My fingers play around the edge of a circular depression beside me in the rock shelf. There are two other similar holes nearby, now filled with sand and duff. They’re grinding holes, tacoiya, used by the native Nɨm people who lived in this meadow, on the ridge, and on as far as I can see from here, since at least the last ice age. The living Nɨm have been removed from this landscape, but I still feel surrounded by minds and voices. This landscape has eyes and ears, it is still theirs. I scoop the sand and duff out of the holes, then blow out the rest of the detritus. The revealed bowls are smooth and cool.
A sudden gust of wind tugs at the branches above me and a rain of orange pine needles lets loose and drops into my lap. I look from my lap to the bright orange crown of the pine over my head, weird and surrealistic, like some modernist’s substitution of the correct colors, making a statement both confusing and jarring. Orange needles instead of green, iridescent instead of muted colors, sick instead of healthy. Out across the forest in front of me, orange pine crowns protrude from the forest, killed by bark beetle and drought. I’m reminded of the autumn colors of New England, how maples are visible in the midst of the forest when they turn red. I can pick ponderosa pine from the rest of the trees everywhere I look -- below me, on the slopes above me, on distant hills... not because of their usual soft, green, tall forms, but because they are brilliantly orange.
But I’ve never seen anything like this.
Four years of drought and warmer temperatures, combined with bark beetle, is killing the pine – that’s what the flyer from the Sierra Forest Service office says.
I look beyond the pine to the ridge where the eagles sit, brooding. A charred forest, a slope of empty blackened trunks and scorched earth below them, are all that is left of the trees that once covered the skirts of the ridge. A fire swept through there sometime recently, fueled into a massive, raging blaze because the land had been left to grow into a tangle of flammable shrubs and trees. Historically the Nɨm used controlled fires to sweep out the understory.
It’s apparently not the first time bark beetles have laid the pine forest low here. A U.C. Irvine researcher points to the record of local newspaper articles bemoaning “bark beetle destroying the pine forest”, published every 20-30 years or so since 1903. When the timing of the articles is overlaid on the drought record, it shows the panic invariably hits after 3-4 years of drought weaken the trees, bark beetles infest them, and many of the pine turn orange and die.
But perhaps climatic change is a new twist, taking us in a novel direction, popping us out of the cycles of recorded history. Look, for example, at the devastation in Canada, where forests covering entire provinces have been razed to the ground by the bark beetle. Canada’s entire Kyoto commitment of carbon sequestration disappeared in three years, because a beetle that was historically kept in check by cold temperatures has escaped out of holes melted in its icy cage by recent warming. How ironic... climate change kept Canada from doing something about climate change.
The Nɨm would know if recurring bark beetle infestations had happened, not just over the last 100 years, but over the last 10,000 years. As stewards of the land, they embraced wildfire and managed the landscape with slow-burn fires they set, so trees were more widely spaced, not competing with each other for water and nutrients.They also included beetles in their diet. But the land and the Nɨm have been denied each other since the mid 1800’s when all California Indians not only lost their “right” to continue to live on their ancestral lands, but also were denied the legal means to acquire title. Has the USFS been an adequate steward of the land since the loss of Nɨm stewardship? Will they be thoughtful and caring wardens through the massive global changes that are here, around us, already?
I sit beside a tacoiya in Chat:iniu, looking over Yauyau, asking my questions. I recall the words of an American indian addressing a room of us 500 ecologists some 20 years ago. “With your science of ecology, with your scientific method, you’re asking questions, designing experiments, getting results, moving slowly forward towards ‘understanding’.” He told us. “What you don’t see is that you are naive; your science is a young thing. You forget that we indians have been where you are, we asked our questions thousands of years ago. We got our answers. We embrace our answers. We live our understanding. And we have already done so for thousands of years.”
Acknowledgements... Gaylen Lee is an archeologist, anthropologist and ethnographer and also a descendant of the Pomona family, and the Nɨm Eagle nakwetɨ. This piece describes his homeland. The facts and the language of his homeland come from his book, “walking where we lived: memoirs of a Mono indian family” (1998. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. 208 Pp.) and from discussion with him on a visit to the Sierra Mono Museum in North Fork, CA. Many thanks to Gaylen for that time, and for permission to visit Cha:tiniu and see the landscape that has been his nakwetɨ’s homeland for thousands of years.
ɨ is pronounced "u" as in "put"
: extends a vowel sound, so a: is pronounced "aaa" as in "baaa"