Wintu Erotic

The Wintu name themselves with their own word for person, which is how most peoples in northern California handled the question before outsiders answered it for them. Their country is the upper Sacramento drainage: the river canyon above what is now Redding, the McCloud and lower Pit, and the Trinity headwaters across the Coast Range divide, all of it under the south face of Mount Shasta. This is broken foothill and conifer canyon rather than valley floor, and life was organized by water. Villages sat on terraces above the rivers, each with its own headman and its own recognized fishing places, and the spring and fall Chinook runs set the year as firmly as the black oak acorn harvest did. There was no central Wintu authority and never had been, which later made it convenient for federal agents to treat them as scattered remnants rather than as a people. The language is the northern member of the small Wintuan family, with Nomlaki in the middle valley and Patwin south of that. It drew unusual attention in the mid twentieth century from the linguist Dorothy Lee, who wrote about the way Wintu verbs oblige a speaker to mark how they know a thing: seen, inferred, or heard secondhand. Directions run along the river's axis instead of by left and right. The last first-language speakers died within living memory, and revitalization now works from recordings and from what families held onto.

Gold changed everything inside a single decade. Miners flooded the upper Sacramento after 1848, hydraulic operations buried the spawning gravels, and settler militias attacked villages outright, the killing at Bridge Gulch in Trinity County in 1852 being the best documented of several. What survived that century was largely undone by concrete in the next. Shasta Dam, finished in 1945, drowned the Sacramento canyon and the lower McCloud, taking villages, burial grounds, and sacred sites with them. Congress had promised replacement land. It was never delivered, and most Wintu today hold no federal recognition at all, though Wintu people are enrolled at the Redding Rancheria and organized bands such as the Nor Rel Muk near Hayfork keep pressing their case. The Winnemem Wintu, the McCloud River band, argue it loudest: dancing against proposals to raise the dam higher, petitioning for river closures so that a young woman can finish her coming of age ceremony without boat traffic running through it, and working for years to repatriate winter-run Chinook from New Zealand, where descendants of eggs shipped out of a McCloud hatchery in the 1870s still run in the Rakaia.