Seeking spatial representation: Reflections on participatory ethnohistorical GIS mapping of Maidu allotment lands

Ethnohistory

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 363-387

  Middleton, Elisabeth Rose ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955579492     PISSN: 00141801     EISSN: 15275477     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-002     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. See, for example, Louise Fortmann, "Gendered Knowledge: Rights and Space in Two Zimbabwe Villages," in Feminist Political Ecology, ed. Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari (New York, 1996), 211-23.
2. Joe Bryan's work with the Western Shoshone and Honey Lake Maidu, which is alluded to in Joel Wainwright and Joe Bryan, "Cartography, Territory, Property: Postcolonial Reflections on Indigenous Counter-mapping in Nicaragua and Belize," Cultural Geographies 16 (2009): 153-78).
3. For descriptions of precontact Maidu life and settlement, see, for example, Farrell Cunningham, "Maidu Summit Land Management Plan," Maidu Summit, July 2007.
4. Francis A. Riddell, "Maidu and Concow," in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, DC, 1978), 370-86.
5. The political ecology approach explores the complex interactions among politics, economy, and environment, at multiple scales, over time, and with attention to differentiation among actors (by gender, race, class, etc.).
6. see, for example, Elisabeth Rose Middleton, "We Were Here, We Are Here, We Will Always Be Here: A Political Ecology of Healing in Mountain Maidu Country," PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008: "Political ecology, as first articulated by [Piers] Blaikie [The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries] ([London,] 1985) and [Piers] Blaikie and [H.] Brookfield [Land Degradation and Society] ([London,] 1987), was an intervention to illuminate the complex relationships among social, political, and economic forces and multiple scales (household to global) that influence and are influenced by ecological factors" (1).
7. Unlike the Apache, who have a land base and whose sense of place is memorialized in Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque, NM, 1996).
8. For an example of deep identity with place, see Karen I. Blu's discussion of Lumbee land and identity: "'Where Do You Stay At?': Homeplace and Community among the Lumbee," in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM, 1996), 197-228.
9. In this way, this interactive map also provides an important accompaniment to narratives that emphasize the victimization of California Indians, such as Robert F. Heizer's seminal text, The Destruction of California Indians (Lincoln, NE, 1974).
10. Heizer's focus on the depredations against California Indians is necessary for its exposition of the destructive policies and individual actions that have caused interminable suffering for Indian people throughout the state. However, Heizer has also been criticized for focusing on the victimization.
11. According to Albert Hurtado, in his 1993 introduction to the text: "Because Heizer was determined to illustrate the horrors of Indian life in the midnineteenth century, he compiled a volume that portrayed Indians as mere victims rather than as thinking actors upon the historical stage.
12. He might have included documents that showed how Indians fought for their rights and attempted to manipulate the federal reservation system" (ix).
13. The work on mapping Indian allotments, linking the map to stories of both Indian victimization and resistance, and using the map for contemporary resistance both honors the truths Heizer offers and shares other stories that show Indian people as "actors upon the historical stage."
14. See, for example, Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo, Natives of the Golden State: The California Indians (San Francisco, 1995).
15. David H. Getches, Charles F. Wilkinson, and Robert A. Williams Jr, "The General Allotment Act," in Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law (St. Paul, MN, 1988), 165-73.
16. Chad Hoopes, Domesticate or Exterminate: California Indian Treaties Unratified and Made Secret in 1852 (Eureka, CA, 1975).
17. Kristin T. Ruppel, Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment (Tucson, AZ, 2008).
18. Almost every text on the history of Indian affairs refers to the destructive effects of the General Allotment/Dawes Act in terms of reducing and dividing Indian lands.
19. For some perspectives, see Ward Churchill, "A Question of Identity," in A Will to Survive, ed. Stephen Greymorning (New York, 2004), 59-94.
20. Getches et al., "General Allotment Act".
21. Rex Weyler, Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War against the American Indian Movement (New York, 1982).
22. Vine Deloria Jr., ed., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman, OK, 1985).
23. Ruppel, Unearthing Indian Land.
24. For a specific look at California, see Al Logan Slagle, "Unfinished Justice: Completing the Restoration and Acknowledgment of California Tribes," American Indian Quarterly 13 (1989): 325-45.
25. See, for example, Sus-312 (Willie Charley/William Williams), Sus-14 and Sus-1079 (Ole Salem), Sus-1080-1086 (Salem family), Sus-999 (Bob Shafer), and Sus-418 (Billy Baker/Baker Bill), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56, Susan-ville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group (hereafter, RG) 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
26. Many allottees also petitioned to sell their own lands, and the majority of these petitions for sale stated (in typewritten form) that the land was not fit for a home and the allottee needed money for "support," "medical expenses," or "to buy a home."
27. Since the files were signed with a thumbprint, it is unclear whether these were, in fact, the allottees' feelings about the land.
28. See, for example, Sus-262 (Annie Baker), Sus-606 (Olie Wicket), and Sus-15 (Jack Watson), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56, Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
29. 4 January 1916 letter from Greenville Indian School Superintendent Edgar Miller to Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Reproduced at the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
30. Like Kate Charley, some of the allottees were illiterate, so were unable to read the notices and unaware that their lands were canceled until they were forced to leave. Sus-312 (Kate Charley for William Charley), Case Files of Land Trans-actions, 1909-56, Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
31. See Cunningham, "Maidu Summit."
32. Pacific Gas & Electric filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and as part of the 2003 settlement agreement with the California Public Utilities Commission, 140,000 acres of PG&E land will be divested to private and public entities for conservation and public benefit purposes, under the oversight of the Pacific Forest and Watershed Lands Stewardship Council.
33. The Stewardship Council was formed to oversee the divestiture. The council is composed of the representatives of state and federal resource agencies, nonprofit natural resource and consumer advocacy groups, PG&E, tribes, and urban and rural interests. Of the 140,000 acres available, 38,094 acres are located in Plumas County.
34. Mission Statement of the Maidu Culture and Development Group (on file with author).
35. The agency that had the records was, of course, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), but these records were not necessarily accessible. Agents in the Sacramento, CA, office indicated that records were accessible only to heirs of allottees.
36. In the next phase of this research, several BIA offices will be contacted to determine whether records are accessible to researchers.
37. The volunteer is a retired archaeologist who offered to assist MCDG in responding to the numerous requests for comments on timber harvest and development plans.
38. For example, Dick and Ollie Reavis's allotments were sold as recently as 1953, and the resulting funds were distributed to the heirs. Sus-36 (Dick Reavis), and Sus-1031 (Ollie Reavis), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56.
39. Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
40. The records on existing allotments are not in the National Archives and Records Administration files because they are active. Existing trust lands were located by searching county parcel data, where parcels in trust are listed as owned by the BIA. However, this county data provide no information on the allottees, heirs, or history of the land.
41. For an ethnographic description of the dynamics of participatory cartography at the intra-community level, see Bjorn Ingmunn Sletto, "'We Drew What We Imagined': Participatory Mapping, Performance, and the Arts of Landscape-Making," Current Anthropology 50 (2009): 443-66.
42. For an overview of participatory action research and some of the challenges to its implementation, see Meredith Minkler and Nina Wallerstein, eds., Community Based Participatory Research for Health (San Francisco, 2003).
43. Andrew Cornwall and Rachel Jewkes, "What Is Participatory Action Research?" Social Science and Medicine 41 (1995): 1667-76.
44. Budd L. Hall, "From Margins to Center? The Development and Purpose of Participatory Research," American Sociologist 23, no. 4 (1992): 15-28.
45. For example, Farrell Cunningham warned that it might be controversial to delve into personal property records (personal communication, Greenville, CA, 2005).
46. When it became clear that all of the records to be used in the research were public records available at the National Archives, Cunningham assisted with the research.
47. Those for whom obtaining records was difficult included Cunningham, Vivian Hansen, Lorena Gorbet, Clara LeCompte, Ron "Comanche" Morales, Franklin Mullen, and others in the community (personal communication, Plumas and Lassen counties, 2005-8).
48. Wainwright and Bryan, "Cartography, Territory, Property." This may be avoided in this project by (1) making numerous paper copies of the map, so that everyone receives the same information; (2) letting as many people as possible know about the map; and (3) gathering information for the map from a wide range of interview and archival sources.
49. Imre Sutton, "American Indian Territoriality: An Online Research Guide," California State University, Fullerton (17 October 2003, 6), madison.law.ou.edu/treatises.html (accessed 16 May 2008).
50. For example, by asserting "we are here" on maps, at community and regional events, and in the media.
51. John Pickles, "Representations in an Electronic Age," in Ground Truth, ed. John Pickles (New York, 1995).
52. Donna Haraway challenges such a view with a cri-tique of science as proffering a "God's eye view" of reality, in "Situated Knowledges," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991).
53. Louise Fortmann, ed., Participatory Research in Conservation and Rural Liveli-hoods: Doing Science Together (Oxford, UK, 2008), 6.
54. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, UK, 2007).
55. These trips and photocopies were made possible by a 2006 Graduate Fellowship from the University of California-Berkeley Center for Race and Gender.
56. Copies of the allotment files and the map (hard copies and digital) will initially be stored at the Plumas County Museum in Quincy and moved to a Maidu museum and cultural center when one is built.
57. Sus-161 (John Jenkins), Sus-162 (Ellen Jenkins), Sus-163 (Goodseener Jenkins), Sus-164 (Hosler Jenkins), Sus-165 (Harper Jenkins), Sus-166 (Ike Jenkins/Jay Side), Sus-167 (Harry Jenkins), Sus-236 (Nancy Jenkins), Sus-237 (Girl Jenkins), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56, Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
58. Sus-999 (Bob Shafer), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56; Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
59. The allotment period was characterized by hydroelectric development, with the creation of dams and reservoirs and the electrification of cities, as well as by the expansion of conservation, with the creation of the U.S.
60. Forest Service in 1905.
61. Like hydroelectric development, conservation acquisitions appropriated Indian lands. Some allottees were surprised to find that their allotments had been included in the Forest Reserve.
62. For example, see Sus-28 (Charlie Red-head/Indian Charlie), Case Files of Land Transactions, 1909-56.
63. Susanville, CA (Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75; National Archives, Pacific Region [San Francisco], San Bruno, CA).
64. A Global Positioning System (GPS) unit was not used to identify the allotment corners, largely because many of them are now in private ownership, built upon, or flooded, and may have been difficult to access on the ground.
65. The corners of accessible allotments may be confirmed with a GPS in the future in order to improve the accuracy of the map. The allotment files were provided to me to copy by (1) the Maidu Cultural and Development Group; (2) Susanville Rancheria; (3) Maidu individuals; and (4) the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, and San Bruno, CA, respectively.
66. Layers were obtained from Michael DeLasaux of the University of California Cooperative Extension, (a natural resources adviser stationed in Quincy, CA), and Zeke Lunder, GIS mapping manager for NorthTree Fire.
67. DeLasaux and Lunder were extremely helpful in terms of sharing data layers and teaching me the basics of ArcView. Dr. N. Maggi Kelly and graduate student instructor Tim DeChant, both of the University of California-Berkeley were also very helpful in teaching me how to use GIS to render the data layers in different ways.
68. Trevor M. Harris, et al., "Pursuing Social Goals through Participatory GIS," in Pickles, Ground Truth, 196.
69. Patrick H. McHaffie, "Manufacturing Metaphors," in Pickles, Ground Truth, 113.
70. Pickles, "Representations in an Electronic Age."
71. See, for example, Harris et al., "Pursuing Social Goals," 196.
72. McHaffie, "Manufacturing Metaphors," 113.
73. Sarah Elwood, "Critical Issues in Par-ticipatory GIS: Deconstructions, Reconstructions, and New Research Directions," Transactions in GIS 10 (2006): 693-708.
74. LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, "Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization," Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 2021-37.
75. Mei-Po Kwan, "Feminist Visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (2002): 345-661.
76. "Is GIS for Women? Reflections on the Critical Discourse in the 1990s," Gender, Place, and Culture 9 (2002): 271-79.
77. Sara L. McLafferty, "Mapping Women's Worlds: Knowledge, Power, and the Bounds of GIS," Gender, Place, and Culture 9 (2002): 263-69.
78. Daniel Z. Sui, "GIS, Cartography, and the 'Third Culture': Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age," Professional Geographer 56 (2004): 62-72.
79. The council and the land divestiture are results of the lawsuit brought against PG&E by the California Public Utilities Commission, and of PG&E's bankruptcy proceedings. For more information, see the Stewardship Council Web site, www.stewardshipcouncil.org (accessed 31 May 2008).
80. For a history of the development of the council and its mandate, see the Settlement Agreement and Stipulation, www.stewardshipcouncil.org/about_us/background_documents.htm (accessed 29 January 2010).
81. For information on the process of divesting the land, see the Land Conservation Plan, lcp.steward shipcouncil.org (accessed October 2009).
82. According to Gorbet, Maidu Summit secretary, Maidu Cultural and Development Group coordinator, and Almanor Basin Watershed Advisory Committee member, the Plumas County Planning Department has approved the construction of 12,000 new homes in the Almanor Basin (personal communication, 16 November 2008, Greenville, CA).
83. Inspired by the American homeland security efforts following 11 September 2001, the Maidu Summit sought to protect the Maidu homeland.
84. Larry Myers, former executive secretary of the Native American Heritage Commission, and alternate Ken Tipon, of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, represent California Indian interests on the Stewardship Council Board.
85. Cunningham, "Maidu Summit," 4.
86. Thanks particularly to the Garcia-Cuouh family of Crescent Mills for layout and printing of the land management plan and maps, and to the Greenville Rancheria for creating multiple CD copies for distribution.
87. Basso, Wisdom Sits, particularly 91-92, 140, and 151-52.
88. Ron Morales, Steve Camacho, and Viola Williams, eds., Creation: As Told by Leona Peconam Morales, Lassen Yah-Monee Maidu Bear Dance Foundation (Susanville, CA, 2005).
89. Allotments were typically canceled by executive order, and reasons included power site withdrawals, a conflicting claim from a white landowner, a double allotment of a single individual, and/or that the allottee was deemed not deserving of an allotment (for example, if he or she had a white father).
90. The allottee may or may not have been made aware of the cancellation (for example, in the Charley case, the allottee was notified but could not read the notice), and the cancellation could take effect immediately or take as long as ten or more years until the allottee was actually evicted from the land.
91. For a discussion of these issues, see Elwood, "Critical Issues in Participatory GIS".
92. Pickles, "Representations in an Electronic Age".
93. Melinda Laituri, "Ensuring Access to GIS for Marginal Societies," in William Craig, et al., Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems (London and New York, 2002), 270.
94. Elwood, "Critical Issues in Participatory GIS," 694.
95. Such as a shapefile displaying archaeological sites, which staff at one of the rancherias noted they would like to render with the allotment shapefile.
96. Initially, the digital map was going to be housed on library and other public computers, but because of the personal nature of some of the data, the map may be password protected and accessible only to Maidu, except with explicit permission. A community meeting will be held to discuss this and other aspects of the allotment-mapping project.
97. In Plumas and Lassen counties, for example, the following Indian agencies made allotments: Redding, Sacramento, Susanville, and Carson City.
98. Al Logan Slagle (1950-2002) was an attorney for California Indian Legal Services in Oakland, CA, and for the Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA) in Washington, DC. He worked on petitions for federal recognition for a host of California tribes.
99. His collection of archives on Native American land and political records is now housed in the Special Collections of Shields Library at the University of California, Davis.
100. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories, Global Designs (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
101. Ramón Grosfoguel, "Decolonizing Political-Economy and Post-Colonial Studies: Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality," in Unsettling Post-coloniality, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, ed. Ramón Grosfoguel, Jose David Saldivar, and Nelson Maldonado Torres (Durham, NC, 2007). 54 Mignolo, Local Histories.
102. Mignolo, Local Histories.
103. For a critical geography perspective, see Pickles, "Representations in an Electronic Age".
104. Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico (Durham, NC, 2004).
105. John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geocoded World (New York, 2004).
106. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped (Honolulu, 1997).
107. Wainwright and Bryan, "Cartography, Territory, Property."
108. For a critical ethnic studies perspective, see Mignolo, Local Histories.
109. This mode of looking at the multiple affects of colonialism on different aspects of society is informed by the scholars of coloniality of power, among them Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Edgardo Lander, and Anibal Quijano.
110. For one explanation of the coloniality-of-power approach that inspired several other works, see Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from the South 1 (2000): 533-80.
111. Regarding the cultural location of a production, the "geopolitics of knowledge," to use a term from Enrique Dussel, informs the creation of a map or text.
112. See Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY, 1985).
113. Walter Mignolo, "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference," South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 57-96.
114. Dussel has informed and contributed to the coloniality-of-power approach.
115. Basso, Wisdom Sits.
116. See James Taylor Carson, "Ethnogeography and the Native American Past," Ethnohistory 49 (2002): 769-88