From that old apartment of mine I could walk west until I came to the Pacific Ocean. I could go almost due south to the Castro, where the theater and many other amenities and a shifting population of friends called me. I rarely walked north, though I drove there to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and plunge into the country—or to visit my mother, so that trips across the bridge meant both liberation and dread. It was an easy walk east to the Civic Center and to the main library, where I still do research, and to the trains to the East Bay. As the 1990s advanced, I spent more and more time driving across the Bay Bridge east to get to the American West, to the mountains and the deserts and the new life and friends I was finding there. Despite everything the world was opening up to me, or I to it.
Audibility, Credibility, Consequence
1
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.
The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.
The city was my great teacher in the 1980s, and that first book came out of what I learned from wandering streets and neighborhoods, from encountering subcultures and enclaves. The second came out of what the vast spaces of the mountains and deserts and the people there had to teach, and the lessons were magnificent, tremendous, sometimes terrifying, and the places brought new friends and a new sense of self.
At some point in my midtwenties, the childhood passion I had had for natural places had returned with a new intensity; I found epiphanies and a sense of liberty in being in the wild places—forests, grasslands, coastline—of my own region and began to study the cultural history of ideas and representations and desires for nature and place and landscape, first through art and art history, then through environmental literature and cultural histories, and then to write about it.
I began exploring and camping, wandering first in local places and English ideas of landscape and then into what lay over the horizon, the American West, the dry lands and open spaces that lay east of us, and non-Western ideas of nature that were more about understanding patterns and relationships than making pictures out of it all. (On those first camping trips, I was still so haunted by street violence that lying out in the open seemed reckless and terrifying; it took me a long time to get used to how rural safety consists of distance from danger, not the barriers against it and the recourse from it that urban structures and systems provide. I still don’t camp alone, though I hike alone, generally with thoughts of danger not far away; access to nature is also contingent on your sense of safety, as people of color also know.) I steeped myself in images of and literature on landscape and began to focus on artists exploring ideas about place, landscape, nature, and travel.
The life I was looking for began taking root in the late 1980s. But it had many beginnings, as though I’d been planting many seeds, waiting and waiting while whatever secret germination and growth took place underground, before they burst into view. I began my first book, I made my first lasting friends, I found out how to go out into the larger world of the American West, I found, as they say, my voice.
I sometimes say that the Nevada Test Site taught me to write, because when I went there for the big spring antinuclear actions and campouts in 1988 and every year thereafter into the millennium, I met a place so stark and vast and, to me, strange, at which so many cultures and stories converged, that I had to bring together all the fragments of what I was doing into a new whole to have something that felt adequate to what I found there. Before then, I had accepted the pigeonholes into which writing fit. I had written criticism and reviews with a confident, objective-sounding tone, written journalistic reports that more or less colored within the lines of journalism. In those years, I had also written small, dense essays that were lyrical, personal, emotional, metaphorical, experimenting with form and tone, letting in what I was learning from poetry and the prophetic voice, doing all the things I was not supposed to do in criticism and journalism, letting wonder and melancholy and uncertainty in, giving rein to what language can do.
The Nevada Test Site was a place of convergence—of peoples, of histories, of values and ideas, of forces from the nuclear arms race to the Eurocentric reaction to deserts. To describe what it meant, I realized I needed all the modes of writing I’d learned and I needed them together, unsegregated. That was the major breakthrough of my writing, and Savage Dreams, the book that resulted, was the first exuberant experiment in bringing together the writing styles and voices and recognizing how they could be the same voice describing in terms historical, evocative, personal, analytical the complexity of a political situation and a historic moment.
It was a powerful place. I can feel what it was like to be there even now: the great expanses of dust-colored earth cobbled in stone, including shining pink quartz, fierce spiky plants here and there in the pale soil between stones, the dry air spectacularly clear (unless there was a dust storm or enough heat to make the air seethe and shimmer) so clear that you could see for dozens of miles to the fang-sharp ranges in the distance. Those immense spaces invited me to move freely and to feel the smallness of human bodies and concerns in a landscape where you could sometimes see a hundred miles, where you could drive half that without seeing a house, where you could, as I often did, wander toward the horizon feeling both liberated and fearful of what happens to a body that is two-thirds liquid in such an arid place. Just sitting still you could almost feel the water coming off your breath and out of your skin to disperse into the atmosphere where sometimes, rarely, in this driest part of the driest state in the union, clouds would gather and rain would evaporate as it fell or dash down only to dry up in minutes.
I had always been craving illimitable space. I found it earlier at Ocean Beach at the far end of the city and I found it as a child in the hills and sometimes lying on my back at night on the wild grass that reached down into the earth, looking into the stars until I felt that I could fall into them, found it in flying dreams, in wandering on foot, in wandering in time and space through books. And then I got more than I had dreamed of, almost as much as I needed.
It’s generally recognized that you have to learn how to enter enclosed and guarded places, but to enter these vast spaces also takes application. A few years earlier, on a road trip with my boyfriend through Death Valley and the Southwest, we had turned back early, not knowing how to find the oases hidden in the valleys and canyons where water collects, or how to appraise the beauty that has little or no verdure, or how to let the quietness and sense of deep and cyclical time enter us. The Nevada Test Site was how I learned to enter, because these annual spring campouts and protests introduced me to people with deep ties to the remote places and gave me time and, quixotically, a place where I felt safe. Safe even though we were facing down the nuclear weapons being exploded not far away, wondering about the radioactive fallout we might be ingesting, and getting arrested, sometimes roughly, by the armed guards protecting the Test Site. Safe from assault because I was camping with friends among thousands of people dedicated to peace and disarmament (though dodging hippie dudes demanding hugs was an ongoing project for us young women).
My younger brother was instrumental in the Test Site organizi
ng by the time he got me to come along in 1988, and it was a place where my environmentalism and his antiwar activism converged. The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small-town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsals for the end-of-the-world war. Our family had immigrated to big cities and it sometimes seems to me that it was through those outback adventures we had, with the ranchers, Native Nevadans, activists, Mormon downwinders, and atomic veterans we worked with and lived among, that the two of us finally truly arrived on the bare soil of this continent.
And then we became part of a great project to redefine it all. A number of Western Shoshone elders had joined us at the actions to say that the nuclear testing was being done on their land, which they’d like back, preferably without any more bombing and contamination. The environmental justice movement—an endeavor to address the race and class of who was impacted by environmental devastation—was gathering momentum and spreading new ways of thinking then. I had volunteered in the late 1980s at Earth Island Institute, an umbrella for a host of environmental projects, including a still-young Rainforest Action Network and EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America. Both addressed the fact that the tropical places they were trying to protect had long had human inhabitants and that human rights and environmental protection were inseparable goals. That may sound obvious now; it was new then.
It may be hard for those who came later to understand how utterly ignorant we non-Natives were then, how much Native people had disappeared from or never entered the mainstream conversation or were talked of exclusively in the past tense as people who had vanished long ago and would never appear to speak up on their own behalf. They were also treated as people who had never existed in the first place when artists, photographers, environmentalists, poets, explorers, historians imagined and depicted North America as a place in which human beings had just arrived, or rather that white men had recently discovered.
Ideas that seem ordinary now overthrew whole categories of thought then. They ended—to some extent, if not enough—an era of telling stories about a North American landscape that had been, until Europeans arrived, without human contact. I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna/whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us. White people were imagined as discoverers of a place that lay waiting, before history, before culture. Beyond this binary lay other ways of being human, other ways of being in the natural world. Being an environmentalist was coming to mean, at last, recognizing and respecting the first dwellers in these places and that human impact—hunting, harvesting, fire management techniques—had to be factored into assessments of what had constituted the ecosystems before Euro-American arrival. That is to say, these new frameworks and voices transformed nothing less than history, nature, and culture in far-reaching ways.
For me there was tremendous hope in the reemergence of people grounded in something other than the Judeo-Christian and European worldviews, who had lived in places for millennia without, for the most part, devastating them. The deep ties some had to the old ways and places seemed to me to provide crucial capacities to navigate the future (which I would see in full power with the Zapatistas of southern Mexico starting in 1994 and in the powerful presence of indigenous people in the twenty-first-century climate movement). The Native North American creation myths in which the world was never perfect, never fallen, and never finished being created shone a clear light on the problems with Genesis and the Judeo-Christian preoccupations with perfection and purity and the fall from grace. In those years I’d also been working with a Native California artist, Lewis DeSoto, whose installations and landscapes and ways of thinking about place and the sacred also showed me new perspectives and possibilities.
In 1990 I met environmental organizer Bob Fulkerson, a fifth-generation Nevadan, and he invited me to join some other Nevadans and journey farther into the state. It was on that short road trip that I grasped how extensive and destructive the military infrastructure was throughout the West, got a sense of these intrepid, resourceful, devoted Westerners dedicated to their rural and remote places along with a desire to join them and a sense that I had been looking for them since childhood. We stayed in touch, and Bob urged me to show up for the Western Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann’s last day in court, in Reno, Nevada, in late spring of 1991. I did so. Their troubles had begun in 1973, when a federal agent asked Mary why she wasn’t paying grazing fees on her cows. She told him that it wasn’t federal land, and she was right that the treaty the Western Shoshone signed in 1863 did not cede their territory. The Danns pushed their claim all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost only because in the course of their case, the government invented a date that it had taken the land in the 1870s, a date that described no actual event, and decided it could compensate the tribe for the land in 1872 prices without interest. The traditionalists, catalyzed by the Danns, refused to accept the payment.
After the court case ended, Bob introduced me to Western Shoshone environmental organizer Virginia Sanchez, and she asked me to write an overarching history of Western Shoshone land rights for a small environmental publication. I took the assignment eagerly, and began it by spending several days in the archives of the University of Nevada in Reno. There I sat in a straight chair spooling through the microfilm of the CIA—the Commission on Indian Affairs that preceded the Bureau of Indian Affairs—reading, printing out, and taking notes on the reports of field officers in Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s. The reels of microfilm were scored with long horizontal scratches, and the letters were all written in beautiful copperplate handwriting that was hard to decipher, but what they meant became increasingly clear.
The neatness of the words unfurling in arcs and curves along hand-ruled pages suggested a kind of orderliness and propriety reaffirmed by the elaborate politeness in the salutations and the signoffs in these letters about genocide. About how to push the Native people out of the way as whites flooded west and subjugate them and let their resources be pillaged, how to contain them and give them some handouts as their homelands were so degraded that food sources vanished. We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice and what not to. The men who wrote these reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people they were helping to exterminate, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.
Somewhat relieved of mine, I became a member of the Western Shoshone Defense Project when it was created the next spring to support Mary and Carrie Dann as they prepared to face attack from the government. They were grand, fearless matriarchs, the most unsubjugated women I ever knew, queens of their household, heads of their ranch, capable of fixing a generator or taming a mustang from their vast herds, cheerful and pithy as they spoke to us in English and to each other in their own language. (Savage Dreams, my book in which they were principal figures, foregrounded a lot of charismatic women and women’s groups, but I don’t know if anyone recognized it as a feminist book.) To be around them was a revelation; it was to be where family memory reached back to before white people arrived, land was sacred, women were in charge, and actions should defend what mattered for the long future. I was getting an education about tangible things like the lay of the land and the history of the West, but also about matters of the spirit and questions of how to live your life.
Joining the project meant spending weeks at a time on the Danns’ remote cattle ranch in northeastern Nevada, living out of my truck or an old trailer near their house, where I could plug in the desktop computer and printer I’d hauled out. It meant joining some friends from the antinuclear movement and some people I’d never met, indigenous and otherwise, as a co
alition and attending tribal meetings and gatherings. It meant, in my case, ghostwriting letters and statements for Carrie and writing a lot of the literature for the project, press releases, and backgrounders (researching the long overview article I’d written after that immersion in the microfilm record had taught me a lot). And it meant waiting, because now that the courtroom conflict was over, the government was threatening to seize their livestock.
The violent assault came on April 11, 1992. An organizer at the ranch ran into a woman who asked him about all the sheriff’s cars outside the community center in the nearest hamlet. The government had hired a roundup team to confiscate cattle, and law enforcement was there to back them up. I got the news by phone and within an hour had canceled all my plans and grabbed my stuff and headed east in my car, across the Bay Bridge, the East Bay, across the Sacramento River and the wide Sacramento Valley, up through the oak groves and then the pine groves and over the Sierra Nevada, and into the desert, dozed a couple of hours at a truck stop, and at dawn resumed driving the five hundred miles between my home and theirs. It was the first time I ever moved toward violence.
At ten in the morning, I found the heart of the ranch—the house, corrals, outbuildings, trailer—almost deserted. The conflict had happened elsewhere, on horseback, with the federal roundup team going after the livestock and the Shoshone supporters running interference on some of the Danns’ tough saddle-broke mustangs. Carrie had argued about land rights and treaties with the federal agent and the local sheriff at the portable corral some of her cattle had been herded into, and the agent grabbed her arm to try to hinder her from intervening. She broke his grip and jumped into the corral and blocked the loading of the cattle. Unwilling to escalate, they went away. She won the battle, though the war dating back to the 1850s didn’t end.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 15
