Marc Dadigan

When Caleen Sisk-Franco first looked at old photographs depicting her tribe’s puberty ceremony, she was confused.

Waimem hugs her father and the Winnemem headman Mark Franco during the 2006 ceremony.

Because of persecution, boarding schools and the destruction of their sacred lands, it had been 70 years since her tribe, the Winnemem Wintu of Northern California, had practiced the Balas Chonas ceremony.

Still, Caleen, the tribe’s spiritual leader, knew her teenage daughter, Marine, was meant to swim to the other side of the McCloud River where she’d spend several days living in a cedar bark hut. She’d also make her first acorn soup, weave baskets and lay her prayers upon the sacred puberty rock.

But in the old pictures, she saw Winnemem warriors in their full regalia, carrying spears and bows. Why, she wondered, would the tribe need its warriors at such a peaceful ceremony?

She would soon understand their reasoning.

The US Forest Service, which owns the puberty rock site and runs it as a campground, refused to close down the river to boaters. And, during the 2006 ceremony, one group parked their houseboat a stone’s throw from the bark hut, and another boat of drunken revelers drifted past the Winnemem shouting obscenities as one woman flashed her breasts.

This weekend the Winnemem, an unrecognized tribe of about 125, will hold their second puberty ceremony, and the Forest Service is again unwilling to close down the river. Fear persists that another ugly scene will ensue.

The tribe’s continued inability to hold a peaceful puberty ceremony is evidence of the inefficacy of the American Indian Religious Freedoms Act, which, in theory, requires tribes have access to places integral to their cultural practices, such as the puberty rock. However, the act doesn’t provide tribes the ability to sue, which often leaves them at the whims of government agencies and private landowners.

The law doesn’t even apply to peoples like the Winnemem who aren’t federally recognized and, thus, not considered a true historic tribe. The Winnemem lost their recognition because of a bookkeeping error in the 80s, and, as the GAO has long lamented, the process to gain recognition now takes about 20 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ stifling bureaucracy.

The Winnemem are a poor, traditional tribe who don’t identify members based on blood quanta but on who follows their ways. For a people so steeped in their culture, their inability to hold their ceremonies and their lack of legal recourse threatens their very existence.

In their eyes, the Winnemem are staving off  a once and future genocide, this latest campaign waged not by guns but by bureaucracy and blindly intractable policy.

I’ll be attending the ceremony with camera and notepad in tow, hoping the ceremony proceeds peacefully but ready to document any incidents.

The struggle I have is convincing editors, readers and the general public why they should care about this little tribe and their ceremony.

Some seem to believe traditional Indian cultures are basically extinct, others don’t understand how spirituality can be connected to geography.

We live in a society that isolates religion from the rest of its existence. Most of us attend service for an hour or two a week, check church off our to-do list and go on with our lives.

For the Winnemem, their spirituality permeates their lives, and, unlike a Catholic who can attend mass at any church around the country, their ceremonies are inextricably tied to sacred places like the puberty rock. Without the sacred places, there are no Winnemem.

Our human rights protections are woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting people like the Winnemem, and people, like me, who are used to drive-through spirituality, are woefully unprepared to understand the Winnemem’s way of life. I’m still struggling to understand it myself.

The last puberty ceremony was more than anything a black mark on our human rights record that needs to be atoned.

But it was also representative of our country’s lack of respect and value for culture.

Cultural diversity, a Yakama man once told me, is as important and valuable as biodiversity, and he’s right.

America’s greatest attribute is its cultural diversity, and yet we have this schizophrenic relationship with it. We celebrate it in discourse, but in practice we actively work to destroy it.

We castigate immigrants that speak their own language or fail to act “American” enough. My own last name was changed from Dagdigian to Dadigan, likely because my Armenian grandfather’s family felt ashamed of its ethnic origin. Our education system does little to empower students to learn and practice their culture, and the growing spread of standardized schooling will likely only accelerate this.

In addition to this, the Winnemem were victims of draconian government policies as well as the Shasta Dam that flooded their village and many of their sacred places.

Not only do they, and people like them, deserve our support as they try to sustain and revitalize their cultures, but we need to understand the value we can find from them, especially from their knowledge of water and environmental issues.

They see through a lot of patchwork environmentalism, see how we try to repair a rip in nature’s tapestry by tearing a piece from somewhere else.  We would do well to pay them heed.

Back in 2006, Marine couldn’t pray to the puberty rock because of the dam. The high waters of the reservoir had submerged it, so instead she dove deep beneath surface and briefly laid her hand against it as, above her, milky sunlight filigreed across the river.

It’s an image that’s etched in my mind, an image that made me want to write about the Winnemem in the first place.

We’re a country that’s used to conflating courage with war and violence. But for Marine the simple laying down of a traditional Winnemem prayer was an act of profound courage.

It shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be that way.

To read more about the puberty ceremony, visit the Winnemem’s blog.

Winnemem Nick Wilson, 14, exchanges a hongi, the traditional Maori greeting, with Rick Tau of the Ngai Tahu tribe.

My first Maori welcoming ceremony, or Pōwhiri, began with a towering woman with emerald, tattooed lips belting a sonorous summoning song as we entered the grounds of the marae, or community center.

We sat down on benches and opposite us were Maori elders who introduced themselves in their traditional language, te reo, with stoic glints in their eyes.

This spring I traveled as a journalist with the Winnemem Wintu, a small California tribe, to cover their remarkable journey to commune with the New Zealand salmon, genetic descendents of the fish that once spawned in their river, the McCloud.

The Pōwhiri was the Maori’s way of acknowledging the significance of the Winnemem’s visit and the honor they took in hosting them.

They fed the Winnemem ambitious feasts and secured them a pristine spot along the Rakaia River to conduct a four-day salmon ceremony. The Maori listened closely to the tribe’s spiritual leader Caleen Sisk-Franco as they exchanged creation stories, histories and their shared struggle to protect sacred lands from the avarice of corporations and developers.

The great irony of the Winnemem’s trip was that after two weeks of being treated as esteemed ambassadors from a sovereign nation, they would return to the United States and promptly cease to exist.

In the 1980s, the Winnemem were unceremoniously dropped from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ list of recognized tribes because of a bookkeeping error (not an uncommon occurrence).

Recognition establishes a formal government-to-government relationship with the U.S. and a tribe, and without it Indians have no access to Indian Health Services, college scholarships and billions of dollars in government aid. It also means that tribes have no protection under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which theoretically ensures their access to sacred places.

For the Winnemem, it’s meant being cornered into poverty and living in a bizarre No Man’s Land where the ability to hold their ceremonies at sacred sites is completely at the whims of government agencies and private landowners.

The federal recognition process was established to identify “real” tribes in the late 70s when there was a resurgence in Indian cultural pride after decades of boarding schools and government policies had sought to disconnect them from the old ways.

The Winnemem’s New Zealand trip was emblematic of just how broken that system is. How else could a tribe be so well-received, even revered, abroad but then return home to a cold shoulder?

For years, the General Accounting Office has documented the persistent problems with federal recognition, but little has been done about it. The BIA’s Office of Federal Acknowledgment is perennially understaffed, and hundreds of applications are lodged in a growing backlog. The average processing time for an application is now about 20 years.

The BIA has also been deluged with lawsuits from tribes who believe they’ve been denied recognition unfairly. This is largely because, as the GAO has documented, the BIA makes inconsistent judgments about tribes based on criteria that are too vague and opaque.

In order to be recognized, tribes have to prove they’ve existed and persisted as a distinct culture. Genealogists, historians and anthropologists examine the evidence provided by a petitioner and make a recommendation to the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs who accepts or rejects it.  According to the GAO, there is no real guidance as to how much evidence the tribes need to present and the Assistant Secretary often contradicts the recommendations with little discernible justification.

Other factors muddy the process. Some recognized tribes aren’t eager to share a limited pot of funds, and recognition often means tribes can open casinos. Not surprisingly, recognition has also become plagued by politics.

Deciding who is and isn’t an Indian is no easy task, and it’s a sad commentary on what we’ve done to Indian cultures that we need to do so in the first place. But we created this problem, and we need to do a better job of fixing it.

In California, where more than 650,000 people identify themselves as Indian, only 65,000 actually belong to a recognized tribe. For some, like the Winnemem, their survival hangs in the balance.

The GAO has already outlined what must change. Reform must come swiftly or we risk losing what’s left of our indigenous cultures and languages. We’ll also lose the environmental insight embedded within these cultures that we so desperately need at a time of global warming and widespread animal extinctions.

While in New Zealand, the tribe’s headman Mark Franco was adamant in declaring that they were “not American but Winnemem.”

After 150 years of atrocities and indignities, it was an understandable distinction to make.

A first step in making things right would be acknowledging the Winnemem, and others like them, as historical tribes and giving them the basic rights they need to preserve their culture.

As Franco says, they’re not looking for a handout. They’re simply looking for the right to exist.

Note: You can hear an interview on Capitol News Network with Caleen Sisk-Franco about recognition and the United National Declaration on the Rights for Indigenous Peoples here.

When I first read that the Springfield Municipal Jail was asking for volunteers to test out its new facility, I immediately emailed the editor at the local paper, the Register-Guard. For whatever reason, the idea of spending the night behind bars was extremely alluring to me, and apparently the same was true  for hundreds of Springfield residents.

Why is that?

As a full-time graduate student, I couldn’t delve into this question as much as I’d have liked to. But I did come across studies by academics who looked at jail tourism sites like Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in Alcatraz) and Alcatraz. Maybe our fascination with jails harkens back to images of old Westerns and outlaws being reeled in by roguish Sheriffs. Whatever the case, the authors found that staff at these exhibits were doing a better job of discussing the realities of daily prison life as well as how the prison industrial complex has had, at best, a questionable affect on society.

The volunteer inmates at the jail didn’t get such a nuanced view. The theme of the night, pounded home again and again, was that the jail would be a pretty miserable place to stay, a place where there was nothing to do but to sit and think about what you’d done.

What wasn’t mentioned was that, as a misdemeanor jail, it would be housing criminals accused of pretty minor offenses. The police chief argued that many of those caught committing minor crimes were probably on their way to committing felonies, if they hadn’t already. I wonder what others think of this line of reasoning.

Also, about half of inmates at jails across the country are technically innocent. Many are waiting to go before a judge, while others are waiting for trial because they couldn’t afford bail.

The police say having such a draconian jail will make criminals think twice, but I can’t imagine a car burglar about to bust open a passenger window suddenly stopping and saying to himself, “Wait a second. There’s no cable at the Springfield jail! I’ll miss South Park! I better rethink these life decisions I’m making!”

If I had more time, I would have liked to discuss these issues with the other men in Pod C. Over the course of the night, I think we were all still absorbing everything. I wonder if any have been left with the same lingering questions I have.

Excerpt from the story:

“. . . The door is slammed shut, and it clangs with a sickening, plangent thud. Morphew flinches ever so slightly.

Overall, there’s a palpable sense of excitement that pervades the air.

Many of the Pod C guys admit that previous to tonight, they had images of dusty Old West jails swimming in their brains. There’s something almost romantic about spending the night behind bars, standing in the place of John Dillinger or Babyface Nelson.

But there is nothing romantic about Pod C. It’s devoid of color. While daylight supposedly seeps in through the window and grated hole high in the ceiling, mostly it’s just you under the harsh fluorescent lights in a sprawling room of sharp right angles and hard metal. . .”

Read the full story here.