Chapter 2. A Visit to Sacred Sites
“If we lose our sacred places then our belief is pretty much we lose being Winnemem. I mean, we’ll still have blood lines, but blood lines don’t really make tribes.”
— Caleen Sisk, Hereditary and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu people
Shasta County, CA — The Winnemem Wintu gather strength and wisdom to defend their culture and way of life at sacred sites high up in the mountains above the McCloud River. June 17, 2018. Judy Silber/The Spiritual Edge
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By Judy Silber
I stand on dry meadow grass with Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk in a narrow valley with mountains all around, looking down at the McCloud River below. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been with earthy tones of red, green and brown. We stand on a Winnemem Wintu dance ground. Behind us is the rest of an old village site where Chief Sisk’s great-grandfather was the headman. She gestures to all the sacred places that could be destroyed if Shasta Dam is built higher and water levels in the reservoir go up.
JUDY SILBER: Tell me where you think that the water level is going to go up to.
CHIEF SISK: Oh yeah. All of this will be underwater. Puberty Rock will be under by maybe 40 feet because we’re slanting downhill. From that height up there, 20 feet above everything, it will come across.
Chief Caleen Sisk is talking about what will happen if the government has its way and the Shasta Dam Enlargement Project goes through. After decades of planning, the project is moving towards final approval.
CHIEF SISK: And then see, up there, it will still impact like Sucker Pool. It will impact Wiwaket Village. It will impact all the way up to the Rock House that Westlands owns now.
SILBER: And so then, how does that impact Children’s Rock?
CHIEF SISK: Uh, we’re hoping it doesn’t impact it, but it will be underwater – unless they draw down all that water.
SILBER: And the dance ground? What happens to the dance ground.
CHIEF SISK: It would be underwater. The women’s healing pool on the little stream. That will be underwater. Coyote Rock will be underwater. This village will be underwater. The burials that are across will have to be moved.
SILBER: Oh, there’s burials.
CHIEF SISK: Yeah, there’s burials and there’s burials up river that will have to be moved.
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LYLA JUNE JOHNSTON: A lot of people have a hard time understanding indigenous sacred sites.
Lyla June Johnston is an indigenous scholar whose research focuses on human ecology and Native worldviews. She writes this about the Winnemem Wintu’s sacred sites:
“What one person might dismiss as just another rock might embody and enable an ocean of memories, stories, lessons and healing for a person whose culture is tied to that land.”
LYLA JUNE: I think a lot of people have a hard time seeing Winnemem sacred sites as sacred. Because they’re trying to compare it to a church or a mosque or something of that sort. But I don’t think it’s actually too hard to understand if we think of different analogies and different cultures. For example, the Ganges River is a huge river in India, very sacred to people in India. And nothing can designate it as sacred, it’s just its history and its connection to people that makes it sacred. And so why can’t these pools and boulders and creeks and mountains be sacred to the Winnemem Wintu? I think sometimes we deny the humanity of the Winnemem Wintu when we deny that these could ever be sacred sites. We don’t see that these are people, too. They have profound experiences with places, too, that might not be mosques or churches and this is where they pray, how they pray. And so I think we really have to listen to and learn from indigenous peoples who have that mental map and historical understanding to understand why these are sacred sites.
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The Winnemem Wintu say their sacred sites exist as a constellation. So if one is flooded, all of them can be changed. Those on the rivers would be directly impacted by Shasta Dam’s enlargement, but it would also energetically alter those high up in the mountains. It’s an outcome that weighs heavily on their minds. Visiting the sites helps them deal with the stress.
CHIEF SISK: We travel back to the river all the time, but we don’t really have a landing place. We don’t have a place that we can leave our things, like ‘this is home’.
Instead, Chief Sisk and other Winnemem Wintu have to travel more than an hour, starting from the rural reaches of Redding, California where a core group of them live. On this mild, February day in 2018, they organize food and supplies before they take off.
Today’s group includes extended family members and friends. It's a small caravan’s worth of cars with about 20 people. We’ll drive to three sacred sites on a mountain that rises above the McCloud River.
Chief Sisk drives her dark blue Ford Explorer truck, and as we travel north her eyes scan the landscape. The snow-capped Trinity Alps rise up in the west. The higher, sharp peaks of the Cascades hover to the north and east. We drive onto a bridge that crosses over the Shasta reservoir, and she notes that with a higher Shasta dam, these water levels will go up.
We turn off the highway and wind through a thick conifer forest. Before American settlers began grabbing up land in Northern California, this was all Winnemem Wintu territory. Now it’s managed by the U.S. Forest Service. We pass public campsites. Then we turn onto a bumpy, steep dirt road and climb upwards. Chief Sisk stays attentive. She slows to look at clear cut patches. She shakes her head at the idea that trees are considered renewable resources.
Our first stop of the day is a sacred spring, a small, but fierce waterfall pours out of the mountain. Everyone piles out of the cars. People are joking around.
SPEAKER: Helene, there’s the guy that looks like James. (LAUGHS) When you were in the other car, I was like, that guy looks like James. And then when you opened the car, oh wait, that is James.
On damp soil, The group gathers in a loose circle.
HELENE SISK: Everybody got smudged with our root that we use all the time.
HELENE SISK: We don’t use the sage and all that stuff that everybody else uses. We use a root. And if she sees something that needs a little prayer, then she’ll come up and give you a prayer.
This is Helene Sisk. She’s Chief Caleen’s sister and the Winnemem Wintu’s song leader. Of the two sisters, Helene is the quieter one. She explains that to purify their energy, one of the guys smudges. He waves the smoke of a lit root around each person as they stand still with arms outstretched. Then another whispers: “To remember the good things”. To listen and speak with their heart.
The smudging done, everyone walks over to the spring.
HELENE SISK: And we wash our face and hands and then put some water on our heart and on top of our head. And say a little prayer there and it helps you out.
SILBER: So it’s like a cleansing.?
HELENE SISK: Kind of. Yeah. Kind of good for you. Good for your mind, too. Make you feel better. Just to know that you did that and you know it’s good for you.
We pile back into the cars and continue climbing the rough road until we stop and everyone gets out of the cars again. The men go off into a sacred sugar pine grove to pray. Meanwhile, the women and children stand around. Chief Caleen’s son Netchi lays out large pine cones neatly in a line.
NETCHI: I found another one. I found another one.
CHIEF SISK: You got them all...So many.
Some of the women start chatting, about how the pine cones fell early this year.
WOMAN01: Because they were early this year.
WOMAN02: Yeah...oh yeah, the world is off track. The world is wrong. (Laughter.)
CHIEF SISK: We’re not. We’re on track.
The men come back, we climb back into the cars, and continue the steep climb upwards until we reach the top, a place the Winnemem Wintu call Universe Rock. It's a remote spot with towering trees, entirely removed from the bustle of modern life. The group pulls out roughed-up metal tables and chairs from the cars. They set out picnic foods and rake pine needles to clear space for a fire on the forest floor.
By now it’s late afternoon. The skies are cloudy and at first it looks like rain. Michael Preston, the son of Chief Sisk, sits with his back to a tree. He holds an animal skin in his lap. I ask him what he’s doing.
MICHAEL PRESTON: I’m just making a fox quiver.
A ceremonial case to hold arrows made from the skin of a fox he found dead on the side of the road.
PRESTON: It’s for the dances, for the war dances.
Preston is in his mid-30s with clear eyes and dark, thick hair pulled back in a ponytail. He's a deep thinker. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in society and the environment. But what he values most is the spiritual side of life. As we talk, he stays focused on the fox skin. He scrapes back and forth with a small knife.
PRESTON: It’s a good place to work on it here on the sacred sites, actually. Just away from everything and in nature is best, most clear way, I guess.`
The Winnemem Wintu have a word to describe the sacred, to describe these sites.
PRESTON: It’s Sawal.
SILBER: What does that mean?
PRESTON: Sacred, the closest Christian term that we can come up with, I guess. Divine. Holy. I don’t know, all of those words.
SILBER: and what is the word again?
PRESTON: Sawal.
PRESTON: I mean, language is always going to fail, what’s really going on, but that’s our attempt to put it in simple terms, I guess. kind of like the Daoism, it’s the same thing, but trying to explain what the Dao is. I mean, it’s a whole book. Same thing for Sawol, I guess.
The American government has never made a lot of room for the indigenous idea of the sacred, or sawal. To explain, I'm going to leave Universe Rock for a bit to introduce you to a really important person in recent Winnemem Wintu history.
FLORENCE JONES: I’m praying for the whole world.
This is Chief Caleen’s great-aunt Florence Jones. Those who knew her well affectionately call her Grams.
JONES: I’m praying for all nationalities. The white. The red. The black. The yellow. The brown. I’m not just praying for my little people here today. I’m praying for the world.
When Florence Jones was born, her elders identified her as a powerful healer and groomed her for the role. By the time she died in 2003 at the age of 95, she was respected by Native people all over California and beyond. News of her death even made it onto the obituary page of the New York times.
JONES: …the Earth, the Mother Earth, the high wind, the tornadoes, just showing you people that you don’t understand. Now I’m here to tell you what the Nature has told me to tell you here today. Of course, you don’t believe in Nature. You lost everything…
PRESTON: She would go into trance and she would talk to spirits and tell people what was wrong with them and they’d be crying and grown men would be crying. I’d be a little kid watching this and like it was always very serious, no talking, nothing. And the way she did it, I can’t really explain it really. It’s just very real about it. You feel it. Like there’s just something going on here. Not just something. There’s something very big going on here.
Florence Jones was a young woman when Shasta Dam went up and displaced her people from their river. But with her knowledge of the old ways, she helped the Winnemem Wintu hold onto their culture and ceremonies. In her later years, those who knew her well called her Grams.
CLAIRE CUMMINGS: Grams and then other leaders in the Winnemem decided to get in the face of the federal government.
Claire Cummings is an attorney who spent decades doing pro bono work for the Winnemem Wintu, starting when Florence Jones was still alive. She says Native American ceremonies were illegal for much of the country’s history. That forced communities such as the Winnemem Wintu to practice in secret.
Finally, in 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. it guaranteed tribes access to their sacred sites on public lands. Not too long after, Florence Jones applied for a permit to hold ceremony at a place called Dekkas, on the west side of the McCloud River. Claire Cummings says the application was a gutsy move. It forced government officials to acknowledge that the Winnemem Wintu were still here — and they had rights.
CUMMINGS: Saying I have a right to my ceremony at Dekkas. And she had the right to continue her ceremonies there.
As a lawyer, Claire Cummings was curious about whether the law could further support Native American religion. Her father had worked at Glacier National Park in Montana.
CUMMINGS: He was born in 1891 and he worked in Glacier National Park and lived with the Blackfeet and this is in the early 20th century.
From him, she learned to respect indigenous wisdom.
CUMMINGS: He said who were the first people here. Pay attention to what they knew and what they learned. It seemed natural to me to consider First Peoples in places where I was.
She realized the law prioritizes protection of private property, not indigenous sacred sites.
CUMMINGS: Our legal system is utilitarian. ‘If it’s useful, it has value.’ It doesn’t see the value of something that’s 10,000 years old and an oral tradition passed down from generation to generation that is kept secret, perhaps. Or danced or dreamed or sung. That’s just not part of the written, Western culture way of grasping the world.
In the 1980s, the Winnemem Wintu owned no land along the McCloud River. Their sacred sites were on private property, national forest and logging company land. To hold ceremony legally, the Winnemem Wintu had to either apply for permits or ask permission. Not exactly ideal.
But then out of a mistake came an opportunity. It all started when loggers cut down ancient trees from a sacred sugar pine grove. The same grove that we visited today. The land is owned by a logging company called Sierra Pacific Industries. Private property owners can mostly do whatever they want on their land. But in this case, Sierra Pacific wanted to do something called a timber harvest. That required a state logging permit.
CUMMINGS: Yeah. Well, the problem is that they got the permit and they didn’t respect the restrictions that were placed on that. So they desecrated the sugar pines.
They cut down the trees. Florence Jones was devastated. Sugar pine trees live upwards of 500 years. For all that time, her Winnemem Wintu ancestors would have gone to these trees to pray, just as she now taught the people around her to do. Not too long after, a group went up the mountain. It included Florence Jones, Sierra Pacific representatives, along with Cal Fire, a few archeologists, other timber people from the state and Claire Cummings, the Winnemem Wintu’s attorney.
CUMMINGS: We went up the mountain and we stopped at the springs...and we were sitting there. And Grams did her prayers. And Grams gave a talk, which talked about how injured she and the place was and she went into trance.
CUMMINGS: She came out of trance and she said, the spirits have said I can forgive you. So she said she forgave them.
Claire Cummings said the other people at the meeting, including those from Sierra Pacific, felt really badly.
CUMMINGS: They cared a lot. They were as hamstrung by their jobs and who they worked for and their Western viewpoint. So what do you do in a situation where they actually really care, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer?
CUMMINGS: Well, in the back of my mind had always been the idea of getting land back for the Winnemem.
She suggested Sierra Pacific sign off on a cultural conservation easement as reparation for the desecrated sugar pine grove. it would permanently protect three sites on the mountain — the sacred spring, the sugar pine grove and Universe Rock. it would allow the Winnemem Wintu to visit and hold ceremony at these sites whenever they wanted. No logging or development could take place on those grounds. Ever. Even if Sierra Pacific sold the land.
CUMMINGS: And in some ways, it’s a better deal than actually owning the land. In this case, the cultural conservation easement gave them all the rights that they needed, which is ceremonial. You want to be able to just go there when the right time is, to do the right dances and songs and pick the herbs, or whatever it is you need to do.
Sierra Pacific accepted. It was a big deal. The sacred spring, sugar pine grove and Universe Rock now had permanent protections. and the Winnemem Wintu had permanent access to the sites.
Back at Universe Rock, the skies clear. Members of the group grab chairs and trudge through overgrown, dry vegetation. It’s not clear where we’re going until we come to an outcrop of rocks where the mountain drops steeply below. Looking out at the valley, seeing pretty much nothing but trees, it’s easy to understand this as a sacred place. In the distance, we see water flowing through the McCloud arm of Shasta Lake.
NETCHI: It’s so cool.
Chief Sisk’s son Netchi runs to the top of a large boulder.
SILBER: What do you see?
NETCHI: I see everything. It’s so cool. You can see everything. Look. I can look down because I’m not scared. It’s cool.
Everyone takes a seat on their chairs, or on the ground. They face Chief Sisk who stands on a large rock, her back to the vast valley below. Beside her is a small chest filled with supplies, such as her pipe, tobacco and abalone shells. She begins to speak to the group.
CHIEF SISK: Some of you are brand new to here. But this is a sacred place here and Grams and everybody did a lot of work to protect this from the loggers, protect this from the people who say they own this land now.
When the Winnemem Wintu want to pray hard on a problem, they say they’re going around the world. It’s not really the whole world. It’s a tour of Winnemem Wintu sacred sites. These sites are all connected, but each one offers a different energy and power and is occupied by its own spirit being. Universe Rock is the last stop.
CHIEF SISK: This is where we can unload, if you’re carrying a lot of stuff then you just put it down here. You just let them take care of it. Let them take that. Do away with it. You don’t want to carry it around no more. Then you give it to them here.
Done talking, Chief Sisk directs that everyone get smudged down. Once again, a few guys walk around with the smudging root and also some sacred spring water so everyone can put a little on their hearts and top of their heads. A few people collect pine needles for tea. Others stare out at the view.
NICK WILSON: What do I see? I see, uh, I mean, you see all of these old time trees out here.
This is Nick Wilson, nephew of Chief Sisk. He’s in his late 20s. Tall. With sharp features. Handsome. It’s not always easy being a young Winnemem Wintu. To stay engaged in this way of life and still have a means to survive.
WILSON: It’s nice seeing these old time trees and it’s nice not seeing a whole bunch of houses out there. It’s real peaceful. Beautiful and it’d be, it kind of takes me back, like I wish I was back in the old days now, like being up here, seeing how it looked.
The trees connect Wilson to his ancestors and the culture he’s committed to.
WILSON: This is one of our sacred places, and people been coming here a long time before me, before Caleen... long, long, old time places. But we’re just here putting our prayers down, letting the spirits know that we’re still here and we’re still needing help because there’s a lot of battles going on right now and this is the closest place you can get to Creator. That’s why it’s called Universe Rock.
Which brings us back to the battle against a bigger Shasta Dam. Even in this place of refuge where they can relax, and let go a bit, the threat to their sacred sites looms large.
SILBER: If the dam raise happens, I don’t know, just how does it make you feel?
CHIEF SISK: If the dam raise happened, I would be very disgusted and sad, and scrambling to my sacred places to see what else can we do?
She’d come back here and to other sacred sites. She’d look to them as you would a friend, for wisdom and the strength to keep fighting against the odds.
The sun falls below the horizon and everyone takes the short walk back to the fire. They set out the food and sit around in a circle, chatting, gossiping and poking fun at one another until it’s well past dark and it’s time to quench the fire, load up the trucks and leave.
SILBER: Lyla June, you published an academic study about the Winnemem Wintu, where you explored what would be lost to them if the proposed Shasta Dam enlargement project is built. In that study, you talk about a people can be endemic to a place. That is, that there’s only one place in the world where they belong. Can you expand on that?
LYLA JUNE: A lot of us know about endemic species, species that are found in only one place in the world. One little valley or one little desert or one little river. So just like the blue cheek butterfly fish in the Red Sea. You won’t find this beautiful fish anywhere else in the world except the Red Sea. Therefore, if you pollute the Red Sea, if you do something to damage the Red Sea, you could very well lose this species forever, because that’s the only place they depend on. So similarly, indigenous cultures can be endemic to a place. Their culture can be so wrapped up in one river basin that they become constrained, in a sense, to this specific biome. And so, the Winnemem Wintu are like this. They are intimately connected to this river basin and what you do to the river basin, you do to the Winnemem Wintu.
SILBER: So would you say the conclusion at this time when the planet is kind of falling apart is that we should be thinking about how to protect these cultures. And then an extension of that is to protect them, that we have to protect their sacred sites.
LYLA JUNE: Absolutely.
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A Prayer for Salmon is a project of The Spiritual Edge at KALW Public Radio. Support comes from the Templeton Religion Trust, California Humanities, the Kalliopeia Foundation, Save Our Spirits and The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder. We are produced on Ohlone and Coastal Miwok land.
Thank you to the Winnemem Wintu and the Run4Salmon community for welcoming us, our microphones and cameras into their midst. To contribute to the Winnemem Wintu’s nonprofit, go to sawalmem.io.
Judy Silber/The Spiritual Edge
