How Did the Hetch Hetchy Project Impact Native Americans?

by Bruce Pierini

Sierra College Anthropology Professor

I believe that the greatest threat to the survival of American Indians — more than the wars, the disease, the poverty, the discrimination, and the European occupation — is the removal of the spiritual matrix of traditional life, the theft of the sacred. From the beginning, American Indians have centered their world views upon profound belief in the spiritual. That belief has become tentative in our time. Fewer and fewer Indian young people are acquiring those aspects of sacred being which have always defined them. I am deeply concerned to expose this theft of the sacred, and to see that American Indians, young people especially, are allowed to define themselves in terms of the spiritual values that inform their ancient heritage.
— N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa)

At first look the answer seems starkly obvious and maddeningly multifaceted. As rising waters of the Tuolumne River inundated the stunning Hetch Hetchy Valley, Natives obviously lost access to important plant and animal resources. (1) These included nutritious grasses, the much-favored black oak acorns Quercus kelloggii (2), basketry materials, deer and other wild game, an historic village site, burials, petroglyph and sacred sites. (3)

On the other hand, the building of O’Shaughnessy Dam provided construction jobs and therefore cash for Native men of the surrounding area.

However, the historic loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley should not be seen as an isolated episode in the lives of Native people or only as a loss of subsistence habitat, as severe as those losses were. Accounting for losses in materialist terms frames the depletion of Native cultures in only one of its elements. After all, if you can’t get deer in this one valley, simply look elsewhere. No black acorns from Hetch Hetchy? Collect further along the western slope. (4)

Eurocentric "assets and liabilities" accounting seduces us into ignoring or forgetting a primary loss suffered over 200 years of crushing change: the loss of a sustaining worldview of the complex and interrelated nature of the land, all of Nature Itself, and of the people themselves. The loss of homelands at Hetch Hetchy is, at the most profound level, a loss of a centuries-old way of life sustained by an empirically-based yet mystical worldview. In this world-view "nature" and "people" don’t just happen or exist independently of one another, as we in the Western tradition understand the world.

The Hetch Hetchy Valley loss was a kind of compounded last stroke. Native people had already been impacted for at least 100 years by terrible disruption from outsiders well before the Hetch Hetchy Dam was thought of. The obliteration of the connection between that Valley and it’s people through flooding was only the latest chapter in what had been a cavalcade of historic, horrific losses.

Those deplorable assaults began with the now all-too-familiar list of historical traumas—depopulation through forced-missionization and introduced diseases like malaria and influenza, assimilation into Hispanic-period ranchos, the Gold Rush, forced relocations, removal from home areas, and absorption into the wage-labor economy outside the valley. In the twentieth century, further impacts resulted from Native children being sent away to Indian schools like the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California and the development of Yosemite National Park which excluded Natives from living in the park. (5)

How old was the way of life in Yosemite area before disruptions?

Archaeologists began studying Yosemite’s cultural heritage in the late 1800s and by now there is a large body of detailed archaeological work that attests to habitation in the Yosemite area over the millennia. The total number of sites now listed is at 1500, and each year 25 new sites are identified. The Park states that the Hetch Hetchy area was inhabited since the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 years ago and that the sites include seasonal villages, hunting camps, sacred sites and gathering areas. (6)

Archaeologists cannot draw direct links to any present Native cultures from these earliest inhabitants, but it is likely that various Native lifeways were broadly similar since all were hunters and gatherers over the last several hundred years at least. By the period directly before contact, a way of life with larger villages, permanent and seasonal settlements, and a broad-based diet had been achieved among the Native groups along the foothills of the Sierra. It is difficult to know, however, if habitation sites in many higher-country areas were continually occupied or only utilized seasonally.

Who were the groups most heavily impacted by the dam?

We have to look at the archeological and historical evidence for habitation and use. For that we turn to a variety of sources with particular emphasis on the Environmental Impact Report for Yosemite National Park published in February 2010 and titled The Silver Thread—Upper Tuolumne River American Indian Land Use in Yosemite National Park (7) by Davis-King Associates and Snyder. Davis-King and Associates and Snyder (DKA) cite a comprehensive bibliography of early to late twentieth century archeological and ethnological work, part of which covers the Hetch Hetchy area. Out of this report and a few other sources a partial narrative of the historic Native peoples and the probable impacts of the dam may be glimpsed. (8)

The DKA report quotes a 1995 archeological report by Montague and Mundy, which itself relied heavily upon material prepared by former Yosemite National Park employees: Craig Bates, who summarized the park’s information known up to that time about the ethnic affiliations in the Hetch Hetchy area and Jim Snyder, who gave detailed historic era information.

During the Mariposa phase (A.D. 1200-1850), ancestors of the Sierra Miwok occupied the park area. … Upon Euro-American contact, the Central and Southern Sierra Miwok occupied the Yosemite area, with the Tuolumne/Merced watershed divide forming the boundary between the two groups. (Kroeber 1925: 442) Thus Hetch Hetchy Valley falls within the territory of the Central Sierra Miwok…permanent villages were generally established below 4,000 ft. in elevation with seasonal camps and villages scattered throughout the area currently defined as Yosemite National Park. (Merriam (1917) Mule deer and acorns were important food items although a diverse array of animal and vegetal items were used (Anderson 1988; Barrett and Gifford 1933). (9)

By the time of the Gold Rush, Native populations had precipitously declined and lifeways had eroded profoundly. Shelly Davis-King sees the Gold Rush as a kind of "final stroke" whereby surviving Native cultures were decimated. (10) Albert L. Hurtado, in Indian Survival on the California Frontier, (11) writes that before the Gold Rush Indians had outnumbered whites ten to one and that had allowed them to discourage white settlement, especially in the foothills. By the early 1850s whites outnumbered Indians by perhaps two to one. Therefore many Native persons would have witnessed the drastic historic losses of their environments, people and cultures within their own lifetimes.

In order to secure the order that would allow miners unobstructed access to the gold fields, in January 1851 Governor John McDougall established The Mariposa Battalion, charged with the subjection of Indians in the entire San Joaquin Valley. (12)

The Mariposa Battalion’s searches and raids under James D. Savage, a trader, miner and pioneer, removed Natives from the village of Ahwahneechee and made the Yosemite Valley known to outsiders; this is how the "discovery" of Yosemite Valley is most often understood. (13) Word quickly spread that stunningly beautiful valleys at about 4,000 feet were waiting to be explored. The Yosemite National Park recounts the development of tourism as slow at first, followed by early twentieth century rapid expansion due to the development of a rail link. (14)

A number of written documents and oral testimonies provide a picture of the post-Gold Rush period as one of regular usage of the Yosemite area by many different groups of Natives. Archeologist Suzanna Montague (2006), quoted by DKA, notes the high-country area was used by Mono Lake Paiute for hunting of bighorn sheep. There were also Miwok present who occasionally fought with the Paiutes, while Central Miwok people sought refuge from the Gold Rush. (15)

Davis-King and Snyder use earlier anthropological sources which indicate continual usage of the Tuolumne corridor throughout the latter part of the 19th Century by Sierra Miwok and/or Paiute groups but advise that more research needs to be done to derive a better picture of use. (16) Paden and Schlichtmann interviewed "old timers" in the 1950s who described "meat and acorns were plentiful … almost every year a visiting tribe of 50 to 100 people would come from higher in the mountains to replenish their food supply, taking the meat back with them. (17)

It is quite clear that knowing the precise ethnic affiliation of the groups occupying Hetch Hetchy Valley in the late prehistoric and early historic eras is not possible at present. A major ethnogeographic report in 2002 by ethnohistorian Brian Bibby for Yosemite National Park makes much the same point but adds there were "seven different tribal communities indicated who had "a traditional, historic relationship with the lands presently within park boundaries—The Central Sierra Miwok, Southern Miwok, Bridgeport Paiute, Mono Lake Paiute, Owens Valley Paiute, Chukchansi Yokuts and Western Mono." (18)

Bibby’s review of existing ethnographic and historic records of ethnolinguistic boundaries showed that "… the fluidity of tribal borders and the complexity of cultural and linguistic identities through time and space" would make precision impossible at the present time. (19) Moreover, inaccurate use of tribal and/or ethnolinguistic labels by 19th and 20th Century Western observers, including references to any and all Natives as "Indians" makes use of the historic record further problematic.

What is clear is that the ethnohistory of Hetch Hetchy along with the entire Yosemite area is extremely complex and a continual work-in-progress. (20)(21) Examination of the Hetch Hetchy’s archaeological and historic sites are obviously not possible due to the dam’s construction and the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Southern Sierra Miwok, Central Sierra Miwok, Northern Paiute, and several other groups that utilized the area as well lost a great due to the dam. In addition to the loss of important foraging range, as well as village and sacred sites, those inhabitants also lost access to spiritual or religious connections with an important center of their homelands. This latest loss capped generations of upheavals which for some earlier Natives had begun at the coastal missions. Following forced missionization and the introduction of diseases, Natives saw their populations decline dramatically. Next the Gold Rush struck a single great blow to Native cultural integrity with its forced removals, killings and relocations. The building of O’Shaughnessey Dam and the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley was the unfortunate culminating jolt of dispossession of their homelands and culture, which already had had a long and sad history.