Professor Greg White and tribal member Arlene Ward at Alumni Glen, the former site of a Mechoopda village
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On Common Ground
CSU, Chico and Mechoopda Indian tribe forge
relationship to preserve history, plan for the
future
By Mary Abowd
Before anthropology professor Antoinette Martinez overturned
a single stone in her excavation at Big Chico Creek Ecological
Reserve, located 10 miles northeast of campus, she did something
that, historically, few archaeologists have done: She approached
the local Native American tribe, the Mechoopda, and asked them
to join her.
“I went to them and said I want to do archaeology on the
reserve and I want you to participate,” recalls Martinez.
Although California environmental law mandates that Native Americans
monitor
such projects in the event an excavation turns up Native American
artifacts or graves, Martinez wanted to forge a relationship that
went beyond legal requirements.
Her desire signals a new style of doing archaeology, one that begins
to heal wounds that have existed for decades between university
anthropology departments and local native peoples. Martinez saw
that Mechoopda participation would enable the tribe to learn firsthand
about their ancestors’ way of life. “This is part of
their past, their heritage,” she says.
It also represents a new chapter in the relationship between California
State University, Chico and the Mechoopda. Last October, in a move
that is unprecedented in the California State University system,
the University signed an official memorandum of understanding (MOU)
with the tribe—descendants of the original inhabitants of
land lying between the foothills and the Sacramento River and stretching
roughly from Durham in south Butte County up to the Tehama County
line.
The document (which can be found on the Web at www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/05_11_10/guidingPrinciples.shtml)
is a set of guiding principles pledging that the two parties will
practice “open, candid, respectful, timely, and effective
communication” and seek agreement on decisions concerning
future use of campus lands. It calls for the tribe and University
to devise a plan that would deal with any artifacts, sacred objects,
or burial remains—materials known as “cultural resources”—that
may be found on campus property in the future.
“I really see this as recognition by the University that
the Mechoopda are the first peoples of this area,” says tribal
chairman Steve Santos, who works as an information technology consultant
at CSU, Chico’s Meriam Library. “A trust relationship
needs to be built, and we’re well on that path.”
Other tribal members agree: “The University has stepped forward
to say, ‘We want to pay attention. We want to know what you
know,’ ” says Arlene Ward, Mechoopda cultural coordinator,
who graduated from CSU, Chico in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree
in anthropology and a certificate in museum studies. “For
a university, the holder of knowledge, to say ‘We may not
have all the answers’ is to me a tremendous step.”
Honoring sacred items
Perhaps most notably, the memorandum will begin to address a long-held
concern among the Mechoopda—the University’s vast collection
of Native American artifacts, among them 158 individual skeletons,
nearly 2,800 individual bones, and some 800 burial-related items.
Those items were amassed during the 1960s and 1970s by archaeology
field classes that dug sites within an hour’s drive of campus—in
the heart of Mechoopda territory. For a time, those bones were
handled by anthropology students and stored on classroom shelves
in what may have been a step forward for science but to the Mechoopda
was a violation of their spiritual beliefs.
A federal law passed in 1990 required universities across the nation
to catalogue such items and present inventories to those Native
American tribes that could claim a link to the remains. During
the 1990s, CSU, Chico began the process but never finished it,
particularly the law’s directive to consult with tribal members
on how to give back any human remains and sacred burial items.
To say the Mechoopda are eager to see this happen would be an understatement. “Those
bones need to go back in the ground,” says Ward. “They
need to go home.”
The MOU does not spell out how that will be done, but it represents
a readiness to work together. “It’s not about what
actions we’re going to take but how we’re going to
interact with one another,” says Greg White, director of
the Archaeological Research Program, who was instrumental in drafting
the text of the agreement. “The purpose is to establish an
administrative context for all of the interaction we can expect
to have with the tribe.”
All parties hope that interaction will resemble what happened when
Martinez reached out with respect toward the Mechoopda. Last semester,
her request for participation was answered when tribal member Eileen
Conway enthusiastically joined her weekly digs at the reserve. “I’d
like to think I’m fulfilling one aspect of how we hope to
work with the Mechoopda,” says Martinez. “Their cultural
heritage is at stake anywhere we work around here.”
Uncovering the past
The MOU didn’t materialize without some hard lessons. Three
years ago, as trenches were dug on campus to wire the university
with T-II fiber optic cable, White watched from his office and
archaeology lab at 25 Main Street with growing concern. “That
was all done without any kind of archaeological effort in monitoring
or consultation with tribes,” he says. “I just thought
there’s something wrong here. What we really need to do is
think about our relationship with the tribes and our responsibility
as stewards of the past.”
The ground beneath the campus is likely replete with Native American
artifacts, even burial sites, notes White, including evidence of
prehistoric settlements dating back 16,000 years. Modern times
offer even more exact clues. Just across from White’s office
is the site of a historic Mechoopda village that was situated along
Big Chico Creek in the mid-1800s, at the time that John Bidwell
came to the area and established his Rancho Arroyo Chico.
Later, that settlement was moved behind the Bidwell Mansion to
what is today the Alumni Glen area between Butte and Holt halls.
There, in exchange for work on Bidwell’s ranch, the Mechoopda
received protection from government “removal policies” and
vigilante violence against Indians, including the 1863 Nome Cult
march when more than 450 local Native Americans were rounded up
and forced to walk nearly 100 miles westward to a reservation in
Mendocino County.
Just as White suspected, the cable trenching project did turn up
historic remnants—but they were not Native American. Bulldozers
hit upon what appeared to be a classroom from Chico Normal School,
the teaching facility founded in 1887 that eventually became CSU,
Chico.
The incident raised the question of how to proceed with the University’s Strategic
Plan for the Future and its Master Plan 2005, which entails
construction of proposed new facilities during the next 15 to 20
years, such as the Student Services Center and student recreation
center. Further digging on campus lands might uncover cultural
items important to local Native Americans.
Administration officials knew it was time to steer things in a
new direction. “There’s always been this unwritten
understanding that we have potential for Native American artifacts
on this campus,” says Greg Francis, executive dean and director
of Facilities Planning and a driving force behind the MOU. “When
we were putting together documentation for the master plan, there
was an awareness that we’re always talking about this, but
where is it written down?”
Thus began a nine-month process to draw up a memorandum that would
guide university-Indian relations into the future. For starters,
Francis says, projects such as the master plan and individual building
plans will be shared with the Mechoopda “well in advance
of doing anything other than drawing lines on paper,” and
Mechoopda “cultural monitors” will now be present when
any digging into campus lands occurs.
It’s a sign that things have come a long way, says White,
who, since coming to CSU Chico in 1996, has served as a liaison
between local tribes and the University. “I think the campus
has come to understand that we live in Indian country,” he
says.
A clash of cultures
To understand the full impact of the MOU, it’s worth considering
the uneasy history that has existed between Native Americans and
universities for decades. “Typically, archaeologists excavated
big sites and pulled a lot of burials out without any Indian participation,” explains
White. “Skeletal remains would be housed in anthropology
labs, studied by generations of students, handled and mishandled,
stored poorly—a real lack of what we would consider modern
curation methods.”
Beginning in the late 1960s, as Indian groups began to gain a political
voice, tribes across the United States began demanding that burial
remains and other sacred objects be returned to them, primarily
so that they could be reburied. The term used was “repatriation” of
those remains, underscoring federally recognized tribes’ status
as sovereign nations.
The controversy didn’t elude CSU, Chico. Beginning in the
1960s, the Department of Anthropology conducted archaeological
digs in the area and stored those finds on campus, says White.
An account in the March 22, 1990, issue of the Chico News & Review,
titled “Skeletons in the Closet,” described the angry
fallout: “About 30 Indian activists crowded into a meeting
of the university’s faculty senate, where they nearly outnumbered
the senators themselves. Their demand: that the bones immediately
be given over to them for reburial.”
The article characterized the dispute this way: “Behind this
disagreement over a set of bones is a clash of cultures that has
existed ever since the first Europeans came to the New World and
began displacing its native inhabitants. It pits a rationalist,
scientific, post-industrial people against one that is earth-bound,
tribal and mystical.”
If that characterization oversimplified things then—it certainly
doesn’t fit today. Both Ward, who has studied anthropology,
and Conway, who joined a university excavation, say they see the
value of scientific discovery, and both express more than a little
curiosity. Nevertheless, the urgency to see burial remains returned,
and reburied, according to tribal spiritual belief, persists. “With
any human remains, our primary objective and goal is to locate
them wherever they may be and make it a priority to repatriate
them,” says Ward. For anyone unable to understand that urgency,
Ward clarifies: “I don’t think you’d want your
grandmother’s bones on a shelf, would you?”
In 1990, the federal government adopted a set of laws that attempted
to remedy the situation. Among them was the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act, referred to as NAGPRA, which White
calls “a legislative response to the failure on the part
of scholars to respond to Native American desires to bring a close
to the old way of doing archaeology.”
NAGPRA assigns the responsibility for remains to what are called
the “most likely descendants,” those who can trace
their ancestry to a tribal group that is most likely related to
the remains in question. It sets in place a complicated legalistic
process, but the first order of business is for facilities housing
remains to conduct an inventory and then submit that inventory
to the most likely descendants. From there, a “consultation” begins,
with the objective of repatriating those remains that qualify under
law.
With a grant from the National Park Service, the Mechoopda tribe
has been working with White in an effort to complete the unfinished
business of documenting some 400,000 artifacts in the University’s
collection and begin the process of repatriation set for a future,
but yet undetermined, date.
More ancestral burial sites
Beyond the question of the human remains and burial items, Ward
says the Mechoopda have concerns about particular sacred and culturally
sensitive sites on campus, including places where the tribe believes
more ancestors are buried.
They look to the Mechoopda village that existed behind Bidwell’s
mansion beginning in 1849 and was, at one point, home to some 500
inhabitants. Later, in 1869, that village was moved west to a plot
of land stretching along Sacramento Avenue as far west as the railroad
tracks and became known as the Mechoopda Indian Rancheria. In the
early 1960s, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs sold the land
to the University, and by 1964, the U.S. government “terminated” the
rancheria. (That action was later deemed unlawful, and in a 1992
court decision, the Mechoopda regained their federal status.) Today,
all that remains of the original rancheria is a small cemetery,
wedged between rental properties that house mostly CSU, Chico students.
The Mechoopda are currently studying the possibility that graves
exist beyond that cemetery.
Perhaps the most sensitive site, however, is the land in south
Chico near Durham where the University’s Agricultural Teaching
and Research Center (University Farm) is located. Ward says the
area is the setting of the Mechoopda creation story. That hot topic
has not yet been broached with campus officials, but she’s
hopeful the speaking terms set by the memorandum will make dialogue
easier. “Once they understand how important the creation
story is to our mythology and that it’s tied to Durham,” she
says, “and once they are used to hearing that, and they accept
it, then they are more sensitized to planning a little more carefully
for this site.”
While these issues remain outstanding, progress has been made on
other fronts. The Mechoopda have consulted with staff at the Meriam
Library regarding the Dorothy Morehead Hill Collection, a treasure
trove of about 6,000 photographs, 90 hours of videotape, 30 boxes
of field and research notes, and 400 audiotapes of Hill’s
exhaustive interviews with Native American elders compiled over
35 years and now held in the library’s Special Collections
(searchable photos, field notes, and audiotapes can be found on
the Web at eagle.csuchico.edu/index.asp). Hill earned her master’s
degree in anthropology at CSU, Chico in 1970. Before her death
in 1998, she requested that her collection be housed at the University.
“She documented and preserved the history of the people of
this area,” says Santos. “At the time, people may have
been a little suspicious, but as time has gone on, they see that
it
was a service to the community.”
Similarly, Ward says she’s been tapped to work with the University’s
alumni association to memorialize the Native American presence
with a redesign of the Alumni Glen. She is also consulting on campus
tour content to provide some Indian narrative to the campus story.
Ward hopes the new changes will encourage more Native American
students to enroll at CSU, Chico. Those students would likely experience
something no other generation has. “They’d be able
to come on campus and say, ‘This is my home,’ ” she
notes, “and when they say ‘I am Mechoopda’ in
the classroom, the students who live in Mechoopda Hall will say, ‘I
know what that is.’ ”
First Peoples of the Land
Eileen Conway grew up watching archaeological documentaries on
television and wishing she could be a part of one. So, years later,
when anthropology professor Antoinette Martinez asked the Mechoopda
to work side by side with her, Conway, a tribal member, jumped
at the chance.
Conway joined Martinez’s Archaeology Field Methods class
at the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve as they dug, sifted,
and meticulously recorded their findings, which turned up numerous
hand stones and slabs for grinding seed, crude points that served
as tools or knives, and projective points used for hunting. “I
want to learn,” she says. “I can’t learn if I
can’t see [the artifacts], and if I don’t know where
to look.”
But her quest to learn has not been without some internal struggle. “One
of the things I have had to do is put away some of my beliefs as
a native Indian,” she says. “We don’t go out
looking for bones or touching them. We don’t disturb the
ones who are resting.”
One Saturday, when the excavation turned up a possible fragment
of a human bone, Conway spotted the tiny piece and picked it up
before she learned what it might be. “If I had thought it
was a bone, I wouldn’t have touched it,” she says.
Digging in that particular spot was brought to a halt. And, later,
students gathered with Conway around the hole where the fragment
was found. They made offerings of pennies and acorns, and Conway
said a silent prayer. The hole was covered.
This winter and spring, samples from the excavation will be analyzed
and artifacts will be stored on university grounds—for now.
Eventually, the Mechoopda would like to house them, and other artifacts,
in their own Native American museum. That was the dream of cultural
coordinator Arlene Ward when she enrolled at CSU, Chico five years
ago to study anthropology. “The University has been the caretaker
of our land, the spokesman for our history, the interpreter of
our culture,” Ward says. “We need to begin telling
our own story and finding our own voice.”
If and when Ward establishes that museum, Conway knows just where
she’ll be standing. “I’ll be right there with
her at the front door,” she says, “cutting the ribbon.”
Mechoopda Culture, Traditional Life, and Society
Mechoopda oral literature is replete with myths recounting the
origin of nearly every aspect of life in the world, including the
establishment of culture. The creation of the first man and woman,
the gift of the first food (acorn), and even the occurrence of
the first death provided orientation for navigating the endless
pitfalls life in this world entails. Standing like ideological
bookends, Kodoyampeh (Earth Maker) and Coyote expressed the dichotomous
and often conflicting nature of life, their exploits recited in
endless episodes of myth.
After the creation of people, Kodoyampeh had established the four
great feasts, or weda, to be held at each season. The weda expressed
a sense of reciprocity, an appreciation for the abundance of seasonal
foods, and acknowledged Kodoyampeh as creator of these life-sustaining
gifts. Another feature of Mechoopda religious life was a series
of ceremonial dances that began in the early fall and continued
until late spring. The cycle of dances reflected a broad variety
of values and concepts. Whether considered a largely social gathering,
a ceremony of deep spiritual content, or the fusion of both, the
monthly parade of ceremonies provided a sense of order that coincided
with the progression of the year, and came into accord with the
great culture-shaping events of the legendary past.
An important annual observance was the memorial “burning” of
offerings for the dead. Held in the late summer before the dance
cycle began, people gathered on the ceremonial burning grounds
to mourn and remember those who had passed during the previous
year. Significant amounts of personal property, attached to several
tall poles, were destroyed or given away in honor of the deceased,
often reflecting the wealth and status of the individual and their
family. The soul of the dead traveled to a particular cave in the
Sutter Buttes, where it was washed by spirits before ascending
to Hipinigkoyo, the Above Meadow.
The ancestral village of Mechoopda averaged about 20 homes (150–175
people), and a large ceremonial roundhouse. Dwellings were primarily
round, earth-covered structures, and averaging 20 feet in diameter,
excavated to about three feet in depth. Entry was through a central
opening in the roof, via a ladder. Additional features of the village
would have included numerous granaries for the storage of foods
such as acorns, brush-covered armadas to provide shade for working
outdoors in summer, and at least one menstrual house.
Reprinted with permission of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of
Chico Rancheria. For more information, visit www.mechoopda.nsn.us,
which
includes a historical overview and tribal structure and programs,
among other topics. Photo: The Dorothy Morehead Hill Collection,
Meriam Library, Special Collections, California State University,
Chico 
About the author
Mary Abowd teaches journalism at CSU, Chico. |
