Philip Burnham

 

From Chapter One:

 

"The Indian village doesn't appear at all on my map. At the turnoff from California 190, I'm surprised to find the road is even paved. I follow the winding curves toward the Panamint Mountains, rising picture perfect across the valley. In the foreground a dozen or so house trailers and adobe bungalows emerge, strung across a sandy tract of 40 acres. There are tamarisk trees, a rock-strewn playground, roaming dogs, a neglected basketball court—an unlikely scene in the heart of a national park. The January morning is balmy. I bear to the left and look for the third trailer down, parked in a copse of tamarisks and mesquites, sheets on the porch flapping in the breeze. An SUV is parked outside. I climb the steps, and a woman greets me gruffly but politely at the door. Known by most local people simply as "Pauline," she has lived in this village, on and off, for sixty-three years.

 

"Pauline Esteves remembers when the government first came to Death Valley. About nine years old at the time, she was living with her family in a camp of brush shelters and tents in this isolated corner of California. Her people made camp near Furnace Creek Ranch, she tells me, a place where the temperature soars above 130 degrees in summer—and the land dips to 200 feet below sea level. Esteves is a mixed-blood Shoshone Indian. She played with white children at the ranch sometimes, she remembers, but "there were more of us" and "we all spoke our own language." Her mother was a Shoshone who spoke no English; her father a Spaniard from the Pyrenees who did little better—that's one thing they had in common, she says wryly. That young Pauline was learning English at the local school was a sign of things to come: the strange men who came wearing National Park Service uniforms spoke nothing else…"

 

Reviews:

 

 

“As America strives to reconcile past and future, this book retells stories that are central to that healing.”

--Winona LaDuke

 

“This is an important book for anyone interested in learning more about the often rocky relationship between the National Park Service and indigenous people.”

--Wilma Mankiller

 

Choice : "Combining highly charged prose and convincing evidence...this superb book constitutes a moving account of [tribal] defeats and victories."

 

Christian Science Monitor : "It's not just Indians who need to heed the lessons of this book and the ultimate illusion of ownership."

 

The Bloomsbury Review : "Burnham's book...proves that quality writing still lives; that you know it when you see it; that "civilization" is not restricted to narrow assumptions about the 'canon'; and that one of the reasons we read is for the experience of...the affirmation of the human spirit..."

 

Santa Fe New Mexican : "This is a detailed, depressing, and important book for residents of 'The Nation' to read."

 

American Indian Culture and Research Journal : "...a great asset to the literature on the relations between Indian people and the NPS."

 

Conservation Biology : "...a profusely documented piece of environmental history in which the author systematically unveils the roots of what would be called a human rights issue."

 

Washington Times : "This book is a well-written treatment of a subject barely touched on by historians of the American West. It is an in-depth look at the symbiotic relationship of the national parks and Indian reservations, and is for the scholar and general reader alike."

 

Salt Lake Tribune : "This is not a feel-good book, but those who have never realized how our national parks benefited from the mistreatment of American Indians should force themselves to read it."

 

Western Historical Quarterly : "Burnham adds to our growing understanding of how the once-inhabited landscapes of the national park system lost their longtime residents, and more importantly illuminates the ongoing social costs of this process."

 

Ethics, Place, and Environment : “…a well-written chronology of events that typify the exceptionally poor relationship between native populations of North America and the United States government.”