Authors: Bill Barich
Congress did pass a law in 1860, though, that allowed for Indians to be held as “apprentices,” or chattel, and many of them were still in slavery long after the Emancipation Proclamation.
About one-third of California’s tribes currently had no legal standing, said McLemore, and hence no access to federal benefits. He told me that the commerical fishing season would begin on the
Klamath River in late May or early June. The Yurok would need their official IDs from the BIA by then. If they didn’t have them, they’d go ahead and fish, anyway—more trouble, not less.
McLemore sighed. He had too much to do. He had to find a house to buy in town, but here again California had pitched him a curveball. There was a crazy real estate boom in and around Klamath, and sellers were demanding premium prices for dumps. A crummy trailer home on a straggly, weed-burdened lot back in Klamath Glen could cost upwards of fifty thousand bucks.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Pelican Bay State Prison,” he answered. “Everybody thinks it’s going to make them rich.”
McLemore shook his head. California, it was not to be believed.
O
N MY WAY TO THE HOOPA VALLEY RESERVATION
, I ran into a problem of my own, several monstrous motor homes and trucks pulling trailers that were creeping along the pavement of Highway 101. You could practically hear the vertebrae cracking as necks craned for a view of some treasured aspect of Redwood National Park.
California had given birth to these suburbs on wheels, of course. In the 1920s, Wally Byam, an advertising man in Los Angeles, started publishing a magazine that catered to the do-it-yourself craze that was sweeping the country, and he printed some plans for building a trailer in one issue. When readers wrote to complain that the design was faulty, he felt obliged to improve it and kept tinkering until he came up with something better.
By 1936, Byam had a new business venture. That year, he introduced a sleek, silvery, riveted-aluminum trailer, the Clipper, that became the flagship of his Airstream Trailer Company. Because of its contours, which were based on aircraft principles, it glided along, said the old copywriter, “like a stream of air.”
The Clipper had a tubular-steel dinette, its own water supply, electric lights, a chemical toilet, a galley, and an air-conditioning
system that used dry ice. It slept four and carried a steep price tag of $1,200, but consumers were undeterred. The fledgling company couldn’t fill all its orders.
Here was a purely American moment. In one fell swoop, Byam had tamed the thrill, the terror, and the sheer adventure of the open road, vanquishing it with backyard technology while simultaneously turning the last wild places in the state into potential venues for domestic sitcoms. Soon caravans of Airstreams were roaming the globe, mutating and spawning replicants, showing up for confabs in Uganda, at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, at Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, and at the Jami-i-Masjid mosque in Afghanistan, but Byam never realized his grandest dream of putting a circle of trailers around the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
The back road into Hoopa Valley, Bald Hills Road, broke off in an easterly fork a few miles from Big Tree, a landmark redwood some three hundred feet tall. As soon as I turned off the main highway, the trailer people were left behind, and I was alone in the landscape, the only car around.
The Bald Hills were a spring-green color, ripe with juice, but the outlying mountains were still capped with snow. The road turned rough and potholed in places, but I made it over Schoolhouse Peak and French Camp Ridge and dropped down toward Weitchpec, a town at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity rivers, at the southern border of Yurok territory, where tension was in the air. Graffiti were sprayed on walls, bridge stanchions, and boulders: Yurok Power and Hoopa Stoners and Fuck the Police.
At the Weitchpec store, a large display of handguns was arranged in a glass case, next to shelves crammed with liquor. The clerk behind the counter had a look of suspicion on her face, and she was short with me when I bought a soda.
Around Klamath, there was talk about the tribal split. Most everyone seemed to think that the Yurok were getting the short end of the stick. One rumor had it that the Hupa were anxious to have
the Yurok gone, so that they could strike a bargain with a timber company to harvest more trees from the virgin forests on their land. The rumor couldn’t be pinned down and proved, but many people subscribed to it, anyway.
A road ran from Weitchpec through the pinched-in granite walls of the Trinity River canyon. Scarlet larkspur was blooming in the foothills. The coastal damp was gone, and the sun was very hot. In the town of Hoopa, poppies were strewn along the playing fields at the high school, home of the Hoopa Warriors, and at the edges of pastures. White butterflies were floating in clouds.
The river was deep green and almost clear, and in the shallows a woman was wading, her white dress hiked up to her thighs. A man was putting in a rowboat upstream from her. I thought he might be her lover or her husband, but he just drifted by.
T
HE ONLY MOTEL IN HOOPA
, a Best Western, brand new, still smelled of the freshly laid carpeting. My room had a sliding-glass door that gave me a view of the Trinity River. After a light supper in town, I went to the community center near the motel for a Bingo game that had drawn a big crowd.
About a hundred people, more than half of them Indians, sat at folding tables in a smoky room where teen-age waitresses dashed around dispensing Pepsis and nachos. A noisy popcorn machine provided a soundtrack, echoing like an old popgun being shot. I had bought a ten-dollar Bingo packet at the door, but the cards made no sense to me. The Bingo I’d known as a child was easy to play, but now there were a dozen different games, Red Cross, Black-Out, and others, and no rules to explain them anywhere in the packet.
As I stood there bewildered, a man, Wayne Kinney, approached and said in a kindly voice, “You need some help? I’ll help you. Go sit at my table.”
Wayne Kinney was about forty. He had a round, almost moon
face and dark brown eyes. His yellow polo shirt was as chipper as a crocus, and he wore a snappy little hat pushed back on his head. He spoke so softly that I had to listen closely to hear him. He was sharing his table with two cousins, both daughters of his mother’s sisters, and with a fleshy, broad-beamed woman everybody called “Auntie,” who did not say a word the entire night, preferring to chainsmoke Pall Malls, mark her Bingo cards, and knit her brow in frustration.
Wayne sat across from Auntie. He looked excited. “I feel lucky tonight,” he declared, drumming his fingers and grinning. Bingo had been good to him lately. In the past few weeks, he had won three hundred dollars, but, alas, the money was gone.
A Yurok, Wayne had been living in Hoopa Valley for three years, up by Weitchpec. Before that, he had worked as a hairdresser in San Francisco and had owned a shop. Without actually stating it, he let it slip that he’d fallen on hard times. His wife and his daughter were still in the city, and Wayne was laboring to support himself by cutting hair and doing perms at Margaret’s House of Beauty, in Hoopa.
The Best Western fascinated Wayne. He had stayed there once with a friend after a Bingo victory, and he seemed to fear that the experience might never be repeated. “How much does your room cost?” he asked.
“Thirty-nine dollars.”
He did some private calculating. “But it’s nice,” he said with authority, as if trying to convince himself that he hadn’t been foolish to blow his winnings on a motel. “The room has a radio. It has a good TV.”
Wayne’s cousin, Marcia, who was visiting from Milpitas, near San Francisco, was busy with her Bingo cards. When I asked what had brought her to the valley, she told me that she had needed to see some people. She had ridden up on a Greyhound and would go home by bus in a few days.
“I ran away,” she said, without a trace of humor.
During the evening, I came gradually to understand that it wasn’t unusual for some Yuroks to go out into the white world and stay in it for a long time—years, even decades—and then to arrive at a moment in life where only some contact with friends and family, with ancestors, with all the specificities of being a Yurok, could quell an ache. Not every Yurok felt that way, surely, but Marcia and Wayne and their clan did.
The Bingo games began, one after another. At our table, the women were playing two or three cards each. It was a simple matter to lose fifty dollars on a Wednesday or a Friday night. You could lose even more on the weekend, when the pots and the buy-in were more substantial. The little balls churned in their cage, an announcer called the numbers, and the numbers flashed on a board, like bolts of hope.
Late that night, an old woman won a special prize—a black 4 × 4 Nissan truck that was parked in the hall. There was a smattering of polite applause, but nobody whooped or blushed or giggled uncontrollably, as they did on television game shows. I was reminded of something that I’d once, read about the Pit River tribe. Jaime de Angulo, a gifted amateur anthropologist, had described a peculiar, “passionless,” Indian state of being that was removed from all desire, beyond all expectations, outside the scope of ordinary time, and unaffected by the notion of change.
After fourteen games, I threw over my cards to Wayne. My eyes were burning from the cigarette smoke, and I was ready for bed.
“I didn’t know there were so many ways to lose,” I said to him, and he smiled and watched me go.
In my motel room, the phone rang ten minutes later. It was Wayne. He wanted to borrow eight dollars, so that he could play the final Bingo games. He proposed to give me a haircut in exchange.
The call upset me. How did he get my room number? But then I remembered how small Hoopa was, and how few guests were at the Best Western, and I saw, too, that the request might seem natural
and even logical to Wayne, particularly after he had invited me into his family circle. So I met him at the motel desk and made the loan. He acted sheepish.
“Business was real slow today,” he said, in apology. “Not many customers.”
“That’s all right,” I told him.
He studied the bills in his hand, and his round face brightened. “Now I can play the last two games. The big money games!” He gave me a business card with the address of Margaret’s House of Beauty. “Stop by tomorrow for your haircut, okay? Any time is fine with me.”
B
EFORE THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN
, the Hupa and the Yurok used Dentalium shells for money. Dentalia are mollusks that inhabit the sand in deep water along the Pacific Coast. Their shells are small, whitish, opalescent, and delicate.
The Indians in California seem not to have harvested the mollusks themselves. Professor Alfred Kroeber, in his classic of anthropology,
Handbook of the Indians of California
(1925), suggested that each shell probably traveled many miles from Oregon or even Vancouver Island to be traded as currency among “a series of mutually unknown nations.”
Dentalia were kept on strings, often long ones of more than three yards. They were strung by size and graded by length—the fewer shells to a string, the higher its value. In the animistic universe of the two tribes, dentalia were viewed as living beings that had free will, entities that could be talked to, or argued with, or implored. The Yurok thought the shells were difficult to get along with, hard to seduce, even snobbish. Dentalia chose their associates with care.
If a Yurok gained some wealth, he frequently traded it for other things, all rated on a scale. A large boat was worth two 12-shell strings, but it could also be bought for ten big woodpecker scalps, soft and brilliantly scarlet. A small boat cost one 13-shell string or
three big woodpecker scalps, but if you had two deer hides sewn together and painted, you could get the boat even up.
Desirable brides were expensive, fetching at least ten strings of various types, plus, say, a headband of fifty woodpecker scalps, some black obsidian, a boat, and so on. Doctors’ fees were steep, too, but not as steep as the price you paid if you killed a man—fifteen strings, some rare red obsidian, some deerskins, a boat, and, in most cases, a daughter.
Once the Hupa took possession of their reservation in 1864, they started leading a regulated, orderly, Western-influenced life. The Yurok had always been less organized, more prone to chaos, and maybe more poetical. The tribe had no chiefs in the usual sense. A person’s status in each village was determined by his wealth, or sometimes by his age.
To Kroeber, Yuroks appeared cautious and fearful, “touchy to slight and sensitive to shaming,” quick to anger, and capable of hating “wholeheartedly, persistently, often irreconcilably.” They were also perceptive, courteous, and affable, he said.
Stephen Powers, who visited the two tribes in 1871, was much less critical. The Yurok were lively, he reported, and they were monogamous and excelled at social dancing. Often they dressed in “civilized suits” and were mounted on horseback.
Of the Hupa, Powers was positively admiring. He considered them the Romans of northern California. Their language was as rigorous as Latin, he felt, “rude, strong, and laconic.” They were politically adept, skilled in relations with other tribes, and so “fatally democratic” that they had no leaders during a war. Every man fought according to his own lights, in a way that seemed good to him.
Both the Hupa and the Yurok were profoundly interested in the supernatural. Instead of confronting an enemy, for example, the Hupa liked to hire a sorcerer to avenge an insult or score a victory. Sorcerers brewed poisonous potions; fired invisible arrows at their victims; collected hair, spittle, feces, and pieces of clothing for casting spells; and performed incantatory chants to do harm.
An Indian devil, a
kitdongwe
, was the most horrible type of Hupa sorcerer. He painted his face black, carried a weapon made of human bones and sinew, and did his prowling at night. A
kitdongwe
could change into a wolf or a bear and could travel at blinding speeds, almost flying. He hoped to keep his secrets from his relatives, hiding his weapon under a rock or in a tree hollow, but it betrayed him sometimes by shooting out sparks and flashes.