“The whole valley was our garden.”[1]

Harry Williams, Bishop Paiute Tribe

I am driving south on Highway 395 in the eastern Sierra. The fiery heat of August assaults my car. 105 degrees: hot windows, wheezing AC system, imaginary hot pokers torturing my sinuses in the extremely dry air. After driving for four hours, I have to get out somewhere and walk the numbness out of my legs. South of Olancha, moving through an ancient volcanic field, I find shade within a cleft of granite and basalt boulders. I park the car on a sandy turnoff. With a cold bottle of Crystal Geyser water, I walk slowly into the desert heat. Corse sand and brittle, seared brush crunch with each footstep. Heading toward a withered willow, I study the blow-torched landscape. Over there is a dark red lava rock. Perfect for our garden. I reach down to touch, almost burning my hands. This land is on fire! A few minutes later, I return to my car with a hot bottle of Crystal Geyser water.

Returning to the eastern Sierra in March, hiking a trail west of the village of Independence, winter rains soaked the ground. A vintage year of wildflowers is popping out of Mother Earth.

I imagine Mother Earth in this sacred land of the Owen Valley Paiute tribes. For over a century, Los Angeles Water and Power has siphoned off the abundant water from rivers and snowmelt toward southern California cities, like an industrial vampire. Expanding geothermal plants mined groundwater resources. Over time, the only potential for a living landscape appears in months of brief rain, birthing fragile wildflowers.

There was a time, two hundred years ago, when Mother Earth vibrantly blessed the land and the people with gushing streams and rivers that flowed all year, channeled into a sophisticated system of irrigation dikes.

For the Paiute people (Nüümü), the Owens Valley is a “place of flowing waters” (Payahüünadü). They are custodians of this land.

What was life like for the Owens Valley Paiute?

This was not an arid wasteland before the Euro-Americans. The Paiutes managed a water-rich landscape, directing snowmelt over broad floodplain gardens. These ditches and seepage networks infused local groundwater, multiplied edible plants, and structured seasonal lifeways, as “to bloom as the rose,” according to local Paiute Harry Williams.[2]

These were extensive and sophisticated irrigation networks, which focused on recharging groundwater rather than rapid flows. Raising the water table sustained marshy gardens used to cultivate wild seed plants and tubers. This attention to the sustainability of groundwater supported riparian habitats for fish and waterfowl.

The Paiute method of water management created short dams, graded channels and alternating northern and southern plots. Only one area was irrigated in a season. An elected tribal leader, Tuvaiju, used an irrigating tool known as a pavado to direct the flow of water. Productivity was enhanced by encouraging shallow, widespread wetting of soil.

In her academic paper, Recovering Cultural Memory: Irrigation Systems of the Owens Valley Paiute Indians, Jenna Cavelle writes:

“The tuvaiju was an elected position carried out each spring, and the commencement of irrigation was declared by the ‘district headman’ and approved by the tribe members. The story follows that about twenty-five men assisted the tuvaiju in constructing a dam consisting of boulders, sticks, and mud. Once the water was released into the ditch, the tuvaiju watered the plot using small ditches and dams consisting of mud, sod, and brush. Steward’s mention of an irrigating tool known as a pavado, or a pole 8 feet in length by 4 inches in diameter, suggests that the tuvaiju utilized this instrument in some way to direct the water into the ditch network.”[3]

Not only was this water management practical. It was social and ceremonial. There was no private ownership. The land was communal, requiring kinship obligations.

With the arrival of Euro-American miners, ranchers and settlers in the mid-19^th century, land tenure and water access were altered dramatically. Settlers seized Paiute ditches. Conflict and forced removal of the Paiutes took away their control of these irrigation systems. With the exportation of Owens River water by Los Angeles Water and Power via the aqueduct, surface flows were diverted. The wondrous and effective system of indigenous irrigation networks and gardens became an archaeological remnant.

However, there is now a collaborative movement by the Owens Valley Paiute tribes for mapping projects, ethnographic interviews, and an intensive review of 19^th-century surveys. Using GPS and GIS, tribal elders have traced ancient ditches, confirming the physical extent of these networks.

In the 1930s, anthropologist Julian H. Steward did extensive research on the Owens Valley Paiute. In Steward’s 1933 book, Ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute, he provided important information about Paiute irrigation practices. He found a rock art symbol that could represent the system of water irrigation created by the Paiute people:

Paiute tribal member Harry Williams shared in an interview on PBS:

“I always thought (the symbol) signified the ditches. I grew up playing in a bunch of them, but I didn’t know what they were. They say it over at Standing Rock, and it’s true: water is life. It creates life. Our ancient ditches made the groundwater rise. They were so flat that the water seeped in easily and raised the groundwater levels.”[4]

Harry Williams spent his childhood days exploring the network of channels, which could extend sixty square miles in the valley. As he grew older, mapping and protecting these sacred waterworks of his people became an obsession. Diverting the waters for the purpose of irrigation long before the Euro-Americans came should be proof that the Nüümü were the rightful owners of the water.

After Harry died, his son Noah carried on the fight for water rights against the LADWP. A research paper in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, using radiocarbon dating, contended that the Nüümü had been irrigating the Owens Valley for more than 400 years.

Taking a prophetic social stance, Jenna Cavelle writes

“…it has been demonstrated that Paiute ditch networks were an integral part of their culture and survival. Restoration of these networks would return a stolen water source to the Paiute and also commemorate a part of Native American history that has been largely forgotten. I recommend that the remnant ditch networks be mapped using geographical information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) technologies to provide current, defensible evidence of the networks in the landscape. I further recommend an extensive investigation into Paiute Indian water rights to determine if these networks would provide them with ‘first user’ rights.”[5]

Using Steward’s map of the old irrigation networks, I walked into the landscape near Birch Creek. Here, it seems that the fragile skin of Mother Earth continues to be revived within the remains of these indigenous waterworks. These so-called archeological remnants, hidden within lush vegetation, are silently working, reviving hopes for the recovery of Paiute custodial care of the water.

Resources

Chalfant, W. A. The Story of Inyo. Rev. ed. Bishop, CA: Chalfant Press, 1933

Reisner, M. Cadillac Desert. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1986.

Steward, J. 1933, Ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute. Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, Volumn 33, No. 3, 233-350.

Walton, J. Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California. London, England: University of California Press, 1992.

Varner, Gary R. The Owens Valley Paiute: A Cultural History. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2009.

[1] How the Owens Valley Paiute Made The Desert Bloom | Tending the Wild | Desert Escapes | PBS SoCal

[2] Ibid.

[3] Cavelle, Jenna. Recovering Cultural Memory: Irrigation Systems of the Owens Valley Paiute Indians. Berkeley: University of California. College Writing Programs 150AC, Fall 2011.

[4] Wei, Clarissa. How the Owens Valley Paiute Made the Desert Bloom”. PBS, December 15, 2016.

[5] Cavelle, Ibid, 13