RAISE THE STAKESSPRING, 1982 The Planet Drum Review Number 5 $2

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

RAISE THE STAKES

CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE

Martha's Vineyardby Lawrence George Ross . . 1

California Updateby Michael Helm 1

Southeast Alaskaby Phil McManus ... . . . . . . . 2

British Columbiaby Doug Dobyns. 3

Mogollon Highlandsby William Koethke . . . . . . . . .. 4

Big Mountainby William Koethke . 5

Africawith Alem Mezgebe . 6

Quetico-Superiorby David Oleson. . . , ..•.... , . . . .. 6

MAGAZINE SECTION

Salmon Enhancementby Michael Helm.

Reforestationwith Victoria Stockley ..

AIM Summit Meetingby Siena Riffia

Freedom to be Respectfulwith Russell Means

Letters & Reviews .Planet Drum Update ..

BOX 31251, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 94131, USA

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ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED

right now, but after informing you thatat any time your program can end attheir very whim.

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ing the summer, has any validity what­soever? Well, the truth hides in the com­pany's books, which, of course, aren'topen to the public in any usable form.

In the meantime the ferry companyfucks up everything.

Secession?loin another State?

Leave the U. S. ? 0

Example 1: The food coop-trucks offresh organic vegetables get on the ferryhours after the trucks from the localchain supermarkets.

Example 2: Glass recycling-in orderto sell the glass, it has to go "off-island,"but the cost of the truck on the ferrymakes the program impossible. Tomake it even worse, they actually arelettin~ the glass truck off for free,

propaganda: if we don't bring over 1enough tourist cars (and guess who de­cides how much is "enough"), all sum­mer, we can't afford to run all winter.How could we make sure that this state­ment, which is their convenient ration-ale for backing up the car invasion dur-

island, and it would create a much morelivable environ'ment.

However, the ferry company has amonopoly on the transportation of allvehicles; in addition, they have thepower to tax the island 100% in theevent they ever lose money. Hence, the

The towns (there are six of them) areenlarging, and in two of them, the cen­ters are no longer of walking size, whichis bringing in the Drive-In Banks andmore and more parking lots. Two mallsare now being considered simultane­ously. The other side of this is:• sewage pouring into the harbor• roads being chopped through the

forest• parking lots growing like mildew• overflowing dumps• contamination of the water table• runways (we have three airports)• no beach access

Circles of Correspondence is an open, planetary forum which exploresthe connection between regional cultures and the watersheds and

bioregions upon which their continued existence depends.

Send us your connections.

MARTHA'SVINEYARDREPORT

by Lawrence George Ross

Five years ago, Martha's Vineyard was. big news on coast-to-coast T. V.,as it announced it was ready to secede from Massachusetts. What had hap­pened was that Massachusetts was reducing the size of its legislature; result:one representative for all of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard Island andNantucket Island.

Martha's Vineyard is a beautifultourist trap with an uncontrollable rateof growth. The island swells from10,000 people to 100,000 in the sum­mer, and the swelling gets larger eachyear. In fact, "summer" started swellingMay 22 this year, for Memorial Dayweekend. And if you think that oursummer is here, come and look at thebare oak trees that are still being har­assed by the cold ocean breezes!

Last fall one developer bulldozed flata beach dune so his new homes wouldhave a better view of the ocean (and ofour next hurricane!).

• more private beaches (the right to thelow tide line can be privately ownedin Massachusetts)

• ETC.• ETC.• ETC!

These problems cannot get but a tem­porary patch in town meetings or publichealth department meetings, since mostislanders aren't used to the pattern of'destructive growth, and respond to theissues from their limited individualexperiences or concerns; an islander(born here) may be against a mall in onelocation (because he shellfishes near it)but not in another, whereas most move­ins (usually suburbanites from else­where) hope to never see another mallin their life. Businessmen (from bothgroups) will switch depending on wheretheir store is, or whether they shellfishin the pond next to the new mall site,or ...

Occasionally, you can outrage allthose groups at once and, for example,

,....--------------------------------1 the above mentioned developer had torebuild a beach dune in front of his de­velopment. Occasionally.

And what about the positive activeapproach?

Mass transit, my occupation, is agreat idea for an island where a 45 min­ute ferry ride is a necessary expense; asof now, it costs $40 round trip to takea car on the ferry. A limitation on cars,particularly short-term tourist vehicles,would not be too difficult to obtain,once there are enough bus routes on the

CALIFORNIAUPDATEThe Limits ofHydraulic Society

by Michael Helm

IThroughout the West, and particu­

larly in California, water politics havereached the political boiling point. Thereason is simple. The supply is limitedand yet water diversion projects havebeen the principal means of determin­ing where population and agriculturalgrowth would occur. Massive inter­basin transfer (some would say theft) ofwater to Southern California, for exam­ple, has been the primary factor in al­lowing that semi-arid region to growfrom a population of 100,000 in 1900 tonearly 14 million people in 1982. Waterdiversion has also facilitated the heav­ily subsidized growth of an agribusinessempire in the normally parched Imperi­al and southwest San Joaquin Valleys.

Besides water, what has made thisvast hydraulic society possible is cheapenergy and imported Mexican labor.Now, the politicaL economic and env~­

ronmental costs of these three forms ofhistoric subsidy are coming home toroost. Cheap energy and the "sunnySouthern California" Hollywood hypeare no longer applicable. Southern Cali­fornia may well have reached the limitsof its growth.

In this context the current raging de­bate over the Peripheral Canal-as partof the proposed $12-23 billion Phase IIexpansion of the State Water Project

(SWP)-takes on crucial significance.The upcoming June referendum on theCanal-which will have the capacity toreroute 70% of the Sacramento River'sflow south-will be the most importantelectoral decision Californians make forthe rest of this century.

• • •

From a Northern California perspec­tive, the Peripheral Canal is· a biore­gional death threat. Past water diver­sions have already severely reduced theregion's historically fecund natural pro­vision. The San Francisco Bay-Sacra­mento Delta estuary-the largest inlandestuary in the United States-has al­ready been drained of half of the freshwater that used to run into it from theSacramento and San Joaquin Riversand their tributaries. This has changedthe delicate ecology of the estuary to thepoint where the crab and shrimp fisheryare gone and 70% of the salmon andstriped bass population has been deci­mated. Salt water intrusion from theincreasingly saline bay now threatensthe $350 million farm production in theDelta. Then too, the Trinity River hasbeen reduced to a trickle, its water di­verted through a mountain and dumpedinto the Sacramento River.

If the Peripheral Canal is built-withits stated intention of diverting an addi­tional 2 million acre feet of water eachyear-most informed Northern' Cali­fornians believe it will permanently de­stroy any possibility of restoring thenatural provision of the delta and bay.They also fear that, with increased di­versions, south San Francisco Bay willno longer be adequately flushed andturn into a noxious-smelling chemical

(Continued on Page 4)

tPlanet/Drum Bundle #3, North Pacific Rim Alive,

num deposit in the headwaters of Bocade Quadra (southeast of Ketchikan)carries the most ominous implicationsfor four great river systems there andtheir inhabitants.

Molybdenum is a key element insteel production and other industrialprocesses. This country is heavily de­pendent on imported molybdenum.However, commercially exploitable de­posits exist in Southeast Alaska and inthe Colorado Rockies (near CrestedButte). The exploitation of both depos­its is currently in the developmentalstage. Both face substantial local oppo­sition. Both are likely to be mined any­way because of the"overriding nationalinterest" and overwhelming corporatebucks.

Local fishermen here were quick tosee through the glossy pamphlets andflowery language of U. S. Borax and rec­ognize the destructive potential to salm­on runs. Siltation of spawning areasand chemical pollution of the water­sheds are virtually inevitable by-prod­ucts of such heavy metal mining. ButKetchikan Chamber - of - Commercetypes have welcomed with open armsthe prospective boom: a 70-year lifecycle requiring an $820 million capitalinvestment in a resource valued (atexisting market prices) at over $22 bil­lion. Frankly, the multimillion dollarsalmon resource is peanuts. And whatabout the web-of-life? It is an expense,a liability, not an asset.

While corporate propaganda prom­ises the full protection of natura1 re­sources, fisheries included, companyofficials admit privately that the tollwill be enormous. Far from being un­grateful, they are quite willing to buyoff the fisherfolk. They do not discusscompensation for the salmon. Nor isthere any appreciation ot tne true costo'f their loss. Ah, but that's progress.

Expanding a poorly-regulated log­ging activity, open-pit mining whichdefies adequate mitigation, and theover-arching propensity for technicalfixes are linking together to provide theimpetus for expanding hatchery opera­tions which will come of age some yearsdown the line. The existing interdepen­dence of wild salmon and fisherfolkinsures that a voice will be heard on thesalmon's behalf. But when a hatcheryindustry has become fully developed,with all of the attendant economicpower and bureaucratic inertia, andwhen it has nurtured the dependence offisherfolk, which will complete the ero­sion of their traditional freedom, thatvoice will falter. The wild fish willsomehow survive, albeit in reducednumbers. But our link with TotemSalmon-teacher, provider, friend­and, through the salmon, with the wil­derness (from the Old French, meaning"wild beast") will be broken. 0

* "Escapement" refers to the fish whichsurvive all obstacles and predators toreach their spawning ground3.

**The "primary ma'nufacture" law re­quires that all timber harvested on fed­erally-owned lands be subject to at leastprimary processing before it is ex­ported; virtually all timber products inSoutheast Alaska are produced forexport.

PACIFIC\

poured into hatchery programs.All of which becomes especially sig­

nificant in view of two threats whichloom large in the future of the salmonpopulations. The first is logging whichhas for years taken a great toll on thesalmon by siltation of spawninggrounds, raising of water temperatures,and destruction of the streams up whichthe salmon return. While managementof logging practices by the U.S. ForestService has improved in recent years,it has also been pathetically inadequate,a fact which reflects the closeness of thegovernment-industry relationship. Re­cently a new, highly-capitalized forcehas emerged to add to the pressures onregional forests.

Eight years ago, the Alaska NativeLands Claims Settlement Act providedfor the payment of millions of dollarsand millions of acres of land to Alaskannative peoples in compensation forpast wrongs. Native cultures have beenteetering on the brink of extinction,traditional ways steam rolled by thei'wonders" of modern technology andthe American standard of living or en­cased at a safe distance in regional mu­seums. The Land Claims Settlementwas}'Videly viewed as an important prece­dent in the establishment of the rightsof natives. But it was a political (not a~ultural) victory. At this point, its moststriking practical consequence is thegreater ease with which the "industrialtIl0noculture" (how apt a description)expropriates timber, mineral and othernatural resources. In the Southeast, vasttracts of forest lands which were pre­viously part of Tongass National For­est are now privately owned by nativecorporations, the new "elders" of thetribes. Growing nu~bers of large log­ging operations have been undertaken.As private land owners, they operatealmost without any regulation and theyare exempt from the federal "primarymanufacture"** law. Hence, native log­ging concerns have an advantage over'regional competito)s. Lagging inter­national demand has temporarily de­pressed the logging industry but thenet effect on the salmon is bad andthreatens to get worse. Unfortunately,the native tradition of honoring speciesinterdependence is being lost in the fogof a fading past.

Tlingit Bear Totem

The second major danger facing localwild salmon populations is as yet apaper threat. But the investment to dateof more than $20 million by U.S. Boraxin the exploration of a major molybde-

NORTH

SOUTHEASTALASKA UPDATE

2 CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE

by Phil McManus

The single definitive image which describes even the most superficialimpression of Southeast Alaska is "wilderness." From Dixon Entrance in thesouth to Icy Straits in the north, "Southeast" is a composite of mountainous,forest-covered islands broken up by the labyrinthine waterways. Thirty yearsof clearcutting have pockmarked the mountainsides with the scars of the localpulp mill industry. Yet these are dwarfed in the pristine, inscrutable vastnessof Alaska, "The Great Land. " t

Several years ago, a Planet! Drum bundle included "Totem Salmon," anarticle by Linn House: I saw a reprint from Liberation, my first contact withPlanet / Drum. Since I have been fishing seasonally in Southeast since 1973,I read the article with particular interest. And I have shared it with fisherfriends here.

What follows is a more recent perspective on the human link in theSoutheastern web-of-life.

"Totem Salmon" began with the rec- ing the '73 and '74 seasons, two of theognition that "Salmon is the totem ani- most depressed in recent years. In con­mal of the North Pacific Range. Only trast, 1980 saw the biggest salmon catchsalmon, as a species, informs us hu- in Alaska since the boom years of themans, as a species, of the vastness & 1930's.unity of the North Pacific Ocean and What has happened in the meantime?its rim ... the human species is also It is a matter of some dispute. Partly(like the salmon) an indigenous popula- it was the imposition of the 200-miletion ... inextricably married to place. limit which curtailed the foreign high­We can only be kept constantly in- seas fishery. Partly it was a gradual re­formed of our situation as a species covery from the effects of abnormallythrough regard and recognition of cold winters in the early '70's. But morebrethren species. The life of the wild than these, it was a substantial shift'insalmon population is of the essence to the management of the fishery. Bythe life of the human population." 1975, the State Department of Fish and

Linn House explored the names of Game began to manage the fishery tosalmon, the patterns of salmon mind, insure "adequate escapement."* Thisand the traditional relationship of salm- contrasts with previous practice whereon and native peoples. He went on to escapement goals were compromisedcritically compare current inefficient by inadequate knowledge and industryfishing methods (big, energy-consump- pressures. It represents a coming-of-agetive boats; lots of them) with the poten- of sorts from the longstanding belief intial for much simpler fish trap methods. the salmon runs as "an inexhaustible("It is not necessary to pursue them in natural resource." Fisherfolk and man­expensive machines at all; every adult agement personnel have increasinglyfish returns to the river of its origin.") replaced their old adversarial relation­While his analysis of "salmon ener- ship with a cooperative one in order togetics" is suggestive, it gives the feeling protect the salmon from the encroach­of telling the story out of context. Fish ments of overfishing and habitat degra­traps were outlawed when Alaska be- dation. And the benefits have beencame a state, despite intense pressure apparent. Salmon returns to Southeastfrom the powerful canneries, because have built consistently since 1977, andthey threatened the livelihood and the 1982 projections call for an astonishinglifestyle of thousands of fisherfolk. return of up to 60 million fish (as op­Even today, for economic and demo- posed to less than 10 million in 1974).graphic reasons, it is difficult to imagine Of course not all of the results of thethe widespread use of fish traps except crisis management of the 70's have beenas the product of a big business effort. good. Fish and Game has become a

Perhaps the net fishing of the people growing bureaucracy with all of the at­who live and work close to the sea is a tendant hazards. "Adequate escape­monument to inefficiency. Perhaps ment" is a somewhat arbitrary deter­someday a reinhabitory culture will mination which has predictably servedpreserve that lifestyle and also rectify to enlarge bureaucratic imperative.its excesses. But today, net fishing, for More ominously, the crisis of the earlyall of its compromises, is an enclave of 70's has given great impetus to a num­resistance in the midst of the "super cog- ber of artificial propagation programs.making machine," a thread that contin- The biological hazards of hatcheryues to tie people and place. schemes (weakened stock, greater sus-

House also described the tragic de- ceptibility to disease, etc.) are the nat­cline, quite evident at that time, of the ural warning signs of the hazards ofgreat salmon runs and its significance messing with the wild populations offor all of the interdependent species of Totem Salmon. And yet, just as else­the Pacific Rim. Seven years later, that where, the tentacles of industrial soci­story has changed. The great runs in ety, with its technocratic hierarchy,Alaska have, at least for the time being, have put the squeeze on minds hererecovered their strength. At the same too. Stream and spawning ground re­time, the threats to these wild popula- habilitation (to compensate for bothtions have continued to grow. House's human and natural destruction) is, nextprognosis that, "One way or another, to management of fishing effort, thesalmon-based industries are going to be most critical task for the protection offorced to turn to fishfarming and aqua- the runs. But such work has been under­culture" remains a likely, but not an funded while millions of dollars (muchinevitable, outcome. of it from an extraordinary self-imposed

House's experience was based on fish- tax on each individual's catch) are being

RIM

by Doug Dobyns

The water changes all the time, a brown filter offresh water drifts through with a special load of feedfor the smaller fish. A school of needlefish wiggletheir tails down in the sand, leaving just their headsout to filter-feed ... suddenly they decide to move~~~~~~~and the surface boils with bubbles as young coho \.- .. ~ -gorge on them.

CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE 3

The mountains remain in place, and for the mostIpart do their work. Ice rhythms and snow rhythmskeep time that the salmon will know when to be .born and when to die. This was always the clock on :this coast, the stream the compass. The sun light isbudgeted by the fresh water, child of the motherocean, and in the play through temperatures andelevation is recorded the vigor of life on our coast.

Time warp. Wolves, whales and other inevitableliving beings patrol the coast. What must they singto one another? Do they know of the dark light and

( the boxes it lives in? Bear hides in thick brush at the..\ sound of planes, whales identify boats by motor

pitch. They have not one estuary, not one sanctuarybay, left to them. What must they sing to one an­other?

Time warp. Mechanical inevitable beings patrolthe coast ... big ones with cargo of bone, blood,and fur from the earth to be packaged into dark

~ I light and slipped into silicon chips for safe keeping;~\ the new bone game. Some of those bones stored in~ Vancouver, Victoria, only a few maybe, but their

~dark light is very strong. It finds its way out and livesin little boxes on the little boats . . .

~:, Th~ ,,. m,ny w'y' to find fi,h, A ,h.'l' tci­~~ I angle on the sounder paper is sockeye, a larger band

1 is spring. The herring seiner must know when he, sees anchovy lest he clog his net and miss the rich set. for roe. The troller must filter the ghost fish from his

I radio scanner, chase only the secret codes whichsmell of true silver.

There are many ways to find fish. If you had tostand for hours on a rock with just a salmon spear,perhaps the colors would tell you as much as any­thing. Watch the birds, sense the shifts in weather,the change of tide, listen for the orca or sea lion toherd you in a fish. Will the seal try to rob you ofyour~~~~~~~dinner? Maybe fresh seal liver ...

Doug Dobyns

Take a look down into the water some­time, can you tell its color? There's a

place I know, between the kelp line and thecliff face, where a different sort of rainbow

lurks. Up against the rock is a line of blue ...the sun throws glitter around from the rock facetsand the waves. Out a little way you find the

greens, the light ones and the dark ones inter-weavelike the fronds of kelp do further out ... and here, .in this curtain, where the purples and browns play'!"',"'-:1-....""'-I·'I,Qlo,.ld\l"7

are little specks of yellow and orange, the rock bass'and snappers. A family of green ling-cod fingerlingsstay close by their father, a black-backed band ofherring swim outside the kelp and once in a whileone turns its side and sends a flash of silver towardthe surface; and now a blue-backed torpedosmashesamongst them to lash out with its tail ... the largespring salmon hooks out and leisurely picks up thefew crippled herring that spin out of the school.When it has fed, it will rest just inside the kelp in a

.......~!'"'F'_~'-\i' ..sparkle of sunlight. .,$!.~!/:

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Now we have lots of discussion inCanada about the fishing industry.A commission has just released its in­terim report and the government asksfor comments. The report has gonesome ways toward what your NorthPa­cific Rim bundle reported, and has madesome courageous recommendations.

But what will the biggies do aboutthis conflict between power and fish?What will happen in the war betweenthe Continental Energy Policy and thevalley residents? What's going to hap­pen between the Canadian Constitu­tion and the Indian People? Some rib­bons get cut as strips and others getchopped to bits. Up here in Canadathere are some flags that have alreadybeen stripped. In Prince Rupert a bunchof fisherpersons are flying the bananaflag-yellow and black. The islandershave declared themselves a bananarepublic-if they are going to bechopped and eaten on cereal (there is anew grain port being built there) theymight as well advertise the fact. We'llhave to send a green one to the Science& Technology minister of the B.C.government, Pat McGeer; many B.C.autos have bumper stickers "Stick it inyour ear McGeer" so he already hassome idea of how we feel. Businesstechnocracy wants to give us, in thePrince Rupert harbor, one or two li­quid gas shipping ports, a huge coalport, some petro-chemical plants, anew grain terminal, and possible smelt­ers just up the vaIley, to add to the al­ready dirty pulp mill, two huge minesflushing garbage of concentrated poi­sons, and aluminum industry which hasdammed off huge areas and wantsmore.

So now there is a movement to createa watershed authority to be run by thepeople who actually live on the river. Itwas presented last month to an all­province meeting by a woman fromVanderhoof named Louise Kaneen. Sheand I and a couple of others did a halfhour radio show that evening, and Iplugged a couple of holes in the hydrooutflow on the CBC TV news for theStikine.

There are lots of good reasons tofight: enhance tourism, save the fish,wilderness, save the weather, and soon. My motivation is much more simpleand only sees big money as the enemyno matter what it wants to do. Keep themega bucks off our coast and out of ourwatersheds or bring in the jets, brotherRonnie-cause that's what you'II need.And that constitutes an act of war on aforeign country, which is what it hasalways been.

B.C. is shaping up into a very inter­esting confrontation. A lot of finewords and nice ideas are fine forCalifornia progressives. Up here it'sgoing to be wet wool and cordite, dieseland fertilizer, push and shove. 0

BRITISH COLUMBIAUPDATE

This summer I managed a fish plant for a co-op of fisherpersons on theStikine River. A barge load of supplies was dumped on the bank and we set towork and built a 70 x 20 foot two story steep-pitch roofed work environmentwith two freezers-a 5 ton blast and a 50 ton hold-in one month, includingthe wiring, installing the machines, insulation, and plumbing. At the end ofthe 4th week began landing salmon and took some 150,000 pounds for thesummer. It was a good year for sockeye and the fishery count on spawnersreaching the lake some 150 miles upriver was well over 50, DOD-close to arecord for the time they have been counting. We took about 17,500 of thesesockeye and wish we could have had a few more, as we reckon the Americantake of the run to be somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000. I think the NativeSubsistence take was around 6000, but don't have verification on that. Of ourfish, probably close to one third were delivered by Native members, and thesalaries in the plant kept to about that ratio. My goal was to have the nativeincome riding at about l/Z-SO we fell short, but did okay. Good feelings there,and I would say that both fishing and working was enjoyable to all.

Since the sockeye made up about twothirds of the catch, the rest was made upof four other Pacific salmon species anda few steelhead. We were delayed forabout a month from fishing the river(which was good for us this year sincethe plant was being built in that time) toallow the run of king salmon to go past.This was a move by the Canadians toappease the Americans (who usuallytake more fish in their sports derby of 3days than we get all year). There is aspecial feeling about kings and it isquite a rush to have a dozen soakers(40 to 70 pounds) dumped on the sort­ing table. I'm for letting them all spawn-they are so beautiful-but if there isgoing to be a harvest, then we can't helpbut want a part in it.

Of course, all this is small squab­bling. The big issue is the power devel­opment being pushed. There is some­thing like 8 billion dollars budgeted tobuild dams on the Stikine and the Iskuttributary right now. All this withoutrecognition of the land claims of theTahltan people who have formallyasked for treaty since 1910 and laidclaim to the entire Canadian watershedin statements released to the interna­tional community. The feeling has beena bit high. This summer a camp wasburned to the ground, destroying sev­eral buildings, a fuel cache was torched,hdicopters and hangars were painted,and some vehicles were shot (one whileit was occupied). B.C. Hydro is in ten­uous circumstance and is trying towork it all out with sleazy talk and nodoubt payola; the fact remains thatthere are many valley people who feelthis is the last stand and are talkingfight.

One of the best memories from thissummer came by accident. A night onthe sand flats at the very end-I hadmissed the tide, missed the channel, andwas settled in for an evening with heavyfog turning to heavy mist about 100yards from shore. Sitting on my skiffwith plastic wrapped around me andcrackers and cheese, a box of beer anda bag of home-grown, I listened to abear splash for salmon in a side channel.Sea lions grunted at the edge of the flats,about two miles away. Cries of gulls,the diesel of a fish packer a long waysoff. About two hours went by and Iwalked toward the side channel andpissed out the beer in a long line on thesand. Just yards away through the mistthe bear did the same-in a line on hisside of the channel. I went back to theboat and he went back to splashingaround. Dawn tide floated me off­woke to the boat bumping around andpoled a half hour before I could get themotor down. We left on the afternoonferry for Rupert-the other workershad gone ahead to Wrangell with afaster boat while I came with the load ofgear.

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Springs, in the Mimbres valley, a thriv­ing community exists which acts assteward of the springs and farms somesurrounding land. In Silver City ahealthy alternative community is grow­ing centered around the co-op foodstore, and on the "Frisco", families andindividuals exist up to the headwaters.

The summer of 1981 saw the_ firstannual "barter faire" in the region, heldin the Mimbres valley. 1981 also sawthe creation of the "Mogollon High­lands Watershed Association." Usingthe facilities and resources of the smalluniversity at Silver City the Associationhas presented monthly forums on topicssuch as the natural history of the ThreeRivers, the archeology, and a popularforum on water rights. The grouppromises to be an educational and pro­tective force for the area. In the SanFrancisco River area, a county news­paper has grown up (Catron CountyFirestarter, Box 195, Glenwood, NM,88039, $3 per year) that speaks to theinterests of the Spanish, Anglo and"new people".

Silver City is the regional meetingplace for many of the "new people" butthe friendships and linkages breakdown into watershed patterns in manyrespects because of distances. Thefood buying clubs that are servicedfrom the Tucson Cooperative Ware­house probably best describe this. TheAlpine, AZ-Reserve, NM club servesthe San Francisco. On the Gila Riverthere is a club organized by people inthe villages of Cliff and Gila. There areseveral clubs in the small town of SilverCity and one in the Mimbres.

Survival, the earth and a commonlifestyle are ingredients in the incipient"new culture". The threat of oil and gasleasing in wilderness areas, steal­ing of water by industrial consumersboth in Silver City and the Phoenix­Tucson basin, and the scuffle for mar­ginal employment provide rallyingpoints. We are a long distance from theecologically intelligent adaption of theApaches, but the seeds are germinatingand the ancient spirits of those whohave lived with the earth before us are~re. 0

, kicking over pottery shards and seeingmounds of villages of the once greatculture that existed here.

-The Apache came in following thevillage culture and brought a nomadic,hunter-gatherer lifestyle that achievedan almost perfect balance with the nat­urallife. The mountain Apaches, as dis­tinct from the desert Apaches to thesouth, travelled up and down the lifezones spending the winters on the edgeof the Sonoran Desert and the summersin the beautiful high mountain mea­dows.

At the time of the European invasionthere were bands on the Three Riversknown variously by the Europeans asHot Springs, Mimbres and WhiteMountain Apaches. These groups areknown most often by the names of thegreat leaders among them, MangasColoradas, Mangus, Victorio, Geron­imo, and the great woman warrior,Lozen, who travelled with Geronimo'slast resistance group. This last group toresist the invasion were no more thantwenty-five people but it required fiveyears and up to five thousand armytroops to vanquish them. They demon­strated the power inherent in their nat­ural adaption by surviving and dis­appearing up over the Mogollon Riminto the mountains where Europeansriding grain-fed cavalry horses had dif­ficulty following. The headwaters ofthe Three Rivers, and especially the GilaRiver headwaters where Geronimo wasborn, proved a natural fortress againstthe invaders. The preservation of thenatural beauty of the area today can betraced to the Apache resistance. Thearea was one of the last to be colonizedby Europeans and then only sparsely.

Francisco Benavides led the firstEuropean entry into the high country inthe early 1880's. He settled at the spotwhere the village of Reserve exists nowon the San Francisco. This began theera of Spanish village cuI ture and sheep­herding in the mountains. In the 1890'sthe Texans began to invade with greatherds of cattle which overgrazed theland. This was the period of the openrange that closed in 1924 with the finalextension of the U.S. governmentpower out into this country-ForestService, BLM and barbed wire.

In the early 1970's another invasionbegan; not one of conquest but atrickle of refugees from industrialcivilization. Small groups, individualfamilies and individuals live dottedaround the Three Rivers. Some ownland and some do not. At Mimbres Hot

Rim, starts the Sonoran life zone. Onebegins to see the century plants, theyucca with the tall spires, and nopalcactus growing much larger than in thepinon-juniper zone. There are alsoringtail cats, javelinas and coati mundisthat are not generally seen higher.

The Rim is a barrier reef against thesouthern desert but human society haslong traversed it. Human habitation inthe area reaches into the distant past,~nd village culture existed here as re­cently as seven hundred years ago witha population density much greater thanexists in 1982. The village culture wasthat great era now generally termedAnasazi, and called Mogollon inSouthwest New Mexico and Hohokamin central Arizona. This era whichended in the 1200's was a part of thegreat "Plumed Serpent" culture thatspread as far as the Valley of Mejico(Mexico City) to the south and to MesaVerde in the north . Trade goods came infrom both coasts. A major thorough­fare ran from the Valley of Mejico toCasas Grandes, Chihuahua; up the RioGrande past Santa Fe to the trading cen­ter of Taos pueblo. Another ran fromCasas Grandes to Alma, NM where itmet a route coming in from the Phoenix­Tucson basin and then continued northup the San Francisco, over the LittleColorado River divide to Zuni, then toHopi and on to Mesa Verde in South­west Colorado.

This great population was the classicKiva culture. Beautiful mimbres pot­tery and the stacked, pueblo style vil­lages were the hallmarks. The diet ofcorn, beans, green chiles, squash andvenison is the same ecological adaptionthat exists today. Because of theiradaption to the natural harmonies, tensof thousands were able to live here inan area where ten might be found to­day. In Catron County which coversmost of the upper San Francisco water­shed, it is estimated that in excess ofthirty thousand people existed wherenow less than three thousand peoplelive in the entire county and these onlyby virtue of the fact that survival sup­plies are shipped out from the cities bydiesel truck. One cannot walk any­where in the Three Rivers area without

by William Koethke

MOGOLLONHIGHLANDSREPORT

The Mogollon Rim country stretches from the Black Range; fifty mileswest of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, to central Arizona, fifty milessouth of Flagstaff. The Rim is a huge escarpment, a piece of the earth liftedup sometimes thousands of feet above the desert to the south. The MogollonRim is the separation line between what is sometimes called the Great Basincountry, the semi-arid desert regions of the inland western U. S., and thedesert to the south.

On the eastern end of the Rim, insouthwest New Mexico there are threeadjoining watersheds in which peopleare beginning to get together to livewith the Earth. These watersheds aredrained by the Mimbres, Gila and SanFrancisco rivers. The Mimbres drainsinto the eastern side of the continentaldivide and the San Francisco drains intothe Gila which meets the ColoradoRiver near Yuma, Arizona.

The upper Mimbres is not now inhab­ited by people, most of it being nationalforest. The Gila highlands is uninhab­ited, being national forest and the Gilaand Aldo Leopold Wildernesses, thelargest temperate zone wilderness areain the U.S. The San Francisco is inhab­ited in places up to its headwaters justinside the Arizona border above Al­pine, AZ.

In this unique region of the ThreeRivers one can travel from the Sonorandesert life zone to the alpine life zoneabove tree line in less than thirty miles.From the grass area above tree line onedescends into the spruce-aspen zone. Inthe Southwest, life zones are divided byelevation and the amount of rainfall isgreatest in the higher elevations. Here inthe desert one can go up vertically andmeet the same life zones that one couldby going north horizontally thousandsof miles.

The spruce-aspen zone breaks intothe ponderosa pine zone at roughly8,500 ft. elevation. The ponderosamixed with firs and scrub oak is gener­ally open country. Each life zone has itscharacteristic set of plants, birds andsmall animals that like to live togetherin that kind of climate. Large animalssuch as bear, deer, and elk seem to pre­fer the higher ponderosa and the spruce­aspen zones, while mule deer will alsolive down as low as the edge of andsometimes in the Sonoran zone. Ante­lope will live even up to the spruce­aspen zone if they can find country thatis open enough for their needs.

The ponderosa zone breaks roughlyat 7,000 ft. and then the pinon-juniperzone begins. This zone is even moreopen in terms of the density of the trees,and grasses and sage grow well. Atroughly 5,000 ft. going south off the

,....-------------------------------""""I"----------------r-~......~~...-.. ...........---.~ .....~4 CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE

CANAL (Continued from Page 1)

sump. Having seen what has alreadyhappened to the Trinity, North Coastpeople fear that the wild Eel and Klam­ath Rivers will be tapped next to quenchthe ever growing southern thirst.

• • •While the Peripheral Canal debate

can be exclusively portrayed as a north­south water war, the truth is more com­plex. Not everyone in Southern Cali­fornia benefits from water diversion.Strange as it may seem, Los Angelesresidents have for the past 40 years beensubsidizing the water used by agricul­tural and development interests inOrange, San Diego, and Kern counties.The prestigious California Water Atlashas estimated that, from 1942-72 alone,Los Angeles received only 8% of theColorado River water that it wasentitled to from the Metropolitan WaterDistrict which services all of coastalSouthern California. That amounted to

a whopping $335 million, subsidy toOrange and San Diego counties.

The same has been true for Phase Iof the State Water Project. Since 1972,Los Angeles has subsidized Kern countyagricultural interests-primarily ownedby oil companies like Getty, Union,Shell, Tenneco, etc.-to the tune of$240 million to grow such dietary "sta­ples" as cotton, almonds and pistachioson 250,000 acres of reclaimed desertland. Coincidentally, the Los AngelesTimes-Mirror Corporation-the pri­mary media source in Southern Califor­nia-owns substantial acreage in thisarea.

The subsidy has worked this way.Ever since Owens Valley days, urbanLos Angeles residents have been scaredinto voting for new water projects onthe basis of allegedimpendingdroughts.Once the projects have been built, how­ever, the water never seems to beneeded. Always there has been an "un­expected" surplus which has been con­veniently siphoned off by developmentinterests at cut-rate prices. To this dayLos Angeles people passively pay 23%

of the water costs of the MetropolitanWater District but receive only 2% ofthe water. The difference is literallygiven to agricultural and developmentinterests outside LosAngeles for simplythe cost of delivery. In 1980, for exam­ple, one half of the entire yield of theState Water Project went to the KernCounty Water Agency. Nearly 80% ofthat water went to a handful of oil­agribusiness companies with Los Ange­les people picking up 37% of the cost.

The proposed Peripheral Canal is cal­culated to further expand the StateWater Project from 2.3 to 4.3 millionacre feet, annually. The oil companiesand the directors of the MetropolitanWater District-many of whom havefinancial interests in areas that wouldget this new SWP water-are stronglybehind this expansion. They are spend­ing millions of dollars to convinceSouthern Californians that they needmore water. However, John Burnham,recently retired chief economist for theMetropolitan Water District, has pub­licly been challenging his former bossesby saying, 'There are three reasons for

voting against the Canal: 1) We don'tneed it, 2) We can't afford it, and 3) Wewon't get the water anyway."

Part of Burnham's opposition sternsfrom the fact that the cheap energy con­tracts negotiated by the SWP in the1960s will soon expire. Even withoutthe Peripheral Canal package, SWPenergy costs to Southern California willtriple by 1985 and increase ninefold by1990. If the Peripheral Canal is built,$1200 a year water bills for SouthernCalifornians won't be out of the ques­tion.

Additionally, the Peripheral Canalpackage will increase the amount ofenergy that SWP uses from 6 billion to11 billion kilowatts, annually. This willbe roughly 20% of all the energy con­sumed in the state. Besides increasingwater costs, this energy drain .will sub­stantially raise everyone's utility bills inorder to pay for the new power plantsthat will be needed.

• • •

The future of agriculture is also in-

CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE 5

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ance and harmony to the HigMountain people. The Father Sun'shines on the Mother Earth andthe Grandmother with the maleenergy of fire creates food for theyoung as she teaches them eachmorning. All around they seegrasses, trees, herbs and creaturesliving peacefully in the morningsilence. The sheep in the corral arequiet. In the. shade built in thesheep camp stands a square ironframe that had once been part of abed, and stretched on this loom isthe beginning of a beautiful woolblanket. They feel that nothingmore is necessary but the timelessharmony of the web of livingthings in which they live-Dine,the People.

contained thousands of Dine. At thattime the HTC led by Chairman AbbottSekaquaptewa passed Ordinances 23and 24 which declared a total stoppageon building shelters in the Hopi portionof the IUA and ordered that furtherlivestock reduction and elimination be­gin immediately. Beginning on the 19th,livestock roundups of Dine herds pro­ceeded for the next three days untillawyers of the NTC went into court andgot it stopped based on the fact thatOrdinances 23 and 24 were worded toapply with discrimination to only theJUA portion and not to the whole Hopireservation. This strategy of the HTCremains suspended but could be reinsti­tuted at any time the HTC chooses toinstate new ordinances that would passthe necessary legal tests.

This may not happen. A new chair­man has been elected to the Hopi TribalCouncil. Ivan Sidney, the new execu­tive, is not Mormon and is said to bemore open-minded toward traditions.Grandfather David Monongye feels op­timistic about Ivan but takes a waitand see attitude.

Roman Bitsui is optimistic also aboutthe new HTC Chairman. Bitsui sees thepossibilities of the two tribes cooperat­ing in helpful projects in the JUA, usingthe Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabili­tation Act passed in 1950 after Dinewere found starving in some areas of thereservation.

Motion continues in the Navajo Tri­bal government which may change thatCouncil's strategy toward the reloca­tion. The primary election for tribal of­ficers will occur this summer and atleast three persons have already enteredthe race against Peter McDonald. Ofthese three-Peterson Zah, WilbertWillie and Jack Jackson-Jackson isspeaking radically in favor of traditionsand traditionals.

Through it all, the People at BigMountain continue a timeless patternof life in the face of the threat of reloca­tion, which to them means death. Theydo not intend to go anywhere.

Pauline Whitesinger, one of the BigMountain Elders who lives on a mesaabove Sweet Water Spring says, "In ourtraditional tongue, there is no word forrelocation. To relocate means to moveaway and never be seen again."

curred on this swap. Roman Bitsui, na­tive of Big Mountain and Vice-Presi­dent of the Hardrock Chapter of theNavajo Tribe (the chapter that coversthe Dinnebito Wash-Big Mountainarea) points out that the 16 parcels aremostly prime areas of land, many withgood springs, arable ground and manycontain graves of Dine. The 21 sq. mi.of Big Mountain would not containmany of the camps ofThe People on thelower slopes (including some of the im­portant elders) and would not containSweet Water Spring on the southwestside of Big Mountain.

Leon Berger who was the staff execu­tive of the Relocation Commission hasnbw moved over in sympa.thy with thec use of the relocatees. He is now work­ing as an assistant to the Navajo TribalChairman Peter McDonald, as the di­rector of a special task force on the relo­cation dispute.

The Grandmother sits on theearth in front of the fire beforesunrise preparing the morningmeal. The stacked rocks whichform the fireplace opens to theeast from which, what she refersto as Father Sun, will rise. Leaningagainst the fireplace is the vener­able fire stick which is used toscrape coals under the skillet forcooking. Another slender andaged stick rests nearby which isused to turn the fry bread in thepan. As she ladles out the sheepgrease and it sputters in the hotpan, the Pinon Jay voices a morn­ing call and Father Sun begins tolook over the mesa far to the east.

Everything is in its place of bal-

Out on the land the situation contin­ues to deteriorate. Because of PL 93­531, new hogans cannot be built nor canold ones be renovated. The small sheepherds, reduced by PL 93-531, still can­not support families and other sourcesof survival are very slim. But, ThePeople endure steadfast.

On April 18, 1981, the schedule con­tained in PL 93-531 gave the Hopi Tri­bal Council administrative and policecontrol of the portion of the JUA thathad been assigned to them and whicho

then there is the legal government thatgoverns the Joint Use Area, the Navajoand Hopi Indian Relocation Commis­sion. This quasi-governmental body isled by three presidentially appointedcommissioners who head a body thathas created its own administrative lawsand has its own police force, judges andcourts. But of course no U.S. citizen,Hopi or Navajo, in the JUA has evervoted for this government set up byCongress in PL93-531-because therehave never been any elections!

• • •

In this nightmare of bureaucracy, theDine, supported by the traditionalHopi, remain steadfast against reloca­tion. One recent event in the drama wasan offer by Senator Barry Goldwater,with concurrence of then Hopi TribalCouncil Chairman Abbott Sekaquap­tewa, to swap 16 parcels of Dine land(32 sq. mi.) for 21 sq. mi. of Big Moun­tain. To date no movement has oc-

Sooner or later the expansion of hy­draulic society has to stop. Perhaps,for a time, cheap labor-in the garmentindustry, restaurants and the fields­can compensate for the loss of cheapfossil fuel energy. But at what politicaland social cost? In the long run South­ern California's hydraulic society can­not be sustained. All Californians haveto begin-if there is to be a sustainablefuture-to live within their bioregionalmeans. This involves a different ac­counting than hydraulic economics canoffer. Our real budget is the naturalfertility of the places where we live andthe June vote on the Peripheral Canaloffers all Californians an opportunityto chart a new direction.

production in the estuary. The agri­business answer to that problem is todam and divert the Eel and KlamathRivers and use that water to flush outthe estuary. The hydraulic process,once started, goes on ad infinitum..

The silence is broken by one Bilangaana [anglo1word-Relocation.Relocation is a threat contained in Public Law 93-531 passed by the Congressof the United States-very coincidently, after the U.S. Geological Survey haddiscovered a possible 20 billion tons of high grade coal on Black Mesa andunder Big Mountain. The Law sets up a timetable for removal of The Peoplewhich is designed to end in the summer of 1986 with over 9,000 traditionalpeople gone from the land. As Jerry Mander reported in the fine article inthe "Bioregions" issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, very few have movedbut the steady pressure is on.

When Kit Carson and the U.S. Armyforcibly rounded up Dine to take themto captivity in Fort Sumner, thousandswho were not captured remained in thehomeland. Some families remained incaves on Big Mountain. They slaughter­ed the herds to avoid discovery andjerked the meat which they then storedin the caves with them for survival.These families and bands have nevertreatied with the U.S. Government norhave they surrendered, but today theIndependent I?iI1e Nation at Big Moun-

volved in the Peripheral Canal debate.Currently, agriculture uses 85% of thedeveloped water in the state. It does sowith no ground water management, noreclamation, no conservation. Agricul­tural water is so heavily subsidized byurban people, so cheap to the farmer,that there is no incentive to conserve.Additionally, profligate use of water iscreating alkalinity problems-whereevaporated salts are concentrated onthe surface of the soil-that now mustbe dealt with. This is the age-old prob­lem of irrigated farming on reclaimeddesert lands. The agribusiness "solu­tion" to this problem is to take evermore fresh water out of Northern Cali­fornia to flush away the salts as well asfertilizer/pesticide residues that accruefrom their type of farming. Along withmore water, agribusiness wants some­thing called the San Joaquin Drain. Itsfunction will be to flush the contami­nated agricultural water from the SanJoaquin Valley into the San FranciscoBay-Delta estuary. This will, of course,kill off the remaining fishery and farm

tain is surrounded by government hier­archies' and is threatened with extinc­tion.

It's difficult to imagine the confusion.There are the traditional Dine and thetraditional Hopi. There are the mission­ary culture Hopi and Dine. There arethe hierarchies of Dine and Hopi TribalCouncils. There is the BIA. There is thatthreat in Washington, in the East, and

BIGMOUNTAINREPORTby William Koethke

ments of the African peoples.The African governments survivethrough' the export of commodi­ties, from the revenues. Its mem­bers lead luxurious lives, theyequip and train their armies,they build jails. Even the educa­tional system is built in such away that it is an elitist educa­tional system. There are areaswhere 95 % illiteracy exists.

MH: What about the questionof hunger?

AM: There are now nearly 70million Africans on the breadline. Most of them don't get evenone meal a day. There are chil­dren dying, there are people dy­ing every day because of hungerwhile all around them is greenpasture. The resources are notbeing used properly.

An interview withAlem Mezgebe

Africa has lately been rele­gated to the back pages of West­ern newspapers-despite the factthat widespread famine and eco­logical crisis are daily mounting.Alem Mezgebe, AssociateEditor for New African maga­zine, recently visited the SanFrancisco Bay Area and PlanetDrum took the opportunity to behis host for a few days. In theprocess Alem-an Eritrean exilenow living in London-shared awealth of political and culturalnews. Particularly interesting isthe emerging view that much ofthl! current African tragedy isessentially institutional and ofWestern origin. In what followsAlem talks about the intolerantneo-colonial elite, the destructivedependence on foreign exchangeand the cash crop, export econ­omy, the role of African women,and Africa's rich culturalheritage.

6

,W ~IIMichael Helm: What is hap­

pening on the African continenttoday that is particularly signifi­cant? You've mentioned hunger,for instance.

Alem Mezgebe: Yes, as I saidin the November issue of theNew African, "Africa is in a mess'politically and in a shambleseconomically. Hunger is but agnawing reminder of the deep­ening crisis-the crisis thatstarted in colonialism. The alienpolitical institutions and institu­tionalized ideologies have nobearing on Africa's past system ofvalues and its people's needs."When independence came, Af­rican governments inherited allthe institutions left by the colo­nialists. Like bureaucracies, se­cret police, the army, Napoleon-

ic and English common law thatcontradicted the values, thedemocratic structures, the au­tonomous way of operating andrunning one's affairs from thevillages that characterized Afri­can history. They don't exist any­more. They're not being toler­ated by the governments, be­cause they feel they challengetheir authority. So they modeltheir governments on the Frenchsystem, the Portuguese system,the English system-all that hasbeen responsible for the deepen­ing crisis in Africa. The peopledon't have the weapons withwhich to solve their problems be­cause the people are on the mar­gin, whereas the governmentshave control over their mindsand the bodies and the move-

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I

II

MH: Africa is rich and yetthere is poverty, hunger andstarvation happening-perhapsyou could talk to the roots ofthat.

AM: The colonial slave tradewa~ very disastrous to Africa be­cause it caused a massive humanhemorrhage. The working adultpopulation was kidnapped andsold. So there were only the wo­men, the elderly and childrenleft behind to work on the farms.

MH: One question that's oftenraised in terms of the history ofslavery is the participation of Af­ricans in it- the playing upon ri­valries and hostilities in Africa byAfricans cooperating with thecolonial structure in terms of ex­ploiting slavery as an institution.Could you speak to that?

AM: I don't agree with that atall. I think it is an argument usedto soothe one's conscience. Therewere soldiers being sent to kidnappeople from the villages. Theywere not getting the cooperationof the people at all. Everywherethere were military raids and

by David Olesen

QUETICO- ~UPERIORREPORT

Ojibwe (or Chippewa). In a series of Today, the local economy is desper­battles and through fierce trading com- ately searching for a boost. The tacon­petition, the Sioux eventually moved ite (low-grade iron ore) mines have re­west to the plains, leaving the Ojibwe cendy laid off large percentages of theiras the dominant native culture. Most work force, and a new federal law haslocal bands have ended up as Canadian prohibited motorized access to much ofcitizens, with the Minnesota groups the Boundary Waters, as well ascentered on the Grand Portage, Nett changed the number and location ofLake, and Vermilion reservations. timber sales. Once-thriving resorts are

The native people played a leading being sold to "the Feds," who under therole in the region's first natural-resource new law are guaranteed "right of firsteconomy-the fur trade. For about 100 refusal." Loggers are clamoring for ac­years after the mid-1700's, the Canoe cess to timber along the wilderness per­Country was literally a highway for ex- iphery. Bumper stickers proclaim,plorers, traders, and voyageurs bound "Better Dead Than Fed"; "Keep thecross-continent in the service of the BWCA Open for Everyone"; "To HellNorthwest Company, Hudson Bay with Public Law 45-495!"Company, and other smaller firms. A group of local boosters are at­This has been the period of history most tempting to give Ely a renewed econ­romanticized and most often presented omic vigor. as "gateway to wilder­to tourists as "Canoe Country history." ness recreation." They seem to be suc-

The fur-trade era is not the "good old ceeding, slowly but surely. Winter tour­days" looked back on by the current ism is on the increase, making the recre­local, residents, though. Ely is an iron ation business a more steady sQurce ofmining town, as is Atikokan-without income.the mines their very existence would be Larger questions loom, as we looktenuous at best. Other local ommunities ahead a few years. Acid rain threatenstrace their origins and owe their present the region's sensitive (and alreadysurvival to commercial lumbering- naturally acidic) waters. Copper-

I live here on the edge of the largest formally-designated "wilderness" area first (early 1900's) for white and red nickel development is forecast, on theeast of the Rockies. A land of lakes, granite ridges and boreal forest stretching pine; today fol:' pulp species like aspen very edge of the wilderness area. Com-from Lake Superior (Grand Portage) on the east to the Rainy River on the we t; and spruce. Mining and lumbering are plete shut-down of the taconite mines innorth to Atikokan ("place of the caribou"-Ojibwe), and bounded on the south the region's economic backbone-wil- the face of low demand and stiff com-by a series of windin:;{ local roads and small communities, derness tourism, though important, in- petition may not be far off. The disposal

Names-a place ,t_ 'Start. This is a Superior-St. Lawrence River basin. So volves a relatively small portion of the of nuclear waste in the region's ancientland familiar t6~fgesteciallyin the we here live in a watershed that lies al- 'C ork f05ce. For the ion's "old- ~tl( ;'~ reme~ stable granite bedrock isMidwest, as the "~aoot;. Cou ry" . most entirely within Canada. ~. ~s" ~any o~ t~e enera fn ge~:in~ fre~.1en,t ~,ention in the press."Quetico-Superior," d t ,< Yet another bouf4~ry-lineasp' . "tP"FI slYand SlaVIC 1m . ell Rem a, IOn here makes .forary Waters." Canoe thiSL~19~.-eHrmft~.~G ir as or their counter' f }¥.iay's some strange e ~llows. Land pncesit is a virtual maze 0_ la es an ~ovingup fro~eso~h often rp,' es and I beri gJ! e ,t ltite for acr,age clJt tru Boundary Wa-tages, most easil trave sr~m. . e)lJ""Itl' t . ~ e Count a a ters art hig~ ~ If{C asing .. You.ngQuetico:'$"up lor because 0 :£~~tsPr~erv 'has been t cause woods folk fI flfeI!}Scl-ves'Vymg WithProvincial Park (Ontario) joi .J><JF'm.uch~fter ess and ru suCC;tsful pro~~a}§from Minneap-Superior Nati6ral Forest her 'The Bou dar Waf~ ~ Area oTis d Chica for a place to call homeBoundary Wat~s because here . e AW) as i i w of~(Or 6hd.-lfo e). The "reinhabitants"international boyndary follows th ele, as t@ be ~ mo~La~ ve often co~e to the area from else-fur-trade route ,.,est from Gran r- tij r ffiillfun alij"~f the coMi.nv here (as I didp traveled th i1dernesstage, over countl;ess lakes and porpg . fhe e if e fo recreation worked seasonally for

Boundary Welters is not an inappro- \)< re~~~cos%re~ f~f ec ~V· 'Rrstop liti$.l loca cam and 0 tft e~, graduallypriate name f~r.th~e..nd, if we look b~ ic~~rces.;;r~b94'der la es ~PbMin ~-a'P 'V'f . ~~s~s(neree:ff-round. Soyo.nd. the polztlcal b~'undary, s~~e "the so tA'ern ej1g~of h I, :igo and ' : ,lew(6f ~e' Idents. towar.dthiS IS a place th~t Is~~und~ry m ~, s etchif1g fr~ Y\las . g «i,' Ii.- .1:(' . - Id rn~ ,nB n'Vll1 ent~llssues ISmany more meamngfuL l~~rbltrary £~~ d ~~~W, and .,~ a . issues a ~ n . i~y tilt a owa t~e alms of or-ways. The bedrock here IS :ne.fr ~he -tlti '~. ~ eco~d~ca' 0 un~4a ij' toanybnpi h<bli¥esne:csi ,~ ..... Iza~s . e ~flends ~f theso~thernedge of the huge ~r 5am~'f,~~er t _, ,mDined influ '"'" .!"'.,. . ~r~. ~ Boiln~ry"" s, m Mmneap~hs. YetShield (also called Canadian Shield), ve pata I s, tUf9--of-t!le- nt ry l~- AlIl\Sst~ . or husi f' t.. ourI}eIg s, the people we. lIve andthe glacier-sco~red grani~es and meta- b~ri~?, ~-9d wildfiile.s.upp,re II i~n), b ae t:fi'e.e.IJ9re Midwes~~s at l~~rd ofl_wo;:lc1-'""Wlth, are the durable Fmns andmorphosed sediments whIch are am'ong artdZwhlt'e spruce, cea:>t, fir,. aspen, the cu:ea ,a,nd batt:y trgyel to If eve ~Ofher locals whose parents came tothe oldest exposed suJJace roc~ in the £bin,;h."a'So;"and maple are themafor fo~ sumrri.~~r;:a~anoe tIliP.)lte-.g.~CAW work in the mines and lumber campsworld. It is ~ ruggejJ,an~sca.1'e sculp~ed est speciesrpere... The la.nd.shows~J.·f~ ric~- (i,ov). (d~in ihitf~ls) a;.!-~cts more visiters m~nyyears a~o. The~ have a deep com­by the glaclers,,,..and stili ,eboundmg ness as an eco~ystem mt~rface I~ ItS dl- tha~I1iY oth~f~Signatedwilderness in mltment to thiS b~autIfulland, too. V>!eslowly, 10,000 years after the stagger verse at'lima-Lt}ife Boret spe~es like J'thec6tjIntry.. these people, the Canoe see eye to eye WIth them on many IS­ing weight.,Pfice was lifted for the (st> lynx, I1'}06se, arlit lak'e11but mix to some .....Coun(rY is-a refuge, the last large intact su.es, and at ~he same time sympathizefar) last time. l Clegreewith whitetail deer, bobcat, and 1'-iece '{wild lake-and-forest country With the wIlderness advocates who

The water~ drain fr~m here in ~ pat bass. Essentially absent for the las~ 50 lellAn the U.S. To the local residents, it have preven~ed the ~illin? o! the Canoetern of lake-filled glaCIal troughs t~r<d- years or so have been former natives i$~he backyard-a pace to be enjoyed Country WIth fly-m fIshmg lodges,ing generally northeast to southwest. such as woodland caribou and wolver- ""'(;n weekends throughout the year, for clearcuts, and snowmobiles. There areThe waterways gain size rapidly as/they ine. The timber wolf here finds its las.r hunting, fishing, trapping, snowmobil- no simple answers-even as I write.move west from the Laurentian di ide. area of refuge in the entire 48 sPer- ing, boating, and canoeing. These peo- I find myself second-guessing the im­This is the Arctic watershed-Hhdson minous states. Wolves are comPletely pIe make their living in the mines, log- pressions that certain comments willBay via the Rainy-Winnipeg-'Nelson protected by tough federal laws, and ging operations, and towns along the convey:system-a fact little known even among populations are at or near capacity edges of the wilderness, and have a per- But It'S good country. Below zerothose quite familiar with the place. To throughout the area. spective of the region as a whole very this morning, good ice now on all thethe south, it is not far to the headwaters Native cultures inhabiting the region different from that of the summertime lakes and streams. Wolves were singingof the Mississippi, and a journey 100 at the time of first contact with whites canoeist or the winter skier from "the from the ridge across the lake last night,miles east puts a traveler in the Lake were the Woodland Sioux and the Cities." D

ation. When they go t.o the villageand talk about this thing, the vil­lage women don't understandthem because they look differ­ent. They now have an alienbody, although they talk thesame language.

MH: What about the urbanmen? Are the urban men morereceptive to a redefinition ofroles?

AM: No, African men are ex­tremely chauvinistic. They al­ways believe that the womanmust be kept where she is-to bea mother, a cook and nothingelse. This is the prevailing atti­tude. It needs a stiff fight, andonly the women can do it.

MH: What about the culturaledge of Pan-Africanism? Couldyou explain what's happening interms of the arts, literature in Af­ica today, that we should beaware of.

AM: Yes, that's my f~vorite

topic. Africa is very, very rich inthe arts. It's also very rich in lit­erature. But, what is literature?People think in terms of Shake­speare because he wrote, butthere is also another aspectand that's oral literature. It's apity that the West has lost itsstorytellers.

MH: Has anybody attemptedto capture the African oral tradi­tion in print at all?

AM: Many Africans have triedthat and many non-Africans­ethnologists, anthropologists.You find that in African Studiesprograms in the West. The thingis, until recently and even now,if you don't speak any of theEuropean languages, like Eng­lish or French, you're not sup­posed to be civilized. So Afri­can people in the urban areasare not interested in what's beingdone around them-the treas­ures they have in terms of cul­ture, customs, traditions. Theyreject them. It's a pity becauseall our history is oral history­which many people think is nottrue history. But it is. Instead ofwriting it, they memorize it andthen they pass it from one gener­ation to the other.

MH: Much like the poetic tra­dition used to be.

AM: That's right. That's whythe old folks in Africa are calledwalking libraries. They knowquite a lot about their history.These are now being neglected.There is no conscious effort bythe African government to pre­serve and record these oral tradi­tions. They are dying out as a re­sult. It's the most importantthing that could be done andshould be done.

MH: In terms of literature,which African writers should webe aware of? Have they beentranslated?

AM: There are many. Theydon't even need a translationbecause most of them write(laughter) in English or French.There are people like Ngugi waThiong'o, who's one of the lead­ing writers in Africa at the mo­ment.

MH: Where's he from?AM: He's from Kenya. He was

jailed for a year without trial be­cause he saw that writing inEnglish was not serving his com­munity's interests, because theydon't know the language. There­fore, he started to write inKikuyu, which is one of themajor languages spoken inKenya. What Ngugi did was re­capture the Mau Mau uprising.That was a nationalistic move­ment·-it was wrongly calledMall' Mau. It was really calledthe Land and Freedom Army.There are still survivors of thatliberation struggle. They arebeggars now; they didn't get rec­ognition, whereas the colonialcollaborators are in power nowin Kenya. So what Ngugi did waShe went to the community andtalked to the people who partici­pated in the war and establisheda center for them. He, and otherpeople, started to give them les-

(Continued on Page 14)

CIRCLES OF CORRESPONDENCE 7

peculiarly Western in democ­racy. In Africa, for instance,people dialogued-democracymeans getting your ideas, yourmessage across by discussing, ar­guing, debating-and then cometo a general consensus and actaccording to that consensus. Hu­man rights were there. Maybethe phrase didn't exist, but peoplewere not prosecuted for believ­ing what they did, for exercisingand professing their faith, wor­shipping their gods-whateverthey wanted to do. It was takenfor granted that you were a hu­man being with all the rights andresponsibilities that accrued tothat particular society.

MH: Are you referring to tri­bal units throughout all ofAfrica?

AM: Yes, there is no persecu­tion because you believe in some­thing. There is all this palaver.Before some action is taken, peo­ple in the villages sit down withthe elders and talk and arguetheir·points. Everybody actedaccording to that. Because whenyou elect your elder it's becauseyou know that person is not go­ing to let you down-he hasyour interest at heart. So theywere not antagonistic forces.This is the system on which theylived. Now, there is enough rawmaterial of that tradition tomold new institutions, based onthose democratic, human institu­tions and customs that existedbefore.

MH: Could you talk a little bitabout African family structure,particularly women? I'd be in­terested in what you might haveto say about African women inthe context of women's libera­tion.

AM: I think the woman ques­tion in Africa is very, very im­portant. But we don't have tolook at the African society fromthe point of view of the Westernwoman. That's wrong, becauseAfrican women, for example,look at the problems of circum­cision and infibulation from adifferent point of view. It's veryimportant to find out how it fitsin the cultural pattern of the peo­ple, and all these questions canonly be answered by the peoplewho practice it.

But, on the whole, African wo­men are oppressed because theirrole is secondary to that of a man.In the countryside it is a fact thatthere is a division of labor. Thewoman is productive-she workson the farm. The man is workingon the farm-he's not idlingaround while she's doing the job.There is a myth that many peoplenow believe-that the woman ishard working and the man isnot. What makes her task harderis that after working on the farmall day she has to come home andcare for her family, which meanscooking and washing and thechildren and so forth, which isan additional chore. This is howit has to be seen. Since the Afri­can male villager has not beentrained to share those chores,you cannot go around and makehim change his mind or his atti­tude towards the woman. Youcannot even go and agitate forwomen's liberation to that wo­man because it is outside herscope and understanding.

MH: But, does that meanchange isn't possible or desir­able?

AM: In order to change some­thing you have to first under­stand the mechanics-you can­not just go ana-use a jet engineon a Volkswagen car.

MH: What about urban Afri­can women? How do they differ,if at all, from rural Africanwomen?

AM: They overdo it. They be­come too Westernized in relationto their society. They are tooWesternized in the way theydress and the way they talk andthe way they behave. It is verycounterproductive for what theywant-that is equality and liber-

OIl:;

..0c~::JoVlco>>­uCIIIZ

MH: lt's more the economicand social structure that creates"too many" people?

AM: That's right, because thepopulation of the world has beenincreasing all the time and yetpeople are able to feed them­selves and have something in ex­cess to exchange for other com­modities. So people cannot con­vince me by saying that there aremore people than there is food.That's not the problem. Theproblem is more structural. Theinstitutions that are now in exis­tence. in Africa do not representthe needs and the aspirations ofthe people. Therefore, there isfamine and crisis at the presenttime.

MH: What are the alterna­tives; what should be done?

AM: The alternative is this.Either we perish-following thepattern we are following now, orwe have to look at t~e problemof Africa differently. We have toquestion the exIstence of struc­tures. We have to question thepolicies of our governments. Wehave to challenge them to createthe necessary atmosphere for adiscussion on what Africa shouldbe, what pattern of developmentit should follow. The groups plan­ning the development programsnow are foreigners who have noknowledge of Africa. They sitdown and they say, "Oh, youhave tremendous hydrologicalresources-if you divert thiswater this way or that way, youget electricity, you can irrigatethis and that." But the peoplewho are directly concerned, thelocal population, are not con­sulted and they know the landbetter. Of course they need elec­tricity- but not at so high aprice that in a few years they'llbe completely uprooted fromthat region, because this newneed has been introduced. Peo­ple have to be able to participatein decision-making from the vil­lage up to the central govern­ment, which is not happening.There are only the bandits in thecapital cities, from the Presi­dent down to the bureaucracy,saying, "This is the way it's goingto be." If you challenge that,then you are an enemy. You areshot or imprisoned.

MH: Which is one of the rea­sons you're in exile now?

AM: Yes, I'm not the only one.There are thousands of Africansnow living in Europe and Amer­ica and elsewhere because theycannot exercise the democraticright to discuss and make sugges­tions on how to improve the lotof the people.

MH: Could you speak to thewhole notion, that's very preva­lent in the West, about demo­cratic institutions, principles,human rights somehow beinginherently' inappropriate toThird World, undevelopedcountries?

AM: Well, I don't agree withthat because there is nothing

Alem Mezgebe

MH: Can you speak to the re­lationship between hunger andenvironmental destruction' of Af­rica as it relates to the monocul­ture?

AM: As I said earlier, the landhad been used to produce cashcrops for exports upon which theeconomy of many African coun­tries, if not all of them, depends.The forests have been chopped inorder to export pulp and timberand so the desertification processis accelerated. You must haveseen pictures in the films of hun­gry people in the Sahel dying.That's also the product of the di­version of rivers and the over­exploitation of the land to pro­duce these cash crops. The peo­ple have to abandon their vil­lages .and regions to move fur-

ther south and leave the land be­hind. And the Sahara Desert iscreeping southwest every day ofthe week. You know, peopleknew-in the rural areas theystill do-how to use the land.They have a bioregion. Theydon't abuse the water. Theydon't abuse the soil. They don'tabuse anything at all. Theyknow when to plant and when tocease planting, because theyused to have surpluses in theirharvest. But this is not happen­ing now. There is mass exit to theurban centers, because that's theonly place where they can getwork or heat or food. So you findmillions of beggars in the urbancenters. People who were proudbefore-being farmers, produc­ing food for themselves and theirfamilies and their communities.Now, Africa is importing hugeamounts of food in order to sur­vive. For instance, agriculturalproduction in Africa was ex­pected in 1980 to be in the regionof 20.8 million tons-a drop of12 % from the 1978 average.Some countries like Uganda whoused to be rice exporters are nowreduced to a peanut republic­they only produce peanuts. Thefigures also reveal that the Afri­can continent's imports of cerealsincreased by 9 % a year-from 2million tons in 1960 to 12 milliontons in 1978. Less food is now be­ing produced in Africa than wasgrown in 1970. The dependenceon imported foods and foreignexchange is also causing havoc tothe health of the people, becausethey don't get what they need.They get mostly wheat. It's notthe indigenous crop and people'shealth is affected. It's a cure thatkills. Wheat is not saving peoplefrom hunger, it's killing them.

MH: What's happening to thepopulation in Africa-is it grow­ing?

AM: It's growing at its normalpace, but the neo-Malthusiansare saying there are more peoplein Africa than there is food tofeed them. It's a theory that's be­ing used to promote contracep­tives and so forth in Africa,which I disagree with com­pletely.

they were using superior fire­power in their various nefariousactivities. Of course, in everysociety you find people who co­operate with the enemy. Thereis no doubt about that. But to saythat the Africans contributed tothe slave trade is absolutelywrong, it's not historically sub­stantiated at all- bec,ause theslave trader doesn't care who'sthere as long as he gets the mus­cles that he can exploit to bringhim new wealth. So that's abso­lutely untenable as an argument.

When we come to the colonialtimes, the slave trade hadreached a saturation point. TheNew World, as they called it,was now working according to adifferent rhythm. Wealth wasbeing produced and naturallyslaves were not in a position tobuy commodities that were be­ing manufactured in the indus­trialized world at that time. Sothey had to abolish slavery and

·then turn Africa into a mono-culture continent producing rawmaterials and commodities likepeanuts, cocoa, cotton, and min­erals like iron, copper, dia­monds, and what have you. Butthere was only a limited scopefor African participation. Therewere millions of people whowere outside that economy.

MH: That's still the economythat exists.

AM: That's still the economythat exists and that's connectedto the problem of hunger. Be­cause the soil is being abused. Informer times you could produceI don't know how many tons ofcotton per acre-now becausethesoil has been overused you haveto expand the acreage in order toproduce and get what they callforeign exchange for their com­modities. I always ask, "Why dowe need that foreign exchange?"Our policies have to change-wehave to produce enough food tosustain ourselves and then beselective in our development pol­icies.

MH: Foreign exchange is usedby the infra-structure that wastrained and created by the colo­nial era. The army, the bureau­cracy, etc., become a class essen­tially that enjoys neo-colonialprerogatives in the context of na­tionalliberation. Would you saythat's accurate?

AM: Yes, you see, you're rightbecause now the presidents livein palaces. Not in palaces left bythe colonial power-they had tobuild new ones. That" means for­eign exchange with which to im­port furniture from Europe,marble from Italy, telephone sys­tems, television-everythingthat's in the West. None of thepeople benefit from that exceptthe new class-the elite. The for­eign exchange is used to create anew army to protect those priv­ileges. I can give you a wholecatalogue of examples. Theyhave prestige projects, huge in­dustrial plants that are workingunder capacity, and the productsare not even exported because noone wants them in the West­they are not high quality. Thepeople cannot buy them be­cause they don't have the cash;they're not in a market economy.But the elite just wants the pres­tige of big projects. Instead ofhaving health centers through­out the villages they prefer tohave one or two prestige hospi­tals in the urban centers. Theyopen one or two big schools inthe capital cities and in the vil­lages there are no schools. Theydon't have textbooks, they don'thave pencils, they don't haveexercise books. So all the moneythat comes in is used to cushionthe needs of the ruling elite.

Photos compliments of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group

by tv

Monday morning our first stop wasat Rex Rathbun's place which abuts thMattole's eroded banks, near the tribttary Mill Creek hatchbox site. Rex is 2

rakish-looking man in his sixties whostaunchly supports the salmon projeclHe, and his wife Ruth, have generouslallowed the Salmon Support Group t<use their ample kitchen area as a meeting place and message center. Addi­tionally, the eyeing facility-which iswhere the fertilized eggs are carefullynurtured for about a month until youcan see a dark eye develop within theyolk-is also on the Rathbun'sproperty.

Rex, a somewhat fatigued GaryPeterson, and I walked over to theeyeing tray. Gary had just returnedfrom a benefit for Mattole salmonenhancement put on by the Grateful

provement work and the determina­tion of appropriate hatchbox sites.Both of these groups are working inclose conjunction with Fish and GamE-which is legally responsible for allhatchery operations in the state. Fishand Game is providing both technicalassistance and financial support for trsalmon enhancement work that is be­ing done, This past year DFG, at thebehest of Assemblyman Doug Boscoand Resources Secretary Huey John­son, allocated a combined total of$75,000 to the Salmon Support Grouland Coastal Headwaters. In addition,local landowners have generously previded access rights for stream surveysand hatchbox sites, and local timbercompanies nave cOiltributed sigriifi~ ).cant discounts and donations of building materials. The president of theSalmon Support Group is a localrancher, Russell Chambers. The factthat new settlers,DFG staff, ranchers,commercial fishermen, farmers andlumber companies are all beginning tcwork together is itself an excitingwatershed development.

Our heads buzzing with informa­tion, George, Peter and I-along withOmar, David Simpson's son, and oneof his friends-decided to do someprimitive ocean shore fishing. Becausea winter storm had washed part ofLighthouse Road away, we cut acrossa dense alder thicket and walked somethree miles to a rock formation thatjutted out from the beach. Using alderbranches, hook and line, old sparkplugs for sinkers, and mussels for baitwe managed to catch six perch andgreenling between us. While at it, weharvested thirty pounds of mussels aswell. Later, over mussel chowder,steamed fish, and other goodies, wemarveled at the gourmet quality of thlMattole's natural provision. Venison,feral pig, mussel soup, beat the spit Otof our usual dietary fare!

SALMON ENNATURAl

likely from their hatchbox programthan of silver salmon.

From previous conversations withLinn and David Simpson, we knewabout the difficulties of the first stageof their enhancement efforts-trappingripe salmon for their eggs and milt.Two years in a row their trap and weirhad washed out near the mouth of theriver. This year, for example, nature'sawesome unpredictability destroyedtheir trapping facilities in late Octoberwhen five inches of rain resulted in therampaging Mattole rising six feetwithin a few hours. Not wanting tointerfere with spawning salmon furtherupstream, Fish and Game had initiallyinsisted that the Salmon SupportGroup trap their fish exclusively at theriver's mouth. Knowing when, where,and for how long the salmon will runis, however, very difficult to predict.Additionally, many of the salmon arenot ripe when they first enter the riverand have to be stored in holding tanks,which generate further potential prob­lems, Since the Mattole is naturallyclosed to spawning salmon during lowwater between May and October-by a sandbar-and the river is nolonger deeply channeled, guessingwhere it will open up after the first sub­stantial storm has been a real gamble.Last year, in the midst of a 7.1 Richterscale earthquake, the Salmon Groupguessed wrong by a quarter mile. TheMattole's opening had moved that farfrom where it had been the previousyear. Then, too, as Linn House haswritten in City Country Miners, "Be­cause the river is high and muddyduring most of the king salmon run,nobody can be quite sure how long itlasts. Everybody, however, has opin­ions. One long-time resident has toldus that under the right conditions allthe salmon can be past in three nights.Another told us that there are alwayskings in the river until Christmas.Biologists shrug their shoulders."

This year, the Salmon Group againimplemented a contingency trappingplan. With the approval and assistanceof Fish and Game, gillnets were usedduring November to pursue seed salm­on. Two males and one eleven poundfemale king were caught in the lowerriver and transferred to a holding tank.Unfortunately, the Salmon SupportGroup reported, "After seven weeks inthe holding tank, the female and twomales died of fungus infestation. Thisprobably signifies some sort of naturallimit to the atnount of time that aspawning fish can be held."

As a third contingency plan, a roughdouble weir of fenceposts, chickenwire, and sandbags-with Fish andGame's exceptional approval-wasinstalled upstream near Whitethorn.This trap worked well. However, bymid-December the large part of theking salmon run had already passed, sothat only one female and two maleswere caught. From this catch some4000 eggs were taken, fertilized andtransferred to the primary "eyeing"incubation box near Petrolia. Theyremained there for nearly a monthbefore being transferred back upstreamto a hatchbox on Thompson Creek.

Interested in the community dy­namics of the salmon project, we learnthat the Salmon Support Group worksclosely with Coastal Headwaters Asso­ciation, headed up by Richard Giengerin Whitethorn. Coastal Headwaters isprimarily concerned with conductingstream surveys and fish populationstudies as these relate to habitat im-

the primary organizers of the SalmonSupport Group. Linn's interest in salm­on goes back to the days when he wasa fisherman in the Pacific Northwest .A philosophic, quiet man, Linn-whois also the author of Totem Salmon­described his enhancement efforts inthese terms. "I live here. I want to livein as vital a way as possible." A man ofwry aesthetic sensibilities, he aClded,"A future with abundant natural pro­vision would allow us to live a life withgrace and slack in it."'Linn also likes aworthy challenge. "Frankly," he con­fided, "I take particular pleasure in try­ing to do something which people saycan't be done." For, up until recently,most local people had pretty muchwritten off any possibility of bringingthe native salmon runs back.

Over an exquisite venison stew,Linn explained why an indigenoussalmon enhancement program ap­pealed to him and his cohorts. "Itmakes more sense to maintain a uniquestock that has already adapted to theMattole over thousands of years thanto introduce hatchery eggs from someremoved source. After all," he af­firmed, "salmon know more aboutsalmon then we do. They're fiercelynative." Polishing off the final touchesof a double liter of Mendocino blancordinaire-over anecdotes about thepleasures and pitfalls of rural living­George, Peter, and I finally drifted intoour. sleeping bags about the time thelast embers in the wood-burning stovebegan to wink out.

The next day was Sunday. Weawoke to the pull of freshly brewedcoffee. Nina, Linn's partner, was play­ing with Laurel, their melodically coo­ing baby daughter. Enticed by thepromise of a special breakfast treat, Westirred from our cobwebs. Three cupsof coffee, a visit to the outhouse later,we were ready for feral pig sausage,flapjacks and a couple of local eggs.

Linn had some pressing business toattend to, so George, Peter and I tookthe opportunity to bone up on someof the written details of the SalmonSupport Group's hatchbox program.From a progress report released to the

general community just that week, welearned that four hatchboxes had beeninstalled, with filters and water supplysystems, on local creeks. Two othershad been built but not installed due tothe short supply of native eggs. Heavyrains, sporadic runs, and high waterhad made it difficult to catch enoughripe females to stock all the hatchboxeswith eggs. During the course of the sea­son, the Salmon Support Group hadcaught 83 adult fish but of these, curi­ously, only two had been king salmonfemales. The Salmon Support Grouphad concentrated their efforts on kingsalmon because, unlike silver salmon,they proceed directly to sea within afew weeks of birth. Silver salmon staywithin fresh water for a full year beforemigrating to sea. Given the degradedhabitat of the Mattole, the SalmonGroup feels that a larger survival rateof returning native king salmon is

The native king and silver salmonrun in Northern California's MattoleWatershed used to be so prolific thatunrestrained residents were known toannually "spear them with pitchforks"as they came into the river each fall.No more. In the 1950s and early '60sthe Mattole Watershed became so de­graded that the native salmon are nowin danger of extinction. A number oflocal residents have-within the pastthree years-intrepidly decided to tryand do something about it. In the diceyprocess they are creating a potentialmodel for community-watershed workthat is simultaneously generating stateof the art scientific information.

While time heals most wounds-the second growth forest is comingback and the log-jammed river is slow­ly scouring itself clean-the exactingnative salmon population will, if un­aided by positive human intervention,likely be gone 50 years down the line.One of the groups that recognizes theneed for prompt action is the MattoleWatershed Salmon Support Group.Planet Drummers Peter Berg, GeorgeTukel and myself paid them a visitthis past February to learn more abouttheir salmon enhancement efforts.

Our first evening was spent withLinn House who, along with DavidSimpson and Gary Peterson, is one of

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m~~~ But, first some background. Mattole,:': according to local legend, means~~~ "clear water," a name derived, from the Indian population that ,

":~':~":~ used to live here before the onslaughtof European migration began in themiddle of the 19th century, While the

~~~ 65-mile long Mattole is currently noted::: by steelhead fishermen for its shallow,

,~~,~ meandering turbidity, old timers­according to local fisheries biologist

1~1 Gary Peterson-remember when, "It:.: was a cool, clear-running river with a~~~ relatively narrow, well-defined chan­::: nel, deep pools, and an abundance of::: streamside vegetation.":': What happened? Well, a number of:=:::: things. First off, the Mattole Water-:1: shed is one of the wettest in California',;1',; -annually receiving in its headwaters,', up to 144 inches of rainfall. Historic-,',::: ally, the mixed hardwood and ever-::: green forest that was here assimilated1~1 this downpour without undue soil ero­:': sion. However, .the advent of sheep111 and cattle ranching-primarily for':' wool and hides-in the early part of~:,~:1,:: this century began to change things.

Large stands of native tanoaks were cut::: to strip the bark which was an essential,',::: component of the local tanning indus-::: try. Other parts of the forest were:::':' burned and cleare,d to increase the','::: amount of available grazing land.111 This process continued until 1950 when':' less costly, synthetic chemicals and::: fibers eliminated the local tanning and

,'i'.~:::f wool producing economy. In themeantime, however, soil and slash

:i: which had previously been well-rootediii began to wash into the Mattole and silt

:

i,:i:i over th~ fragile spawning habitat salm­on reqUIre.

::: Concomitant with the decline of

,1,~,1 sheep and cattle raising, indigenous:': Douglas Fir trees became commercially::: valuable. Beginning in the late 1940s1:1 and extending through the '50s, rapid111 clear-cutting of Douglas Fir-with

,i:1:" al ttendant sOdil-erodiknglskid and access

ogging roa s-too p ace. Disastrous111 floods in 1955 and 1964 caused severe::: damage to the already weakened::: watershed. "Erosion processes initiated

,,:~,:~,,:~ . during these floods," according to JoeErwin of the Mattole Center for Sci­

,', ence and Education, "have continued::: into the present." The net result of all::: this has been that the Mattole Water-

,~:~,~ shed is today physically degraded andeconomically depressed, and the salm­

:.: on scarce. The natural provision whichiii has traditionally sustained the area-

:~,:~,:,i the forest and the fishery-has beenreduced to a minimum.

','

I::::.:,',

~;~:=:,',

~~~:::;:~.:.',':.:,',,',

iii,',:::

1.:.',',,',:::,',,',:::

,--------------,-------------,9

PROVISIONare harvested-all without making anyreal use of fresh water river systems.Besides undermining efforts to restorethe health of watersheds, nobody .knows what sea ranching will do to thecarrying capacity of the ocean forother species. The wild genetic diver­sity of the salmon population will alsobe reduced, by increased competitionfor food at sea, to the point where na­tive salmon stocks, in conjunction withdisdain for their spawning habitat, willvery likely become extinct. Then theultimate biologic danger will have tobe confronted. Should a disease infestthe few remaining salmon stocks, thewhole salmon fishery will risk extinc­tion. The problem with sea ranching,and to a lesser extent large hatcheriesin general, is that an abundant short­term harvest could turn into a long­term total loss. Enhancing native salm­on runs and restoring their habitat isthe only policy capable of guaranteeinga sustainable salmon population.

The next day on our way out of theMattole Watershed we stopped off atthe Mattole Center for Science andEducation in Honeydew. The center,run by Joe and Nancy Erwin, serves asa combination community meetingplace and data collecting agency. Joe,who was born in the watershed, seestheir efforts as part of the developingart of watershed restoration. They putout' a monthly journal, Pacific Water­shed Enhancement, which reports oninteresting developments, from North­ern California to Alaska, related toreforestation and salmon enhance­ment. Joe, a self-described "intellectualmidwife" and moderate, sees the Cen­ter and his journal as a forum wherenaturalists, professional fishery andforest employees, scientists, and inter­ested watershed inhabitants can ex­change information and views. He seesthe possibility that the Mattole Water­shed could serve as an ideal naturallaboratory where pioneer informationcan be generated. Regarding the salm­on program, he confided. "My deep~st

personal interest is that Nancy and Ijust like to catch healthy nativesalmon."

Heading back Highway 101 towardsSan Francisco, George, Peter and Ireflected on our experience. What hadstarted as an idea in a few minds sev­eral years ago was now generating intoa watershed-wide cultural force.Over a hundred people, directly andindirectly, are now involved in thesalmon enhancement effort. Given thatthe population of the Mattole Water­shed is estimated to be around 1800,that means that around 5% of the peo­ple who live there are participating.Though funding continues to be aproblem, and many unknown varia­bles could limit the success of the ef­fort, something new and exciting isdefinitely stirring in one weathervanewatershed in Northern California. AsDavid Simpson mused to us one even­ing, "It would greatly sadden me if Iwere to get up one morning and lookout over the Mattole and know that thesalmon were gone. Somehow, thesalmon and the health of the watershedare indivisibly involved in why Iwant to live here."

Update. A phone call to Petroliain mid-March brought good news.Gary Peterson reported that the Salm­on Support Group was exultant. Some27,000 silver fry in Mill Creek and3700 king fry in Thompson Creek hadhatched out! With luck, they would allbe migrating to sea within the nextyear. 0

For further information orcontributions contact:

Mattole Watershed SalmonSupport GroupP.O. Box 189

Petrolia. CA 95558

Pacific Watershed Enhancement$15/year

Mattole Center for Scienceand Education

P.O. Box 96Honeydew, CA 95545

tole's summer water temperaturessometimes reach a killing 820 F. Thepond will be built in the shade, fedwith Mill Creek water, and coveredwith wire mesh to keep predators­especially raccoons-from feasting onthe juveniles. When smolted the silverswill be released for their short 2.8 milesrun to the open sea.

David Miller asked Linn and Garyabout the Thompson Creek king salm­on hatchbox. They explained thatsome 3700 eyed king eggs were incu­bating there, though not without someanxious hours. The one female theyhad managed to trap had died in theholding tank in the middle of the night.Luckily she was "ripe" for spawning.Even though she had been dead forup to 8 hours, the eggs had been suc­cessfully removed and fertilized withthe milt from the two males. Millerexpressed astonishment and urged Linnand Gary "to write that up". Apparent­ly, the conventional wisdom was thatonce a female died, the eggs wereincapable of fertilization. The fact thatthe Salmon Support Group had beensuccessful after 8 hours would be ofgreat interest to fisheries biologistsand hatchbox operators! Linn andGary sheepishly smiled at each otheras if to suggest that being on the fron­tier of any discipline created conditionswhere one learned as much from one'smistakes as by following the rules.

David Miller, Bill Hill, and ChrisToole wanted to visit the ThompsonCreek site. We decided to break forlunch, before the trio departed, andtake in the slide show which Gary hadput together for the Grateful Dead con­cert. Rex volunteered Ruth's kitchenas the projection room. For the nexthalf hour we listened as Gary docu­mented various aspects of the water­shed as they related to the salmonenhancement effort. Bill Hill was par­ticularly excited by the graphic presen­tation and invited Gary to, "comeshow your slides anytime to the FishCouncil. We'll put you right on!"

~tandingout in Rex's front yard,before breaking up, we discussed therelative merits and dangers of large­scale hatchery programs. Bill Hillde ended them, arguing that they had

MATTOLE..WATERSHED

been relatively successful, at least inthe short run, in providing salmonstock for the commercial fishery toharvest. Bill suggested that the hatch­box program was at best an interestingadjunct to larger hatchery operations.Still, some of us felt that there weresignificant problems with this ap­proach. One is that hatcheries are es­sentially managed from pessimisticassumptions about the economic via­bility of restoring the natural habitatsthat would allow salmon to reproduceon their own. Logically, they lead tosalmon ranching at sea where habitatis essentially dispensed with, exceptfor the use of the ocean as a kind ofpasture. With this approach, a mono­cultural crop of genetically developedsalmon are hatched out in close prox­imity to the sea, fed in holding ponds,then released as smolt. Two to fouryears later, after fattening in the ocean,they return to their holding ponds and

run. Rex explained to everyone whathad happened. Essentially, the countyculvert-which ran under LighthouseRoad-had channeled the fast movingMill Creek winter runoff in such a waythat it had dug a ten foot hole at theculvert's base which returning silvershad been unable to jump. The county,feeling responsible, had subsequentlybridged the gap with several tiers oflarge boulders which we could now seefrothing in front of us. Rex indicatedthat plans were afoot to baffle theculvert this coming summer so thatfuture returning fish could rest period­ically while passing inside through itsswiftly flowing water.

Arriving at the hatchbox site, DavidMiller expressed satisfaction with itsconstruction. The hatchboxes werebuilt by local carpenters, AndreaCohen and Rhodes Hileman. Rhodeshad also contributed his welding skills,learned in San Francisco shipyards.Linn and Gary asked David Miller­since he had designed the hatchbox­about a water flow problem they werehaving. While not critical, the waterflow had been substantially reduced asa result of a flushing operation gearedto remove some siltation from thebottom of the hatchbox. There wasalso concern that a dozen or so alevin-a tadpole-like stage that salmonassume between the eyed and fry stage-had been prematurely flushed outinto the holding tray. What had thatdone to the 30,000 alevin still maturingwithin the graveled layers of the hatch­box? Miller explained that if the alevinhad been damaged the Salmon SupportGroup would by now be aware of itdue to the severe stench the damagedeggs would give off. Since there wasn'tany stench, he reassured everyonethat the alevin were probably alright.Linn, Gary and David Simpson alllooked noticeably relieved. Regardingthe water flow problem, Miller asked ifthe upstream intake source could pos­sibly be clogged or whether some airhad perhaps been pocketed within theplastic water lines? Since both of thesepossibilities had been checked, every­one stood around scratching theirheads.

While Linn checked the water tem­perature within the hatchbox to makesure it remained within the critical42-58 degrees that the alevin required,I briefly explored the steeply-sloped,Mill Creek terrain. John Vargo, an­other Salmon Support Group enthusi­ast, had generated on his own, self­taught hook, a detailed study of MillCreek's suitability for a hatchbox site.I confirmed with my senses the sub­stance of Vargo's study. The water wascool enough and relatively silt free.The creek bed contained abundantgravel of the 2-4 inch size that spawn­ing salmon and steelhead require. Inaddition, I could see that the denseriparian canopy which hovers over thecreek-consisting of alders, tanoak,and Douglas Fir, as well as an abun­dance of ferns- would provide suffi­cient shade to keep juvenile salmonidsadequately cooled during the summer.

The discussion moved to the MillCreek holding pond. It was scheduledto be built later that week and wouldcontain the silver fry which normallyhatch out approximately 50 days afterfertilization. The fry will be reared inthe artificial pond for their first year.One of the reasons that a holding pondwill be necessary for the juvenile sil­vers is that-due to absence of deeppools and riparian shade-the Mat-

ANCEMENT

Dead in San Francisco. Rex explainedthat the empty tray before us had beenused to eye some 3700 king salmoneggs that were now incubating in theThompson Creek hatchbox. I alsolearned that 30,000 silver salmon eggsfrom the nearby Noyo River-whichhad already been eyed there-had beenplaced in the Mill Creek hatchboxsome 600 yards upstream from wherewe stood. This decision-to use Noyoeggs, provided by Fish and Game, onMill Creek-was not without its con­troversy. Especially since the SalmonSupport Group is primarily committedto restoring native salmon to theMattole. Nevertheless, Gary ex­plained, the group had decided to use"foreign" eggs because native silverspawning on Mill Creek had becomeextinct due to a poorly planned countyculvert. Then too, a desire to test thehatchbox system and the shortage ofnative eggs this year had also figuredinto their calculations. The SalmonSupport Group had concluded thatintroducing Noyo silvers offered min­imal risk of fungus infestation, becauseboth the Noyo and Mattole have sim­ilar habitat conditions-even extend­ing to sandbars which close both riversduring low water between May andOctober. Using Noyo silvers will allowthe Salmon Support Group to estab­lish a new silver run on Mill Creek­which is near the Mattole's mouth­without interfering with native silversthat still spawn further upstream.

We returned to Rex's front yard andwere shortly joined by Linn Houseand David Simpson, as well as a con­tingent of interested fisheries peoplefrom outside the watershed. An infor­mation sharing meeting had beenpreviously arranged with David Miller-a biologist down from SimpsonLumber Company in Korbel-andBill Hill and Chris Toole of theHumboldt Fish Action Council. DavidMiller is the designer of the"down­welling" hatchbox which the SalmonSupport Group is using. It is designedto simulate the stream conditions­water purity, temperature, aeration,and protective gravel-required bynaturally hatching eggs. The hatchbox-a variant of one that has been usedsuccessfully in Alaska and BritishColumbia-is capable of increasingegg to fry survival five to ten timesover natural spawning, using a rela­tively small number of spawners.Since the Mattole salmon population isso diminished, hatchboxes are a rela­tively low cost interim way of main­taining the run until the natural habi­tat can be restored and the salmon,once again, propagate on their own.

In tandem we walked'up to MillCreek, stopping at the culvert sitewhich had hampered the native silver

put our efforts into contactingand encouraging landowners toparticipate in the CFIP program.

MH: About how many peopleare there in the cooperative?

YS: It varies. Last year therewere as many as 25 people whowere working with us. This year,it's hovering around 20; not allof us work at one time. Right nowwe have a crew of about 16people.

MH: Typically, how do you getthe jobs? How does that work?

YS: Some of the landownersare referred to us by the Depart­ment of Forestry. We work veryclosely with the local service for­ester for this area. The Depart­ment has a forester who is as­signed to this area, who workswith the landowners, and heworks with us in developing theprojects. The way that it typicallyhappens is that he refers a land­owner to us; the landowner con­tacts us and lets us know he wantsto participate in the program.One of the requirements for par­ticipation in the CFIP programis that the landowners have a re­source management plan pre­pared for their land, which de­tails the kind of soils on the land,the kind of tim ber that existsthere, what needs to be done interms of improving existing tim­ber stands or regeneration, eros­ion control problems, and so on.The management plans are in­tended by the program to be atool for the landowners. Some­thing which the landowner canhave and say "Okay, this is whatthe best use of this particulararea of my land would be in theopinion of the forester who pre­pared it."

MH: So you don't prepare themanagement plan?

YS:' We work with a privateregistered professional forester,generally, to prepare manage­ment plans for the local land­owners. If there's timber on theland itself, the forester is respon­sible for assessing the growth ofthat stand, stand improvement,that sort of thing. We generallydo a great deal of the work onerosion control and fisheries andwildlife habitat improvement.In several cases, we actually putthe plan together with input fromthe local foresters on the timber.So we help prepare the manage­ment plan and at the same timedevelop a project for a singlelandowner. It is then submittedto our local service forester wholooks at it, comes out and looks atthe land, and talks about whethermaybe we should have a littlemore pine and a little less fir. Theservice forester has generallybeen really good to work with.He's here, very accessible, andrealizes that there are specificproblems in this area for refores­tation. He's been more than will­ing to try new methods for insur­ing survival. One of our concerns,initially, was that the specifica­tions would be too rigid and froma centralized point of view. To acertain extent they are; for in­stance the project costs allowedare the same throughout theCoast Range, whereas obviouslythe costs of actual planting arenot the same throughout theCoast Range. But as far as actualplanting specifications are con­cerned, the regional offices haveenough autonomy to respond to asite's specific conditions. If theyapprove the project at that level,they send it on to Sacramento forfinal approval. At that point wecan start planning for a specificplanting season. In some cases,the landowners do their ownwork. But in most cases we do thework and the landowner contrib­utes 10% of the project coststhrough planting. This programallows for that 10 % landownercost to be covered in materials orservices. This means the landowners can plant a certain num­ber of trees to satisfy their portionof the planting cost and see whatis being done. It's an excellentoption, in that respect. It reallyencourages participation on thepart of the landowner.

rives its revenues directly fromthe sale of timber in our state for­ests. It's not a tax-supported pro­gram, doesn't come out of taxrevenues. It comes directly out ofthe profits of the state's timbersales. So it's taking the resourcethat belongs to the people of Cali­fornia, taking part of the profitsfrom that, and diverting it direct­ly into resource improvement onCalifornia lands. CFIP was de­veloped primarily because theylooked at timber projections forthe next 100 years in this state andrealized they were going to runout-have a severe timber short­fall. They looked at availablelands and realized that some­where between 40-50 % of thetimber lands in the state wereunder non-industry, non-publicownership, Le., small privatelandowners. This was generallyland that had been harvested,that had not been reforested, hadnot been taken care of in a waythat would provide timber for thefuture. Reforestation is such along term thing that most smalllandowners simply can't justifythat kind of economic invest­ment. So, because of that, thestate developed this cost-shareprogram in order to make the no­tion of reforesting one's land soattractive that landowners wouldbe hard put to turn it down. Theprogram in this area has beenwell received.

MH: What are the require­ments to be eligible?

YS: There is a 20-acre mini­mum lot size. The landowner hasto have at least 20 acres of landand it has to be capable of grow­ing timber. That's the reforesta­tion part of it. There is no acreagelimit on the soil conservationpractices or on fisheries practices.There is a maximum acreage of5,000 acres. Acreage is about theonly hard and fast requirement.The only other significant re­quirement is that you have toagree that you will not use thatland in a way that will be detri­mental to the timber that youhave reforested for a period of tenyears. In other words, if you re­forested your land and then de­cided that rather than have trees,you would rather have a vineyardthere, then you would have to

repay the state, with interest, forthe original cost of reforesting theland. That's a reasonable require­ment, I think.

MH: So, when the CFIP pro­gram came into being you de­cided to form a co-op?

YS: Right. We looked at thepossibilities in that program andrealized that it was probably theonly way that we were going tobe able to continue reforestationand restoration work within thisarea. There are no public landshere that you could contract thatkind of work on. It's almost allsmall ownerships with a fewlarger sheep ranches. So we gottogether and looked at the possi­bility of doing work under thatprogram. It seemed feasible to

aware of the problems and of pos­sible solutions, and had a stronginterest in continuing that work.Everybody who was involved inthat grant program has land orlives on land in this area. We areplanning to stay and are lookingat our future in this area, and atwhat the needs of the place are.So there was a strong interest incontinuing. Some of us also hadbeen involved with people fromother forestry cooperatives inNorthern California and Oregonand had an idea what might bedone as far as developing refor­estation work in the privatesphere, without grants, or with­out direct subsidy.

The State of California thatvery same year developed a pro­gram that was somewhat mod­

...".

area we have a very high annualrainfall, but it comes within gen­erally about a three-month peri­od. It averages 80 inches of rain,which is a tremendous amount ofrain, but it does not extend lateinto the spring and it does not be­gin early in the falL So duringsummer months we have that

very classic drought kind of cli­mate, very hot, very dry.

According to the oldtimers inthis area, there has been a fairlydramatic change in the patternsof summer fog, which in mostof the coastal region provides asignificant amount of precipita­tion. Fog drip, within a Redwoodplant community or a DouglasFir / Hemlock plant community,is very important. It providessummer moisture and helps con­trol fire. They're beginning tosuspect that the clearing of largeacreages of land effectively pro­hibits fog from moving inland,that it's the low pressure area thatis maintained beneath the forestcanopy that essentially draws fogin off the coast. If you eliminatethe forest, you create a landform that reflects a tremendousamount of heat-even throughthe evening-which repels thatfog from moving onto the land.So there you have a microclimatechange that also affects the possi­bilities of reforesting.

The absence of humus alsoleads to compaction of the soil.The soil is no longer loose and

. friable. The trees can't get theirroots down where it's beencleared for long periods of time.In a lot of areas we've alsotended to lose mycorrhizal asso­ciations and other soil microbialactivities that allow trees to takeup nutrients effectively. We'vealso lost nutrients. So there's awhole range of problems in­volved in trying to restore landsthat have been converted tograzing for over 30-40 years thatwe, in the beginning, weren'taware of.

MH: So you applied for thisgrant, got it, and formed a coop­erative?

YS: When the CETA grant ranout, we had a core of people that

• were very well-trained, were

PLANET DRUM MEMBERSHIP-$15/YEAR

An interview with Victoria StockleyPhotos by Paul Brigmann

NATURAL PROVISIONREFORESTATION

MichaelHelm: Vicky, how didyou get involved in starting up atree planting co-op?

Victoria Stockley: A number ofus actually got together andstarted the co-op. I had been liv­ing in the area for nearfy ten yearsand had become interested in re­sources use and what that meantfor this area. The older uses, log­ging and ranching, were failing.Then in 1978 there was a 12,000acre forest fire here. Th'at servedas a strong catalyst for people toget together and think aboutwhat needed to be done to im­prove the resources we had. Atthat point we developed a grantthat was funded for 18 monthsthrough CETA, which enabledus to replant about 100 acres with40,000 seedlings within the firearea. The grant was structured toprovide training and educationfor 16 people to do restoration'ork, including erosion control,

reforestation, and revegetation inthe fire area. The initial grantcontinued thru two plantingseasons.

MH: What kinds of trees didyou plant?

YS: Indigenous trees. We re­planted Douglas Fir and Red­wood, which were the nativeconifers destroyed by fire. I~ thethe process we learned a greatdeal about what it takes to refor­est land in this area. It's one thingto take productive tim berlandand cut it and replant it-you stillhave the soil, nutrients and soilorganisms that are necessary togrow trees. In an area like ours,which has been cut and con­verted to grazing land, thosecomponents of the soil necessaryfor regrowth are severely dimin­ished. That presented a wholeset of problems for us in our re­forestation efforts that weweren't even aware of when westarted. We didn't know that wecouldn't just go out and planttrees and then watch them grow.It became evident that there weretechniques we needed to learn,that there was a whole set of vari­ables that we needed to take intoaccount.

MH: Could you describe someof those?

YS: The loss of forest soil struc­ture is probably the most crucial-a loss that came about througha combination of erosion, whichtakes off the topsoil, and the factthat you no longer have a high de­gree of humus building up in thesoil; litter, needle fall, leaves,that sort of thing. Grasslands thathave been grazed do not producea tremendous amount of organicmaterial.

MH: What about climate interms of erosion?

YS: Well, this is an extension ofthat maritime climate, the North­west Pacific climate. We tend tohave most of our rain during thewinter months. In the Cazadero

In July of 1980 a pioneer reforestation program, geared to simul­taneously help the small rural landowner and replenish the forestsfor future generations, was started up in California. Since then, thislabor-intensive program-financed out of sales of public timber­has funded the preparation of management plans for 86,642 acres,reforested 9,337 acres, thinned timber stands on 4,991 acres, im­proved fisheries and wildlife habitat on 54 projects and implementedland conservation on 65 projects. Reforester Victoria Stockley haslived in Western Sonoma County for the past 10 years on an up-to­recently operating sheep ranch. What follows is a detailed discussionof how local people are cooperatively committing themselves to bothlearning from and caringfor the land in the Cazadero area.

10

RAISE THE STAKES, BOX 31251, SAN FRANCISCO 94131, USA

MH: How long have you beendoing this now?About how manyacres have you planted?

VS: Under CFIP, we plantedalmost 200 acres last year. It willprobably be about the same,maybe 250, this year, which isabout 12 projects. They average10 acres, but a few are bigger.

MH: What is a typical replant­ing day like, once you are actuallyon a site?

VS: It varies according to thetopography. We generally startwherever we can get access to thesite. Most of our projects are onlands that range from 40-60acres, and access onto these sitesis generally pretty good. We usu­ally can get close to the area thatwe are going to be reforesting.What it means is having thetrees there, the materials there,everybody arrives at 8 am. Theday before, one of the crew andI will flag the area that's going tobe planted so that everybody willhave an idea of the perimeter ofthe project. Then we'll go overwhat species are going in. Thenit's just a. matter of breakingdown into smaller crews of six oreight and delineating the area towork in. For those of us who havebeen planting for a couple ofyears it's a matter that we havestraight line organization, whereyou line up six or eight peopleacross a slope and then start put­ting in trees. The trees going in onan even 1O-foot kind of spacing.It's a matter of going back andforth across the slope or going upand down from the tops to thebottoms of slopes, depending onwhere you're starting from andhow steep the terrain is. What isinteresting, and what we're start­ing to do a little bit more of thisyear, is developing ways to cutdown the amount of time that wespend retracing ground; trying tovisualize how to go across a slopeand cover the area without wast­ing a lot of time walking over itwithout planting trees. In talk­ing to other crews who have beenworking, doing this kind of workin Northern California and Ore­gon for a number of years-someof them close to 10 years-yourealize that there's a tremendous­ly sophisticated kind of crew or­ganization for tree planting thatabsolutely cuts that wasted timeto a minimum. Talking to peoplein Forks of Salmon, we've learnedthey have developed these move­ments for making turns on slopeswhich are extremely well thoughtout. They can move a whole lineof people without anybody hav­ing to stop, without you being sofar ahead that you lose your abil­ity to space your trees, and thatsort of thing. That's somethingycu develop working with agroup of people over a long peri­od of time. We're just beginningto explore those rhythms andmovements.

MH: Typically, on a site, doyou have to do some clearing be­fore you do the planting?

VS: Well, we have a lot ofgrassland, a lot of timber landthat has been converted to grass.Grass is the predominant cover,and that means that we haveessentially two choices, eith­er we use herbicides-whichmost landowners find bothsocially and biologically unac­ceptable, or we hand scalp it­which means taking out aMcLeod or hoe of some kind, andphysically scraping the grassdown to mineral soil in an area ofabout 16 square feet-which is alot of grass. On a lot of our sites itmeans sending a crew ahead toscalp and then having a secondcrew come along and plant thetrees and put in the browse pro­tectors to keep the deer off, andthat in itself probably more thandoubles our planting costs. Ifyou're planting in an area that'srecently been cut which has noherbaceous cover or grass on it,you simply eliminate that stepand it's strictly a planting opera­tion.

In other cases, like what wehave in the fire area, there's atremendous amount of sprouting

hardwood. Where those areas aredense, where they become thick­ets or tan oak and madrone theyhave to be pruned back. This isone of the things that we havecompromised on with the De­partment of Forestry. We havefound that our best survival oc­curred when we interplanted inthat dense tan oak which pro­vides a lot of shade during thesummer. More moisture is pickedup from fog drip by the sprouts ifthe tan oak is left there for thefirst year or so. Our procedurenow is to partially prune, plantand then go back in once theseedlings are established andprune back the tan' oaks so theydon't shade out the conifers, rath­er than clearing out all thatbrush first and then planting.

MH: What about mortality;how many trees would you planton a lO-aereplotand what wouldyou expect in terms of actualsurvival?

VS: About 4,000 trees, and thesurvival would depend entirelyon the site. The site conditions sodetermine survival in this areathat you can have whole sets ofexpectations for different areas.Where we were interplantingwith tan oak on a site which isnorth-facing, isn't cxpOsed to the.harsher sun, we are getting up to90% survival. On south-facingslopes which have been convertedto grassland and are exposed,where there is clayier soil, we'relucky to get 20 %. In some cases,

we aren't getting any survival.Generally, that depends on thespecies, too. The low survivalrates are generally with DouglasFir. .

MH: What other trees do youplant besides Douglas Fir?

VS: We're planting redwoodsand, in the last few years, a sub­stantial amount of Ponderosa andSugar Pines. Simply becausethose converted grazing sites arenot capable of growing fir at thispoint. What we've done is to startplanting pine in those open areasas a nurse crop. The pine is a har­dier tree; it can survive the moredroughty summers and hotterweather. Those trees will be al­lowed to grow to a height wherethey can start producing a humuslayer and some shade. Our hopeis that on these sites the DouglasFir will be able to make it underthe protection of the pines. Ideal­ly, on these open, exposed sites,we would be planting oak, whichis the primary indigenous treeupon which succession is built.The whole climax forest that washere originally was based uponthe biomass and soil nutrientsprovided by the oaks. Black oakhas a fungus which is very bene­ficial to Douglas Fir. MaYbe one

of the things we should be doingalong that line now is plantingCeanothus as a first step, be­cause it is a nitrogen fixer, to pre­pare the soil. Then go to a hard­wood and finally to Douglas Fir.Right now we can't afford to gothrough these kinds of successivesteps. Planting pine is a shortcut.And I'm not convinced that it's areal wise shortcut. What we'redoing is introducing a dominantspecies into an area where ithasn't previously existed. Wedon't know what the conse­quences 'might be.

MH: What are the best thingsabout doing this kind of work?

VS: The best thing about thework is that you get done at theend of the day and realize thatyou've put in 250 trees that mightbe here 250 years from now. It'sreal work. It's something that youdo that is going to have a benefi­cial effect. That's satisfyingl It'ssatisfying to clear a logjam from acreek when you know that it willopen 2 miles of spawning groundthat wouldn't have been thereotherwise. It means that maybenext year two steelhead thathaven't been there for 50 years,will help to start a whole newcycle.

There's also a social aspectthat is satisfying in the work. It'san opportunity for people livingin this community to get togetherand work, doing someting thatwill be beneficial to all of us andour children, hopefully. It's also

work that takes place outside. It'sphysically difficult, but that hasits positive side and is made lessonerous because there is a groupof you doing it. The dangers are(laughter) falling down a lot. Mybiggest problem is I fall down alot. I've talked to planters inother, less steep areas, and theythink we're sort of crazy-be­cause we are working on mar­ginal land under conditions thatnone of them would considerworking under. If we were intothis work just for the bucks, wewould never plant the kinds oftrees sites that we plant. I mean,they are difficult, steep, and cur­rently inhospitable enough to in­sure you aren't going to makemoney off of it. We're lucky toaverage $5-6 / hr doing this work.We are buying, because we livehere, very expensive seedlings, inthe hope that the higher qualityof the stock will reduce the mor­tality. We're also paying forbrowse protection covering forevery sxeedling for the same rea­son. But this added expensemeans we don't take home asmuch money. Still, if we manageto get our seedlings through thesummer we don't want to losethem in the fall to some deer

browsing on them.MH: Is the main mortality in

the first year?VS: Yes. There's two stages of

mortality. One is'within a coupleof months of planting-where aseedling fails because of poorgenetic stock or because the rootscan't get past some buried rockformation. The second stage isusually in August or Septemberwhen the soil moisture is real low.We plant during the winter whenit is wet and hope that the rootswill get deep enough by summerto keep moist. But in some placesthe roots can't keep up with thedropping level of soil moistureand the seedling dies.

MH: You mentioned thestrength of genetic stock as anaspect of seedling mortality.Where do you get your seedlingsfrom? If they don't come fromindigenous sources is that a prob­lem?

VS: We buy seedlings .from anumber of different sources. Infact, this year we're trying to fur­ther diversify the sources so wecan eliminate large scale mortal-

. ity that could be traced to onenursery or another, which has

. happened in the past. Some ofour nurseries are industry sourceslike Louisiana Pacific; the statehas its own nursery. Ideally,that's not the best way-to buyfrom outside sources. Last yearwe collected Redwood seeds fromthis area and gave them to oursources to grow seedlings for us.The idea is that seeds that comefrom trees that have successfullyadapted to this area will have amuch higher survival rate whenreplanted as seedlings here. Co­incidentally or not, we have hadvery good success replanting withlocal Redwood seedlings. Theideal long-term solution would beto set up a local nursery here.We're looking at that possibility-to do our own seed collection,grow them here with someamount of local soils incorporatedinto the planting mix. That wouldbe the best way to go about it.However, nurseries are notori­ous money losers. So that meanswe would, as a co-op or commu­nity, have to be in a position tosubsidize a nursery for 5-6 years.Nurseries are capital intensiveand very time-consuming, metic­ulous operations, If you growseedlings the traditional way­with shade houses, peat vermicu­lite soil mixes and fertilizers­there is a trade-off. Because theseedlings then have been essen­tially coddled, and when youthrow them out on an exposed,scorched hillside they croak.They say "Oh, Mama what youdoin' to me!" That's one of themajor problems we have withDouglas Fir seedlings-they'renot a resilient tree like a Red­wood which can sprout, die­back and resprout. DouglasFirs only have one shot inthis world. They either make itthat first year or they are gone.So transplanting Douglas Fir outof nurseries where they have beencoddled that first year is real dif­ficult for them. In fact, this yearwe asked the nursery to removethe shade from some of the Doug­las Fir to toughen them up a littlebefore we transplantthem. It willbe interesting to see if that helpstheir survival. This kind of expe­rimentation is something thatwe talk about continually whileworking in a crew. We're all veryinterested in improving the sur­vival ratie.

MH: So part of the work reallyincludes researching new tech­niques and approaches?

VS: Continually. The mainthing we've learned is that youhave to approach each site on acompletely individual basis.There is no way to effectively,tandardize procedures over alarge diverse area. The ForestryDepartment now understandsthat. That's because the local for­ester works with us and is ex­posed to site specific problems,

crucial details, that someone 11who has only gone through a for­estry program at a university.often hasn't sufficiently appreci­ated. Once the foresters get out inthe field they quickly see that youhave to make decisions on a sitespecific basis. The Departmentof Forestry has been, I feel, verygood about allowing us to try dif­ferent things on different sites­even if they don't know for surewhat will happen. It's a continu­ous process of educating ourselvesabout the way things work.

MH: Let's get a little morephilosophical. How do you seethe restoration work you're doingin terms of what a piece of landis?

VS: the first thing thatemerges is a sense of what is ap­propriate to a piece of land. Ob­viously, we're having problemsreforesting this land because itwas converted to a use thatwasn't appropriate to the land'scapabilities. I'm talking aboutlarge scale conversions of timber­land to grass for livestock graz­ing. In the short-term it was eco­nomically necessary. We can rec­ognize that in the Depression ofthe 1930's there w,as no marketfor timber. The timber marketwas absolutely gone. WhenWorld War II broke out theresuddenly was a big demand formeat products. At that point,many landowners here girdledtheir timber-it wasn't worthtaking to the mill-and con­verted it to grazing land. In theshort-term that was probably thenecessary thing to do. It was diffi­cult to see at that point what thelong-term consequences of con­version might be. They didn'tknow that timber land like oursisn't capable of sustaining agrass cover that is heavily grazedfor more than a few years. Thedepletion of soil and nutrientsquickly leads to loss of your bet­ter grasses, so what you're leftwith is a lot of first-successionspecies like thistles and dove mul­lein.

MH, Another exatnple of tl~at

is what is happening in the Ama­zon right now, where they aretrying to convert ;ungle forestinto large-scale agriculture.

VS: In Brazil it's very dramaticbecause of the heavy rainfall andthe structure of the soils. TheAmazon absolutely requires tre­mendous amounts of biomassbeing incorporated into the soilsevery year because they are sowell drained that nutrient leech­ing is almost immediate if youdon't have the forest-producedcovering, the continuous addi­tion of organic material into thesoil. It's the same principle as ishappening here. But it's moredangerous there because it will bemuch harder to reverse the de­structive process in Brazil. That'sgoing to be a real disaster.

But getting back to a more gen­eral philosophy of land use, be­sides appropriateness, is the ec­onomic question. Obviously, thathas a large bearing on land use.What we're looking at is retainingthe potential for economic use ofthe land. Whether for grazing ortimber or something else. One ap­proach to this question might beto diversify the kinds of thingsone grows on the land by makingbetter use of the more marginalresources, and by making surethat what you do doesn't elimi­nate the possibility of future useof a resource. A small landownerwho has 10 acres of grassland,10 acres of oak woodland, andsome land that is capable ofgrowing commercial timbermight manage these in such away that he could have a fewsheep, sell some timber down theline, cut some hardwood for per­sonal and commercial firewood.There are a whole lot of thingsthat you could do on your landthat would both generate someincome and maintain the land'sbiological integrity.

(Continued on Page 12)

An interview with Russell Means

ish Columbia; and many otherplaces. Do you think there couldbe a land-based union of peopleswho are interested in preservingand restoring the places wherethey live, whether they're Indiansor not?

RM: I hesitate, only becauseI'm pessimistic when it comes toEuropeans. The vast majority ofEuropeans haven't any stayingpower, largely because theydon't have any culture. I do notbelieve, because of that lack ofculture, that Europeans alonecan establish anything towardsself-sufficiency that would be sus­taining. I do believe that Indiansand non-Indians of any color, orof every color, can establish aland-base of independence and.respect because I'm experiencingit now at Yellow Thunder Campwhere we have white people liv­ing with us, and who are com­mitted with us.

PB: Do you feel that the whitepeople there are lacking some­how?

RM: Oh, definitely they'relacking something. They're lack­ing that tie to the land-that spir­itual bond. But they'll get it. I'mnot worried about that.

PB: There's a difference be­tween the Yellow Thunder Campand Big Mountain in that BigMountain has a group of peoplewho are already on their place,who are being relocated, and Yel­low Thunder is actually the enun­ciation of a new nation. You'reaware of this. Is there a competi­tion between the two? What's theexact difference between YellowThunder and Big Mountain?

RM: There isn't any difference.Both are love of our land-ourholy land. The only difference issuperficial, just as you've out­lined. We have moved back andreclaimed our holy land. TheDine want to remain and stay ontheir holy land. The struggle isthe same.

PB: It seems to me that whenthe Yellow Thunder Camp isestablished it will actually bea declaration of a. new land­based' nation in North America.

RM: I believe that the UnitedStates is also aware of that. Youhave to deal with reality. We'reright in the middle, at YellowThunder Camp, of the richestone hundred square miles thatthe geologists have claimed.

PB: Uranium?RM: There are over eighty mil­

lion tons of uranium in our holyland. There is over ninety milliontons of taconite iron ore in theholy land. On the peripheral

FREEDOMIncreasingly, people are beginning to understand that cul­

tural and ecological questions are inseparable. During a •break in the recent AIM Summit Meeting, Peter Berg talkedwith Russell Means about the possibility for a land-basedunion between Native and reinhabitory peoples, as well asthe coming confrontation at Yellow Thunder in SouthDakota. What follows is a spiritec1 discussion that cuts to thequick of late industrial age politics.

Peter Berg: I thought yourspeech at the Black Hills Allianceopened the door for a new kind ofcoalition with environmentalists,conservationists, and othergroups that have feelings aboutthe environment, a coalitionthat would allow them to joinwhat up to that point had beenperhaps a closed situation, an ex­clusively Indian situation. Haveyou had any response of thatkind?

Russell Means: Not per se, justthat in our relationships with theBlack Hills Alliance out of RapidCity, South Dakota, we havecome into contact with many ofthe movement people, whetherthey be environmentalists, ecolo­gists or anti-nukers. They're allconcerned with our Mother, theEarth, and the unborn genera­tions. So, in my travels and lec­tures that I give at universities,especially among the youngwhite people, I find this new con­sciousness, this searching for re­spect. And I do know now, atleast among young white Euro­peans, that everything's come fullcircle and we're beginning toshare the same philosophy-aphilosophy that's based on re­spect and not selfishness. But,other than that, I haven't had any

c: per se contacts with those envi­ronmentalists or ecologists.

PB: In London last summerWinona La Duke, Thomas Ban­yaca, Jr. and I put a resolution infront of the Fourth World Assem­bly that the interests of indigen-ous people, devolutionary peo­ple, meaning ethnic groups inEurope that wanted to get powerfor their own nations, and what Icall reinhabitants, meaning theecologically oriented people inAmerica, were the same, and itwas accepted. What do you feelabout that; is there a chance fora planet-wide coalition betweenthese groups?

RM: Of course I believe in that.I have to, through the teachingsof my ancestors. It's been prophe­sied that all the sacred colorswould come together. There isn'tany doubt in my mind that it willcontinue to grow. In fact, that isone of my missions, to hopefullybl'ing the sacred colors togetheron behalf of our Mother Earthand all her children.

PB: At this time in North Amer­ica, a number of people that feelthat the bioregion, the place it­self where they live, is importantand that they should be part of it.These bioregional people are inSan Antonio, Texas; New Eng­land; the Slocan Valley in Brit-

La Monte and Nellie Red Owl,Lakota women from Pine Ridge,OglaUa and Yellow ThunderCamp in the Sacred Black Hills.All final decisions and guidancecame from these three Elders,and their approval was integralto the policies formulated duringthese sessions. This is importantbecause respect: for Elders is aunique aspect of Indian philoso­phy, and their wisdom andknowledge is considered essentialto the direction AIM is taking.

Gold, uranium, coal and.petroleum are parts of the Earthessential to the continuance oftechnology and the prosperity ofgreed. Corporations, supportedby governments, have no regardfor life, and their voracious appe­tite for natural resources at theexpense of the future ability ofman to continue his existence onEarth is becoming recognized bymany people.

It is on Indian land that theseresources are most abundant, andas a result the governments of theworld, and particularly the U.S.,have stepped up their attempts togain control of these lands. Theseresources are so crucial to the con­tinuance of extra-modern prog­ress that it is no longer possibleto give credence to any act takenby the U.S. Government in re­gard to Indian people.

The AIM Summit Meetingbrought home certain concepts tothose who were fortunate enough

to attend. Among them was thereminder that 0llr Mother Earthcannot be sold, that she is ouruniversal mother without whomnone of us could exist and that noone can claim to own her, or anypart of her. In fact, the basicpremise of the issue concerningYellow Thunder Camp in theSacred Black Hills is that theBlack Hills are not for sale. Theybelong to Indian people, andAIM was asked to defend themfor the Elders and the children.

It is time for people to listenwith their hearts as well as theirminds to the words of Indianpeople. It is time to question theimages created by those whowould gain by rape of naturalresources at the expense of all life.

Ifyou would like to know moreabout the American IndianMovement, or the InternationalIndian Treaty Council, pleasewrite to the following address:International Indian Treaty

Council330 Ellis Street, Suite 418San Francisco, Calfornia 94102USA 0

and guidance of the Indian lead­ers: 1) Survival Schools, whichprovide alternative educationalprograms for Indian childr~n,

support traditional teachingssuch as language, culture, pray­ers and respect, in addition to the"3 R's"; 2) the International In­dian Treaty Council, which hasopened the doors of the UnitedNations to the issues of genocideand other threats against the sur­vival of Indian people and whichhas also provided an umbrella ofunity for Indian Nations ofNorth, Central and South Amer­ica; 3) the sense of responsibilitythat has been developed towardsindigenous people around theworld, all speak to the motivesof AIM and the concern it gener­ates in support of the relationshipbetween man, life, the GreatSpirit and harmony with MotherEarth.

During the January meetingthe leaders met often in closed ses­sion, behind doors, protected bysecurity. The sessions took placeunder the guidance of threeElders, Elsie Gibbons, Agnes

nous, people. Military force usedagainst indigenous people has be­come so acceptable that, whenmedia portrays scenes fromWounded Knee as violent Indiansarmed against the whole U.S.,the citizens of the U.S. believethat the U.S. is under attack by ahandful of light arms. Most U.S.people never stop to questionwhat it means or to wonder whatthe real issue is from the side ofthe original inhabitants of thiscountry.

AIM was born to protect nativepeople from the encroachingdeath perpetrated by Americansociety. The men and women ofAIM are not suicidal, yet theyare willing to die in defense ofIndian Elders, youth, the un­born, and for the health and well­being of our Grandmother,Mother Earth.

The base of AIM is not vio­lence. Violence is a forced reac­tion to overt oppression. The baseof AIM is spiritual, with respectfor the Great Spirit and theSacred Pipe, and for the instruc­tions of the Creator which aretaught by the Elders and throughSpiritual Leaders.

There is so much to say aboutthe American Indian Movementand the work it does for the strug­gle of Indian people. But thereis not much room here, so I justwant to mention a few benefitsthat have been developed overthe last 10 years under the care

,AIM is the only liberation and

militant organization to survivethe 70's intact, with the samephilosophy and with continuedunity and respect among theleaders. AIM has endured andweathered the storms of oppres­sion by the CIA, the BIA, theFBI, assassination attempts, im­prisonment of hundreds of lead­ers and infiltration. AIM is work­ing and progressing rapidly onthe national level as well as fromthe family of nations-using the1868 Fort Laramie Treaty as abasic document.

AIM met in San Francisco dur­ingJanuary 1982. The major con­cerns addressed were AIM's par­ticipation in the non-alignedmovement, the question of parti­cipation in the anti-nuclearmovement, and to develop tac­tics to force the United States tolive up to its own laws.

The purpose of the meetingwas to bring together nationaland international leaders of AIMto discuss federal and state poli­cies and how they relate to theland, and to formulate the direc­tion AIM should take over thenext 20 years, with a commit­ment to heritage, culture andprotection of the land base.

In order to understand theworkings of AIM it is importantto recognize several unique prin­ciples that apply to Native Amer­ican people.

First of all, Indian people arenot a minority. Their relation­ship to the U.S. Government wascreated by internationally rec­ognized treaty agreements, andin the legal sense they are indeed

sovereign nations whose rights toseH-determination must be re­spected if the Constitution andlaws of the U.S. are to be givencredibility. The fact that the U.S.Government has ignored the law­ful contracts which they madewith the various Indian nationsin no way discredits their vali­dity.

Secondly, Indian people of theAmericas have been threatenedby a continual policy of geno­cide by the U.S. Governmentwhich has been designed to re­move Indian people from theirlands and destroy their tribal andnational identity. It is importantto note that genocide, overt mur­der of a race of people, takesplace in many ways. The physi­cal murder used by the 7th Cav­alry has been replaced in moderntimes with more subtle methods.Christianity, education, unilat­eral acts by Congress and theSupreme Court have all playedtheir part in trying to destroy thecultural and traditional ways ofAmerican Indian people, strivingto assimilate, denigrate and forcethem to become part of the face­less mass of U.S. society.

Self-defense, a right guaran­teed by international law, has·been denied Indian, or indige-

by Siena Riffia

AIMSUMMITMEETING

12

REFORESTATION(Continued from Page 11)

Another thing I think impor­tant to keep in mind is that theprocesses of degradation are notjust something that other peopledid in the past. They are going onright now. Those of us who havemoved out here more recentlyhave contributed our share. Justbuilding the roads to get access toour homes has contributed signi­ficant erosion. It isn't just thelogging and over-grazing. Wehave to learn how to live here ina way that doesn't make thingsworse. A lot of us don't know howto build roads that won't end upcreating slides that will blockstreams and destroy fish habitat.

Roads are a major problem. Theyare responsible for most of theheavy erosion and destruction ofhabitat that occurs. We have tolearn not only the appropriateway to build roads but also howto maintain them. What we'reengaged in here is not only learn­ing the best way to plant trees butalso how to live here. We want torestore land that has been usedhard, while simultaneously mak­ing sure that we don't make thesituation worse by how we livehere. We're still learning how todo that.

Our co-op has workshopswhere we discuss how we candeal with roads, stream crossings,and revegetation on our ownland. We realize that we don't

•

need a program to do this. Inthe long-run one of the problemswith a program like CFIP isthat you can get lulled into a feel­ing of security that someone fromthe outside is going to continueto pay for t~is work. That's dan­gerous, because we might notalways have that outside support.Nobody knows what the future ofCFIP is. It probably is good fora few more years, but govern­ment programs are notoriouslyunstable. So that means wehave to seriously consider howwe are going to do this work:when we won't have any cost­sharing. The obvious answeris that we, in the community,are going to be responsible forit. In the long-run it's going to be

either individual landowners co­operating to do the critical workor some kind of community tithein labor or a tax. We have to ac­cept the fact that part of any landuse is maintaining it. We havelarger restorative and mainten­ance costs now because in thepast the real costs were notpicked up. That idea is whatCFIP is about-that part of thestate's income from the sale of re­sources should be reinvested inguaranteeing the future produc­tivity of the land. In the future,part of the proceeds from any re­source use will have to be re­

.invested in the land. While itcan be done on a state, regional,or local level, probably the locallevel~where people actually live

-is the best place. Our co-opoperates from that level in thatwe essentially tax ourselves 30%of 'our income to pay for moreeffectiveness in our restorationwork. That gives us the bucksbuy better tree stock, to buythings like individual browseguards. Ideally you try to bal­ance resource extraction with re­source maintenance. However,here in the Cazadero area, thebias 'was so strongly in the direc­tion of extraction in the past thatwe have had to be willing to taxourselves more in the present topay for proper and effectivemaintenance and improvement.Eventually, we hope to achieve asustainable balance between thetwo. D

TO BE RESPECTFUL13

Russell Means and Dennis Banks

World. Many people of con­science do not subscribe to thosemeasurements. If what I saysounds like what you have justtermed the Third World, fine-Iwon't argue that. All I know is in­digenous philosophy, a philoso­phy that I have learned from myElders.

PB: When you said beforethatit'wasn't possible for Euro­peans in North America, bythemselves, to develop a cultureof place anything like what In­dian nations currently support orcelebrate, I had a sinking feeling.Perhaps three-quarters of thepeople in North America now areEuropean descendents. Don'tyou think it's possible that thesepeople might somehow be able todevelop a feeling for ecosystems,climate, soil, native plants andanimals that would make them"native" in the sense that theywere carried by the place.

For I"formation regardingYellow Thunder: Write AIMAIRLIFT, 543 Ellington, SanFrancisco, CA, 94112 USA orCall: (415) 337-0575

PB: Why is it spiritually right? 'RM: That would require a very

lengthy, and to some, it would bea complicated answer.

PB: Politically?RM: It's politically right be­

cause of the condition of theworld and the condition of theUnited States of America.

PB: Do you mean the Reaganqdministration?

RM: Yes, definitely.PB, You know, I recall that

when we were with the Paiutes inNevada fifteen years ago, thepeople said that a lot of their newproblems had to do with theEisenhower administration, thatit was the first administrationthat had put steel chains aroundreservation boundaries, and didit while no one was looking.What is Reagan doing while no­body is looking?

RM: He's doing no differentthan Eisenhower did. He's doingno different than George Wash­ington did, or Lincoln did, An­drew Jackson did, or Rooseveltdid, or Kenned.y did. You see, thePresident of the United States ofAmerica is charged with the re­sponsibility of making sure thatthe economic well-being of theUnited States of America con­tinues. That economic well-beingis based upon an industrial soci­ety. An industrial society is basedupon exploiting and manipulat­ing our Sacred Mother, the earth,the land. If you exploit and man­ipulate the land, you necessarilyhave to exploit and manipulateevery living thing on it, whichincludes the human being. Thatis why, in this day and age, peo­ple of all colors are beginning torealize the folly of industrializedsociety and that world view. Thepeoples who retained the oldestworld view are the indigenouspeoples of the world, be theyAborigines, Samis, Red Indians,Hawaiians, etc.

PB: Where are we going?Where is AIM going from here,and I don't mean as an organiza­tion. What do you think is goingto be happening in the next five,ten, fifteen years?

RM: Well, I'm no prophet.However, the American IndianMovement will continue to grow,will continue to have an impactin all areas of this Earth's life. Towhat degree it will have impact,I hope and pray, will becomelarger and larger in collusionwith all our allies. That's the bestI can do.

PB: Yellow Thunder Camp,even at only eight hundred acres,if it achieves what you want toachieve for it, will be the equiva­lent of a new political entity, ter­ritorial nation, in North Amer­ica. I think you're awar~ of this,and the political implications. Itwould mean that, for example,movements in Northern Cali­fornia to form a separate statewould be encouraged. It alsomeans that all federal powerwould be against you. I knowthat you've iust been goingstraight ahead on this. YellowThunder Camp, the minute theymove against it, is going to defenditself. What do you think is goingto happen?

RM: This will probably be mis­understood, but I am not worriedabout it, because I am confidentin our own spirituality there atYellow Thunder Camp. Powersthat be, that are within and with­out our holy land, are aiding us.This spiritual power, that th~ in­dustrialized mind cannot con­ceive of. All I know is that I'mgoing to die at Yellow Thunder.If I me of old age, or if I die de­fending my land, my freedom,so be it.

man being cannot destroy theworld. Our Mother Earth hasmillions of years to heal herselfand she gives birth to all of life. Solife will continue with or withoutthe human being. So, you see,just that small little statementtells you the general path that theindustrialized human being haschosen. They're afraid thatthey're going to destroy theworld. They might destroy thehuman being and take a few oth­er life-forms with them, but ourMother will prevail.

PB: How do you deal with yourown arrogance? Someone coulddescribe you as an arrogant per­son. What do you make of that?When you think about your ownarrogance, what do you put itagainst?

RM: How do I deal with myown arrogance? I live with myown people. They continuallyremind me of my proper role inlife.

PB: You used the word "Eld­ers"before. What do Elders meanwhen you use that word-theolder people?

RM: When I mention Elders,I'm talking about the Elderswho are very old and are goingto be leaving us very soon. I'mtalking about those Elderswho had a touch with our reality,whose parents and / or grand­parents were born free and there­fore come from a world that Ionly touched during WoundedKnee in 1973, and in which Inow live at Yellow ThunderCamp, and that's freedom, free­dom to be respectful.

PB: When you say they wereborn free, does that mean theyweren't defeated, they weren'toppressed, they weren't discrim­inated against?

RM: No, when I say born free,I mean they grew up with parentsand grandparents who were bornfree. Therefore, they come fromthe oldest philosophy, the oldestworld view. That's how theygrew up, these Elders, by be­ing exposed to that world viewand learning from it. Now thoseElders are passing that worldview on to the people that willlisten and for the oldest worldview to prevail and to continue,to'survive, you have to have free­dom. Otherwise, everyone loses.

PB: I believe that there arenon-Indians in North Americawho have similar feelings bornout of either hope or desperation,

RM: Only if they subscribe to and who are trying to restorecommon sense. Common sense is nativeplantspecies, restoresalm­recognition that all living things on runs in Northern Californiaare superior, in all ways, to the rivers, restore topsoil in Vermont.human condition and that the Don't you think that there's ahuman being must, and has to, in basis for an alliance among theseorder to survive, take direction people?and learn from all the superior RM: We're repeating our-forms of life that surround him. selves. I think this is the third timeBe they our green relatives of the I'm going to agree with that dur­earth or our relatives who crawl ing the course of this interview.and swim, be they the wingeds or Definitely. I mentioned thethe four-Ieggeds. They must take sacred colors and I argue with nodirection from those relatives of one's path, and if they happen toours, the human being I'm talk- be whatever color and are on theing about, in order to gain com- path towards respect, respect formon sense, and therefore respect, topsoil, respect for salmon runs,for everything that's holy and respect for life-beautifull Andsacred. again, I'll repeat myself. I have

PB: You mean that unless they I met with many, many white peo­learn from nature and learn from pIe. I LIVE with white people­natural systems that they're lost? who have that view and want toAs long as they remain merely learn the oldest world view.ideological or idealistic they can't PB: Let me get off my specialdo it. topic for a minute then and ask

RM: Exactly. In all industrial what you're up to here. What'ssociety the problem is that its going on? Why are we havingmembers believe that the human this conference in San Francisco?being is superior to life. Whether Why is the AIM leadership de­they believe it consciously or un- ciding to meet together rightconsciously, is not important. now?

PB: What do you mean? That RM: The American Indianhuman beings are lucky to be Movement leadership has de-alive and that nature persists out- cided to meet at the beginning ofside of us? 1982 in San Francisco because we

RM: I'm saying that the arro- have not met together in almostgance of the human being knows seven years and because it is spiri­no bounds. For example, they use tually right and politically right.terms loosely such as ''I'm going And because Dennis Banks can-to destroy the world." The hu- not leave California.

today is because the Europeanallowed himself to commit geno­cide against himself.

PB: You're talking about LateIndustrial culture?

RM: Yes, I'm talking about theindustrial culture. That is theEuropean philosophy, a philoso­phy that I do not subscribe to.There are Indian people; thereare African people; there aremestizos -mixed blood people;Asian people; there are Polyne­sian people; there are indigenouspeople around the world whohave bought the European phil­osophy. European, when Imention European philosophy,does not specifically denote whitepeople. What it denotes is thosepeople that believe in economicinterdependence and the indus­trial society.

PB: Russell, why is this sound­ing like the political philosophyof the Third World? What's dif­ferent about this and what's usu­ally called the Third World?

RM: First of all, the FirstWorld, the Second World, andthe Third World have been calledthat by design of the Europeans.They're the ones who definedFirst World. They're the oneswho defined the Second. They'rethe ones who defined the Third

and the Basques and the Cornishand the Welsh in Europe whichhave their own cultures.

RM: It's European philosophy.Europeans rid themselves of theirculture in order to establish theHoly Roman Empire. Now, I'mnot going into a whole history les­son with you. I'm just telling youthat Europ.eans, wherever theyhave transplanted themselves,have continued and they havealso converted many people ofcolor to this same European phil­osophy and death culture. It is adeath culture because it only be­lieves in exploiting and manipu­lating. It believes in exploitingand manipulating because it, bynecessity, has become interde­pendent economically speaking.The reason for all this death cul­ture and all its manifestationsthat are prevalent in the world

edges of it there is coal, gas andoil. There's timber. Most impor­tant of all, there's undergroundwater .. Not only geothermalwater, but other water in differ­ent strata of the earth that aretermed aquifers. It is because ofall this so-called natural resourcewealth-and the interests, there­fore, of the multi-national cor­porations in collusion with thefederal government-that it ishighly improbable that we'll beallowed to remain in the holyland.

PB: There are groups in NorthAmerica who are not Indian peo­ple, that have come to NorthAmerican ofwhatever generation-fifth, fourth, third, second,first-who are attempting tolearn where they are and whatit's about. Do you feel that thesepeople and what they're doingcan be part of an alliance or acoalition? Is it possible that therecould be a union of land-basedpeople in North America, regard­less of their own ethnic back­ground?

RM: Yes, I do. But it can't bedone alone by any specific group.It would have to be done with thedirection of the landlords, andthat's the Red Indians of theWestern Hemisphere.

PB: Jack Forbes is a NativeAmerican historian who has pro­posed that there should be a newredistricting of political units inNorth America. One of the thingsthat he and I agree upon is thatNorthern California should be aseparate state or a separate na­tion. That's on the basis that it'sa different place on the planet­we're talking about geology, cli­mate, soil, cultural traditions,etc. How do you feel about that?That there. could be autonomousregions, even if there aren't na­tive peoples who proclaim thoseregions as their own?

RM: I believe that's living in afantasy world.

PB: Isn't Yellow ThunderCamp a fantasy world-it'seight hundred acres.

RM: Term it what you like. It'sa reality.

PB: Do you think it's a fantasythat regions of North Americacould become autonomous orindependent?

RM: Yes, I believe that's a fan­tasy. I'm saying it's a fantasy.beC'ause you're saying, "even ifthere aren't any native peoplethere", as you term the RedIndians.

PB: I'm talking about placeslike the Ozarks-Indian peoplein the Ozarks are nearly absent.The people in the Ozarks whowant the Ozarks to be an inde­pendent political entity aren'tIndian people, but they're bio­spherically involved people.

RM: You asked me what Ithought. I told you. I believe it tobe a fantasy.

PB: It's a fantasy because thereal political potential is amongNative Americans for land-basedpolitics?

RM: It's a fantasy becauseyou're talking about politics. Ifyou want to talk about culture,well, that's a different ball game.Culture is what enables people tosurvive. Politics enable people tokill. All I know is that the Euro­pean mentality is so removedfrom culture-it never talksabout culture, and thereforehasn't any understanding of otherpeoples.

PB: The European mentalityin North America?

RM: That's exactly what I'mtalking about. I didn't knowthere was any other mentality.

PB: Well, there are the Bretons

sons in carpentry and otherthings so they could be free towork and not feel always re­jected like they were for manyyears. Ngugi wrote a play inKikuyu and he actually used thepeople who fought in the liber­ation struggle to play their ownroles. The government foundthis extremely dangerous, so onemorning on New Year's Eve in1978, policemen came and ran­sacked his house and took himaway. Nobody knew where hewas. Many African intellectuals,and everybody concerned,mounted a campaign in order toget him released-but he wasjailed and detained for a year

MH: Are there any publishedworks oj his available in English?

AM: Yes, he wrote a book veryrecently called Detention. Hewrote Petals oj Blood, Cry Not,Child, and many more. He alsowrote plays like The Trial ofDedan Kimahi-about one ofthe leaders of the Mau Mau

14

Africa (from Page 7)

movement who was hanged bythe British. Ngugi was baptizedby the missionaries and his namewas James Ngugi. After writingseveral books, he decided thathe should go back to his roots,so he's now called N gugi waThiong'o. Then there are writerslike Chimua Achebe. He's Ni­gerian and he wrote a very goodbook called Things Fall Apart.It's about the arrival of mission­aries and how they tried to con­vert the population-how theywent about denigrating the tra­ditional gods and so forth.There is also Wone Coyinka, an­other Nigerian writer, whowrote The Lion and the Jewel.And then there is a very goodpoet, who really describes theattitude towards women, a Ken­yan, who lived in Uganda,named Okot 'pBitek. He wrotetwo books and a collection ofpoems, one poem called Songs ojLawino about a traditionalAfrican woman lamenting abouther husband who's a Westerneducated one-how he treats her,how he sees' things and so on. An-

other one is Songs oj Ocol, whichis the man's attitude towards hisAfrican woman-the traditionalwoman.

MH: What about Ajricansculpture?

AM: The bronze sculptures ofBenin (Nigeria) are world fa­mous. The Makonde of Tan­zania and Mozambique are alsofamous for their sculptures.These inspired Picasso and theexpressionist school. But, unfor­tunately, the people who get in­spired from African arts nevergive credit to African aFt. Theycall it "primitive art", which isnot true at all. It's very sophisti­cated to be primitive.

There are very few traditionalpaintings in Africa. They havetie dye, which are patternsdressed on deer cloth. Usingthe brush and the canvas is gen­erally not an African tradition,except in the theatre. The Ethio­pian churchmen were into paint­ing-using paint as an art. Ethi­opian paintings are very famous.It is generally believed that com­ic strips as an art were devel-

oped in Ethiopia. Because theytell the story of the Queen ofSheba from the beginning to endin different frames-this wasbeing done about 700, 800 yearsago and are luckily still pre­served. Jewelry and hairdos arealso something that has beenAfrica's pride. Even utensils thatare used in the home have to beartistically made. The utilitarianfunction isn't enough. You haveto make them aesthetic-youhave to draw pleasure from look­ing at them when you use them-like cooking pots, plates. Eachobject has its own personality.No two things could be the same.So art is an integral part of Afri­can culture. It's not like the 6thart or whatever it's called in theWest. As a specialty, it does notexist. Art is a part of everydaylife. Now, the danger is the tour­ist arts-which endanger auth­entic African art. Because tour­ists go into places like Kenya andTanzania and have to bring backartistic trophies of their visit toAfrica. Because of that, there ismass production of very bad

commercial art.MH: It's like Native Amer­

ican art here-same problems.AM: That's right, and ·this is

endangering African art.M H: What areas oj Ajrica

right now do you think are themost progressive and inspira­tional in terms of the kinds ojchanges that we've beentalking about.

AM: Unfortunately, there isnone. Because the so-called so­cialist countries in Africa are justtrying to model the country inthe Russian style or method,and the capitalist countries ofAfrica are emulating the West.So there is nobody who is reallytrying to rediscover Africa's past,study Africa's traditional institu­tions, and to make them meetthe needs of the present. That'swhy it's very difficult to say thatthis is progressive or that's pro­gressive. I'll call one progressivewhen that person goes to hisroots-looks at the things thatare there-the treasures-andthen builds a new lifestyle onthat heritage. D

Out of print for a number of yearssince its original publication in 1974(I first read it in a lovingly copiedversion), it is available now in a newedition for the social transformationminded who will hopefully use itlike a hand axe. Peter Berg

IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVE(A Critique of Civilization) byStanley Diamond • TransactionBooks • New Brunswick, NewJersey • Second Printing 1981.

TREE TALK is likely to become theirreverent bible for those interested

In THE DESERT SMEllS LIKERAIN, Gary Nabhan's associationwith Papago culture and agriculturaltradition has achieved for ethno­biology the skillful equivalent of RyCooder's classic musical partner­ship with norteno accord ian flamer,Flaco Jiminez. Endangered talentsare preserved with a sharp, knowingeye and a coyote sense of humor.Nabhan shows how the Papago haveexisted in the Sonoran Desert Bio­region for centuries with a highlydeveloped, finely tuned sense of"what to do when it rains" (whichcan be anywhere from 5-15 inchesannually)-how their knowledgetranslates an unpredictable rainfallinto a successful, nourishing, run­off agriculture.

Amid the backdrop of desert,rain, local food production, and themany facets of the Indians "who dis­trust the taste of well water:' GaryNabhan also renders beautiful sea­sonal pictures of contemporaryPapago life. We're guided on jour­nies to I'itoi Ki (the Papago tribalmountain shrine), a Saguaro harvestand "drinking for the rain" feast,descriptions of the Changos delDieserto (depicting the sometimemischievous nature of Papago chil­dren). and a lively October fourthfeast day of St. Francis completewith a chicken scratch polka sound­track.

Like a border radio station, TheDesert Smells Like Rain is steeped ina tradition that airs over monocul­tural, political and historical boun­daries and emerges as a music tunedto all segments of the biogeograph­ical spectrum. Robert C. Watts

THE DESERT SMELLS LIKE RAIN •by Gary Nabhan • North Point Press• 850 Talbot • Berkeley, CA 94706·$12.50

We've lost more than we'vegained through "civilization," or asStanley Diamond sees its politicalmanifestation, the creation ofStates. Who are human beings inthe biosphere, and how many nat­ural roles are they capable of play­ing? More than you'll ever see inmovies or on TV, or than the Pub­lic or Police will allow. Listen to thedepth of connections Diamondmakes about culture before ourIdeas about ourselves were nar­rowed:

" ... ritual expression of the pri­mary needs of the person in na­ture and society. Meanings arequestioned and resolved and aliteral 'being born again withothers' or co-naissance or 'thefree abandon of communion' oc­curs. . emphasis on existencerather than essence ... the re­sponsibility of the individual toself and to society. lack ofconcern with analytic modes ofthought.

. the organic community.the apprehension of conscious­ness throughout society andnature."The feeling and thinking world of

primitive people, not "simple" prim­itive, but primary people. As richas a blossom when compared to aparking meter. Potentially us. We'vebeen jammed through a strainer ofabstract mental models that actua­ly diminish rather than expand ourcontact with ourselves, society andthe natural world that contains us.

This book must be read if you wantto know the personal and politicaldimensions of a transition out of LateIndustrial monoculture-think. "Civ­il;zation and Progress," the intro­ductory chapter that wi II eventuallystand alone as a great essay, is aconcentrated and tough analysis ofhow primitive society's richness islost: "Civilization originates in con­quest abroad and repression athome." Go along with Diamondthrough the politics of anthropolog­ical field work and cold questionson the role of anthropology in in­dustrial society to the remarkablechapter, "The Search for the Prim­itive," where you'll find as muchabout our fascination with primi-tive people and the possibilities forhuman cultural consciousness ashas ever been written in as short aspace. Reflections on ancient andmodern political philosophy, lawand history follow, almost as com­mentaries on the two fundamentalpieces, and they're worth readingfor the pure free play of spirit, theintellectual liberation, that Dia­mond performs. Anarcho-Marxistsaxophone solos.

Gary Nabhan

WHERE YOU AT?

Pacific North Rim, Lawrence Hills inthe British Isles, Kent Whealy in theMississippi watershed, Cary Fowlerin the Southest, Javier Caballero andChristina Mapes in Mesoamerica,John Withee and Samuel Kaymen inthe Northeast, Mahina Drees and I inthe Sonoran Desert-who are work­ing to re-regionalize seeds. Wherethere are native varieties sti II extant,we are conserving them, increasingthem, and reintroducing them tothose people in the region who havelost them. Once reintroduced, theyusually stick-it's like recoveringpart of your heritage. (It is.) I shouldadd that traditional peoples andthese seeds have symbiotic relation­ships-they reinforce one another,.particularly if the plant has symbolicor ceremonial significance. ThePapago, the Hopi and Taos Pueblohave all gotten involved in their ownseed revivals recently.

Last autumn, over 100 seed-saversresearchers, gardeners and home­steaders from the U.S. and Mexicogathered in Tucson for a Seed BanksServing People workshop sponsoredby Meals for Millions/Southwestand the National Sharecropper'sFund. Folks outlined strategies forwild and cultivated plant conserva­tion, not merely by sticking seeds ina seed bank for posterity, but by en­couraging their reestablishment inthe regions to which they are native.The 75 page proceedings is nowavailable for a $3.50 charge to coverprinting and mailing costs. WriteSeeds Workshop, Meals forMiliions/Southwest, P.O. Box 42 622 TucsonArizona 85733.

I wanted to answer that excellentquestionnaire on the 1st page ofCOEV. That was great. I just thoughtit might be interesting for you to hearour answers for Silverton, Co. be­cause they are really odd.

1. The water we drink comes fromBoulder Gulch, the gulch tops out at13,000 ft. and that's only 21,1, milesfrom here. At the bottom of thegulch it goes right through the mid­dle of the Standard Metal Mill tail­ing ponds and then into the Animas.The Animas continues under the newtailing ponds. A few years back(about 3) the old tailings pondsspilled over into the Animas Riverand they got permission to build newtailings ponds which turned out to beeven closer to the River. But ourdrinking water comes out of thecreek in Boulder Gulch just beforethe tailings ponds. Even though ourwater is treated, many people getsick in late June when they move thesheep to the high country.

3. What soil series? Silverton is

SEED ALLIES

ANTI-NUKE POEMS WANTEDfor the Abalone Alliance'sjournal, It's About Times.

Send mss. (w/SASE) to PAN: Poets Against Nukes,P.O. Box 1139, Berkeley, CA 94701

Raise the Stakes recently publishedtwo pieces from Australia on plantpatenting and diversifying regionalagriculture. They brought to mindconvergent evolution, since a num­ber of us in the Sonoran Desert areworking on parallel concerns. I guessthat many arid-landers have hadsuch an intense focus on adaptedseeds because hybrids developed for"worldwide" introduction the lasttwo decades have done poorest intruly arid areas. The difference be­tween regionally adapted seedstocksand those that don't yield in mar­ginal environments is one that is hit­ting people in the gutas well as in thewallet. Let's take a larger look at thisissue.

For roughly ten millenia, variouspeoples around the world have beensaving and selecting seed, and grow­ing it out the next year. This simpleprocess has led to the domesticationof a couple thousand species of foodplants. But it also has led to the flow­ering of numerous local and regionalgene pools of cultivated plants, aspeople swapped seed with theirneighbors and fine-tuned selectionsto their specific environments. Whatevolved was hundreds of locally­adapted cultivars or ecotypes. In theSonoran Desert, for instance, we haddozens of kinds of corn, some ofwhich could mature within a short(55-65 day) growing season beforedrought set in; we had beans tolerantof saline soils,' root knot, nematodes,blight, etc. Most regions with a di­versity of environments and cultureshad this kind of crop diversity upthrough the Industrial Revolution.

Within this ,century, seeds havebecome deregionalized. By hybrid­izing two stocks from different re­gions, with different attributes, plantbreeders developed some interest­ing, useful varieties, and should begiven that credit. But there alsocame a false confidence that theywere "creating" new diversity, whenin many cases, one new super varietycame to replace dozens of finely­tuned ones. Farmers recognized theweaknesses of some of these supervarieties (poorer taste, texture, stor­ability, lower nutritive value) onlyafter it was too late: their traditionalseeds had lost their viability, or werealready consumed. A ten-milleniatradition of saving seeds has nowbeen disrupted in most parts of theplanet within the last three decades.If diversity does have anything todo with ecological stability, the re­sults could be disastrous.

There are a number of folksaround the world-Forest RothShomer of Abundant Life in the

built on the only flat place in the SanjUan Country. It was deposited hereby the 3 streams coming in whichmeet here and go out as the AnimasRiver-(Rio de las Animas Perdidas)Riverof LostSouls. Under the depos­it it is old volcanic-deformed byglacier.

6. What were the primary subsis­tence techniques of the culture thatlived in your area before you? Therewas no culture here. The Utes camein the summer in small huntingbands but moved on when they gotenough game. The first white mennear here were trappers out of Taoswho went on over to the Great SaltLake Basin and happened to meet upwith Hudson Bay trappers in the vi­cinity of present day Ogden, Utah.

7. Five edible plants. The mostprolific is nettles (left over from earlygardens around the turn of the cen­tury). Dandelion leaves are also here-of course not native The Utes atethe inner bark of aspen in starvationtimes-50 to 100 miles from here.We also have edible plants but noone should eat them-too few-allhigh altitude like American bistort,mountain sorrel, elk thistle, cattails(but rare).

8. Our winter storms come rightout of the SW- f it rains in LosAngeles we get snow four days later.

9. Our garbage goes one mile outof town, right next to StandardMetals tailing ponds.

10. Our growing season is 13 days-yes, days.

13. Five grasses: cattails, bear­grass, arrowhead, foxtail barley,burrea.

14. Five resident birds: Inthewin­ter we don't have that many-onlycrows and eagles. In the summermountain bluebird, brown cappedrosy finch, cliff swallow and robin.

15. Land use history. Beaver trap­ping, mining, and now tourists. Wehave the Si Iverton Rai lroad - narrowgauge-runs in the summer.

16. Glaciers right around here.You can't miss it- hanging valleys,moraines.

17. Grizzlies were considered ex­tinct-but someone shot one twosummers ago, illegally. It was aroundthe garbage dump of a new miningoutfit.

20. What spring wildflower isconsistently among the first tobloom? The dandelion, although itisn't native. The whole town of Sil­verton is golden with them. And theyare a real boon here-everyone is soglad to see some color in this wasteland. The town has been bulldozed,tipped up, and scraped off since.1870 when it first began. Hardly atree or plant left.

Actually the townsite, being on aflood plain of 3 streams, should havean intermittent covering of RockyMountain iris, aspen, etc. But

t------------~--~--------------'1these are only found in rare over­looked corners now.

Dolores LaChapelle

Editor's Note: Dolores tells usthat her two books on philosophy,rituals and ceremonies, Earth Wis­dom and Earth Rituals, are nowavailable directly from her at P.O.Box 542, Silverton, CO 91433.

15

• Raise The Stakes: The PlanetDrum Review, No.2. Containsregional reports from Quebec,Northwest Nation, The BlackHills, Brittany, Northumbria,Scotland, Samiland, and north­ern California. Feature articlesinclude: Reconstituting Califor­nia by Jack Forbes, Eco-Develop­ment by Raymond Dasmann,The Suicide & Rebirth of Agri­culture by Richard Merrill andthe Limits of Population Controlby Stephanie Mills. $2.00.

• Watershed Guide & LivingHere. A four-color poster withpamphlet evoking the naturalamenities of the San FranciscoBay Area watershed. New mem­bers receive a copy free uponjoining. Additional copies are$2.50. •

• Raise The Stakes: PlanetDrum Review, No. 3 containsregional updates from the BlackHills and Samiland as well as in­depth reports from AboriginalAustralia, the Rockies, the NorthAtlantic Rim, and the KlamathlTrinity, Passaic, and SonoranWatersheds. Other features in­clude Bioregional Comics byLeonard Rifas, Aesthetics byMichael McClure, RenewableEnergy To Renew Society byPeter Berg, Cities: Salvaging theParts by Gary Snyder, ErnestCallenbach, Murray Bookchinand Morris Berman, Decentral­ism by Jacques Ellul, No Guar­antees by Tom Birch, and poetryby Peter Blue Cloud. $2.00.

PLANETIDRUM

• Backbone - The Rockies.A six-part Bundle of essays,poems, journals, calendars andproposals about the fragile RockyMountains. $3.50.·

BUNDLES,POSTERS& BOOKS

PLANET DRUM BOOKS

• Renewable Energy and Bio~

regions: A New Context forPublic Policy by Peter Berg andGeorge Tukel. 26 pages. A con­cept of renewable energy torestore and maintain bioregions.$.75"The rationale for a division ofthe nation based on, naturalresources to lay the frameworkfor development of a steady­state, regionally based society."

- THE WORKBOOK

• Reinhabiting a SeparateCountry: A Bioregional An­thology of Northern California,edited by Peter Berg. 220 pages.Essays, natural history, biog­raphies, poems and stories reveal­ing Northern California as adistinct area of the planetarybiosphere. $7.00.""The book serves as both pioneerand genre model . . . represent­ing a vital and widespread newethos. "

-NEWAGE MAGAZINE

• Devolutionary Notes byMichael Zwerin. 64 pages. A firsthand account of European sepa­ratist movements today. $2.95.·". . . a strange and fascinating

'little guidebook to a movementthat is 'redesigning the map ofEurope:'" -RAIN MAGAZINE

• Raise The Stakes: Planet DrumReview, No.4 is SOLD OUT.

of interested people who will in tum re­ceive a complimentary issue of RAISE

THE STAKES.

3 Send us a list of your cultural and coop­erative outlets: bookstores, food co-ops,community and environmental centers.

4 Arrange a bioregional workshop in yourarea. For transportation, room and board,Planft Drum will come to help you.

5 Send RAISE THE STAKES a report from

your region.

NEW FROM PLANET DRUM ~~~

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2 Help build a bioregional group in yourarea. We can help by sending you a listof Planet/Drum members in your area.You can send us the names and addresses

Since 1974 Planet Drum Foundation has served a diverse circle ofmembers and correspondents interested in developing, analyzing and com­municating the concept of a bioregion through its regional bundles, books,and tri-annual review, RAISE THE STAKES. There are a growing number ofindividuals and groups that are exploring cultural, environmental, and econ­omic forms appropriate to the places they live in. Planet Drum Foundationis now developing network and support functions for existing bioregionalgroups and projects as well as for those that will evolve in the future. Weinvite you to join the Planet Drum circle in furthering the ongoing exchangeof place-related ideas and activities.

WHAT YOU CAN DO1 Become a member of Planet. Drum Foun­

dation. Membership includes three issuesof RAISE THE STAKES, at least one sur­prise publication, a 25 % discount on allPlanet/Drum books and bundles, andaccess to our networking and workshopfacilities.

Figures of Regulation: Guides for Re-balancing Society with the Biosphere, Peter Berg

The ways we live in places must acknowledge the features of local natural systems. Figures ofregulation can help create this bond and provide an ethical basis for community activities based on"new customs" rather than laws.

Toward a Bioregional Model: Clearing Ground for Watershed Planning, George Tukel

Developing a bioregional model will allow the design of communities and means of provision(food, energy, housing) to resonate with solar income, local watersheds, and the goals of a reinhab­itory society.

Reinhabiting Cities and Towns: Designing for Sustainability, John Todd withGeorge Tukel

The information we need to have about alternative technology and renewable energy alreadyexists. How can it be integrated into a design process that ~s connected to the biology of a specificplace? "Reinhabiting Cities and Towns" presents a design method to accomplish this and gives prac­tical applications which result from it.

The ongoing exchange of place­related ideas and activities, to mymind, seems suited not only to thepublished and written word but alsoto the spoken word and to personalcontacting - face-to-face networking.Since existing and emergent biore­gional groups and projects consist ofdiverse individuals I try to write per­sonal'etters in response to questionsor requests for information. Try me.Meeting with individual visitors fromother areas, such as the Ozark AreaCommunity Congress (OACC) peo­ple, the folks from the Kansas AreaWatershed (KAW), and visitors fromthe San Antonio Bioregional Project, ... is published tn-annually by Planet Drum Foundation. We encourage readers to sharehas given us a chance to discuss is- vital information, both urban and rural, about what is going on in their native regions. Sendsues, exchange stories, and grow in us your bioregional reports, letters, interviews, poems, stories, and art. Inquiries, manu-awareness and effectiveness. scripts, and tax-deductible contributions should be sentto Planet Drum Foundation, P.O. Box

By the time this reaches you we 31251, San Francisco, CA 94131 USA. Telephone (415) 285-6556.will have made a trip into the North- The entire contents of RAISE THE STAKES are copyright © Planet Drum Foundationwest as part of an effort at this kind 8 H dof networking. Rain (a community 19 2. owever, in or er to encourage dissemination of the information in this issue (only),self-reliance and appropriate tech- any non-book publication may reprint one article-without charge-upon written requestnology networking and support and approval. Full credit to RAISE THE STAKES-including our address and membershipgroup) will be our hosts in Portland. rates ($15/yr)-must prominently accompany the reprint of any article.

We hope to meet with the Cascade Postmaster Please Send Form 3547 or 3579Regional library people in Eugene, t------------------------------------------Ithe Illinois Valley Self-Reliance Editor-Michael Helm. Assistant Editors & Mapmakers-Judy Goldhaft and Robert C. Watts.Project and the Tak iIrna People's Networking- Sheila Purcell andEric Bear. Distribution-Diane Nettles. Graphic Design andClinic in the southern Oregon / Cave Production- Nancy von Stoutenburg. Typesetting-Ampersand Typography, Berkeley.Junction area, as well as attend the Printing-Warren's Waller Press, San Francisco. Working Angels-Eileen MinardHumboldt's Herbicide Task Force and Richard Grow.strategy weekend. r--..............---~~_--.._---_ .............--._......--....------.......,

Bioregional workshops are an-

other area of networking that we' R· Th 5 k 'R Th· C;:~r'~~~eo~~:~:ina~:~~c~~i~:t~~~ ~~~ I alse e ta es. eturn IS ouponworkshops and encouraging the ,growth of study or action oriented ,seed groups. Contact Eric if you'dlike to explore a workshop for your Ibioregion. I

Since Raise the Stakes (RTS) re-lmains one of our most effective out­reach voices, I'd like to draw yourattention to our new, self-pro­claimed distribution outreach per- ,son, Diane Nettles. Diane says "I'm 0 I am enclosing the names and addresses of friends who would like to receive a 0here to help Planet Drum get RTS I sample copy of RAISE THE STAKES #5. I enclose $1 for each. Here's $15 for a year's sub-more widely distributed. If you ~ [J Find enclosed the names and addresses of friends to whom I scription to Raise Thewould like to sell RTS in your area, : would like to send gift memberships in PLANET DRUM FOUNDATION. I'm sending Stakes plus 25% discountto your friends and associates or at J $15 for each gift. on other Planet Drum

, 0 Id I k d Publications . . . California Residents please add

regional fairs or conferences, write I wou i e to tra e (you name it) 6% to the prices for State SalesI tt ·th ·d 0 f , and/or a reportme a e er WI your leas. r, or Tax.

those of you who are less ambitious,. from my region for a year's membership in Planet Drum Foundation. 0send me names and addresses of the" 0 I enclose the names and addresses of 10 friends whom I think would like to know Here's a tax deductible con- • Please add $.50 for postageplaces in your community where you J about Planet Drum. Please send me a copy of Reinhabiting a Separate Country for my tribution of and handling.would hope to see RTS for sale. let's' labor. t .. Please add. $1.00 for postagenetwor~ beyond those already con- , PLEASE CUT AND .MAIL IN TODAY!'. , and handlmg.verted. ....~........-....-....--..-.~ ...~~~....~...~... ..............~...... ~__..~...~

NETWORKINGANDDISTRIBUTIONby Sheila Rose Purcell

KNOWING HOME

For those unfamiliar with thework of the Rain staff this book is afine introduction. KNOWINGHOME serves as an issue specificarticulation of the creation of a sus­tainable city. The scope of issuesdiscussed (from energy and housingto food and economics) remainunited by reference to and focusupon the life and politics of place.Knowing Home's blend of stories,conceptual articles, graphics and alocal and national self-help re­source guide is weighted and laidout in such a graceful manner thatthose involved in self-reliantcommunity work elsewhere woulddo well to send for a copy.Sheila PurcellKNOWING HOME: Studies for aPossible Portland • Edited by theStaff of Rain. RAI N • 2270 NWIrving • Portland, OR 97210 • $5

in the dynamics of creating a sus­tainable forest culture. Avoiding

. extremes, Ray Raphael argues forthe necessity of both living with andusing our forest bounty. His runningnarrative is anecdotally supple­mented by a host of oral historiesdrawn from the likes of lumber­jacks, timber operators, foresters,naturalists, ranchers, and reforesta­tion workers. Of particular interestis the concluding section, based onSwiss example, which suggests thestructure and benefits of a landedforestry. Michael HelmTREE TALK by Ray RaphaelIsland Press • Star Route 1, Box 38,Covelo, CA 95428. $12.00

SEND ORDERS TO P.O. BOX 31251, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131