Chapter 7. Agriculture and Genocide
“Colonization is the act of being a bad guest in someone else’s house. It is the act of destroying something you don’t understand because you don’t think it’s worth understanding.”
—Lyla June Johnston
Glenn County, CA. May 28, 2022. Nuts such as walnuts, almonds and pistachios are water-intensive and major export crops in California. Judy Silber/The Spiritual Edge
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By Judy Silber
The Run4Salmon has arrived near the university town of Chico, about 140 miles north of the San Francisco Bay Area. To get here, we’ve made our way on foot and by boat as we follow the salmon’s migration path up the Sacramento River. We’ll now switch to bikes. From a community stockpile, Winnemem Wintu Doug Scholfield and his cousin Jerod Ward choose a tandem.
DOUG SCHOLFIELD: Tandem is a little difficult. You’ve got to learn how to work with your people. We haven’t learned that yet. He keeps trying to go left and I keep trying to go right.
JEROD WARD: I’m just trying to hold on.
SCHOLFIELD: If we’re going to get these salmon back, we need to learn how to work together. It may take a couple wrecks.
I suspect most Californians don’t think too hard about the state’s history and it’s takeover by Euro American settlers. But for indigenous people it’s hard to forget. To help us understand, here’s Lyla June Johnston, an indigenous scholar who is trying to find ways to reconcile past and present.
LYLA JUNE: I think a lot of people boil down history to: well, humans conquer humans. It’s just a part of nature and it’s just happened through history. So sad and let’s just move on. Let's pretend you made a meal for me the day before and fed me and were kind to me. And the next day, I barge into your house, take everything. Beat you up. Kick you out. And call you primitive on the way out.
LYLA JUNE: You probably wouldn’t say, “Oh, that’s just human nature.” You wouldn’t say it just happens. You would say, Lyla, that was mean. And we deserve some justice here. And let’s not forget about that. Let’s make things right. Right? LIke give me my house back.
LYLA JUNE: And so, it’s just insane, but what we’ve always wanted as indigenous peoples and what we still want today is we just want to be family. We want to be relatives with other human beings. But people need to treat us right.
LYLA JUNE: So for Native people, it’s about reclaiming our languages, our identity, reclaiming our worth and reclaiming our own destiny. On the non-Native side, it’s about being humble, respectful. Listening. Honoring the fact that Native people are the original and foremost scientists of this land and we probably should follow their leadership.
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NICOLE: Okay, you guys ready? Can we turn the guitar up just a little bit?
A Run4Salmon participant named Nicole has gathered up a few young people to help bang out percussion on two large metal trash bins. To the tune Say My Name by Destiny’s Child, she sings lyrics written with the salmon in mind.
NICOLE SINGS: Salmon run, the prayers are all around you, ancestors have found you, won’t stop until it’s done. Salmon run. Salmon run. You acting kind of shady, treating waters sacred. We want to make a change. Salmon run. Salmon run.
ALI MEDERS-KNIGHT: Hey, welcome to occupied Mechoopda territory. You are welcome here.
Ali Meders-Knight, a Mechoopda tribal member, speaks at the outdoor concert put on by the Run4Salmon. She tells the audience seated in front of a makeshift stage about her people’s connections to the Chico area.
ALI MEDERS-KNIGHT: I explain it as a territory because a lot of time people say, oh, you’re Mechoopda. This is your land. I’m like, oh land, I don’t own anything. But as far as territory, yeah, I have a lot of responsibility.
ALI MEDERS-KNIGHT: We have, for the last 150 years, dealt with the onslaught of colonization. Not only the colonization of the people, but the colonization of the land.
The Mechoopda have lived on this land since time immemorial. but starting in the mid-1800s Mexican land grants began to re-distribute it to settlers. On the campus of California State University, Chico there’s a creek where kids hang out today.
JESSE DIZARD: It’s a place that some members of the Mechoopda tribe have described as being kind of a special place
This is Jesse Dizard. He teaches anthropology at the university.
DIZARD: Because it was thought of as a place where Creator may have brought human beings into the world.
DIZARD: Kids go there to make out and smoke whatever they smoke these days and it’s...they don’t know the history of the place. They don’t know what it was. They just see it as oh, it’s just another little spot on campus.
Ali Meders-Knight says The Mechoopda haven’t forgotten what was taken from them.
MEDERS-KNIGHT: When you go to the grocery store and you see groceries and you see magazines and you see lights and you see a checker, that’s not always been there. There was a creek underneath there. There was a tree underneath there. There were frogs that lived there. There were a lot of beautiful things that lived here and it was way better than what you see in a grocery store. It had way more to offer.
The next morning, the group gathers at the entrance to the farm where they spent the night.
CHIEF CALEEN SISK: Hopefully, it’s a good day to ride. Right? It’s a good day to ride.
Chief Caleen Sisk stands in the center of a circle to prepare us for what we’ll see up close on the bikes. How agriculture has transformed the Sacramento Valley — and the demands it places on the river that flows through here.
CHIEF SISK: I just want to put down this short prayer to Elolbus. That’s what we call the Creator. We’re going to pray for those salmon to come back through Butte Creek and back through this whole area, the way that they did before, too…
Chief Sisk is interrupted by her granddaughter Mya who plays music on a cellphone. She laughs.
CHIEF SISK. I’m sorry.
CHIEF SISK: My younger generation is coming up. You can see the struggle.
CHIEF SISK: That’s why we’re going to bring those salmon home. We’re going to bring them home and all of our rivers will be better. So we ask Elobus to look at your heart, look at your mind, settle your hearts down so that you can enjoy this. Put all your troubles to the side for today and then you can be stronger to face the things that will come our way.
I approach Chief Sisk’s son Michael Preston as he sits on his bike, ready to take off.
MICHAEL PRESTON: I got my Run4Salmon baton, slash staff.
Michael will ride at the front of the group and carry the baton shaped like a salmon with blue and red feathers hanging down.
PRESTON: Flicker for the volcanos and blue jay feathers for the rivers and oceans.
PRESTON: That’s the bigger prayer journey that the salmon, as well as us, that we’re a part of, is the fire and water elements that can control our water systems, that control the world, really. And so we’re paying homage to that.
Fire and water. These elements are out of balance, he tells me. Over the last few years, California has suffered greatly due to wildfires.
PRESTON: There’s not enough of us people who consider fire sacred and pray to the sacred fires any more. And there’s not enough people who consider water sacred and pray to the waters any more. So they’re off balance. And so, this is part of our rebalancing effort as well. For our responsibility as Winnemem Wintu people to help restore balance to our area of the world.
The Run4Salmon pedals through Chico under the shade of tall trees, almost none of them indigenous to the area. Then we head west toward the Sacramento River.
We arrive at a quiet one-lane road.
On one side of the road is the wide blue of the river. On the other side are orchards lined up in perfectly straight rows. In a world paved over with concrete, I would usually take comfort in the green. But up close on the bike, these look more like factory trees.
I catch up to Michael Preston at the front of the group. Loud cars and trucks shoot by. We bike past narrow irrigation canals with muddied water. We pass farm after farm after farm.
PRESTON: I think these are walnuts. Mostly people just see how big the fields are from the freeway. But if you go back in these back roads, you can really see how much of the land is really being farmed with water-intensive crops.
Nuts such as walnuts, almonds and pistachios are big business in California with billions of dollars worth exported overseas every year. Water to irrigate the trees and other crops draws from the Sacramento River or the aquifer below the ground. That’s turned water into a scarce resource. It’s also completely reshaped the geography here.
The Valley floor once filled with so much water it was passable by boat in the winter time. In the spring, thick wild grasses, wild oat and clover grew tall. The diverse habitat attracted huge flocks of migratory birds and other animal species, like elk and grizzly bears, which we no longer see.
Michael Magliari is a history professor at Chico. He says in the decade that followed the 1849 Gold Rush, California’s population more than tripled.
MICHAEL MAGLIARI: And those people have to be fed.
The new settlers set about draining swamps and bogs, building levees, flattening potential fields, cutting down oak trees and clearing away pretty much anything that threatened their ability to farm.
MAGLIARI: There were scalp bounties offered for wolves and coyotes and ground squirrels, even in California.
MAGLIARI: It varied on the animal. Grizzly bears and wolves, maybe $10 bounties. Coyotes, $5 bounties. They varied.
Twenty-five cents…
MAGLIARI: …for ground squirrels or gophers. And these would be paid by either the state or local counties.
In 1849, a settler named John Bidwell bought a large ranch in Mechoopda territory, land that would become present-day Chico. An entrepreneurial type, he began experimenting with new crops, including some that are now California staples, such as walnuts, almonds and peaches.
MAGLIARI: Finding out which crops worked…working with the railroads to get all these things coordinated and marketed back east. Whether they were shipping fruit fresh or dried or canned. Developing the early canneries.
John Bidwell and others had no doubt this was progress.
The Run4Salmon group pulls into a small rest area close to the Sacramento River. It’s hot. Everyone reaches for water bottles. In addition to bikes, the support vehicles are also here. Jerod Ward blasts one of his songs from a car speaker. It’s called Purple Pants.
The day is full of light-hearted moments like this, lots of inside jokes and teasing. But the group is also well aware of what took place here. It’s a disturbing part of California’s history that most people who live in the state don’t know much about. Before colonization, California was home to an estimated 300,000 indigenous people. By the 1870s, the population had fallen to one-tenth of that from disease, malnutrition, forced marches to reservations and outright massacres.
GARY THOMAS: Everyone wants to play a blind eye and sit back and listen to the propagandized history of this continent.
Gary Thomas you may remember from previous episodes, is an Elem Pomo ceremonial singer and here to support Chief Caleen Sisk.
THOMAS: But what’s happening with all the devastation, all the ancestors are coming up and all the spiritual side is coming up. And because we’re so connected now with our spirituality, everybody’s absorbing that and feeling that massacre, feeling the animosity that happened to our people a long time ago.
He tells me he feels the spirits of those ancestors and the horror of their experiences.
THOMAS: I Have felt that this whole trip. That’s my purpose on this because I’m the one who’s supposed to be singing and praying for people who were massacred up and down this river. The ones that used to feed off the salmon. I’m here to pray for them. That is my position. That’s been my position.
We ride some more, up and down slight hills along wide two-lane roads. Other than the cars and trucks, and endless rectangular fields, it’s pretty empty out here. A herd of cows watches and moos as we bike past. After a few hours, we stop to eat at a perch overlooking the Sacramento River. The contrast is stark. Oak and bay trees cover slopes going down to the water.
PRESTON: It’s nice and quiet out here right now.
It’s like, for a moment, we’ve returned to nature. Michael Preston looks around.
PRESTON: Lots of oak trees. And we got the river right here. Hopefully, there’s salmon in there. We want more and more wild salmon. But we’re starting to get more and more back into Northern California, closer to our area and…
And closer to an ugly history whose pain still lingers. About 60 miles from here, near the present day city of Redding, a large massacre of Native California people took place. American settlers in the Valley had raised an alarm about a supposed pending attack by Indians. Captain John C. Fremont and Scout Kit Carson were in the area. They went to investigate. By the Sacramento River, they came upon a large group of Wintus.
MADLEY INTERVIEW: Yes, this was on April 5, 1846
Benjamin Madley, a professor of history at University of California, Los Angeles, wrote the book American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873.
MADLEY: And so this is an instance in which elements of the U.S. Army led by Kit Carson and John C. Fremont massacred what was probably a group of people who were simply gathered to fish and to dry and/or smoke that salmon along the banks of the river.
John Fremont and his men surrounded them and opened fire. Then they charged into the village. One U.S. soldier said, “The bucks, squaws and papooses were shot down like sheep and those men never stopped as long as they could find one alive.” They also pursued on horseback those who tried to escape, “tomahawking their way through the flying indians.“ Madley estimates as many as 1,000 Wintu people or more were killed on that day.
BENJAMIN MADLEY: The colonizers often believed or convinced themselves, or convinced each other that they had to strike first against indigenous people unless they wanted to wait for indigenous people to strike them and suffer those consequences. So the loss of a cow could lead to the massacre of an entire community.
California’s first governor was a man named Peter Burnett.
MADLEY: He publicly declared to both houses of the legislature and I quote: that a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct.
The idea that extinction of Native people was inevitable, even part of God’s plan, took root in settler’s minds.
MADLEY: It’s much more convenient and acceptable for us to think that something is inevitable than to think that we are committing horrible, egregious crimes.
MADLEY: It was for camouflaging the fact that what is actually happening is people are bayonetting babies. They are driving civilians into houses and setting them on fire. They are tying stones around people’s necks and drowning them. They’re taking them out to sea and throwing them off of ships. They’re beheading people. They are hanging people. They are shooting people.
He estimates that over a 27-year period, ending in 1873, state-sponsored militias, vigilantes and federal troops murdered as many as 16,000 California Native people, or more.
MADLEY: And initially, in the research, I thought maybe these are rogue operators. But it turns out that governors and state legislators put the power of the purse behind these operations.
Three bills in the California legislature authorized the spending of more than $1.1 million for militias. The federal government also approved and paid for Indian killing campaigns.
MADLEY: But in addition to getting money, the people who participated were also eligible to get land from the federal government. Because by the Militia Act, if you had participated in a militia operation, you could get land from the federal government...So they were taking land from California Indian people as pay for killing California Indian people.
SILBER: [Big sigh.]
MADLEY: It is pretty awful. It is awful.
He says the money gave a nod of approval to vigilante groups. The tragic story of the yana people in Tehama and Shasta Counties shows the intensity of settlers who wanted the Indians gone. According to Benjamin Madley, before 1847, the Yana may have numbered more than 3,000 people. as the white population increased, the Yana retreated to the mountains where they had limited resources.
Then in 1858, settlers near the town of Red Bluff declared they wanted: extermination or complete removal. Many Yana were rounded up and confined to reservations. Still, the killing continued until settlers effectively reached their goal. Today, there are people who claim Yana descendancy, but there is no Yana tribe.
The Winnemem Wintu also experienced the terror of those killing years. Chief Caleen Sisk heard stories from her elders.
CHIEF SISK: There’s a little saying that comes down the line from my grandma. She goes, we’re only here because they were bad shots. Not that we didn’t get shot at, but they were bad shots. They missed. That’s why we’re here. And so I think about that, too. I think about, what they did to just live so that we’re here.
The Run4Salmon arrives to a remote nature area on the Sacramento River. A nearby campground is called Massacre Flat. We wait for a group of runners to come in.
Doug Scholfield is the first. He says he ran about 14 miles on trails, plus a few extra as he looked for the other runners whom he feared had gotten lost.
SCHOLFIELD: Yeah we ran alongside the river. The top of the ridge. You can see the river. It's pretty cool.
SILBER: What were you thinking about?
SCHOLFIELD: You start thinking about the old days when natives would travel those pathways and those trails up to the different villages.
Once, Native villages stretched all along the Sacramento River.
SCHOLFIELD: a lot of villages were raided and these are easy pickins because this was where all the Natives lived around the river.
These killings are often framed as part of a war between Native people and settlers.
CHIEF SISK: People don’t really understand. They think you lost the war, you might as well give it up. She laughs. It’s like, what war? There was no war.
GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOME: We apologize to the citizens of California, to all Native Americans.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsome issued a first-ever apology to the state’s Native peoples.
NEWSOME: For the many instances of murder…inflicted on the tribes.
He established a Truth and Healing Council to clarify the historical record. Chief Sisk is a member. Part of the mission includes gathering narratives from California tribes. The council is expected to issue a final report in 2025. It may include recommendations for reparations.
A few months after Governor Newsome’s address, Chief Caleen Sisk and other Winnemem Wintu are invited to attend the annual Chamber of Commerce state of the City address in Redding. Mayor Julie Winter is speaking in a large, echoey meeting hall.
MAYOR JULIE WINTER: The Redding area was settled thousands of years ago by the Wintu people who were made up of nine distinct bands.
Today, several tribes of Wintu people live in the Redding area, including the Redding Rancheria, the Wintu tribe of Northern California and the Winnemem Wintu. The mayor asks all Wintu present to stand.
MAYOR WINTER: I apologize for the grave injustices.That were perpetrated on your families. I'm grieved to think you were not protected by your local government and that your people have suffered to this day.
After the speech, local insurance agent Derek Parsons is so moved, he approaches the chairman of the Wintu Tribe of Northern California.
DEREK PARSONS: It doesn't mean a whole lot, but just wanted to let you know that I support you all. And your culture and continuing heritage. So I love seeing you up here. It was really neat. So thanks very much.
WINTU TRIBAL MEMBER: Come see our museum, up in Shasta Lake City.
PARSONS: I thought it was great today because we're just making a statement and saying, look, we don't support, you know, what happened in the past… we live in this land that they took care of.
Chief Caleen Sisk isn’t so impressed. She acknowledges it took courage for the Mayor to make such a speech. But she grumbles that an apology without substance isn’t worth much. It won’t return salmon to the McCloud River. It won’t give the Winnemem Wintu back their land.
CHIEF SISK: Grams says, uh, apologies are just words, you know, you can, you can say, you know, like in school, They make you say it, apologize to him. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Well, how sorry are you? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, but it doesn't fix it. Right? So like, like she says, you know, if your two boys are fighting and the one boy breaks the other boy's arms. Then he has to, if he's really sorry, then he'll carry the wood that, that boy would have carried for the grandmother. He would do that to clean the slate. That's an apology.
She’s skeptical of empty promises. Empty words. How sincere could this apology be? After all, the Wintu invited to the luncheon event had to pay for their tickets. Apology or not, help or not, she wants salmon back on the McCloud River. The Run4Salmon continues on.
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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.
September 23, 2018. Judy Silber/The Spiritual Edge
