CONCOW, Calif. — Until recently, when members of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu pulled up a map of their ancestral land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, only about two dozen of their historic sites appeared.
Disease, violence and forced labor had separated California tribe members from their history. Without routine Indigenous fire to clear out the foothills, the landscape — much of it now managed by the U.S. Forest Service — grew dense with conifers, obscuring the signs of their enduring presence.
As a result, archaeologists’ picture of the tribe’s past was spare. No more than 500 people. Going back about 3,000 years — a fraction of the time other tribes are known to have lived in the state.
Then the forests burned.
In less than a decade, wildfires destroyed forests across 95% of the tribe’s homelands. The Forest Service turned to the tribe for help healing the land. As members walked the wide-open moonscape, they found evidence of their vibrant history everywhere.
Now just a few years later, their map shows more than 1,200 sites.
Each one is itself a collection: Arrowheads. Rock art. Milling stations where ancestors used cups carved into rock faces to grind salmon, manzanita berries and bay leaves. The circular pits of winter houses, where they sat around a fire under a cedar roof.
A milling station found by the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu in their tribal homelands.
(Sara Nevis / For The Times)
Now, as Tribal Chairperson Matthew Williford Sr. walks these lands, he imagines a much more vibrant past than the one traditionally portrayed by archeologists.
For millennia, upward of 5,000 ancestors living in the basin, many trekking to higher elevation to gather food in the summertime. Husbands venting about domestic life as they shaped their arrowheads on one side of the hill; wives doing the same at the milling stations on the other side.
Matthew Williford Sr., Konkow Valley Band of Maidu tribal chairperson, stands in Plumas National Forest.
(Sara Nevis / For The Times)
Now, to better understand the tribe’s past, the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu is teaming up with a new generation of archaeologists. On a recent day in the Plumas National Forest, Matthew O’Brien, an anthropology professor at Chico State University, worked alongside a handful of students and tribal members.
The team excavated a house pit, carefully carrying artifacts to a rudimentary lab of folding tables and camp chairs, where students weighed them, measured them with calipers and assessed their chemical makeup with an expensive tool called an XRF analyzer. People offered explanations for how their ancestors used the artifacts.
For O’Brien, this form of archeology is worlds apart from the practice of the past. Tribal people are not voiceless historical subjects to study but active collaborators helping to understand and protect the past.
In the 20th century, “the government put archaeologists in charge of stewarding the past. In places like the United States, that leads to some serious ethical issues because what we’re in charge of protecting is not our own culture,” O’Brien said. Now, “it’s our job to help repair that relationship.”
It’s an irony lost on no one that the same policies that disconnected tribal members from their history also enabled the fires that then allowed them to rediscover it.
Even before California gained statehood, Gold Rush lawmakers banned tribes from lighting fire to rejuvenate and thin out forests. That same law also allowed white Californians to force Indigenous adults and children into labor, which separated “at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures,” the state later acknowledged.
Meanwhile, the federal government refused to ratify treaties to establish reservations for tribes whose homelands lay within newly created California, leaving tribes like the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu landless. By the early 1900s, Forest Service officials were working aggressively to squash lingering sentiment among white ranchers that intentional fire was productive. Any fire that started on Forest Service land, the policy became, ought to be contained by 10 a.m. the next morning.
The Konkow Valley Band of Maidu did what they could. Tribal members drove around in a beat-up Buick flinging matches out the window. Eventually those efforts landed one elder in jail for arson.
The open forests of oak, dogwood and a few pines, once routinely thinned and maintained with low-intensity “good” fire, became thick with conifers, to the delight of the Forest Service. Now five to six times denser, the trees formed yet another barrier between the tribe and its history — yet a fragile one. When fire inevitably ignites within so much wood in such a tight space — through lightning or human error — it does not burn gently.
A statue stands in a lot charred by the Camp fire, which tore through Paradise, Calif., in 2018.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
In 2018, the Camp fire ripped through Butte County, burning 150,000 acres and killing 85 people. Three years later, the Dixie fire ravaged nearly a million acres. In its wake, a world covered in ash. Waterways turned into black sludge. A foul smell of sulfur lingered in the air.
“It was sickening,” Williford said. “Just disgusting.”
Material to be burned is piled in an area of Plumas National Forest that the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu helps manage.
(Sara Nevis / For The Times)
“The land used to repay us, or acknowledge us, by giving us what we needed,” Williford said, standing on a dirt road overlooking the valley. “There were Native generations that were disconnected, unplugged. … We feel lucky that it’s our opportunity to reconnect, to let the land know that ‘Hey! We’re still here!’”
Restoration work with the Forest Service — surveying sites, planting trees and bringing back good fire — continues to unearth long-lost artifacts. And the most exciting data from O’Brien’s team is yet to come:
The team plans to carbon-date a piece of charcoal from the house pit it excavated to see just how long ago tribal ancestors sat around its hearth.
It was an ancient fire, not the recent ones, that preserved some dead wood, and with it, a lasting elemental fingerprint saying, “We were here.”
