The Paiute of the Owens Valley: Four Thousand Years Before the Aqueduct

Before this valley had a highway, before it had an aqueduct, before it had a name anyone outside the region recognized, it had the Paiute.

At least four thousand years, the archaeological record shows. Probably longer. The Owens Valley Paiute developed a food system sophisticated enough that when the anthropologist Julian Steward documented it in the nineteen thirties, he wrote that it did not look like anything he had seen from a hunter-gatherer population. They dug irrigation channels from mountain streams to managed stands of wild seed-bearing plants on the valley floor. They were directing water to increase the yield of what they grew. The valley that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power later drained for a city was a valley that had already been managed, with care, for generations.

The United States Army ended that in the eighteen sixties. Between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-three, in what is known as the Owens Valley Indian War, Army campaigns struck at Paiute bands who had resisted the encroachment of miners and ranchers onto their agricultural and hunting territories. In eighteen sixty-three, the Army force-marched nearly one thousand Paiute from the Owens Valley two hundred fifty miles south, over the Tehachapi Mountains, to Fort Tejon. Many died. The precise number is not in the public record.

The survivors were eventually permitted to return. But the march permanently disrupted the valley's Indigenous agricultural system. And fifty years after the Army came, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power took the water.

The tribal governments that the documentary record cannot fully represent are still here. The Bishop Paiute Tribe, the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley, and the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe are federally recognized, hold land, and govern in this valley today. The perspective of those communities on their own history is held by them, through their own cultural programs, and that is the appropriate place to seek it.

What the documentary record can say is this: the valley was theirs first, and their descendants are still here.