Northern California, Settlers, Indians

The place frustrated me, intrigued me, wouldn’t let me alone. It was a valley in the Coast Range of California, a fair drive north of San Francisco, where we visited my husband’s family summer after summer. The land was beautiful, with rolling hills, steep ridges, blue mountains on the horizon. Hawks skimmed the firs and cruised the bright, sunburned slopes. It was ranch country, mostly cattle. The town had a creamery, a Rexall drug store, a redwood train station, a procession of heavy logging trucks down Main Street, a restaurant that went bankrupt every so often, two radio stations with no decent music on either one, and an oasis: a second-hand bookstore. To a New Englander like me, nothing seemed old enough. I tried to get out to walk and see the country, but everything was fenced.

Neighbors opened a trail across their land one year, and I discovered the fragrant pepperwood shade, the peeling red madrone, the steep slopes of bleached oat grass, the pebbled streams, the blackberry tangles, the trickling of water, the stillness of the redwood groves. Now I was in love with the land, but something still was missing. There must have been people here, people who belonged to the place, who had nothing to do with San Francisco or Highway 101. Where were they?

My husband remembered something his grandmother had told him late in her life, something that still bothered her after eighty years. Born on a ranch in 1869, she played with Indian children whose parents, like hers, lived and worked on the place. But one day when she was four the Army came to round the Indians up and march them to the reservation. Her playmates, all of them, grownups she knew were there one day, then gone. Her sadness and loneliness as a child came across to her grandson, and across 120 years to me. Now I knew there was a story.

I realized "round up" meant the Army was making a clean sweep. White people didn't want Indians around. It took me longer to be properly curious, to find out, for instance, that the reservation was 60 miles away. People walked 60 miles into the mountains in the fall of the year, carrying whatever they could, with the rains coming down, the rains that are so much wetter than they are in New England. Half the people on the march didn't make it. Of those on the reservation in the following year, half died. I understood later still that the Army action was settled policy. The White community meant to have done with the Indians. There was talk of vermin and extermination. And not just talk. At this point, the emptiness of the land struck me, the absences, the shadows. Why did this happen? Did it have to happen? In my distress at the wrong, the waste, the desolation, a woman's voice came to me, not an Indian but a White. She had been there. She knew the story. She would talk to me.

Rush of Shadows took twenty years to imagine, research, and write. I found the land itself most eloquent. For the settlers, it was likely the first land that finally belonged to them, and the best. The Indians believed not that it belonged to them but that they belonged to it and were created to take care of it. For thousands of years they had lived on it in prosperity and peace and in great numbers, developing useful arts and a rich ceremonial life. They traded with their neighbors, many individuals speaking several languages. They made the finest baskets made on earth, works of art that held water and so were useful for everything. Their memories, skills and political methods, their encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, their choices about what was important, what to be aware of, left me exhilarated at the variety and extent of human intelligence and possibility.

I read at UC Berkeley, the Mendocino Historical Society, the Library of Congress: general, local, and oral histories; contemporary accounts of missions, ranches, reservations; traditional stories recorded by anthropologists; analysis and word lists of characteristic verb-led languages; interpretations in newspapers, letters, books, and government reports. I listened over coffee as Herman and Albertine reminisced about their 5000-acre ranch, their barn, how they thought about sheep and horses, where to cut trees and where to leave them, how the little dog went for the wind boar's testicles, how it was when the house burned down, what they planted, how they managed water.

I sought out indigenous people, who had been ignored in my education. I read Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds, Greg Sarris’s Mabel McKay, Weaving the Dream, Powers’s The Killing of Crazyhorse. I studied Pomo baskets and Australian Aboriginal paintings. I listened to drums at powwows, walked into the Canyon de Chelly in moonlight with a native guide who cut us switches to wave away the insects, haunted the Missions where California Indians were incarcerated before the Americans came. It is as easy to sentimentalize Native cultures as to dismiss them. California Indians who are still around were kind enough to help straighten me out on this score. A man at Coyote Dam let me taste acorn meal, the staple, which turned out to be mild and wholesome. My friend Darnella (Creek), to whom I expressed doubt about whether I could fairly represent Indian people, said that if Michael Dorris (Modoc) could write in the voice of the young girl in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, a writer's imagination could do what needed to be done. A Berkeley professor taught my daughter how to shun a boy who had intruded on her in the shower. A home health aide, perhaps rightly feeling that something extra was coming to her, skillfully ripped my family off. A medicine woman I met at a fair taught me how to inquire whether what I was writing was good and genuine. I wanted to make a big deal of approaching her, visiting her later, but she was swift and dealt with me there and then. I could just ask what I needed to know. How? "Dear Lord," she told me. "You know how to say that."

Very few people know the story I've told in Rush of Shadows, although it has happened again and again, in one way or another, all over North America. The fact that we don't know the story is astonishing but not accidental. We are all living on Indian land, and unless we're Indian, we stole it. Our forebears drove off the native people, often killed them outright, and set about exonerating themselves somehow. Seeing this clearly is a revolting but necessary part of our coming of age on this continent. Did it have to be this way? What better choices might we have made? Can we say that we are taking care of the land we got so that its life and ours will be sustainable, as it was under native caretaking, for thousands of years? This would be a good hope to have.

Rush of Shadows is not just about genocide, though the time it tells of was a gruesome time. The novel took shape as the story of two women, an Indian and a White. Their attempted friendship is instructive. It says that there is at least a possibility that people from disparate cultures can negotiate their differences, that conflict can have a novel and less damaging outcome. In the future this story could happen another way.