who was from northern California, had authored the partitioning bill, and had married into a wealthy timber-industry family.
Their speeches were as dull as such speeches always are, but they sounded especially queer in Hoopa Valley. The speakers, too, seemed odd. In their pancake makeup and their crisp, dark suits, they resembled ill-at-ease ambassadors from a foreign country, which, in essence, they were.
There were protests against Public Law 100–580 in town. At Mike’s Auto Body Shop, four figures were hung in effigy out front, dummies representing Inouye, Bosco, Senator Alan Cranston of California, and an unidentified perpetrator. The shop was owned jointly by Mike McConnell, a Hupa, and Herb O’Neill, a Yurok. They had posted a sign near the dangling bodies that said, “Welcome to Yuropa,” an imaginary land where the tribes would still live together in harmony.
McConnell and O’Neill had worked with each other for years, a couple of Indians with Irish names who enjoyed banging on fenders and trading quips. O’Neill, at seventy-four, had a face that was creased everywhere. When I asked how old he was when he came to Hoopa Valley, he held his hands about sixteen inches apart, the size of a newborn infant.
He smiled and said, “I was an orphan.”
Someone had dispatched him to an orphanage in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, and from there he enlisted in the army and foughtin Germany. After the war, he returned to the reservation because he had nowhere else to go.
O’Neill wasn’t sure who had won what in the partitioning. Did it have to do with water rights? With logging interests? He just didn’t like the idea of the tribes being separated.
A customer pulled in while we were talking, attracted by the lynched dummies. He looked at them for a time and said, “Did you know that Inouye has only one arm?”
“Sure,” O’Neill told him. “That’s why they call him the ‘One-armed Bandit’ in Hawaii.”
McConnell, the artist responsible for the figures, had never heard about the lost arm before, so he went over and ripped one off the Inouye dummy.
T HE BEST WESTERN IN HOOPA was scheduled to be transformed into the Tsewenaldin Inn at a dedication ceremony on Hupa Sovereign Day, so I had to check out. I looked through my sliding-glass door while I was packing and saw a woman come out of the bushes by the river, her hair matted with leaves and twigs.
I realized that it was the same woman I had seen on that first afternoon in town, but she no longer wore a white dress. Instead, she had on a rose-colored sweatsuit, and her feet were bare. She was not young and beautiful, as I had naively assumed, but middle-aged and in some kind of mental distress.
As I observed, she rolled the sweatpants to her knees, waded into the river, and stood at the same spot where I’d noticed her before, staring into the water for about ten minutes without moving a muscle. Then she got out of the river, stripped off her sweatpants to reveal a pair of blue gym shorts, and waded back in. Again, she stood absolutely still in the same spot for about ten minutes, staring, before she stumbled up the bank and walked off toward town.
As I was leaving the motel, I asked the desk clerk, an agreeable white woman, if she knew anything about the woman in the river.
The woman’s mother had drowned about a year ago, the clerk said, and since then, on almost every day, even in the coldest winter months, the woman had waded into the Trinity to stare into the water and search for her mother’s body.
CHAPTER 4
D OWN THE ROAD FROM HOOPA VALLEY , at the base of the Trinity Mountains, lay the town of Willow Creek, where everyone was involved in the annual rite of preparing for tourist season on the day that I arrived. As a fisherman mends his nets in anticipation of salmon, so, too, did the proprietors of motels, gift shops, and sporting goods stores in the Far North get ready for their customers, whitewashing walls, hosing bug corpses from
Their speeches were as dull as such speeches always are, but they sounded especially queer in Hoopa Valley. The speakers, too, seemed odd. In their pancake makeup and their crisp, dark suits, they resembled ill-at-ease ambassadors from a foreign country, which, in essence, they were.
There were protests against Public Law 100–580 in town. At Mike’s Auto Body Shop, four figures were hung in effigy out front, dummies representing Inouye, Bosco, Senator Alan Cranston of California, and an unidentified perpetrator. The shop was owned jointly by Mike McConnell, a Hupa, and Herb O’Neill, a Yurok. They had posted a sign near the dangling bodies that said, “Welcome to Yuropa,” an imaginary land where the tribes would still live together in harmony.
McConnell and O’Neill had worked with each other for years, a couple of Indians with Irish names who enjoyed banging on fenders and trading quips. O’Neill, at seventy-four, had a face that was creased everywhere. When I asked how old he was when he came to Hoopa Valley, he held his hands about sixteen inches apart, the size of a newborn infant.
He smiled and said, “I was an orphan.”
Someone had dispatched him to an orphanage in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, and from there he enlisted in the army and foughtin Germany. After the war, he returned to the reservation because he had nowhere else to go.
O’Neill wasn’t sure who had won what in the partitioning. Did it have to do with water rights? With logging interests? He just didn’t like the idea of the tribes being separated.
A customer pulled in while we were talking, attracted by the lynched dummies. He looked at them for a time and said, “Did you know that Inouye has only one arm?”
“Sure,” O’Neill told him. “That’s why they call him the ‘One-armed Bandit’ in Hawaii.”
McConnell, the artist responsible for the figures, had never heard about the lost arm before, so he went over and ripped one off the Inouye dummy.
T HE BEST WESTERN IN HOOPA was scheduled to be transformed into the Tsewenaldin Inn at a dedication ceremony on Hupa Sovereign Day, so I had to check out. I looked through my sliding-glass door while I was packing and saw a woman come out of the bushes by the river, her hair matted with leaves and twigs.
I realized that it was the same woman I had seen on that first afternoon in town, but she no longer wore a white dress. Instead, she had on a rose-colored sweatsuit, and her feet were bare. She was not young and beautiful, as I had naively assumed, but middle-aged and in some kind of mental distress.
As I observed, she rolled the sweatpants to her knees, waded into the river, and stood at the same spot where I’d noticed her before, staring into the water for about ten minutes without moving a muscle. Then she got out of the river, stripped off her sweatpants to reveal a pair of blue gym shorts, and waded back in. Again, she stood absolutely still in the same spot for about ten minutes, staring, before she stumbled up the bank and walked off toward town.
As I was leaving the motel, I asked the desk clerk, an agreeable white woman, if she knew anything about the woman in the river.
The woman’s mother had drowned about a year ago, the clerk said, and since then, on almost every day, even in the coldest winter months, the woman had waded into the Trinity to stare into the water and search for her mother’s body.
CHAPTER 4
D OWN THE ROAD FROM HOOPA VALLEY , at the base of the Trinity Mountains, lay the town of Willow Creek, where everyone was involved in the annual rite of preparing for tourist season on the day that I arrived. As a fisherman mends his nets in anticipation of salmon, so, too, did the proprietors of motels, gift shops, and sporting goods stores in the Far North get ready for their customers, whitewashing walls, hosing bug corpses from
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