Eagle Rock, a large eagle-shaped rock, sits high on the Sacred Land of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, making sure the river below is safe. It looks much the same as it did centuries ago, except it has been desecrated by gunshots.

This sacred space is one of the first sites to be mapped as a part of the Winnemem Wintu Sacred Sites Documentation Project. DataCenter partnered with Pacific Institute to provide GPS training for youth and elder tribal members so they could map the sites themselves.

Throughout the summer, youth and elders of the tribe will be hiking across their land, stopping at sacred sites to tell stories and, using GPS mapping technology, record the location of that site on a satellite map. The tribe will then use this map to protect their sacred lands from development. This project is the next step of the oral history project, beginning in 2008, in which Winnemem Wintu young adult Mike Preston collected and recorded stories from tribal members about each of the sacred sites.
More background on the project (pdf).

On June 15, the tribe embarked on the first of several trips to map their sacred sites. For Audrey Ward, a 26 year old member of the tribe, Samwell Cave was one of the most memorable sites of the day. A cave with a story: many years ago a young girl and her sister hid in this cave to hide from a neighboring tribe that was known to be abducting women. One of the girls died when she fell into a deep hole in the cave.

Since she was a child, Audrey was told not to go there because it was a sacred space used by tribal medicine doctors. But at the age of 26, not only did Audrey get to map this sacred space in her memory, she also got to click a button and map the location’s significance for the whole world, especially land developers, to see.

“DataCenter has helped us improve our resources and knowledge of how to translate the importance of areas that we want to protect into a language that archeologists and other people that look at land can understand. This project is empowering us to keep fighting for our sacred spaces.”

(Photo above: Audrey and her brother marking a sacred site using a smart phone that is connected to GIS mapping technology.)

The Sacred Lands Film Project is filming these trips for an upcoming documentary. While some tribal members are intimidated by the idea of chronicling this process on film, Audrey said, “It’s good to have our people and stories on film, because if there is a time when someone from our tribe cannot tell the story, the film will have the story for many people to see.” In this way, the voices of the Winnmem Wintu people can be heard in communities throughout the United States and the world.

Audrey and her tribe have over 40 more sites to mark on the map, and they’ll be taking trips throughout the summer. Thank you for your gifts which make this empowering project possible. We look forward to keeping you informed as the sacred site map is completed.

By miho kim
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The circumstances: The bulk of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe territory has been submerged by the construction of the Shasta Dam. Raising the Dam would threaten their remaining territories, including tribal sacred sites.

The project: In early March, DataCenter traveled joined the Tribe in its community near Redding, CA to review preliminary findings from interviews with Tribal members and formulate a plan for public education and advocacy about the issue.

Because of your support, DataCenter partnered with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and launched the Winnemem Wintu Sacred Sites Oral Documentation Project in 2007. The project served two main purposes:

• Preserve the Tribal members’ rich traditional knowledge for future generations
• Document their information using research tools to help them advocate for environmental justice

The future: Throughout the summer, Datacenter will partner with the Pacific Institute, the Georgraphy Department at San Francisco State University and the Sacred Lands Film Project to lead participatory mapping workshops to document the Winnemem Wintu Sacred Sites. Using hands-on tools and mobile devices, Tribal members across generations will use their traditional knowledge to design a map of their sacred sites, a powerful piece of evidence in the argument to protect Tribal land in the wake of Dam construction.

This project is an exciting model that demonstrates DataCenter’s newly developed capacity-building strategies through internships and community fellowships. Mike Preston, a young Winnemem Wintu leader currently enrolled at UC Berkeley, began his internship at DataCenter in 2007 and initiated the documentation component of this project. Today, as a Community Fellow at DataCenter, he is key consul to his tribe. In the words of Tribal Headman, Mark Franco,

“[DataCenter's] support has been crucial to this project; their expertise in planning and implementing oral history projects has given our entire effort and Mike a strong foundation in understanding new methodolgies and techniques…Futhermore, DataCenter’s unique social justice perspective and commitment to honoring community expertise and experiences has allowed…Mike to craft a project that will truly highlight the voices of the Winnmem Wintu Tribe.”

The Sacred Sites Oral Documentation Project has supported the Winnemem Wintu Tribe in developing a self-sustaining infrastructure and inventory for the preservation of their unique knowledge. They also gained the capacity to conduct and use research to meet strategic needs and elevate their message in an authentic way. We look forward to our growing partnership of key allies in this effort and are grateful to the California Consumer Protection Foundation for its generous support of the project.

DataCenter and Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE) partnered in late 2009 to bring 12 young people together for an Indigenous Knowledge and Research Justice Camp.  The 2-day camp was the first step in building a network of young people that can participate in and eventually lead the current uranium battles, offering their skills and talents as politically-oriented organizers, artists, and performers.

We explored the different realms of knowledge: mainstream knowledge, experiential knowledge, and traditional and grassroots knowledge.  We discussed how community, experienced, and traditional grassroots knowledge provide a person with a stable foundation, whereas mainstream knowledge doesn’t.  Community, traditional, grassroots, and experienced knowledge make you who you are and are necessary to continue community life.  Ideas and lessons that come from the earth are time-tested and more foundational.  Oftentimes, mainstream knowledge distracts us from what is really important, for instance, how does Paris Hilton really affect our lives?  Mainstream knowledge can serve a good purpose and share information that everyone should have access to and know in order to and build a common awareness.  Knowledge can come from multiple communities and be shared.

One of the most memorable moments from the camp was when participants were asked to draw their life story on a single piece of paper and how uranium mining has impacted their lives.  Every participant had a personal story to share on how uranium mining continues to impact our lives, from having a family member that used to work in the mines, from seeing old mining equipment abandoned in their communities, to having family members that have gotten sick and passed on from uranium contamination.

Working on uranium issues, it is clear that policy-makers and those in power usually only value information that comes from western science.  Numbers, statistics, data, western science, and written documents make knowledge “valued.”  In our communities, our knowledge is not always documented in these ways and is usually not considered acceptable or relevant.  We also decided that the value of knowledge goes up as you need it (i.e. in the woods a computer isn’t valuable at all, whereas traditional knowledge would be more important).

We decided to do a video project that will challenge these ideas and help us reclaim and document our community’s knowledge so that we can share it with others.  As our training camp ended, our participants walked away with flip cameras and tapes to continue to build upon the lessons of the training even after the training ended.  Participants are free to choose to create a video diary in which they share thoughts, insight, and ideas that arise after the training session has ended; or interview friends, family members, and others in order to document the knowledge that already exists in our communities; or to use on our group project, a film project that explores how uranium continues to affect the lives of our families and communities.  After collecting video, participants will send their cameras and tapes to organizers for processing and editing.  The final product will be a video that can be used to upload to YouTube, to send to legislators to educate them on the uranium issue, and to be put on Ch 27, the local TV station.

Coming Soon: a short YouTube video of the Community-Uranium Mining session with Dine Youth!

Nadine Padilla, Coordinator of MASE Coalition, is based in Albuquerque, NM, and is Navajo and Pueblo (Isleta/Laguna) from Bluewater Lake, NM.  For more information about MASE Coaltion, please contact Nadine Padilla at mz.nadine@gmail.com.

With DataCenter support, our youth intern Michael Preston, a young emerging leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe of Northern California, along with our research intern Rachel Gelfand worked closely with one of National Radio Project’s own star producers Andrew Stelzer to produce a very powerful radio documentary: War Dance of the Winnemem Wintu. Preston presents the story of his tribe and their struggle to prevent the flooding of the sacred land and native ecology they have called home for centuries. The Winnemem evoked the ceremonial War Dance to protect their sacred sites, burial grounds, and historical village sites from further destruction in 1887, 2004 and again in 2009.

The radio project arose from the DataCenter-Winnemem Wintu Sacred Sites Oral Documentation Project, for which Mike and Rachel had conducted a series of interviews with the tribal members. The Winnemem Wintu-DataCenter partnership was launched to strengthen the capacity of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe to effectively apply culturally-based systems of knowledge in conjunction with outside information and research methods in order to protect the environmental, spiritual, cultural and economic integrity of their lands and people. Specifically, the project will probe the tribe’s ecological, cultural and spiritual perspectives and attempt to assess the potential impact of the California water policy concerning the Mt. Shasta watershed on the members of the Tribe, as well as to the living diversity of a peoples and a unique ecological landscape of the McCloud River region of California they call home. Data from the Project will also be used to support the Winnemem Wintu Tribe’s efforts to preserve their sacred lands, their historical knowledge of those sites, and sustain their culture.

Lend your support to the Winnemen Wintu Tribe and their critical struggle for cultural sovereignty and right to their traditional ways of life as they see fit – and to realize the long overdue opportunity for the US Government to repair its mistakes and errors of the past, once and for all!

Making Contact, “An international radio program that links people, vital ideas, and important information,” is produced by National Radio Project, is an award-winning, 29-minute weekly magazine/documentary-style public affairs program heard on over 200 radio stations in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Ireland.

To get the Winnemem Wintu story broadcast on your public radio station, please inquire with Lisa @ 510-251-1332 ext 105 or lrudman@radioproject.org.

This experience has proven to be a powerful model of research support organization – media organization – community partnership, that we feel has a powerful potential in elevating the community voices to shift values, public debate, and influence the larger sociopolitical climate in which policy decisions are made – all the while honoring the traditional method of community knowledge production and transfer: oral history and storytelling. Please contact miho if you’re interested in learning more about this partnership or have any questions!

Data Center’s participation in this radio project was funded in part by the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation

photos by permission of Christopher McCleod

miho kim is DC’s Indigenous Knowledge Project point person