Winnemem Wintu tribe
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 15:39
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Below are some links for the Winnemem Wintu tribe and the plan to raise Shasta Dam.
It's another scandalous story. 14,000 Winnemem Wintus were living along the McCloud River before Europeans arrived in the area. Early on, many were wiped out by epidemics spread by trappers. Gold was discovered in Shasta Co. in 1848, and more were killed, died of disease, or were pushed off their land. Eventually they were allotted 160 acres along the McCloud. By 1900, fewer than 400 Wintus were left. In the late 30s the gov began retaking allotments to remove Winnemem from the river so they could build Shasta Dam. Shasta Dam was finished in 1944, creating Shasta Lake and flooding much of the Winnemem's ancestral villages, burial sites, etc. The government had promised to compensate them with land, which never happened.
Sometime in the 1980s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated the Winnemem's federal tribal status--BIA health services, grants for education, etc. etc. were all stopped. Members of the tribe have petitioned, testified in Congress, held hunger strikes, and protests to try to regain tribal status, so far without success. Why is it up to the BIA to decide this? There's only 140 of them left.
In 2000 CalFed (coalition of state/federal/aggie/environmental grps etc.) made a plan to enlarge water storage in the Bay Delta by raising the height of Shasta Dam 6 to 18 feet--enough to flood most remaining Winnemem Wintu cultural sites. Feinstein has pushed for it, but there's been enough opposition to delay things up til now. But with this year's drought and increasing population, there'll be a lot of pressure. The bottom link is a Feb. 2007 article from the Redding Record Searchlight which describes the various interests involved.
http://www.sacredland.org/endangered_sites_pages/shasta_dam.html
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Jacques' comment
The process through which the Winnemem Wintu were brought from 14,000 to 140 is so outrageous that people do not know what to compare it with. In part because each people looks at its history as the best and the only one to promote. If as happened in WWII, the Holocaust wiped out millions of jews, then the Jews take it to the point of incomparability so that trying to compare it diminishes or devalues what was done.
Is it not time to look at history and history telling beyond comparison, competition? Is it not time to look at outrageousness, massacres as processes of attrition which have led humanity to an inability to understand its present situation, its roots and where competitive historical writing is taking humanity. Is it an accident that a system which was born out of genocidal sequences should nurture something like the Holocaust, AND lead some of those who suffered it to reproduce it on Palestinians? (Badiou and Winter in Polemics)
Is it not time that one pushes the process initiated by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth toward a real healing process in which those who were slaughtered, or at least their descendants, are allowed to tell their story as well as tell us how they think healing could take place. Such healing will require much more than truth and reconciliation. It does not require State institutions, it does not require lawyers. It requires people who are willing to free themselves from the shackles of a system which tortures our consciences to the point of paralysis.
Is it not possible, in the name of an ethic of truth, one which is free from morality and religious principles, to go face to face with the horrors of the system and prescribe an end to the kind of thinking and practices which gave birth to it. Is it not time to end the torture of people who continue to be treated as if they should have disappeared?
Long before the horrendous episode of the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII, Native Americans were put through similar processes, not just in one place, but wherever they lived, to this day. This is not to say one was worse than the other, but to say that there has been a connection between all of these certified and uncertified holocausts. Demonizing individuals while not saying anything about the socio-economic system which drove these individuals to lead humanity to the brink of catastrophe is tantamount to putting one's head in the sand.