 Here’s a photo slideshow of some of the highlights from my time at the village of Tuiimyali. The Winnemem beat is quite a busy one. The whole process has been a huge lesson in cultural humility, but I don’t think anything shocked me quite as much as the letter Caleen received from U.S. Fish and Wildlife revoking her 25-year-old eagle feather permit. The letter is included in the slideshow.
It was hard to believe how simply and quickly a basic right to religious freedom could be stripped away. [...]
This slideshow depicts the Winnemem’s trip to New Zealand this March to sing and atone to the salmon on the Rakaia River. The salmon are descended from the fish that once swam in the McCloud River, on whose shores the tribe lived before the Shasta Dam was built during World War II.
The slideshow is narrated by [...]
I found this NPR interview with Lynda Lovejoy, a New Mexico state senator who potentially could be the Navajo nation’s first female president, to be particularly fascinating, mostly for what wasn’t discussed.
Lovejoy explained how she, like Hillary Clinton did during her presidential campaign, has encountered some sexism and antiquated ideas about women’s roles during her [...]
Coleman is the only federal hatchery operated in California, and it’s also the closest to Tuiimyali, the Winnemem’s village. Established in 1942, it was meant to help mitigate the effects of the Shasta Dam on the California salmon populations, but, like many hatcheries, it’s success has been extremely limited.
(Ironically, the tribe the dam most devastated, the [...]
The Shasta Dam, 600 feet tall, destroyed the McCloud salmon runs when it was built during World War II
“Why don’t they understand what keeps the rivers clean?”
Caleen, the spiritual leader of the Winnemem Wintu, asked me this last night as she drove us back to her village outside Redding.
We were returning from Sacramento where [...]
This Monday, I accompanied Caleen Sisk-Franco and her husband Mark Franco (the Winnemem chief and headman respectively) to the University of Oregon’s Indigenous Solidarity Day, which was organized as an alternative to Columbus Day.
America is uniquely talented at bowdlerizing history so it more closely resembles myth, and the celebration of Columbus is one of the shining [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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About me I'm a freelance writer and multimedia reporter currently based in Redding, CA, where I'm living with the Winnemem Wintu tribe and working on a book about their struggle for cultural survival, their spiritually centered salmon habitat restoration plan and their advocacy for water conservation. I can be reached at marcdadigan@gmail.com.
Twitter id: dadigan
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