We live in an estranged modern sphere disconnected from the brilliant legacy and regard of a people and culture who lived their stories into this land for millions of years. By contrast, we as a present-day township, have only been here for one hundred years. So just how is it that we have completely erased a most meaningful, instructive, and sacred heritage that we have here in the Sierra?

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     The lands we now call Mammoth Lakes and its surrounding areas were the summer camps and ceremonial grounds for a profound network of Kutzadika’a, Nüümü, Newe, and other connected peoples, who gathered here to hunt, harvest, trade, and evolve their richly complex cosmology of interrelationship. In narrow-viewed history books, we might only read of native people’s ways of mere survival, but we are actually only reading a glimpse of our own, and the general psychology we occupy, far-limited understandings into a peoples’ highly intelligent way of being. 

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      As a European descendent whose way of being and thinking is still permanently influenced by non-native understanding, I dare to describe a hopeful and brief peering into the meaningful existence of the Indigenous peoples of this land. 

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     The people who lived not just “on” these lands, but extraordinarily “with” these lands, did so for a time beyond mind, or time immemorial as often put. The ancestors of this extreme land of highest highs and deepest depths, oldest trees, volcanic presence, and hanging valleys that we now call home, were caretakers whose memories, dreams, and stories are still imbued into the sacred landscape. They indeed, sustainably gathered pine nuts, kwijabi, and obsidian, while establishing the first irrigation systems, to name a few. But perhaps lesser told, is their deep knowledge that everything–from stone, to river, to raven, to constellation, was encoded with a brilliant sentience. This way of understanding the interconnectivity of all things naturally gave instruction to extraordinary caring capacity for and attunement to the land and the beings that call it home. For if one understands that causing harm to a single habitat would cause equal or greater harm to self and all that self is connected with, one would live with a heightened sense of protection, justice, and inherent responsibility to maintain collective wellbeing. This advanced consciousness of relationship is not only a cultural touchstone of our Indigenous community, but a teacher to us, and a legacy that this land holds most resonance with. 

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     And as we move along a timeline of understanding, white settlers arrived in the mid 1800’s, who lived by a different mindset that focussed on material value steeped in extraction. They were blind to the magnificence of a people who lived a more whole capacity of human potential. Instead, the settlers could only see through the lens of their colonial conditioning and perspective: they saw a savage-like and lesser people who lived in the dirt and tule-grass huts, rather than a remarkable people living an infinitely rich inner, communal, and cosmological understanding of existence, and who embodied teachings for them. The domination of settler worldview and wide-spread propaganda allowed for unspeakable acts of violence like the national genocidal campaigns for “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” in the late 19th century all over California. Like residential boarding schools that stole native children from their families and brutalized them. And forced relocation from their homelands to a tiny fragment of land, and therefore, enacting certain poverty. There are indeed more acts of violence and cultural erasure than can be named here. Meryl Picard, Bishop Paiute Tribal Chairwoman, speaks of the siren in Minden, Nevada that still rings out over town at 6:00 pm daily, as a relic that alarmed Indigenous people of that time to leave town “or else.” Meryl transports the still current and insidious fear within native folks at the white supremacy and domination of white imagination that lingers into present time.

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     Today, the Indigenous community on reservations in Payahuunadü, which is what we call the Owen’s Valley of Bishop, Big Pine, Independence, and Lone Pine, the still landless non-federally recognized Kutzadika’a of Kooza Pa’a, which is Mono Lake, and the Nüümü people of Benton and Bridgeport, live with the harm done to their people here in the name of colonization, ownership, and resource extraction. And yet, they are an extraordinarily resilient, beautiful, intelligent, and invaluable people of our current times. Their dignified voices powerfully speak to the strength of their community, and continual wise innovation to reclaim a space in contemporary minds, hearts, lands, and economy that supports their thriving wellbeing and rising cultural regeneration now and into the future.

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    Like Glenn Nelson Jr., a Bishop Paiute tribal member, who teaches the Nüümü language and the remembrance of lifeways encoded within, against all odds of cultural erasure through English and settler assimilation. Or Genevieve “Gina” Jones, a Big Pine Paiute & Shoshone tribal member, who is stepping up again and again into leadership roles like Inyo County Board of Supervisors candidate, when in the 1960’s (not too long ago) she and her family experienced coerced relocation to Los Angeles by governmental powers forced upon Indigenous peoples for the purpose of assimilation, reduction in federal responsibility, and clearing land for economic development.

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     More often than not, and unknowingly, we as a community in Mammoth Lakes, are carrying on a legacy of those that didn’t or couldn’t regard the Indigenous people and lifeways they embodied. Yet, we have now entered another moment in time; ripe and ready to clear the systemic racial haze and step up and into the responsibility to heal the perpetuation of harm and erasure, both passive and active. In this, we not only open a possibility to play our community’s part in a global movement and understanding to repair and reconcile horrific acts, but we earn a potential chance to call them friends, and perhaps, teachers. Who our Indigenous community inherently is, both as unique individuals and as an authentic people, are a vitally missing part to becoming an evolved community that is wiser, more caring, more integral and interconnected, together. More advanced, one could say, but in a newer and decolonized understanding of advancement. 

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     This is the task at hand, at center of heart, to learn to shift our perspective to see that we have truly missed the mark by not inviting our Indigenous community to the table. Our table has remained empty, dry, and flavorless in some ways, although we are conditioned to not see our deficit, only to pretend of its abundance. 

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    So, what does that look like, actually? It looks like inviting our Indigenous community members to that table, to the board meetings, to the speaking events, to the creative-process, to the conversations. And not just for their traditional knowledge and input, but as way to dismantle our own ignorance and learn the value of who these people truly are. It looks like listening to them, really listening. Being brave and staying with our own discomfort. It looks like going to and supporting native-led events and campaigns, like those at the Paiute Shoshone Cultural Center in Bishop, without a personal agenda. It looks like meeting each other where we are all at, and holding a long-view of centering relationship building. Through patience and receptivity, you may earn a friend, and together, we may enact our part to pierce the bubble. 

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    What if the answers to all of our communities’ problems are not where we think they reside? What if it is right in front of us –a cultural and colonization problem– right below us in the centuries of sacred interconnected living infused in the memories of the land under our feet, rising up to ask us to get to know their living descendents, our rightful community, and their living wisdom, today. As European descendents, we have to go far further back in our lineages to a time when we lived an earth-revering consciousness. But our Indigenous community, whose wisdom and lifeways are not only most pertinent to this land, but a missing pulse, ideals, understanding to our modern endeavors as we create and shape life.

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    Now close your eyes and in your mind’s eye, look around Mammoth Lakes in a future time. Do you see the cultural diversity, the cultural thriving? The community pride that we have remembered and taken action on reconciling a lost and significant ally for community wellbeing in the realest, most whole sense of the word? Perhaps we see an Indigenous Cultural Center of our own here in Mammoth. Perhaps we see abundant land and people acknowledgments in our town governance and events. Perhaps we see their council woven into decision making. Perhaps we see all of the recreators that drive through Payahuunadü and up to Mammoth, aware of the original and current peoples of this land, and invited into cultural regeneration. Perhaps we see their art and narrative in a mural, as one of the initiating steps, that tells their story of their extraordinary people, the journey unique to them, and perhaps a shared vision for a future dream.

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written by Melle North, project curator

edited and reviewed by tribal members:

Meryl Picard, Bishop Paiute Tribal Chairwoman

Genevieve "Gina" Jones, Inyo County Board of Supervisors Candidate

Glenn Nelson Jr., Nüümü Paiute Language Provider

& Zak Young, non-tribal, interim project manager