Tag: California

Excerpts

Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril

on February 27, 2023

By: Char Miller

This Land is Their Land 

However polite its title, the 1891 “Petition to the Senators and Representatives of the Congress of the United States in the Behalf of the Remnants of the former Tribes of the Yosemite Indians Praying for Aid and Assistance” was anything but deferential. 

The petition offered a blunt critique of the mostly white gold miners’ brutal incursion into the Yosemite region in the late 1840s. It sharply criticized the state-sanctioned violence that California unleashed in the 1850s on the Indigenous Peoples of the Central Sierra, and astutely recognized that elite tourists—and the amenities they required to cushion their late nineteenth-century visits to the rugged landscape—were also responsible for cultural disruption and physical dispossession. The petition reported that the previous half century of exploitation had turned the Ahwahneechii and Monos into “poorly-clad paupers and unwelcome guests, silently the objects of curiosity or contemptuous pity to the throngs of strangers who yearly gather in this our own land and heritage.”  

The once fertile and sustaining terrain of the Indigenous Peoples had been torn apart. “The gradual destruction of its trees, the occupancy of every foot of its territory by bands of grazing horses and cattle, the decimation of the fish in the river, the destruction of every means of support for ourselves and families by the rapacious acts of the whites,” the petition asserted, would “shortly result in the total exclusion of the remaining remnants of our tribes from this our beloved valley, which has been ours from time beyond our faintest traditions, and which we still claim.” 

The US government did not respond to this appeal for the return of tribal lands, an ironclad treaty that would protect their inheritance, and compensation for their decades of immiseration. Instead, the petition, to which forty-three survivors put their names, was buried in the 1891 report of Yosemite’s acting park superintendent. But its bureaucratic fate doesn’t diminish its importance any more than does the probability that the document’s amanuensis was a Euro-American fluent in English. The oral histories on which the petition depends, and, as anthropologist Ed Castillo observed, the “incredible description” it provides of the “political, military, and ecological factors driving remaining tribesmen from their valley could only have as their source local Indigenous knowledge.”  

That knowledge, and the distressing catalogue of injustices it contains, is an important challenge to settler-colonial justifications for How the West Was Won. One facet of that master narrative also centers on Yosemite National Park— by the time tourists arrived to “ooh and ahhh” over its iconic waterfalls, steep granite walls, and staggering vistas, the land was “empty.” Its putative emptiness, the result of violent dispossession, set the stage for an early twentieth-century, decade-long battle over whether to build a dam in the park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The dam’s proponents, including federal officials, as well as citizens and politicians in San Francisco eager to secure a stable water supply following the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, believed the dam was emblematic of Progressive Era reforms that provided essential—and publicly owned—resources to a rapidly urbanizing society. John Muir, founding president of the Sierra Club, which was established in 1892, was among those who pushed back, arguing that the dam’s construction would inundate the wild Hetch Hetchy Valley. “Dam Hetch Hetchy!” he thundered, “as well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated for the heart of man.” 

What neither side admitted was that their respective arguments depended on a shared perception that no one lived in the Hetch Hetchy Valley., or that no had ever lived there. Its emptiness enabled dam supporters to conclude that the site would be perfect for a reservoir. Its emptiness, for those like Muir who pressed for the valley’s preservation, was a mark of its higher utility as pristine nature. Yet to conceive of this valley as devoid of people required two forms of erasure of the history and contemporary status of the Indigenous Peoples that their 1891 petition so brilliantly evoked.  

The first erasure occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, when California and the United States governments sanctioned the violent expulsion of the Indigenous Peoples from the Sierras’s flanking valleys and foothills. The dispossession of the Miwok, Paiute, Shoshone, and others from their ancestral territories was an act of genocide, historian Benjamin Madley argues in American Genocide. He writes: the “pressures of demographics (the migration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants), economics (the largest gold rush in US history), and profound racial hatred all made the genocide possible, it took sustained political will—at both the federal and state levels—to create the laws, policies, and well-funded killing machine that carried it out and ensured its continuation over decades.” 

The second erasure is embedded in the continuing and disquieting silence over the interlocking connection between the ruthless uprooting of Indigenous Peoples from the Yosemite region, the establishment of the national park, and the subsequent Hetch Hetchy controversy. Until that silence is broken, our understanding of the ongoing debate about the dam and reservoir will remain incomplete. This accounting is especially necessary because scholars and activists assert that the formative battle over the Hetch Hetchy dam marked the birth of the modern environmental movement in the United States. The assertion reveals a troubling and complicated story. 

Muir was integral to each of these erasures. Consider his reflections that he jotted down in his journal after a hike up what he called Bloody Canyon in Mono County and then revised for publication in his book The Mountains of California 1894). Entering the pass, the “huge rocks began to close around in all their wild, mysterious impressiveness,” Muir wrote, “when suddenly, as I gazed eagerly about me, a drove of gray, hairy beings came into sight., lumbering toward with a kind of boneless, wallowing motion like bears.” Anxious about “so grim a company,” and suppressing his fears, he realized “that although hairy as bears and as crooked as summit pines, the strange creatures were sufficiently erect to belong to our own species.” He was hiking up a trail that the Mono and other Indigenous Peoples had worn smooth over the millennia, transiting between the Mono and Owens basins and Yosemite and the valleys below. His disdain for these men and women shows throughout his descriptions, such as, “the dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might almost possess a geological significance.” To Muir they belonged to a distant time, and befouled his wilderness. “Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.” 

The larger settler-colonial culture adopted his perspective and, whether Indigenous Peoples were forced out of Yosemite by force of arms or the scratch of a pen, a key consequence was that this “empty” terrain was ripe for commercial exploitation. Tourism to the region, enabled by a growing cross-continental transportation grid, and the growth of San Francisco and Los Angeles, was fueled by artists and photographers who visited the region a decade or more before Muir’s arrival there in 1868. James Mason Hutchings, who hired Muir to work at his Yosemite hotel, was a relentless promoter. He drew a swelling number of artists, scientists, and tourists to make the arduous journey to the remote location through his publication of tour guides, lithographs, and magazine articles about Yosemite’s wonders and curiosities. Many of these visitors recounted their experiences in the rough and wild space, some published, others not. However manifest, these documents reinforced the cultural conversation about what they perceived to be Yosemite’s prime value—a beneficent refuge in an industrializing world, where you could escape civilization, and yet have its amenities. 

The sanctuary status was one of the key arguments that Muir and others developed in the early twentieth century against the city of San Francisco and its political allies who laid claim to the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside what became Yosemite National Park. The thrust and counterthrust manifested in a series of congressional hearings, in the pages of many of the nation’s leading magazines and newspapers, and in oft angry speeches. The fierce debate testifies to the centrality of a valley that few Americans had ever visited. Even though San Francisco’s interests prevailed, and the O’Shaughnessy Dam and its steep-walled reservoir  that funnels potable water to the Bay Area was built, the controversy continues to simmer. Beginning in the 1980s, an odd coalition of Republican state and national politicians and the Sierra Club and its allies periodically call into question San Francisco’s reliance on the reservoir and urge the federal government to tear down the dam and restore the long-submerged valley. 

Yet any resolution of this enduring latest struggle to define the future of Hetch Hetchy, and by extension Yosemite, must start by prioritizing what hitherto has been ignored. Novelist, historian, and activist David Treuer writes, “America’s national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession.” His pithy conclusion—”the American West began with war but concluded with parks”—is mirrored in the Yosemite Indigenous Peoples’ claims asserted in the 1891 petition: “We say this valley was not given to us by our fathers for a day, or a year, but for all time.” 

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College and the director of the Claremont Colleges‘ environmental analysis program.

Copyright © 2022 by Char Miller
Publisher Reverberations Books Santa Cruz, CA
www.reverberationsbooks.com
Imprint of Chin Music Press Seattle, WA
www.chinmusicpress.com
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935659
ISBN: 978-1-63405-037-1

Reviews

Lamentation and Place: A review of Inter State: Essays from California

on January 20, 2022

Dan Cady

Accord to polls, most Americans believe in life after death. Among those who hold most tightly to this improbable notion are faithful Christians. In the texts they adopted from the ancient Hebrews, their god condemned the first humans to death—this otherwise unknown fate—for attempting to eat their way to knowledge. With anger and irony, he scolded his creations saying, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” God invents death. Yet death remains a secondary theological theme until the Christian era.  In the Christian Gospels, their messiah engages dead people, dying people, people who fear dead or dying people, and people who simply fear death. He councils them, cures them, and even raises them from the dead. As the messiah himself contemplates his own demise, he too shows fear. But then, with one act, death is reinvented into a fork in the road leading to eternity, with the faithful heading one way, and the rest slouching towards Mordor. The scheme allows this American majority to view dying as a temporary interlude between the material world and the inescapable occupation of a celestial (or scorching hot) afterlife.

This makes Americans particularly piss-poor at accepting loss and expressing grief. Though some tried. In the 1960s, rationalists, (or perhaps folks just hedging their bets), came to believe that they could systematize their fears by adopting Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. By the book, each subject moved from denial to acceptance with a tantrum, a deal, and the blues sandwiched in between. In Inter State, José Vadi illustrates that grief is chaotic and not conveniently compartmentalized. Sometimes acceptance is followed by anger, and sometimes each stage happens in minutes, and sometimes simultaneously. He grieves for people. He grieves for cities. He grieves for himself and the transient world around him. For Vadi, struggling with grieving most closely resembles anger, but in expressions peppered by the other four—as they are hardly mutually exclusive. His grieving, however, is perfectly appropriate, and greatly appreciated. He lost his grandfather, his childhood, and the very places those ghosts might still haunt. He writes, but we commiserate together. He demands his reader to be a good listener.

A lamentation on memory, place, loss, and erasure, through Inter State, Vadi traverses and critiques California like a quixotic Umberto Eco—but unlike Eco, he does so not as a tourist, but a lifer. Vadi’s emotional investment in the San Gabriel Valley and Bay Area proper is evidenced in his intimate descriptions of dive bars, street corners, and under-appreciated urban vistas. Walking with him through San Francisco’s Tenderloin or cutting across Oakland’s (and Berkeley’s) Telegraph avenue feels authentic enough to conjure up the sound of multi-lane traffic and the smell of marijuana and urine. As someone who spent years in both the SGV and San Francisco (a generation later for the former, and earlier for the latter) I was genuinely touched by his vision and his loss. His San Francisco, where tech conquered and gentrified, replaced my San Francisco. And for this, I too still feel anger, denial, and begrudging acceptance.

Vadi’s book is both edgy and nostalgic, and at its most provocative hints at issues concerning the future of ethnic identity in a demographically shifting state that constructs public memory at its own convenience. His visits through the Central Valley, Tehachapi, and Salinas suggests as much. He wonders how one commemorates transients. He wrestles with the necessity of memorializing and the subsequent proliferation of historical fraud.  But for me, Vadi is at his best when skating, or dreaming about skating. He approaches his environments at the sidewalk level. Skyscrapers may fascinate spire-gazing Midwestern tourists, but Vadi’s line of sight explores ground level. Every curb, bench, stairwell, and handrail holds both purpose and memory. The sound of his wheels in historic (but often invisible) locations echo the familiar noise of every skater who came before—some famous, some infamous, but most nameless. The clank of an adolescent’s failed kick-flip, for Vadi must be both the sound of comfort and the reminder of the inescapable adulthood confronting a married, employed Berkeley grad.

I do have a beef with José Vadi; and that’s concerning his dismissal of Fresno. By pronouncing it “dead,” he did to Fresno what Gertrude Stein did to Oakland with her oft-quoted, “There’s no there there.” Stein, of course, said so because of losing the Oakland she once knew; Vadi, who otherwise strives for authentic experiences, has no relationship to the derided town. He drives through Fresno–one of the most gritty, troubled, confounding, demographically diverse cities on the planet–and jots down his condemnation and short caveat with less care than Francis Trollope mustered in her evisceration of Cincinnati. Like Pomona, Fontana, and even Oakland, Fresno can be grim, but it still deserves a skater’s eye rather than a Victorian’s snub. If Vadi relied on his hubba better angels, he might have found his way into the Fresno High area, and heard the scraping sounds of teenagers launching their boards and bodies down the local school’s notorious staircase. He could have cased the Tower district and followed the plumes of weed and experienced other like-kinds with eclectic tastes, soccer knowledge, scabbed elbows, and the want of cold beers. Unlike Oakland, Fresno’s downtown might have offered a small haven from the sort of gentrification responsible for much of Vadi’s angst. Without tech money to reinvent block after block, Fresno’s downtown changes slowly. If Vadi is being honest about his want of an urban environment uncorrupted by the thing some call progress, Fresno awaits his return.

Regardless of his dismissal of my current hometown, Inter State is affecting. His writing comes from vulnerability which manifests as authenticity. I think Vadi accepts the permanence of death for both people and their built environments. In Inter State, he grapples with loss, and in doing so helps us all grieve a little better.

Inter State: Essays from California by José Vadi. Copyright © 2021 by Soft Skull Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Link to title

Dan Cady is Associate Professor of History at Fresno State