An American life.

Let me tell you my story, my life, my people’s life. Some of it is pretty, beautiful, and some of it is a living nightmare. But don’t dispair, we survived, and in the end we came out stronger. Life’s a journey…let’s travel it together.

‘It starts in the beginning, a long time ago, after the great flood. Only my people survived, in my language, people are Maidu. So I am Maidu. I and all my people live in a beautiful place of meadows and forests, small streams and ponds and lakes. We are a small tribe, I don’t know how many, but so many spread over the land between two large rivers and a huge mountain range that I don’t know everyone, only the hundred or so that live within walking distance of my village. I meet others of my tribe who live further away on those special days when we all gather to dance and sing for the pow wow, when we trade stories, teach the children our history and learn skills, and find a wife to start a family. Pow wows are so much fun, they bring us together as a people. I look forward to those events. I learnt to drum at several pow wows growing up, and dance as well. I got so good at dancing my older sister made my regalia to wear, with feathers and deer skin, with bone beads and quillwork. I helped her make it over several years, it took a long time and was hard work but fun at the same time. We had to find dead porcupines and pull off their quills, then clean them, and boil them to make them soft, then dye them different colors. It was a long process. I learnt a lot from helping my sister. She learnt to do it from our mother and grandmother. Mother was too busy working at acorn gathering and cooking and clothes washing and other chores to teach my sister a lot, so most of what she learnt about jewelry making and clothes making she learnt from our grandmother and various aunties in the village. One day I learnt a new skill in gathering porcupine quills, which helped us a lot. An uncle who lived way up the valley near the crest of the mountains where it snowed in the winter was visiting our village to marry one of the young beautiful girls who had just become a woman and was ready for marriage. I know, because her father had given her facial tattoos just two months before, and she had gone around showing everyone in the village. She was so proud. And now she was marrying, and moving away. Soon, babies.

but I digress, I was telling you about what I learnt about gathering quills. Instead of searching for a dead porcupine, the uncle showed me a new technique - throw a blanket over a live porcupine, and they shoot off all their quills into the blanket. You then can pick out all the quills, and the porcupine escapes to live another day and grow more quills. It’s much nicer to gather quills this way, not stinky and gross pulling them out of a dead porcupine. My sister was happy to learn this technique, I’ll tell you.

‘Eventually my regalia was completed to my sister’s satisfaction, and I wore it proudly, winning many dance contests. Some of the bone beads I carved myself ( really hard work), most I traded from village bead makers for acorn flour that I and my mother ground in a pestle for hours and bleached out the tannic acid to make it taste good. Speaking of the flour, it is hard work to make, but the final porridge tastes so good, especially when you mix in some wild honey. Now collecting the honey is not that easy, I leave that up to my father and my older brothers to do that. I helped them once, and got stung so bad, the bees chased me to the river. I had to jump in the water to escape. The whole village laughed when they heard about it.

We also spend a lot of time time finding and digging up plants and tubers for eating, searching for food is never ending!

the valley floor is very large, covered with oak trees, which we rely on for the acorns and the bark to make our houses. And shade in the summer, it gets so hot. And pine trees, which drop their nettles with which we make our baskets. I tried once, but I’m all thumbs, not talented like my mother and my aunties. The baskets they make are so beautiful and well made, they are the best in the whole valley. They make them so tight they hold water, for when we have to go down to the river to collect fresh water for cooking. My favorite tree is the tall magestic redwood. They grow in groves, small forests of them, and all types of animals live in the trees, even way up at the tops. I love my valley. The rivers are filled with fish, the best fish are the big salmon, which we eat a lot. The smaller fish have lots of bones and are difficult to eat. Beaver and otter inhabit the ponds and rivers, and we catch them and use their skins for clothing, and their teeth and claws for jewelry. We always thank them for giving their lives up for us. it is always a sad thing to kill them.

living in our valley is so special and peaceful. No fighting, no war. Lots of work, but life is all about work. It’s not bad. I like to go hunting with my father and brothers, and sometimes my uncles. I have gotten elk and deer, and once I was with my father when we got a bear. That was scary. The arrows didn’t kill it immediately, we had to go in close and stab it with our spears. It put up quite a fight. But I was gifted with a big claw which I proudly wear around my neck . I thought those days would never end. They were idylic. Looking back, I realize that it wasn’t all work and grind also, there was a lot of play as well. The children always were playing, laughing. Sitting around the fireplace at night there were always stories being told. And there were always young infants underfoot, so obviously there was a lot of lovemaking going on as well. Then things changed.

‘It started off with new people entering the valley, people we didn’t know, who spoke a different language, had a different culture. Thought differently. Had a different religion. They brought cows into the valley, forced us to work on their ranches. But it was our land in our valley, so how it became their land I didnot understand. We weren’t allowed to use fire to groom the pasture. In fact, we weren’t allowed to do anything of our old ways. We were punished if we practiced our ancestral religion, spoke our language. They brought disease with them, and we got sick, and died. Then even more, different new people came, hundreds, if not thousands, came flooding in. Speaking another language altogether. And they brought violence with them. They killed us. Then they forced us off our land, and moved us to ugly reservations, where we were starved and always sad., while they ruined the beautiful land and rivers with their insatiable quest for the yellow metal they called gold. Towns were built, roads were built, filled with traffic and noise day and night. The peace was broken, the daydream came to a crashing end. And the nightmare had begun.

pow wows we’re not allowed anymore, children were not allowed to live with their families, they were taken away to live the new people, in boarding schools, and made to practice their catholic relion, or no religion at all. The children were forgetting their history.the laughter stopped. The crying began. It was a time of sorrow. It became so bad that in the whole valley, and other nearby valleys, the Maidu went from thousands of people to about a hundred. We almost became extinct. In my lifetime. We were starving. Had lost all hope. But things changed, again. The gold dried up, the rush stopped. People stopped flooding in. Some left. We were allowed to return to our beloved valley, and live our traditional lives as before. Not quite the same, we had to be careful not to anger those that settled in the valley. But it was better than at the beginning of the nightmare. We were at least allowed to live our lives. Pow wows were held again. Our history was allowed to be taught again. Babies were born, and not taken from us. In fact, baby making was a priority, people were brought together from all the valleys so that they could marry and have children, healthy, fun loving children. So many children, that soon there were thousands of Maidu in the three valleys around us. We are not extinct anymore! And our history and culture is remembered by the children. Our traditional way of life has changed, we have entered the modern age, but at least we are still here. The nightmare has ended, and we have woken up into a new reality. Not quite a dream, like it used to be, but now California dreaming like the Mammas and the pappas sing about. And we still dance and drum, and celebrate the salmon. We are back!