NOT FOR REPRINT

BETH ROSE MIDDLETON MANNING

UPSTREAM: TRUST LANDS AND POWER ON THE FEATHER

On November 14, 2013, the Pacific Stewardship Council voted to transfer 2,325 acres — all of utility company Pacific Gas & Electric’s holdings inTasman Koyom, Humbug Valley, — to the Summit Consortium: the first return of land to the Native American Mountain Maidu people since contact. Tasman Koyom is one of the only high mountain valleys in the Mountain Maidu homeland that was not flooded for hydroelectric development, nor was it extensively settled. It is a cultural landscape that is centrally important to Maidu community members.

I was born, raised, and educated in rural California, just a few Upstream, my new book, traces the history of the remarkable hours south of Tasman Koyom. I was one of very few African PG&E land transfer to the Maidu. Just a century ago, Maidu Americans in the small Sierra foothill towns of Pioneer, Pine people’s homes were torn down, their lands taken, their Grove, and Plymouth where we lived. I grew up largely cemeteries relocated, and their carefully tended gathering without electricity, spending a lot of time outside and building areas razed and flooded for the development of what became a deep appreciation for the land. I also grew up with a mine PG&E’s . Along with hydroelectric development, shaft in the backyard, just over the ridge from a large lumber railroads and national parks and forests operated jointly mill, and near a river that I now know provides water and to displace American Indian landholders and to erase any power to the San Francisco Bay Area. I was interested in evidence of their histories and rights. Cultural practices Native American issues, but I didn’t realize how specifically were disrupted as people could no longer fish for migratory they were intertwined with my life until I began to learn species, now barred from the upper watershed by a multidam about the history and infrastructure of California water, power, “stairway of power.” and timber. As a McNair Scholar at University of California- Today, vacationers enjoy second homes along man-made Davis, I developed an undergraduate research project assessing reservoirs that form part of the power production enterprise. attitudes toward forest management in Plumas County, in There are deep, hidden injustices associated particularly with northeastern California, within the Maidu homeland. My the development of hydroelectric infrastructure. As MCDG undergraduate advisor, ethnoecologist Dr. M. Kat Anderson, Board Member Lorena Gorbet told journalist Jane Braxton introduced me to members of the Maidu community. Little in 2014: “Along with their gathering sites, the Maidu lost After graduation in 2001, I moved to Plumas County and salmon and snapping turtles, ceremonies, language, and song began to work for a rural research and education nonprofit — everything that goes with the land … . We have always been called the Sierra Institute, and to volunteer with the Maidu looking for compensation for what we lost. Always.” Culture and Development Group, which later became a PG&E’s largest is , located in member organization of the Maidu Summit. Mountain Maidu country, high in the north fork of the

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There are deep, hidden

injustices associated

particularly with the development of hydroelectric

infrastructure.

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The intent of the Indian watershed. Gorbet and MCDG researched and documented the history of the seizure of Maidu lands and the development of Lake Almanor, Allotment Act of 1887 including compiling and developing the map of the parcels under the lake and their status. Many of these lands were former American Indian allotment lands. I began assisting Gorbet with research on the history of these lands and how they were was to break up collective taken from Maidu people. In federal, state, and private archives, I found extensive documentation of Indian allotments in Plumas and Lassen counties that we could American Indian lands and use to advocate for recognition and restitution. The intent of the Indian Allotment Act of 1887 was to break up collective American transfer the non-allotted Indian lands and transfer the non-allotted parcels to non-American Indians. This resulted in major loss of tribal lands. Because treaties negotiated with California Indian tribes parcels to non-American were never ratified, many allotments were classified as in the public domain. As such, allotments in California became a limited opportunity for tribal members without a land Indians. This resulted in base to have rights recognized to part of their homeland. Upstream documents the ways in which these public domain allotments in northeastern California were approved but then major loss of tribal lands. rapidly canceled or sold for the development of private, and later public, hydroelectric, water storage, and conveyance infrastructure. Maidu people who lost these lands were rarely compensated for them, and still lack a land base and federal recognition. The research that forms the basis of Upstream extends from Lake Almanor to throughout Plumas and Lassen counties, and down the north fork of the Feather River. Downstream from Lake Almanor is , impounded by Oroville , the largest earthen fill dam in the , and the headwaters of the nation’s largest state-built water and power conveyance system — the California State Water Project. The expropriation of Mountain Maidu homelands forms the foundation of this system that conveys water to millions of downstream users. Upstream works to inform the public about the injustices our state water system

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is built upon, and offers opportunities to advocate for Indigenous restitution and it. The present and the future are our recognition, and more justice-oriented conservation. provenience and yet the present is so The landmark return of the Tasman Koyom to Maidu people stems from a 2003 fleeting that we must make the future settlement between PG&E and the California Public Utilities Commission. The our greatest focus – and we must make settlement forced PG&E to divest nonessential lands throughout the state for it a world in which we can live well. We conservation and public benefit. This divestiture is overseen by a Stewardship must make a future of justice. Council of appointed representatives from primarily federal and state agencies, as To me, these words were a call well as conservation groups and PG&E. The council is required by the settlement to action. I was compelled to write to transfer the PG&E lands to conservation entities that will manage them in Upstream to contribute to that future accordance with six beneficial public values (habitat protection, open space, of justice, and to advocate specifically recreation, sustainable forestry, agriculture, historic values). The settlement does not for reform in natural resource address the history of these lands, or that they include individual American Indian education, policy, and practice to allotment lands that were canceled, purchased, or trespassed upon to develop power recognize Indigenous histories, present, company operations. In effect, the settlement actually reproduces injustice by not and futures on the land. addressing how and why the land came to be under the company’s ownership. In 2006, I worked with Maidu Summit member Farrell Cunningham yatam (a Maidu word used after the name of a person who has passed away) to write the first draft of the Maidu Summit Land Management Plan. The plan was an application for ownership of the Tasman Koyom, which was available for divestiture in the BETH ROSE MIDDLETON MANNING is an associate Stewardship Council process. As Cunningham surveyed the painful history of power professor of Native American studies at the University and timber companies seizing his homeland, and envisioned Maidu-led reacquisition of California, Davis. She is the author of Upstream: Trust and stewardship, he wrote: Lands and Power on the Feather River and Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation. Manning With these lands we have an opportunity to begin righting a great wrong. We may researches Native environmental policy and activism for be frightened of outcomes we are unsure of but we should be even more frightened of site protection using conservation tools. She is a graduate living in a world where the foundation of injustice is honorable and the perpetuation of UC-Davis and the University of California-Berkeley. of that injustice acceptable … .We cannot change the past but neither can we ignore

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