Da ow a ga: The Washoe Lake

The name the Washoe people gave this lake translates, roughly, as edge of the lake. Da ow a ga. The word is older than the state of California. It is older than John Fremont's expedition, which arrived here in eighteen forty-four and became the first American party to look at this water and describe it in a report sent to Washington. The word describes the physical fact of the lakeshore as a place: where you come to be at the edge of the water. The Washoe summered here for at least three thousand years. Likely much longer.

Their seasonal rounds were structured around this basin. Families came to the lake in summer to fish the streams, gather plant foods, and conduct ceremonies. They moved into the Great Basin valleys for winter. They returned to the lake every year. This was not wandering. It was a managed relationship with a specific landscape, maintained across generations, without any written title to the land, because they did not need one.

No treaty was ever negotiated ceding this basin. The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, whose headquarters are in Gardnerville, Nevada, holds federal recognition and has been saying this clearly and on the record for a long time. The resort economy that replaced their summer rounds, the hotels, the casinos, the subdivisions, the ski areas, occupied land the Washoe never formally gave away.

In September of twenty twenty-one, after a consultation process with the tribe, the ski resort at the north end of the lake changed its name from one the Washoe identified as a slur to Palisades Tahoe. The renaming was real. It was meaningful to tribal members who had been asking for it for years. And as the Washoe Tribe itself noted: the land did not change hands.

Lake Tahoe is twenty-two miles long, twelve miles wide, and one thousand six hundred forty-five feet deep. It is the second-deepest lake in the United States. The Washoe called it Da ow a ga, and they were here first, and they are still here.