|
|
|
Book Review
| River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin. By Stephen Most. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006. xxxiv + 293 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and sources, and index. Paper $22.50.
|
| In this fine study, filmmaker and playwright Stephen Most suggests that rivalry, from the Latin rivalis (one who uses a stream with another), "probably received its name in a water dispute" (p. 230). How appropriate, because the Klamath River has it all: countless federal and state agencies, three Indian reservations, logging towns and irrigation schemes, world-class fisheries, and a national park. It is no surprise that the watershed's story is one of unending rivalry. |
1
|
|
Expanding on a documentary film, Most emphasizes the myths of the Klamath, from Nepowo (leader of the salmon) to secessionist fantasies of the State of Jefferson. Such myths, like the enormous bucket erected in downtown Klamath Falls in 2000 to protest water reallocation, articulate political positions and ideas about nature, and help explain the intensity of disputes on the Klamath, whether over logging roads or fishing rights; as Most notes, "What was at stake was life" (p. xxxiv). |
2
|
|
Most organizes the many rival strands of myth and history on the Klamath into three sections, each about a different part of the watershed. Chronology was clearly not Most's priority; instead, he privileges connections between past and present which, like the Klamath's rivalries, are often refracted through provocative contrasts: Karuk weirs versus American dams; Smokey the Bear paired with Robert Crumb's counterculture comic Bigfoot and Whiteman; Fanny Flounder, one of the river's great shamans, juxtaposed with a fellow Yurok who played Stanford's Prince Lightfoot. These contrasts, combined with outstanding first-person voices from indigenous families and other watershed residents (including some the best accounts of the wars over Indian fishing that I have seen in print) make River of Renewal more than a pedestrian recounting of a place's past. The stock stories of the West are here—revolts against the feds, "Indian" wars, tales of abundance and disaster—but Most's account mashes them together in useful ways reminiscent of the region's complex ecology. |
3
|
|
On page 119, Most quotes Walter Benjamin ("Half of the art of storytelling is to keep a story free from explanation"), and he has taken the philosopher's words to heart—the narrative at times lacks analysis, and several chapters are essentially collections of fascinating anecdotes. But in contrast to many studies of resource disputes in the American West, which either ignore Indians or reduce them to mere comanagers, River of Renewal correctly illustrates the ways in which all environmental history is ultimately indigenous history. Most concludes with watershed conferences that have brought together the Klamath's peoples in recent years, and he connects these efforts with local indigenous world-renewal ceremonies. "Fixing the world" isn't just some stolen metaphor here; it's about the long-term engagement of rival peoples with each other and with their river. Some critics might note the shortcomings of watershed-based studies—few of the Klamath's residents ever saw their landscape in that way, and indeed, that is the source of their woes—but Most's account is one of the best in recent years for its integration of Native with newcomer, past with present, and myth with reality. |
4
|
|
Coll Thrush, assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, wrote Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Washington, 2007). He is now researching Aboriginal and settler food cultures on the Northwest Coast and thinking about London's urban past through the lens of indigenous visitors from the Americas, the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|