Time to Save California's Pandora

By Marc Dadigan
In James Cameron’s online video “A Message from Pandora”, the director of Avatar is seen traveling to the Xingu river in Brazil, meeting with Amazonian indigenous tribes and condemning the Belo Monte Dam, a $11 billion behemoth that would displace some 20,000 people. In a compelling case of life imitating art, Cameron has since received some credit when a Brazilian judge last week halted the construction of the Belo Monte, citing the need for more study of its impact on the surrounding rainforest.
“All of a sudden I’m in the Amazon, and living a real-life Avatar.” Cameron says in the video moments after an indigenous woman dashes his face with red paint.
Cameron is to be commended for standing behind his film’s support for indigenous right, but he didn’t need to travel all the way to the Amazon to find his real-life Pandora. He could have driven a few hours north of his Palo Alto home to the pine-quilted mountains of the McCloud River canyon where another tribe’s existence is imperiled by a large dam.
This Sunday, two United Nations human rights experts visited the McCloud and documented the threat the 602-foot Shasta Dam poses to the Winnemem Wintu, a small traditional tribe that still lives in their ancestral territory.
Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk-Franco led the U.N. officials on a tour of her tribe’s sacred places that would be permanently submerged if the Bureau of Reclamation’s proposed 18.5 raise of the Shasta Dam is approved by Congress.
Sisk-Franco took them to the sacred Puberty Rock, where the tribe’s adolescent girls pray during their coming-of-age ceremony; a purling creek that’s a healing place for the tribe’s women and Eagle Rock, a raptor shaped outcropping connected to the tribe’s doctoring traditions.
If the dam were raised, they could no longer practice the religious ceremonies that are intertwined with these sacred places, and the Winnemem would have lost what makes them Winnemem.
It would be the equivalent of the government razing every Catholic church in the country, the difference being that Catholics can build new churches; the Winnemem can never replace their sacred places.
It’s a testament to the tribe’s resilience that they still exist. When the dam was constructed during World War II, the resulting reservoir, Shasta Lake, submerged their villages on the McCloud and 90 percent of their sacred places.
For the tribe, the McCloud River is their universe, and their sacred places its constellations. For Shasta Lake to have nearly swallowed them all was an unfathomable loss.
At one point during the U.N. tour, Sisk-Franco noted the boat was above a sacred blessing rock, one that is almost always submerged beneath the reservoir. She poignantly explained how one rainy day in February, the reservoir’s water had ebbed enough to reveal the rock, and five of her young Winnemem boys immediately jumped into the freezing water.
As had once been the tribe’s tradition, they swam to the rock and rubbed their hands against it, not knowing if they’d ever see it again.
I understand if Cameron has never heard of the Winnemem because the BOR and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have done a thorough job of expunging the tribe from our history.
When visitors tour the Shasta Dam, the B.O.R. presents a nearly scriptural tale of a monument to American ingenuity and its enterprising spirit. But no one ever learns that Winnemem were evicted from their McCloud homes to clear the path for Shasta Lake or that Winnemem veterans returned from fighting in the Pacific to find their homes underwater.
Making matters worse, the BIA dropped the Winnemem from its list of federally recognized tribes in the 1980s, meaning they have limited access to federal grants and little legal standing to protect their lands.
B.O.R. says it will complete a feasibility study of the dam raise by 2013, at which time it will go to Congress for a vote. They say the dam raise is needed to slake the thirst of California’s growing population, but the state’s alfalfa farmers could create just as much extra water by conserving only five percent of what they currently use.
I would like to invite Mr. Cameron to come take the same tour the U.N. did, to meet the tribe and see the beauty of their culture and religion, which could soon be lost beneath Shasta Lake’s murky depths.
Some might question why I would compare the Shasta Dam raise to the Belo Monte, which would displace thousands while the Winnemem number only 123. But if there were only 123 dolphins left in the world, wouldn’t we be working like mad to save them?
Why shouldn’t we believe saving our endangered cultures is just as important as saving our endangered species?
The Shasta Dam raise is an unnecessary atrocity in the making, but like the Belo Monte, it’s one that can be stopped.
Sadly, Brazilian authorities overruled the judge's injunction this week, citing the dam's construction as a concern of "national security." Apparently the security of the 50,000 indigenous people who might lose land or their homes is not a priority.
This doesn't have to happen here, not if we listen to the Winnemem's story and respect their right to exist.
There’s still time to save California’s own Pandora.
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Marc Dadigan is a freelance journalist writing a book about the Winnemem’s spiritually guided salmon restoration project.