Giant hands fold and unfold in quiet frustration atop a table in the roadside cafe.
Walt Lara, a burly but gentle man, is squeezed into a booth.
”I should have gotten up and said something in that Supreme Court room,” he says, knotting his fist into a tight ball. ”They probably would have thrown me out, but if only the judges heard what we had to say, then maybe. . . .”
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The battle over the land where ”the spirits left the Earth” started nearly a dozen summers ago in this forest, where the trees scrape the sky and the fish come home from the ocean to wage up-current battles in the freshwater streams.
But the giant thousand-year-old Sequoias, the spawning salmon and even the legendary ”Bigfoot” are considered minor miracles compared with the power of the High Country.
It`s a world that Edison and Bell forgot, bordered by steep oceanside cliffs and dotted with magical mountains that the Indians say the ”Great Creator” himself left thousands of years ago as temples for the three tribes of Yurok, Karok and Tolowa.
The High Country, or ”Haa-th keek”-which means ”Way Out There” to the Yuroks-is just a few ridges away from the neighboring Karoks` ”Kota-Mein,”
or ”Center of the World.”
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP
But 11 years ago the U.S Forest Service decided to pave right through this world with a two-lane blacktop highway.
In late April, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-3 to give the Forest Service the go-ahead for the road and the subsequent logging of 46,000 virgin acres of nearby land, despite the Indians` lawsuit claiming that those actions would deprive them of their 1st Amendment rights to free exercise of religion. It`s a landmark case because it`s the first time the court had been asked to decide a 1st Amendment religious-rights case that challenged the use of government land.
Besides laying claim to the land on aboriginal grounds (which was not at issue in the lawsuit), the Indians say the decision set a dangerous precedent that will not only adversely affect other Indian challenges to similar government actions in other parts of the country, but also will weaken all other religious denominations` protections of free exercise of religion.
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Florence Shaughnessy, 86, sits overlooking the Klamath River in her living room filled with woven baskets, eel spears and family photos draped with shell necklaces. She recalls when she was in her 30s and was taken up Doctor Rock to heal a leg crippled in a traffic accident.
”I`m still getting around on it pretty good,” she says, tapping her knee. She refuses to give any details of the ”medicine” performed except to say only a select handful knew they had been empowered if they stood in a special spot and heard the echo of their clapped hands.
She wonders aloud if such echoes could be heard over the roar of trucks hauling timber. The average logging truck weighs 26.5 tons, is as long as a tree is tall and about as quiet as a subway car.
Downriver, Lorraine O`Rourke is having a cup of late-morning coffee. ”My mother never showed me how to weave baskets,” she says. ”She said the times of the old ways are gone. She lived in a (sod) house really close to here, but before she died she had my husband run over it with the Cat (Caterpillar tractor). Just buried the whole thing. I don`t know why she did that, because my grandmother loved that house so. . . .”
She takes a long sip from her coffee mug. ”Maybe that`s why.”
Outside, her sons, Lawrence ”Tager” O`Rourke and his brother Tom, are sitting at a picnic table on a bluff overlooking the Klamath River. Tom is busy hand-sanding a cedar box to give to a friend. Lawrence quit work as a building tradesman for months to fight the road project.
`JUST SHOOT US`
”Why don`t they just get it over with and line us all up and shoot us?” he says. ”That would be more humane instead of this slow death. A lot of people feel that if the High Country is worth living for, then it`s worth dying for. They just keep taking our land away. My ancestors lived on this very spot long before the Bureau of Indian Affairs existed. Now the bureau is telling us that we are `squatters.` ”
Further north, in the Del Norte County Assesor`s Office, Jerry Cochran sits behind a desk.
”Look, I`m 46 years old,” he says. ”And I`ve done all the hiking I want to do. Now when I go to the wilderness I want to drive through it.”
In another office, in adjoining Humboldt County to the south, Forest Supervisor Jim Davis rattles off statistics: The Pacific Northwest provides 52 percent of the nation`s wood supply. The U.S. Forest Service has traditionally supplied 13 percent of the lumber produced in the area. That translates into about 20 million board feet a year-enough for about 660 average homes. It takes about three acres of land to create 1 million board feet.
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Deep in the heart of that timberland, a small grocery and the church across the street are the only buildings for miles on a lonely winding road. A group of agitated men are leaning on pickups and cars in the store`s parking lot.
”I`m gonna get me a bulldozer and knock down a neighborhood where all those fancy people in the East live and see how they like it,” sputters one as he jumps into his pickup. He backs it up, wheels angrily churning up gravel, before screeching down the highway.
On this reservation, in the mountainous woods-which resemble Michigan`s Upper Peninsula more than the windswept plains commonly associated with native Americans-some predict a frontier-style armed insurrection. Others call for secession.
It`s just hothead talk now, but loaded words are not taken lightly in this wilderness, where rifles hang in many living rooms and some people won`t leave home without a gun.
There`s also a contingent horrified at the prospect of violence, who are preaching further legal, political and spiritual tactics in the battle against a logging road that has taken on the war cry of ”No GO.” The slogan is even spray-painted across portions of the offending road.
”GO” is the abbreviated name of the road: It would be a 55-mile-long link between the hamlets of Gasquet and Orleans, each with about 150 people.
Only a proposed 6-mile right-of-way remains to be completed. It would connect road spurs and it would run right through the Indians` sacred area in the Six Rivers National Forest of Northwestern California.
It`s the ironic finish to a story that began just before the 1849 Gold Rush, when area Indians welcomed white prospectors and settlers as gods, believing them to be the returning ”Woga.”
WHERE THE WOGA LIVE
Indian cosmology has it that the Woga, light-skinned spirit people, walked these lands before creating humans and then disappearing. The Woga are said to have left for the heavens from the High Country, but a couple of the spirits decided to hang around Earth to keep an eye on things and serve as conduits to the spirit world. They reside in the rocks themselves.
The ”making of medicine” is the major business in the High Country, besides spiritual training. Medicine is not only used for healing purposes, but also to make things go in a person`s favor-or to put things, including the Earth itself, back in balance.
Once the medicine is made privately by a doctor on the mountain, a public dance is held, usually in a sunken sod house by the river, to activate it.
The brush dance is primarily a healing ritual for individuals, while the jump and deerskin dances are ”world renewal” ceremonies traditionally held in late summer and tied to the land or the river.
Indian leaders say the existing roadways already make it hard to hear the spirits while performing their rituals. But beyond that, most of the Indians are tight-lipped about saying anything about the High Country, which they try to prevent from being photographed or taped.
Only recently, and with much criticism from hardliners, have a few reluctantly let select aspects of their religion out of the woods in a last-ditch media effort to save the spiritual glue they say holds the key to their people`s very existence.
Though the court`s majority opinion, written by Justice Sandra Day O`Connor, conceded that the road and subsequent timber harvesting could ”have devastating effects on traditional Indian religious practices,” it found, in a nutshell, that the land is the government`s to do with as it sees fit.
The high court dissent called the Forest Service road ”marginally useful,” since most of the surrounding timberlands have become part of the nationally protected Siskiyou Wilderness Area and all but one small local mill that the road was designed to benefit have shut down since the lawsuit was first filed.
`THE WORST`
”Out of the thousands of bad things that have been done to the Indians over the years, this is one of the worst,” says Jimmy James, a Yurok spiritual elder and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
James is not a big man. He has a short, stocky body and a cheerful face, but something in his tone and gaze freezes you to the spot, making you forget where you are standing: on the edge of a school field where coaches`
instructions are being shouted over the crack of Little League bats.
”That`s just about all I can say,” he says slowly, turning back to the classroom, where he is one of seven adults crouched on tiny chairs in the Jack Norton Elementary School. The school, one of the few outposts for electricity and telephone (via C.B. radio) in the area, represents a return to community and ethnic roots.
James, a full-blooded Yurok and fluent speaker of the language, still vividly remembers when he was ”knocked from here to the walls” for using his native tongue at a government boarding school. That was just a generation or two ago during the great purge of all things Indian, when the government was trying forcefully to assimilate into the mainstream the resistant local Indians, who were among the last tribes to be encroached upon by Western civilization because of their far Northwest location and the isolated, rugged terrain.
CULTURAL RENAISSANCE
Now at least the language has come full cycle: James, who is in his mid-70s, is an instructor for other adults who want to speak Yurok.
After class, when the subject of the road comes up, all present defer to James. When asked about High Country legends he can talk about, he quietly recites a long passage from the Great Creator in Yurok. Then he translates in English, waving an open palm to those in the room:
”Love one another. Help one another. Don`t let one go hungry. Neither let them go cold, because you are my children, as one. Don`t make a criticism of this, for I gave it to you for a purpose.”
The Indian language program, sponsored by Humboldt State University, is not without its detractors, but it`s an important part of the first cultural renaissance for the tribes, an ironic sidelight to the timing of the High Court decision.
Because of intermarriage-primarily with whites of Irish ancestry in the area-there are few full-blooded Indians left. Activist Christopher Peters estimates the Indian population at 4,000 predominantly Yurok, 2,000 Karok, 1,500 Hupa (sic) and 600 Tolowa living within a 60-mile radius of the Hoopa Valley Reservation.
Of those Indians, he estimates only about 20 percent are actively engaged in Indian spiritual pursuits, although the majority would probably supply
”lip-service” support on the GO Road issue.
Still, one tribe of Tolowa, on the Smith Valley Rancheria (a small reservation) in Del Norte County near the coast, actually passed a resolution supporting the GO Road nearly 10 years ago. That was during the boom mill time when a half-dozen mills were operating in nearby Crescent City, providing work either directly or indirectly for many of the rancheria Indians.
WHERE ARE THE JOBS?
But the GO Road is coming too late to save the jobs of the Smith Valley Indians, who now suffer about 70 percent unemployment, says Tribal Chairman William Richards. And Richards now admits to ”mixed feelings” about its completion since the mills are closed. Sylvia S. White, another vocal GO Road supporter from the Smith Valley Rancheria, also has toned down her support for the road, suggesting that maybe a ”compromise” road is possible.
But to those fighting the GO project, a compromise road is about as possible as a partial pregnancy.
Here it becomes apparent that the idea of political or spiritual cohesiveness among the Indians is absurd. The tribes operate independently, have separate languages and proudly boast of their minute regional differences in much the same way that Italians and Frenchmen would compare themselves, though both are European.
These fiercely territorial people further divide themselves into upriver and downriver dwellers, a reference to where they live along the Klamath, where the reservation is ”extended” for a mile on each side of the river`s length-or so the map shows, because in reality much of the land marked
”reservation” actually belongs to non-Indians, including several timber companies and a contingent of motorcyle-riding outlaws.
Various Indians talk about reclaiming their lands, but they have enough trouble officially organizing themselves as tribal units under the complex rules outlined by the U.S. government, let alone forming a cohesive association among tribes.
`SOMETHING IS DYING`
Peters is one of the few Indians fighting the road who acknowledge it probably ”eventually” will be completed, and says the insistence that the road will not be finished is indicative of the ”stage of denial that all people go through when they realize something is dying.”
To some Indians, the High Country is still very much alive, and their beliefs about it appear to many outsiders as fervent superstition rivaling the curse of King Tut`s tomb.
The true believers take these spiritual dictates so seriously that only special people with pure minds, bodies and hearts adequately prepared through the proper amount of sweating, praying and fasting are allowed to walk up the Golden Stairs and sit on the naturally formed prayer seats on Doctor Rock, Chimney Rock and Peak Eight.
There, the spirits will communicate only in undistracted silence and empower just the chosen few who are properly prepared. Tourists and other curiosity-seekers need not apply, and only serve to interfere in the process. Violators, according to the Indians, risk some calamity befalling them or their families. In the case of casual non-Indian campers, ”ignorance is bliss,” and they can usually pass through unscathed, says Peters.
But such increased recreational use of the land and easier management of the area are among the reasons the Forest Service wants the GO Road, says Forest Supervisor Jim Davis.
He says the Forest Service has tried to accommodate the Indians by placing the proposed road a half-mile to a mile away from any of the dozen sacred sites, instead of following an overgrown Jeep trail left over from the mining days of the 1930s and closed in late 1985 with the passage of the Wilderness Act.
A YEAR OF GRACE
Construction on the GO Road probably won`t begin for another year, because the Forest Service must first address environmental issues that were identified in the lower federal courts.
Davis says the road would be built along a corridor left by Congress through the 150,000-some acres of the Blue Creek/Siskiyou Wilderness. Most of the logging would take place further south in the Blue Creek watershed area.
But others here have heard the spirits calling-telling them to look into their hearts, reflected in their beloved land. The mountains that at one time seemed so bountiful are now covered with splotches of logging eczema: brown burnt patches of earth scarred with stumps. They bleed pulp into the streams, choking off the salmon that can`t seem to find their way home anymore.
Looking down at their hands now, these few are asking, ”What are we doing?” as the soft whisper of the spirits` voices slowly slips away. –
