Standing Tall

To be published Dec. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “The Corps of Engineers just denied the permit half an hour ago” said my step-mother triumphantly in Sunday’s phone call.  She knew I’d welcome that news even though our conversations haven’t traversed the Standing Rock Sioux’s territory or the corporate pipeline that threatens it. 

           

     The bravery of those people camping out at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers in defense of their rights to their lands has had me standing taller lately.  However, to think that our government could respond appropriately at this moment of great need – in fact, the Corps of Engineers, which is not known for its interest in public input – has re-instated my belief in this system.  Suddenly I feel glad to be Uncle Sam’s daughter.

           

     It’s all about land, when it comes right down to it, how land matters ‘way more than we think.  The Standing Rock Sioux know how much land matters, as do most Native American tribes.  Despite treaties and lands reserved for their exclusive use, their history is peppered with losses of control over resources and their quality of life to the kind of thinking behind the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

           

    It’s watching others stand up for land that’s straightened my backbone, like Dave Archambault, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, who was interviewed Friday on the PBS News Hour.  Responding to the pipeline CEO’s statement that the tribe was worried about nothing, he said “If the safeguards are all there, why not put it (back to the original route) north of Bismark?”

           

     “He (the CEO) will say that it can’t go there because of the population of the community, the environmental impacts, the sacred sites that are there, the wetlands that it has to cross. These are all the same concerns that we have. It’s just that we’re a lot fewer (in population.)  And so, if there is no worry, if the safeguards are there, then relocate it to that location. That’s OK.”

               

     As he said this, his face showed nothing: no anger, no glee at beating that kind of logic at its own game, no snide-bordering-on-vindictive disgust like my face would have shown had I pulled that off.  He was remarkable, sitting there in the News Hour studio in his light blue, button-down collar shirt, no jacket, no tie, no eagle feathers in his hair or silver jewelry draped around his neck.  He was just a man speaking truth to power who had come to Washington to discuss his peoples’ concerns with the federal government, which Sunday’s news confirmed was worth the effort.

           

     The news earlier in the week that several thousand veterans would be joining the tribes at their encampment, intending to make a human wall between the land protectors and the proto-military police forces who had drenched the protestors with water cannons the week before, had confirmed the national importance of this seemingly tiny decision.  Have we not had enough of our culture’s and our government’s ignorant, arrogant demeaning treatment of native people?  The veterans’ actions say that we have.

           

     I feel that the efforts of the Standing Rock tribe and other Americans, Native and natural-born citizens both, have been a great gift to those of us who feel compelled to question the erosive aspects of “development.”  “We have every right to protest this pipeline,” Archambault said.  “We have indigenous lands, we have ancestral lands, we have treaty lands. The pipeline is 500 feet from our reservation border.… (I)t’s unfortunate that this nation continues to treat our tribe and tribal nations around this country in this manner.”

           

     Monday morning I logged on to the PBS News Hour website to follow up the Corps’ announcement.  There, in an article by Jenni Monet, was a photo of a 97-year-old woman standing in a gymnasium on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation Saturday, waiting to greet the veterans arriving in support.  First Lt. Marcela LeBeau of the Lakota tribe had served in the U.S. Army as a nurse between 1944 and 1947.  Dressed in a plum-colored, dress-length Ultrasuede raincoat, her powder-blue snow parka lying on a folding table behind her, her silver hair piled high on her head, Lt. LeBeau stood tall as she waited for the volunteer troops with a placid, peaceful smile on her face, a smile only slightly wider than the Mona Lisa’s.  Did she know then that this effort was going to work?  Or did she only know that it was the right thing to do, regardless?

    When governments and corporations do not respect the laws of the land or the people who live there, we all have every right to protest.  In fact, I believe we have an obligation.  Standing tall at Standing Rock, the veterans of wars both foreign and domestic have shown us how to reclaim our democracy. May we stand tall with them in support and spirit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann researches issues of land ethics, land use and land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  For more information on the Standing Rock efforts, go to www.pbsnewshour.org.  To contribute funds to these efforts, visit http://www.rop.org/rural-oregon-stands-standing-rock/. Thanks to rural minister/songwriter John Pitney for this recommendation.  See also Waddie Mitchell's lyrics to Juni Fisher's song "Still Here," described in this blog Feb. 11, 2015.

 

 

 

 

Free Rein

Published in slightly edited form March 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“We gallop everywhere we go
 I just loop the reins
And I never say Whoa
To my little red horse.”

     I’m borrowing these lines from a Juni Fisher song to show the roots of the common phrase “free rein.” For those who have never been on a horse’s back, it may not help much.  But being astride an animal ten or fifteen times heavier, stronger and faster than yourself, and letting him have his head, so to speak – can teach the meaning of another common phrase, “hang on.”  You’d better hope your hands can find the reins and “rein him in” (to use another common phrase) as you approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

     Last week, when I wrote “Free Rain,” I was hearing this other “rein” in my head.  For almost 40 years I have been researching and writing about California’s water story.  No matter what the issue or urgency, the largest landowners in this valley always have had free rein over the water supply.  They have had free rein over the regulators of our water supply.  They most always have free rein even over the media reporting the news about our water supply.

     Last week I wrote about the letter the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID) sent to its landowners about the availability of water to purchase at $1,300/acre-foot (af).  The seller listed was not a government agency but a contractor for State Water Project (SWP) water.  I called Scott Edwards, the manager of LSID, to find out who had water to sell and to learn more about the circumstances.

     “Tejon,” he said is the seller.  He thinks there are two other districts asking to buy the offered water and does not yet know how much LSID will receive of the 865 af requested.  I asked who within our district was able to buy this water, and he said “It’s all kinds of people, not just the big guys,” understanding the meaning of my question.

    

     Tejon is a familiar name to most of us, but rings a special bell in my mind.  Tejon Ranch was (and probably still is) the largest landowner in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which surrounds the town of Arvin, one of the two towns I’ve studied since 1981.  Only part of its lands lie within the district boundaries, but even those acres were well in excess of the 160-acre limitation that was supposed to apply to Friant-Kern water when it was first received by that district.  The limitation was never enforced.    

    

     Tejon also receives SWP water through the Kern County Water Agency, which accounts for the availability of water to sell to the Tulare and Fresno County districts who don’t.  Paul Taylor, the Berkeley economist who was the champion of the acreage limitation provisions, understood the State Water Project as one of several means the large landowners created to circumvent the 160-acre law.

    
     Besides offering irrigation water for sale at usurious prices, the large landowners are using their free rein invisibly in other ways, particularly through groundwater pumping.  A friend who sits on the board of Tulare Irrigation District told me that he has become concerned about the water banking his district and the City of Tulare have done diligently for the past 10 years being tapped by Boswell’s “pump farm” to the west.  Thought to be 40 acres with 28 wells, the location is not known, much less how much water they are pumping, where it is being used, or how it is being transported.  No government agency is yet in charge of groundwater pumping.  We have no reins.

    

     The North Rim approaches.  What will we do?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a voluntary water conserver who worries about agriculture and writes in town.  You can send her your water saving tips c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Still Here

Published in edited form Feb. 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Juni Fisher will be in town this weekend, singing her heart out to us on Valentine’s Day at the Lindsay Community Theater.  I’m grateful I’m still here to hear her, and grateful she’s still willing to come home and share her gift with her people.


     She makes my heart sing with her songs about people and horses, about intimacy between these two species that has few words, but a huge vocabulary in body language.  I suspect that we humans would all communicate better if we comprehended the importance of touch and gestures.


     But last year she brought us a different song folded in between the horse-people songs like a foxtail woven into a saddle blanket or a slicker tied on behind the seat.  It’s on her album Listen … to the horse (2013), titled “Still There.”  It’s all about Western attitudes to land and how they affect our behavior toward each other.


     Here’s how the song got born.  Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet from Nevada, called Juni one day to read her a poem he’d just written.  “When he finished, I had to sit down.  It was that stunning,” she wrote in the liner notes.  “The melody came easily, because he had written the words in such a perfectly lyrical way.  I love when that happens.”  I love that it happened, and think the Great Spirit had a hand in its birth.  This song is telling us about some adjustments we need to make in our lives here and now.

            “The Iroquois and Blackfoot, the Seminole and Crow/

            Were there as we discounted where they live and what they know,” the song

opens, then continues: 

           “Staked claim to plain and mountain range/

            Spread weeds of ways to suit and change /

            The pallet and the pantry full of all we would not share /

           We did not care / That they’d been there."

     We know this story, this black shadow of our history in this place.  The song reminds us that we keep it in the shadows, where it does its black work.   Rising to the light on the back of a song helps.  Let us say Amen to that history, and begin to work with its meaning.

     But the bridge of the song brings us to the present. 

        “They’re still there / And for all the selfish choices that we made /

         They paid a debt they never should have paid” it starts boldly, then ends

       “Who are we to think that we could have their souls? /

        They’re in the places where the grass grows through their bones /

       Their spirits ride the air / And they’re still there.”

     I was telling our new pastor, Mark Smith, about this song.  Mark serves both the Lindsay and Exeter Methodist Churches, which is wonderful because he grew up in Tulare County amidst our land-people relations.  He’d just mentioned that one of his grandfathers was part Yaqui, and that the family still knows the story of his land loss as the Americans took over California.  It struck me that the grass may be growing through his grandfather’s bones, but the part of Mark that is part Yaqui is still here, like the parts in his parents, siblings and all their children.  Still here.

     And while we are sitting in the theater Saturday night having our hearts challenged and mended all at the same time, another experiment in being still here will be going on at Quaker Oaks Farm just north of Farmersville.  Darlene and Lalo Franco, with other members of the Wukchumni tribe who have been meeting on that land for almost 3 decades, will be helping to host a camp-out for youth (of all ages.)  They hope to share the meaning of that land with the newcomers, to pass on what it means to be attached, to know yourself as part of a place.  Still here.

     They’re still here.  We’re still here.  Maybe we can learn more about what that means.  Thank you, Juni, for delivering the message so beautifully, and for still being part of this place.  Thank you, Darlene and Lalo, for telling your story.  May we all have major heart breakouts this weekend.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a land advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your family land stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.