Voices from This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts (review)

Nestled between the Sierra Nevada and the White-Inyo mountain ranges in eastern California, the Owens Valley is geographically isolated and spatially bound. Yet this secluded sliver of California possesses a history that blatantly transcends the local. As a major site of the well-known water wars, the Owens Valley became a significant, albeit controversial source of water, enabled Los Angeles’ burgeoning development in the early twentieth century. Conceived of in 1904 and completed by 1913, the Los Angeles aqueduct literally bound the Owens Valley to the demands of the growing metropolis. Several decades later, in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the agriculturally and economically floundering Owens Valley was chosen as the site for the first official “war relocation center.” Manzanar interned 10,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945.

The water wars and the internment period are “so familiar as to be symbols of pasts deeply embedded in region and nation” (17), yet Wehrey, herself a native of the region, argues that exclusive scholarship and focus on these major events obscure the continuity of the valley’s own history, buttressing a narrative that is both episodic and detached from the locale’s distinct past. Reaffirming the valley’s historical integrity, Wehrey adeptly unveils a colorful local history constructed through the memories and accounts of “ordinary” residents. These “local companions” (19), Wehrey notes, convey a profound “knowledge of place” (22), their identities inextricably bound to the Owens Valley’s physical landscape and communities. Gathered from an oral history archive housed at the Eastern California Museum—and conducted by four interviewers over a nearly fifty year span—Wehrey includes fourteen life histories that stretch back 125 years into the valley’s past. While she utilizes secondary sources in the prefaces to each interview and in the introductory chapter, Voices from this Long Brown Land pivots on the life histories of local people, ultimately forging a more inclusive, continuous, interwoven, and bottom-up account of the Owens Valley’s past than any published to date.

Through an introductory chapter and short prefaces to each interview, Wehrey situates the oral testimonies within a more comprehensive historical framework. Unraveling the major developments of the Owens Valley, she explains that for over 5000 years the Great North Basin Paiute occupied the valley exclusively. In 1860, news of silver strikes in the Coso Mountains sparked the first Euro-American migration to the area. Under the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862, white settlers usurped plum land from the indigenous population to set up farms and ranches, engendering violent backlash and a period of hostile relations. By 1865, after driving off half of the indigenous population and subduing the remaining resistance with the help of the army, Euro-American hegemony ushered in a period of relative stability. Towns began to dot the valley within several years, yet the settlers quickly experienced setbacks. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, the city of Los Angeles systematically purchased the vast majority of the valley’s land to facilitate its exportation of water south. By the early1930s, Manzanar’s fruit orchards folded and the agricultural sector lay in near ruins. Intermittent extractive operations, soda ash recovery, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employment, grazing, and nascent tourism propelled the region’s dwindling population through the Depression and into the late 1930s. Following the internment period, a postwar rise in tourism and the reemergence of a vibrant agricultural sector—operating primarily on city-owned lands—marked still greater shifts in the valley’s economic and social structures.

Arranged chronologically and chosen by Wehrey for their “honesty of expression” (23), the fourteen oral histories are striking in their reflection of a dialectical relationship between structure and individual agency, as the narrators are seen both shaping and being shaped by the broad contours of local and regional history. One clear...