Not only did the federal government take away the Yurok’s land, but beginning in the twentieth century it also prohibited the tribe from the centuries-old indigenous practice of burning their land to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, to create habitat for animals, and to reduce the risk of larger wild fires. The Natives who attempted to farm found it increasingly difficult to keep the land free from the Douglas fir—the “white man’s fir”—which began to invade formerly open lands.
By the nineteen-nineties, the Yurok were left with only five per cent of their original reservation. As tribal leaders wrote in the preamble to their 1993 constitution, “Our social and ecological balance, thousands and thousands of years old, was shattered by the invasion of the non-Indians.” (The New Yorker, Oct. 10, 2018)
For the Yurok Indians, however, today’s climate crisis has offered a silver lining.
In 2010, Yurok leaders joined California’s cap-and-trade program. For each metric ton of carbon that the tribe can prove its forests have sequestered from the atmosphere, the California Air Resources Board issues the tribe one offset credit. Polluting industries can then buy the Yurok’s offsets in order to comply with the state’s greenhouse-gas-emissions cap.
“[We’re] getting paid for carbon,” Dale Webster, a founding member of the Yurok tribal council told a writer from the New Yorker in 2018. “For all these trees along the river, where the prairie used to be, where all the deer and the elk used to come through.”
However compromising, the Yurok’s carbon-offset project, among the first of its kind in the United States, has become the tribe’s main source of discretionary income. It has helped buy back, to date, nearly sixty thousand acres—up from five thousand—as well as providing community supports far beyond what the Redwood Casino ever promised.
In an interesting twist, the same forest management practices that win the Yurok carbon offset credits—including the once banned controlled burning to manage forest growth—have also earned international approbation. The Yurok Tribe recently became the first indigenous community in the United States to be awarded the Equator Prize by the United Nations Development Programme, which honors “innovative nature-based solutions for tackling climate change, environment and poverty challenges.” There is a growing recognition that management of intact forestlands by Indigenous Peoples is key to protecting the climate.
As Tony and I reached the end of the James Irvine Trail, we wondered if the lines in Woody Guthrie’s famous “This Land is Your Land” should be changed to “This Land Was Their Land.”
Epilogue
It has taken me far too long to realize that invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native Americans. Through my work championing young people marginalized by race, class, language, and more, I have known that Native youth not only have the lowest graduation rates of any racial group, but they are also dying by suicide at the highest rate of any demographic in the United States. I did not know that Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than people of any other race and that Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than any other ethnic group.
Two years ago, Teen Vogue interviewed a handful of Native American teenagers about this invisibility. Fifteen-year-old Peyton Boyd, a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, says she remembers her teachers showing videos about diversity where “all the races of the world came together and held hands.” But one race was always missing: Native Americans.
“Can you name a famous Native American actor?” the magazine asks its readers. “A famous Native politician who is alive today? Can you name five Native Americans, famous for anything, who were born after 1950? Do you know what the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was, or the history of Indian boarding schools in the U.S.? Do you personally know anyone who is Native American?” The magazine continues:
If you answered no to most of these questions, it’s not your fault. Maybe you can’t name a Native actor because of the 2,336 characters on 345 of the most popular television shows that aired between 1987 and 2007, only three were Native American. Most Americans have never heard of Carlisle because even though this country operated over 400 Indian boarding schools, only four states teach this history. Media depiction of contemporary Native Americans is so rare that, according to a 2015 report, 95 of the first 100 Google image search results for “Native American” are historical representations. Sixty-two percent of non-Native Americans report not knowing a single one of the over 5 million Native people in the U.S., 70% of whom live in urban areas.”
Where do we as a nation start redressing this invisibility, beyond land acknowledgements?
Where do I start?
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