Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990

1. The Yurok Reservation

39 1 The Yurok Reservation Once I saw a bunch of red currants that were just so perfect I couldn’t pick them. That’s when I first began to see all of my jewelry, for those red currants are rubies and I leave them all for my children. And I want to leave my children all of my garnets the wild strawberries. I leave my gold which is the gold in salmon berries, and my silver the raindrops seen in the moonlight. There are opals, too, when the moon shines on the water which has been ruffled by the wind. The diamonds I leave are the raindrops caught in a spider web, and my pearls are raindrops caught in cobwebs. My onyx is in the blackberries that grow everywhere and the thimble berries are more rubies. My amethyst, lavender, is the young salal berries. I have a few more jewels but I haven’t dug them up yet. I did see another golden treasure when I was out at Doctor Rock. There’s a kind of fungus there that turns golden, and there were spider webs over it. The spider webs make all the difference. When you get up early in the morning when it’s all covered with dew, then you see it: just a shining patch of gold under that sheet of cobwebs. Another thing that I have observed in my lifetime is the migration of spiders, which filled the air with silver. The spiders were on the south side of the river, and they let out long webs that made sails like parachutes and the wind carried them across the river. There were silver streaks all over the river. These are the treasures that I leave for the children. Florence Shaughnessy (Yurok), 1978 Non-Indians first settled in Yurok territory during the gold rush of 1849. Varied white interests defeated ratification of an 1851 treaty that would have created a large reservation. The ensuing armed conflict between Yuroks and whites extended into the mid-1860s. In 1855 President Franklin Pierce, by executive order, established the Klamath River Reservation in Yurok territory, a military zone along the lower twenty miles of the river. (Thus the Yuroks were a federally recognized tribe early on.) In 1864 Congress authorized a total of four reservations in the state of California. These included the twelve-by-twelve-square-mile Hoopa Valley Reservation on the Trinity River, occupied by Hupa, Yurok, and other Indian people. In the 1880s and 1890s, the validity of the 1855 Klamath River Reservation came under attack. The dispute was resolved in 1891, when President Benjamin Harrison issued an executive order enlarging the Hoopa Reservation by creating a “connecting strip” or “addition,” joining the questionable Klamath River Reservation to the fully authorized Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. The process resulted in the formation of an Extension to the Hoopa Square, a strip one mile wide on either side of the Klamath River running downriver from the Square at the junction of the Klamath and the Trinity River to the Pacific. The Square came to be popularly understood as a Hupa Indian reservation; the Extension was occupied primarily by Yuroks and is now called the Yurok Reservation. Three communal “rancherias” have also been granted to primarily Yurok residents on the coast, at Big Lagoon, Trinidad, and Klamath (Resighini). In 1891 the Extension consisted of 58,168 acres. After 1892, however, lands in the Extension were allotted to Yurok families under the Dawes Act, and the putative “surplus” lands were opened to whites. Timber companies and others bought up many allotments through questionable forced fee patents, and eventually controlled 87 percent of the Extension. In 1990, only about 6,800 communal acres remained in the Yurok Reservation, although Yuroks held an additional approximately 2,000 allotted acres. s u rv i va l By 1910 Yurok population had reached its nadir. Although the deeply reduced surviving population slowly began to increase after 1910, Yuroks were plagued by governmental indifference and oppressed by nonIndian landholders. Salmon canneries, beginning in 1877, provided some wage labor until they were closed in 1934, when all Indian commercial fishing and subsistence gill netting were also banned. Yuroks sought relief from poverty and malnutrition through assured access to aboriginal subsistence sites alienated by the allotment process. Robert Spott, an influential speaker from Requa, at the mouth of the Klamath, described Yurok people’s situation...