We Were Once All Indigenous People

The indigenous people in the northeastern corner of California’s Great Central Valley are called the Machoopda. Not long after moving here over 25 years ago I met an indigenous man from Mexico who was well versed in local native folklore. He said that where I took my meditations was the main praying place of the people who lived here before the white man came.

He then recounted a favorite story passed down among the Machoopda people about an elder woman. After the native people were forcibly relocated in the 1930’s to a reservation hundreds of miles south, near Bakersfield, an elder woman so missed the land here that she walked all the way back, over 300 miles.

When I first came to this area, the fields all the way to the foothills were still open and untrammeled, and I encountered various wild animals during meditations along the creek at the former periphery of town.

Besides the insistent notes of pheasant, I saw long-eared rabbits scurry through the grass, and watched numerous raptors, including eagles, falcons, hawks and vultures. I also encountered a few rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes held a fascination and fear for me. Growing up along the Great Lakes, I had never seen a venomous snake before coming to California as a young man. I’d seen a few giving warning with their rattles on hikes in the High Sierra, but this day on the edge of town was very different.

The grass was long and beginning to dry after the winter and spring rains, and I sat cross-legged with a view of the stream and foothills, only a quarter-mile from the end of the dirt path. After the senses became attuned to my surroundings, I heard something in the grass.

Within a few seconds a large rattler appeared, slithering directly toward me. With a surge of adrenaline my legs and arms instantly became springs and I went straight up off the ground, leaping a foot or more into the air.

I stood for a minute, and then did something that seemed natural at the time but seems remarkable in hindsight: I sat back down. I don’t know exactly why – partly out of the intent to face my fear, partly intense curiosity.

The rattlesnake was fat and looked about four feet long. It moved closer. Since it didn’t coil and rattle, I remained motionless. The magnificent reptile stretched out next to me, less than an arm’s length away. I stayed put.

For 45 minutes I sat next to that rattlesnake, watching it and my own reactions like a hawk. When I got up and walked away it felt like I’d been alone in the wilderness for a week. I was changed. I had faced and ended my psychological fear of rattlesnakes, though a healthy physical fear of venomous snakes remains.

Walking home, there was a tremendous sense of stillness, peace and reverence. I learned later that indigenous people greatly value such experiences, and believe that a close encounter with a venomous snake is a sign of transmutation.

The local habitat of rabbits, pheasant and rattlesnakes is gone now, paved and built over by a sprawling, treeless development in a retro-tech and faux Babylonian style. An ugly new courthouse sits in the middle, a testimony to the lack of vision, foresight and aesthetic of this formerly bucolic town.

Ironically, the Machoopda now have large new structures, such as a clinic and a community center, on the developed land a short distance from the creek where their foremothers used to pray.

No one can begrudge them those essential places of modernity, but there’s a contradiction in their complicity in the destruction of local habitat, one that speaks to the dilemma and tragedy befalling indigenous peoples all over the Earth.

As the Mayan writer, poet and activist leader Pedro Uc Be in the Yucatan has said, “The social crisis and the environmental crisis appeared together in our world, at the same time, and have the same underlying causes.”

There are core questions, which urgently need to be asked and explored open-endedly for insight, not answered and settled from any perspective:

What is the context for indigenous insights and knowledge -- the Earth and humanity as a whole, or “sovereign” nationhood, whether American, Mexican, Cherokee or Maori?

Is trafficking in power, whether within or outside national and international frames, a given, the inescapable reality of environmental and cultural preservation?

Can indigenous peoples point the way ahead by showing that without a relationship to nature we have no relationship to anyone or anything?

With respect to cultural preservation, Pedro Uc Be has said of his own lineage, “A new Mayan recorded consciousness has started to emerge through literature, science, history, music. This creation of memory generates hope for us. We have started to develop a recorded cultural awareness of ourselves. Maybe it’s tragic, but it’s also beautiful.”

It is tragic because a recorded consciousness is not lived consciousness. It’s beautiful because a recorded indigenous cultural awareness can enrich human consciousness – if the Earth and human consciousness are viewed as a whole.

In the end, as Pedro has said, “A real environmental discourse must be a debate at our level, a pluricultural debate which gives a voice to first nations. It cannot happen in Paris, London or New York, but must take place at the human scale in traditional communities across the world.”

Martin LeFevre

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