Interactive mapping tool helps tell the story of California’s Tribal resistance

The damming of California’s rivers has been hugely consequential to the economic, cultural and ecological geography of the North State. Here in Shasta County, the erection of the Shasta Dam has been lauded by the Bureau of Reclamation as a monumental feat of American engineering, generating local jobs and pivotal to “[benefiting] millions of people miles away,” by means of irrigation and power generation. 

But like the construction of all hydroelectric dams in the area, someone paid the price. In the case of the Shasta Dam, it was a community of Winnenem Wintu whose village was flooded as the Sacramento River was dammed in the 1930s. Other Tribal communities were also forced from their homes with the development of hydroelectric dams in the adjacent counties which straddle the ancestral homelands of the Wintu, Pit River, and Maidu Tribes. 

But in the years since the initial dispossession from their land, first by the federal government’s illegal confiscation and then by flooding, the Indigenous peoples of the North State have frequently challenged both their physical displacement and the ongoing extraction of resources from that land — the latter of which has often occurred at the hands of the power industry. 

Over recent years, researchers at the University of California have set out to document that long arc of Indigenous resistance in the North State through a series of interactive “StoryMaps” that are included in a larger corresponding curriculum for public use. 

Carrying our Ancestors Home, is a California-focused educational tool first established at UCLA, which now features new multimedia StoryMaps focused on the history of what has become known as California’s North State. The StoryMaps combine written text, photos, videos, and links to readings that teach users about Indigenous resistance, leveraging primary sources and interviews with Tribal members themselves. 

To visualize the history of Indigenous activism among the Maidu and Pit River nations, UC Davis scholars Beth Rose Middleton Manning and Marc Dadigan — who also freelances for Shasta Scout — mapped areas of the North State’s mountainous terrain that have been successfully reclaimed by Tribes after previously being held by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). 

Speaking to a reporter this week, Middleton described the scene of one of the team’s interviews with a member of the Pit River nation. It’s a moment that crystallized for the researcher the disparity between the use of land long stewarded by Tribal communities and the lack of benefit they’ve received from those infrastructural projects.

“We were standing out there with two Tribal members, and there’s power lines buzzing overhead, and these are from projects that were put in almost a century ago,” Middleton recalled. “But these Tribal members were never serviced by that power. They still aren’t.”

What the StoryMaps also lay out are the dubious means by which the state and federal government obtained Tribal land on which many hydroelectric dams exist today.  In the 1850s, federal agents were deployed to Northern California to negotiate “treaties” with Tribes for millions of acres of reservation land that were to be allotted to Indigenous peoples. But many of those treaties were never ratified by the federal government, effectively disenfranchising Native signatories of their rights to the land in spite of the signed contracts. 

“Where people thought they had some protected rights to land, those were actually lands that were opened up for settlement,” Middleton explained, noting that this was just one bureaucratic means by which California Tribes were displaced, a betrayal that occurred in conjunction with the state-sponsored genocide of Natives up and down the state. 

Diving deep into the legal battles that ensued between Tribes, PG&E, and the federal government in the aftermath of Native dispossession, the StoryMaps focus on specific actions such as the Battle of Four Corners that occurred in 1970, when a group of Pit River Tribal Members engaged in occupation of federal lands, resulting in their violent arrests.

“Pit River people eventually developed a clever legal strategy with their attorney Aubrey Grossman, a veteran litigator of the civil rights movement,” narration from a StoryMap titled From Occupations to Land Back explains. “They would get arrested for ‘trespassing’ and force PG&E and the federal government to prove in court [that the government] actually had title to the lands.”

Other themes addressed in the StoryMaps include the Indigenous stewardship of the Maidu people, and how damming of the Klamath River not only severed their access to the land they once cared for but wrought immense ecological damage on populations of fish and beavers. 

The text cites some of the Maidu’s precolonial and sustainable practices as relates to seed gathering and fish harvesting. When gathering roots, for example, Maidu people left enough seed for regenerating the plants in the next season, and, when fishing, they released fish who had yet to lay their eggs.     

By platforming Tribal members to tell their own stories in their own voices as part of the StoryMaps, Middleton said, “we’re inviting people to look at these recordings and documents and think about what happened with treaty-making, with the development of hydro facilities, with the seizure of Native lands for both public and private purposes.” 

Each StoryMap within the larger curriculum includes a series of reflection questions, with which students or anyone engaging with this resource can ask themselves about how this history still resonates today. “To me, that’s the essence of learning,” Middleton added, “looking at and listening to information, and then really thinking about it. That’s our goal.” 

The curriculum was created for use by the University of California, but any member of the public can now access the material for use with a class, or on their own. Other topics covered in the curriculum include protection of the genetic data of Native communities, responsibly archiving Indigenous art and cultural objects, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is designed to facilitate the recovery and return of Native ancestral remains to modern-day Tribal members.

Find the curriculum here.

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