Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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The Owens Valley Paiutes were unique in that from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century (and maybe dating from aboriginal times) they were practicing irrigation that was, as one source described it, “simply ‘an artificial reproduction of natural conditions’ existing in the swampy lowlands of Owens Valley.”¹⁵ The practice continued until the forced exodus of the Owens Valley people to Fort Tejon in 1863 and the subsequent depopulation of the area. Communal labor was utilized to construct and maintain check damns and feeder ditches that directed the spring runoff to swampy grounds where yellow nut-grass and other bulbous plants were harvested by Indian farmers using digging sticks in the fall. As anthropologists Sven Liljeblad and Catherine Fowler have noted, “At the time of European contact, artificial irrigation of wild crops in Owens Valley was an integral part of communal activity and an essential feature of traditional village organization.”¹⁶ As several scholars have observed, the Owens Valley group is the best example in North America of a group that developed its own system of “vegeculture.”¹⁷