Tulare the Phantom Lake transcript
- We're now looking out at the vista of the Tulare Lake Bed right here. That's all within what would have been the Tulare Lake Bed. The entire valley was wild nature. Tulare Lake was a permanent body of water up until historic times, until settlement times. And probably, it was probably almost an impossible concept to imagine taming all of that, or, you know, putting it all under the plow or cultivating all of it. Tulare Lake was wide, broad, and shallow. A good number to use for its average size was about 440 square miles. Nearly impenetrable tule marshes, all around the edges. There is no remnant of the lake out there now. So my back is to the source of these waters. All these waters came out of the Sierra, and lake would have been all of the land that's west of us right now. The lake, basically, if you can imagine, pretty hard to picture this, but the lake stretched from here clear to the Coast Range. So, where those distant hills are silhouetted there, where Kettleman City is today, Tulare Lake used to stretch from here 20 to 30, some miles across the valley to the west side. Used to be water as far as you can see. If the lake were back in its original size, we would almost feel like we're at the edge of the ocean. We would see water extending many miles from here. This area probably was first farmed in about the 1860s or 1870s. There were still streams flowing through the valley, but those streams were now being diverted and used to grow agricultural crops. And so, Tulare Lake disappeared many decades before we built the first dam on any of these streams in the Sierra. And as the lake began to disappear, this lake bottom soil was, and is, some of the very best agricultural soil in the world. And so the productivity of this ground is unquestioned. It's just very hard to imagine that this lake bottom land once was the shore of a huge freshwater lake.
- I worked for JG Boswell for 26 years. And the last seven years of that, I was on a board of director, and I mainly just took care of the cropping and agricultural side. And I was a ranch manager of the Corcoran ranch, which is a 200-square mile ranch operation.
- [Christopher] What's the significance of JG Boswell down here?
- Well, they're the largest land owner of what's left of the Tulare Lake. And it's really where I learned how to farm and worked with just some tremendous people, some really good people. You can see how clean the levees are. So, no weeds are taking out any water. No trees are removing any water. The water is being channeled and taken right to a crop. It's a very efficient system, may not be the prettiest, but it's highly efficient. We are headed down into the Tulare Lake Basin, just south of Fresno County, which I just read in the paper, once again is the number one agricultural county in the entire United States. They brought in over $5 billion. The San Joaquin Valley, and the key to it's tremendous output is the weather. It's the environment. And it's kind of like a greenhouse, and you have the capabilities to put water on when you want to put water on because it's not constantly raining, or you're not getting things done in a time when it's not beneficial to the plant. And you can take advantage of that environment as long as you can get water when you want it. And a nice little tomato field here, with the tractor pulling it out of the field, and you know, tomato production in the San Joaquin Valley is a critical component in the United States. 95% of all the processed tomatoes are grown here, from pizzas to ketchup. Look at the color. So you see, you got to have good drivers. So you got a driver driving the machine, you got a sorter on the back, you've got a person driving this tractor. We call these tubs, pulling a tub. So, when they fill that back-end one up, he'll go to the front-end. There's another harvester going right there. Pretty ass-kicking, huh. Yeah.
- Well, where we are now is on this prehistoric shoreline of Tulare Lake, just about in the middle of the State between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin. We're looking on the ancient shorelines for the oldest artifacts that were left here from the first people who inhabited this area. It doesn't mean we're not going to pick up something that's not as old, because we did have hunters come in here afterwards as the lake dried up. You know, back when the early people here, this would all be under water. You can imagine the wildlife that was here, especially the water fowl and things of that nature, and all the native grasses and what have you. Clams, mussels, fish, turtles, everything that goes with a lake environment, you could imagine. Thousands of people lived around this lake at the time of European contact. If I don't find something today, I'll find it maybe the next time. So a lot of it's just luck, just by chance, kind of depends on the condition of the soil surface. But you always get something out of it. You get that satisfaction at least, you know, I'm trying to help. I'm trying to help with the puzzle. There's a lot of questions left unanswered out here.
- Everyday, I learn something new. The waterworld's like the camel groped by the blind men. Each one felt a difference. I learn something new every day. I mean, something big. I mean, some new whole wrinkle in... It's such a huge... You know, there's 400, there's over 450 water agencies in California. Everyone's got their own intrigues and inside politics, everything from the Bureau on Reclamation, Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources, Metropolitan Water District, Kern County Water Agency, Friant Water Users. Every little tiny town and village has water problems. I don't think it's humanly possible to know everything there is to know about water. Most people, me included, drive over this road and they have no idea what this is. I just drive over a ditch and think, well, it's just another ditch. I don't know if it was a freshwater ditch, if it was a drainage ditch, it was a farmer's canal, if it was a government canal, whether I paid for it with my taxes. I do know that when you're in a desert, every critter from an insect to a human being is going to look for the water.
- Part of the valley history is part of my family's history as well. I write about the changes that each generation has seen throughout the years, and I think makes us, I hope, in the end, a little more respectful toward the land. My family is some of the first farmers here, so they started the alteration of the landscape, railroads coming in, towns being built, the lake bed drying up completely. When they came here, there was a Tulare Lake when they moved here and started farming. What I was always interested in seeing is what my great-grandparents saw, the oak trees, the wild flowers, and the rivers going through the valley. And I've tried to imagine something that's no longer there, but my grandparents saw it. My great-grandparents saw it, and went out in boats on Tulare Lake. Family stories that have been passed down about Tulare Lake and about the river and about the farmland. And here's my generation's contribution to the valley landscape. And that's in the form of subdivisions and building and commerce. This is the property that fed my grandmother's family. This was all alfalfa, 120 acres. You know, they tilled it and they brought water to it, and made it an incredible farming region.
- Okay, watch the barbed wire here. It's just high enough to trip you. Here's some of the stinking gourd growing on the river banks, just like over along the Cottonwood Creek. Jays that plant all the oak trees. And now we're dropping down into river bottom. From the high ground, we're coming down through sand, going by things like a real spiny member of the sunflower family that grows in the sandy soil, past willows. Willows make the same sort of cottony seeds that cottonwoods make. So we are now in an oxbow of one of the channels of the Kings River. This would have been flowing water, headed out to the Tulare Lake, coming clear from the Sierra, water on a landscape that doesn't get enough rainfall to support trees. When we began planting crops in this portion of the Kings River, peaches or plums or apricots, those trees began using water that once flowed down the stream and filled the river, water that once went out and formed the giant lake, Tulare Lake. After enough decades of having that happen, the lake continued to shrink and shrink until the lake disappeared. In the old days, the river was so full so much of the year every year that that water filled all the land nearby into a broad band of oak forest. It probably looked something like how people imagine Sherwood Forest with a solid canopy of trees above, gigantic oak trees covering many square miles, extending from many hundreds of feet to something like a mile in width here at the edge of the river. Underneath the overstory would have been young oak trees, willow trees, cottonwoods, ash trees, and below those were the California blackberry, wild rose, elderberry, the sage brush, the stinging nettle, Santa Barbara sedge, and the creeping wild rye, a rich, layered forest of bright, lush green filled with a tremendous variety of birds and animals, the sort of place where in the early valley, grizzly bears would live along these different major rivers and creeks that filled Tulare Lake. I feel like we're a little bit poorer because we do not have very many early photographs from the early days of a place like this. Most people didn't think that it was important. They took pictures of buildings and, you know, stores, and a graduating class from a school, but people were not photographing the creeks and the waterways and the habitat.
- This is the wrought iron gate that my grandparents met in front of. This would been in 1905 or 1906 when they met here. And when I was 10 years old and my grandma was 90, she came back here to visit, and we'd gone out to the cemetery to see the graves of her parents and her friends. And then she asked us to drive her by here. And I was 10 years old, and I remember sitting in the back seat with her and I remember her. She wasn't able to get out and walk, but we rolled down the window and she pointed to this gate and she told me, almost like a secret, "That's where I met your grandfather, right in front of that wrought iron gate." I thought it was 10 years old. And 20 years later, I came back to this museum to do some research.
- Hello.
- Hi, I'm Eileen.
- Hi, Linda Atkinson.
- Nice to meet you.
- Lynda Emmanuel.
- Nice to meet you.
- And I'm Val .
- [Eileen] It's called signature quilt where each resident has signed their name and then stitched over in thread.
- [Linda] We'll just take it into the parlor and we will spread it out because I think it'll be easier.
- [Eileen] You know, it just kind of puts them in that place and that idea of a growing community, the building of a community. And that's where I got the title Pattern of the Land, because it was the pattern of this quilt.
- They used to have quilting parties and the ladies in the group, they would all get together and they would piece the top and they would quilt them. And I've seen these from other communities. They would sign it.
- [Eileen] At this edge is Mr. J. W. Beaver, my great-grandfather, and right here is Mrs. Kate Beaver, and that is my great-grandmother. They were married and they became a part of this community at the time this quilt was made in the early 1870s.
- Here's this map showing how large Tulare Lake actually, you know, could expand to, the Phantom Lake. And then I don't know, does it give a date at the bottom?
- 1910.
- Yeah. And you know, people would go to the lake for a weekend or even a week. And they would camp as these men are camping, and they would fish and they would also go on duck hunts. And actually, my husband's great-grandfather, he helped support the family by shooting ducks and selling them. And so, it was really kind of important to our community, all those many years ago.
- All of these shiny pieces that you're seeing, these are pieces of clamshell, freshwater clam, or mussel shells. And you'll find these completely all over the lake basin, mostly along the shorelines, but you'll find these everywhere. If this were the old days, when people occupied this area, this would all be water out here. And this would all be swamp land, more or less all through here, swamps and sloughs, what have you. This would probably go, oh, maybe 20 miles of water, this direction, What is this right here? See here. There's here's the tip of an old one. Probably it's the tip of a spear point, say 10,000 to 13,500 years ago. These would have been fabricated by these hunters. How many people could just pick up a rock and fashion that, you know?
- We brought the tomatoes in from the field. We're conveying the crop up. That water is actually filling up the truck and the tomatoes are being flumed out. You see that water there? So that just recycled water. Now, look at the line for the organic water, totally clean water. So that's a very slow process. You have to clean everything out. Okay? So it takes a long time to fill up the tube. Here, we're just using recycled water, but that line for organic, all clean. The nozzles are washing off the water. It's all about water. On the dice line, the dice line, there's steam peelers that are taking the tops, the peel off, the outside peel, and they're being diced. The rest of the tomatoes are going through a flume. They're going through a series of screens, there's the screens up there, depending on the thickness that you want, the fineness of the product, check it out. It takes a lot of water.
- Growing up in this valley, driving through orchards and vineyards, my grandfather was a 20-acre raisin farmer, I have many fond memories of swimming in ditches, driving around the farm country. You know, I think it's really one of the most amazing places on the planet. We had these lushly vegetated rivers coming out of the Sierra. We had the largest lake west of the Mississippi River. People have no idea now. It just looks like a big, empty flat valley. And a beautiful time to have seen the valley would have been 1868, when John Muir came over Pacheco Pass on horseback. And he said the wild flowers were up to his hips while he was seated on horseback. As far as you could see, this carpet of beautiful wild flowers over the valley, and he could see across to the Sierra the Range of Light. Those were the times when Tulare Lake was still full of fish, the ducks and the geese were abundant. And of course, you know, we think of it as a wilderness. In fact, it was a fairly heavily populated place. The Central Valley of California was one of the most heavily populated indigenous places in America. And there were Indians living all over this valley. They lived on islands in Tulare Lake. They lived all over the foothills, and they lived in relative harmony.
- This is kind of, you know, my private hideaway. This is a type called Excelsior, they're blades. A lot of serrations on the blades. Typically, that would be the shape of an Excelsior type. These are the, see all the serrations? And look at the size of the lake. See all the tules around the shorelines, tules and sloughs and so on. All the ones with the little tips on the bottom, those were first found in caves in Nevada. Gypsum Cave was the name of the cave. So there was a Gypsum Cave culture that made their way out here, too. See, it looks like all of these groups you find in the Great Basin eventually ended up in Tulare Lake. It's been referred to by a lot of the archeologists as a aboriginal Garden of Eden, you know, back when, especially when the Yokuts lived here.
- And the European showed up and decided to convert it into cotton farming.
- [Jennifer] Yes.
- [Lucinda] That's right, right, it's crazy.
- She's a champ driver. And the baskets, I know for sure, you know, that our people use them. And I don't know the word for it. I know a lot of people say it's art, but it's not art either. It's our stuff that we use.
- Yeah.
- And that's what I plan on doing is making these things so that we can use them again, even though we have our Tupperware and our Dollar Store, we still want to use our baskets. We're going up to Badger to gather our sourberry sticks. One of the things that we wanted to get out to our people was that when we take them to our gathering area, they have to ask permission and, you know, get in touch with the people who showed them the spot. These areas aren't protected or anything, but you don't just get in there and go and gather. Once you see sourberry sticks out here, then you recognize it. When you're driving down the road, say, there is a plant. So, when mom and I travel, we're always looking at the ground, you know, looking for different plants and stuff.
- See, these are the straight ones that I was telling you about that we're kind of looking for, that's ones that we want.
- Sourberries .
- There's still a lot in there, but I don't like to struggle .
- The European days, I try not to think about it, 'cause that's all in the past, but I know when my kids see the documentaries, you know, it makes them very angry. And I know we have things to be angry about, but it's not going to help anything, you know? So we just, I don't know. I just try to educate people on what we're doing and why we're doing it now. And, you know, just trying to keep the togetherness, and getting our traditions to come back and stay alive. I mean, you see how many different tribes that it's brought together today, and this is Monos, Tachis, Wukchumni and, you know, just that many different tribes all together. And this material that we're picking today is for the cradleboards. And that's where we carried our babies over our backs.
- Yeah, these are pretty, straight ones. There you go. Makes me feel good, really. You don't know how it makes me feel to see the new generation gathering. It a sight to see for an old person, . It's a real nice feeling.
- [Jennifer] See how pretty red they are, for the color? That's the kind you want.
- This was all open water when there was a big lake here. And now this is a big evaporation pond for agricultural wastewater. The soils of the western San Joaquin Valley are underlain by a clay layer, the bottom of the ancient Tulare Lake, that blocks the downward percolation of applied irrigation water. What's ever in the soil that gets dissolved goes in the shallow groundwater and can get into food chains, plants, and then it gets in the insects, and then it goes on up through birds and mammals and humans. And of course, the real problematic one is the selenium. If the selenium level exceeds two parts per billion in the water, it becomes dangerous for wildlife. It's like a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool. And so it's poisonous water, and they have to find a way to get rid of it. And the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of it is to evaporate it. There's your salt crust. This is what brings down civilizations. Too much of this and nothing grows. It looks like, I don't know, it's gotta be four or 500 acres right here. So, this is Rachel Carson's silent spring and it's not pesticides that's the poison, but it's minerals that occur naturally in the soils on this side of the valley. And the problem that they've been unable to solve for half a century is where do we put all this salt and the poisons, the trace elements, the heavy metals?
- I think it all depends on your intentions, and what it is that you want the landscape to do for you. My grandmother was born here on this piece of property, 120 years ago today. And she's very sentimental person. So I think she'd be very happy that I'm here 120 years later. I don't know what she'd say about the state of what her parents' ranch looks like today. Somebody moving here from out of state in this day and age, they see brand-new subdivision with nice street lights and maybe a gate across, you know, in front of them. And they might say, "Oh, okay, really nice place to live." Somebody who's lived here longer than that, my father would see that subdivision as a very sad thing, because that paved over what was once his family's farm. You know, it's almost like that lake never, ever existed. You know, only two photos out there that we've found. It's almost like it never was. And so, the landscape changed its course. It's just too bad that it happened so quickly, so drastically. And I think, with little concern for how it was going to affect a few generations down the road, is what it comes down to.
- You know, when driving around the lake bottom area and you hit some of these small towns, this is Stratford, you know, you try to assess why these communities are impoverished. Is it because of the drought, and whether it's environmental regulations, or was it the San Joaquin River restoration and bringing Chinook salmon up the river? Like today, that's a lot of argument over that. So, you know, the first time I came to Stratford, I saw this and I asked, "When did this occur?" I mean, is this in the last five years or 15? Is this decades we're talking about? Yeah, this must have been the watering hole, the local tavern. Stratford is in the 20th Congressional District. And this district is ranked 435 of all the districts in the United States, as it relates to poverty. It's at the bottom.
- Well, some of the, if you know some of the vacant buildings on these streets, it happened over a series of several decades, obviously, basically since the mechanization of farming. This town was originally a farm labor town. It was also a railroad spur where they'd load up the railroad cars with wheat. And as farming became mechanized, obviously, the town shrank, businesses left. And then this next wave is actually from the lack of farm water, where there's just not enough water for the farms to farm. So there's no work for the farm laborers.
- What do you think would bring this town back to life?
- Well, for some of these vacant buildings, they're obviously too far gone to do anything. The biggest thing that would help this economy is water. We need water here, and that would supply jobs and bring new businesses to this area.
- [Steve] Where water goes, food grows.
- Where water grows, food grows.
- See, this been going on for decades, a battle over water, who has first rights to it, who has control over it? Drinking water, water for irrigation, proper treatment and reuse of water in these types of communities is a real challenge. So, you know, when you tell a farm worker or a family that your water is high in arsenic or high in nitrates, you know, it raises lots of questions.
- We were promised when the water went up to $45, that we would get clean drinking water. We would receive clean drinking water, which has not happened.
- We are here as residents and we are all low-income, and we're here to protest this because we need the board to be figuring out solutions, how they can provide us safe drinking water for a fair rate.
- [Man] Our water in Alpaugh is okay. With the filtration system coming in, we will have better drinking water if the community will pass-
- [Woman] I'm sorry, do you think the water is potable? The water's drinkable?
- Stop, stop! If you're going to do this, you can leave! This is a community meeting and you are going to behave or walk out of here!
- There's these communities that are struggling to exist, and don't look down on us, but try to work with us. Don't just come and say, "Here's all the things that you're doing that aren't right. But here's how we can help." And I think that would go a long ways.
- Try to simplify the water issues. It's where should the water go and why, and who is going to determine its highest and best use. We had an opportunity, for example, this winter, to store a lot of water in San Louis Dam, but a decision was made that that water needed to flow out the Delta to protect fish. They didn't store that water, and now we're in a drought that's probably the toughest drought we've been in in 30 years. Without water, you have nothing. Without water, you don't have any crops. Without water, you don't have any life. So water is the key. Winter time, this is where it starts for us. This is a critical time of year as you wait to see what type of snowpack develops and know how much water you're going to have for next year's crop. And then in the spring, as the snow melts from the Sierras, the water will start flowing down the river for agricultural use, for crop irrigation.
- One reason why snow is so important to California is that in most years, when we're fortunate, it accumulates during the winter, you know, November through March or April, a rather large volume, and it's essentially a frozen reservoir. Our built reservoirs are relatively small, very small compared to the volume of runoff from the snowpack. As we deplete reservoir storage in the summer and then through the winter, we depend upon the melting snow to replenish that storage, to refill the reservoirs. Call it 59. And that's what's so dicey now with, you know, all the issues of climate change. We're getting that ice down on the bottom. Is because instead of accumulating snow, say, at this elevation, five-nine, five-six, if you're getting mostly rain, that runs off immediately, so you don't have that effectiveness of the storage that the snow provides. It's just not really practical to think of building sufficient reservoir storage, to provide the level of water supplies that we currently enjoy now with the snowpack.
- [Derick] Right here. I don't remember ever having to do this.
- The combination of the snowpack storage and reservoir storage, really has allowed California to develop in the way that it has. If we go from snow-dominated to rain-dominated winters, then how reservoirs are managed is going to change very dramatically. Highway 41 is the historic shoreline for Tulare Lake.
- This highway? Yes. Yup. Kind of interesting about the road because it runs north to south. It really shows a stark contrast about here on the west side, here's the Kings River flowing, pretty much intact, flowing into the Tulare Lake basin, and ultimately, how it ends up down in the lake bottom. You see these gates? From that point on, there's no river. So the water is headed towards Tulare Lake down this canal. All the way out, that great expanse would be the Tulare Lake, that dry area right there, the Phantom Lake. If you do see water on the surface, that's more a mirage at this point in time. You know, we just crossed the highway and you look there and you see all the trees. You know that's a living river. Then you look here, you see some of the trees and you just look out there towards the historic lake, and it turns into canals with gates, water diversion systems. And water in the lake, the decision for that water is for agricultural purposes only. So that this is the Tulare Lake today. The question is, is there a way to still grow cotton, have this type of infrastructure, as they would say, or canal system, and restore the river and the lake, just like it was on the other side of that highway. The water is there, even though it's a canal today. You would engage the farmers. You would engage those rural communities and the environmental community as well. Instead of building bigger dams up in the Sierras, you let those waters flow down, and you have it come down this Kings River, and you have it come into the Tulare Lake. The lake bottom area may have no more than 12 landowners, major landowners, and 60 residents. And just imagine that you're only going to use 10% of the lake, to start with. And that's multiple beneficial use, good drinking water, as well as to lay water on the lands for irrigation purposes, and for the environmental benefits and for recreational purposes, what's called quality of life.
- Almost everything on the floor of the valley today is managed water. There's very little water that is not, I mean, it all belongs to somebody, to an irrigation district, a grower. You know, it's on its way somewhere for some sort of use, a town, primarily farmland though. The majority of the water in the Southern Valley is still agricultural water. The spot where we're standing is where the tractor has a siphon down in the water. And it's using a pump to suck water up out of the large canal. It's following through the pipe here, being placed out in a wetland here, where the farm ground was relatively marginal. It was pretty tough to grow good crops here. It's the sort of ground where water on that same ground can support tremendous habitat and wildlife values. And that's what's been done here with an interested private landowner. To really get a feeling for a tule marsh, you just have to get in the tules. There really was no easy place to cross the tule marshes in those early days. As farming has changed the landscape, we're literally in what might've been farmland five years ago. We're near the southeast shore, watching a female grackle come across to land in the tules, and red-winged blackbirds and dozens of ibis. There's just a richness of wildlife here that are here because this literally is the Tulare Lake. This is a restored remnant of the Tulare Lake. The same kind of marsh vegetation, the same kind of birds, nesting birds like ibis. Their silhouette is intriguing because they have a long neck and a bill that curves down. And then their long legs and feet trail out behind. Right at the edge of the water where it was shallow, this is where the plant grew that gave the lake its name, the Spanish word from an Aztec word for the kind of plants that grow in a marsh. And so a marshy area where tules grow was called tulares, los tulares, which are the tule marshes. When I was a college student in Fresno, this is a sort of thing I would do between classes. I'd walk with usually bare feet or tennis shoes out into a tule marsh to look at bird nests. It's an egg of an Ibis. Now here, there's one spot where a little bit of dried tule stem stuck to the shell to see the original color. This one is one that never hatched. That's why it's been bleached by the sun, but you can see the original color on this side was a really gorgeous kind of sky blue, robin egg blue. But this was in a nest where some eggs did hatch. This one may have been infertile. Something may have happened, and so this one was left in the nest. I'll just put this back where it came from. These were the plants that the Yokuts would gather and, you know, tie into a bundle, shaped like the pontoon of a catamaran that allowed them to go out and fish and hunt for waterfowl out in the marsh. There's just a remarkable richness of life in this kind of a place.
- The language, the reason we started was because mom said she wanted someone to talk to. And that was my main goal, was to be able to talk to mom. When you understand the language, that's who you are, like the hellos in the different languages. That's how it tells me what tribe you are.
- [Marie] Oh, we just say, hihde. That's hello, hihde.
- The Tachis, they say heyet. So when somebody tells me, heyet, I know that they're usually Tachi. Well, in the olden days, they were for sure Tachi.
- It's just, actually, it's just the fluent is Jennifer's and Dave's uncle and he lives in Orosi, Jen?
- [Jennifer] Yeah.
- His name is Felix Icho, and Saturday is going to be his birthday, 96, huh?
- [Jennifer] Yep.
- And me, I'm just learning again. So we're the only two that actually do speak our language, and he's a Wukchumni.
- And we travel a lot together, and so I'm able to hear her more. And then we, I tell her silly stuff when we were driving down the road and things like that. So we have fun with the language.
- Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a?.
- Ihneshat'a.
- Ihneshat'a, yeah.
- Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a.
- Yeah.
- Is, how are you feeling? Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a hechi? How are you feeling today?
- We don't have a goodbye, 'cause we never said goodbye. We just said, we'll see you later when you return, and all that. Haudau ma xuiwihn . Eka na mam haudau ma xuiwihn. That's, I'll see you when you return .
- This is along the edge of the largest river that filled Tulare Lake. The Kings River was and still is the largest of the rivers that flow out into the Tulare Lake Bed. The Kings River, historically, was a year-round river. The connection with Tulare Lake is one that the Native Americans would have known immediately because every year, they would get in a boat that they would build up along this stretch of the river. And they would follow the river all the way to the Tulare Lake. At certain times of year, the lake was so full of fish and waterfowl that that's where they would make their living. And then they'd have this sort of annual migration where the people would then move back up into the low foothills, and stay along the edge of the river here. Now, here it is, the 21st century and it's still possible in the hustling, hustle-bustle growing valley that we live in to find a spot, kind of off the beaten path. You know, we could hear the train travel by earlier. I can hear other vehicles in the distance, but this is a spot that's still remarkably quiet. For most of these native habitats, at least on the floor of the valley, the numbers we usually hear are that for most of these areas like this, we're down to somewhere between one and 5%, that usually somewhere between 95 to 99% of the original prairie and vernal pools, and marshes and forest areas, have been converted to farmland or neighborhoods or urban areas. So there's very, very little left. We've got just remnants here and there. Okay, now here's a remarkable contrast and the contrast is very dramatic. It's forest, and then a dirt farm road. And then right on the other side, a relatively new orchard. I think that you can see here that that orchard is doing quite well. Got some drip irrigation running on it right now. And the forest at our back that we've just wandered through is doing extremely well. I guess, really, my fondest hope is that we can come to an understanding in the valley where agriculture and environmental or habitat conservation can go hand-in-hand, because I think that in almost all parts of the world, they do, and they should because they really, they are allies in many ways for the need for water and for clean air. All the same sort of things that benefit the farmland are things that typically benefit wild habitat as well. I don't think there needs to be an adversarial situation between those two entities. If we are allowed to view ourselves as being in opposing camps, I don't think it's good for either one. I think it ends up creating an artificial hostility that doesn't need to be there.
- Who knows what's going to happen to this? You know, they may start farming it again. Or they may just let it grow over with weeds. Just not sure. I suspect at some point, the lake's going to come again. I think there'll be times when you just, there's just more water than these reservoirs and these dams can hold back. And this is all going to flood again.
- I started about 19 years ago, working with Clara Charlie. She didn't have anybody to work with and me and Mom were going to her classes, and I really wanted to keep making baskets 'cause I knew it had to be in me somewhere.
- This is my first time, I don't know. I just try to educate people on what we're doing and why we're doing it now and getting our traditions to come back and stay alive.
- We're supposed to be the caretakers of the land. You receive from the earth, you had to give back to it.
- I worked for JG Boswell for 26 years. And the last seven years of that, I was on a board of director, and I mainly just took care of the cropping and agricultural side. And I was a ranch manager of the Corcoran ranch, which is a 200-square mile ranch operation.
- [Christopher] What's the significance of JG Boswell down here?
- Well, they're the largest land owner of what's left of the Tulare Lake. And it's really where I learned how to farm and worked with just some tremendous people, some really good people. You can see how clean the levees are. So, no weeds are taking out any water. No trees are removing any water. The water is being channeled and taken right to a crop. It's a very efficient system, may not be the prettiest, but it's highly efficient. We are headed down into the Tulare Lake Basin, just south of Fresno County, which I just read in the paper, once again is the number one agricultural county in the entire United States. They brought in over $5 billion. The San Joaquin Valley, and the key to it's tremendous output is the weather. It's the environment. And it's kind of like a greenhouse, and you have the capabilities to put water on when you want to put water on because it's not constantly raining, or you're not getting things done in a time when it's not beneficial to the plant. And you can take advantage of that environment as long as you can get water when you want it. And a nice little tomato field here, with the tractor pulling it out of the field, and you know, tomato production in the San Joaquin Valley is a critical component in the United States. 95% of all the processed tomatoes are grown here, from pizzas to ketchup. Look at the color. So you see, you got to have good drivers. So you got a driver driving the machine, you got a sorter on the back, you've got a person driving this tractor. We call these tubs, pulling a tub. So, when they fill that back-end one up, he'll go to the front-end. There's another harvester going right there. Pretty ass-kicking, huh. Yeah.
- Well, where we are now is on this prehistoric shoreline of Tulare Lake, just about in the middle of the State between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin. We're looking on the ancient shorelines for the oldest artifacts that were left here from the first people who inhabited this area. It doesn't mean we're not going to pick up something that's not as old, because we did have hunters come in here afterwards as the lake dried up. You know, back when the early people here, this would all be under water. You can imagine the wildlife that was here, especially the water fowl and things of that nature, and all the native grasses and what have you. Clams, mussels, fish, turtles, everything that goes with a lake environment, you could imagine. Thousands of people lived around this lake at the time of European contact. If I don't find something today, I'll find it maybe the next time. So a lot of it's just luck, just by chance, kind of depends on the condition of the soil surface. But you always get something out of it. You get that satisfaction at least, you know, I'm trying to help. I'm trying to help with the puzzle. There's a lot of questions left unanswered out here.
- Everyday, I learn something new. The waterworld's like the camel groped by the blind men. Each one felt a difference. I learn something new every day. I mean, something big. I mean, some new whole wrinkle in... It's such a huge... You know, there's 400, there's over 450 water agencies in California. Everyone's got their own intrigues and inside politics, everything from the Bureau on Reclamation, Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources, Metropolitan Water District, Kern County Water Agency, Friant Water Users. Every little tiny town and village has water problems. I don't think it's humanly possible to know everything there is to know about water. Most people, me included, drive over this road and they have no idea what this is. I just drive over a ditch and think, well, it's just another ditch. I don't know if it was a freshwater ditch, if it was a drainage ditch, it was a farmer's canal, if it was a government canal, whether I paid for it with my taxes. I do know that when you're in a desert, every critter from an insect to a human being is going to look for the water.
- Part of the valley history is part of my family's history as well. I write about the changes that each generation has seen throughout the years, and I think makes us, I hope, in the end, a little more respectful toward the land. My family is some of the first farmers here, so they started the alteration of the landscape, railroads coming in, towns being built, the lake bed drying up completely. When they came here, there was a Tulare Lake when they moved here and started farming. What I was always interested in seeing is what my great-grandparents saw, the oak trees, the wild flowers, and the rivers going through the valley. And I've tried to imagine something that's no longer there, but my grandparents saw it. My great-grandparents saw it, and went out in boats on Tulare Lake. Family stories that have been passed down about Tulare Lake and about the river and about the farmland. And here's my generation's contribution to the valley landscape. And that's in the form of subdivisions and building and commerce. This is the property that fed my grandmother's family. This was all alfalfa, 120 acres. You know, they tilled it and they brought water to it, and made it an incredible farming region.
- Okay, watch the barbed wire here. It's just high enough to trip you. Here's some of the stinking gourd growing on the river banks, just like over along the Cottonwood Creek. Jays that plant all the oak trees. And now we're dropping down into river bottom. From the high ground, we're coming down through sand, going by things like a real spiny member of the sunflower family that grows in the sandy soil, past willows. Willows make the same sort of cottony seeds that cottonwoods make. So we are now in an oxbow of one of the channels of the Kings River. This would have been flowing water, headed out to the Tulare Lake, coming clear from the Sierra, water on a landscape that doesn't get enough rainfall to support trees. When we began planting crops in this portion of the Kings River, peaches or plums or apricots, those trees began using water that once flowed down the stream and filled the river, water that once went out and formed the giant lake, Tulare Lake. After enough decades of having that happen, the lake continued to shrink and shrink until the lake disappeared. In the old days, the river was so full so much of the year every year that that water filled all the land nearby into a broad band of oak forest. It probably looked something like how people imagine Sherwood Forest with a solid canopy of trees above, gigantic oak trees covering many square miles, extending from many hundreds of feet to something like a mile in width here at the edge of the river. Underneath the overstory would have been young oak trees, willow trees, cottonwoods, ash trees, and below those were the California blackberry, wild rose, elderberry, the sage brush, the stinging nettle, Santa Barbara sedge, and the creeping wild rye, a rich, layered forest of bright, lush green filled with a tremendous variety of birds and animals, the sort of place where in the early valley, grizzly bears would live along these different major rivers and creeks that filled Tulare Lake. I feel like we're a little bit poorer because we do not have very many early photographs from the early days of a place like this. Most people didn't think that it was important. They took pictures of buildings and, you know, stores, and a graduating class from a school, but people were not photographing the creeks and the waterways and the habitat.
- This is the wrought iron gate that my grandparents met in front of. This would been in 1905 or 1906 when they met here. And when I was 10 years old and my grandma was 90, she came back here to visit, and we'd gone out to the cemetery to see the graves of her parents and her friends. And then she asked us to drive her by here. And I was 10 years old, and I remember sitting in the back seat with her and I remember her. She wasn't able to get out and walk, but we rolled down the window and she pointed to this gate and she told me, almost like a secret, "That's where I met your grandfather, right in front of that wrought iron gate." I thought it was 10 years old. And 20 years later, I came back to this museum to do some research.
- Hello.
- Hi, I'm Eileen.
- Hi, Linda Atkinson.
- Nice to meet you.
- Lynda Emmanuel.
- Nice to meet you.
- And I'm Val .
- [Eileen] It's called signature quilt where each resident has signed their name and then stitched over in thread.
- [Linda] We'll just take it into the parlor and we will spread it out because I think it'll be easier.
- [Eileen] You know, it just kind of puts them in that place and that idea of a growing community, the building of a community. And that's where I got the title Pattern of the Land, because it was the pattern of this quilt.
- They used to have quilting parties and the ladies in the group, they would all get together and they would piece the top and they would quilt them. And I've seen these from other communities. They would sign it.
- [Eileen] At this edge is Mr. J. W. Beaver, my great-grandfather, and right here is Mrs. Kate Beaver, and that is my great-grandmother. They were married and they became a part of this community at the time this quilt was made in the early 1870s.
- Here's this map showing how large Tulare Lake actually, you know, could expand to, the Phantom Lake. And then I don't know, does it give a date at the bottom?
- 1910.
- Yeah. And you know, people would go to the lake for a weekend or even a week. And they would camp as these men are camping, and they would fish and they would also go on duck hunts. And actually, my husband's great-grandfather, he helped support the family by shooting ducks and selling them. And so, it was really kind of important to our community, all those many years ago.
- All of these shiny pieces that you're seeing, these are pieces of clamshell, freshwater clam, or mussel shells. And you'll find these completely all over the lake basin, mostly along the shorelines, but you'll find these everywhere. If this were the old days, when people occupied this area, this would all be water out here. And this would all be swamp land, more or less all through here, swamps and sloughs, what have you. This would probably go, oh, maybe 20 miles of water, this direction, What is this right here? See here. There's here's the tip of an old one. Probably it's the tip of a spear point, say 10,000 to 13,500 years ago. These would have been fabricated by these hunters. How many people could just pick up a rock and fashion that, you know?
- We brought the tomatoes in from the field. We're conveying the crop up. That water is actually filling up the truck and the tomatoes are being flumed out. You see that water there? So that just recycled water. Now, look at the line for the organic water, totally clean water. So that's a very slow process. You have to clean everything out. Okay? So it takes a long time to fill up the tube. Here, we're just using recycled water, but that line for organic, all clean. The nozzles are washing off the water. It's all about water. On the dice line, the dice line, there's steam peelers that are taking the tops, the peel off, the outside peel, and they're being diced. The rest of the tomatoes are going through a flume. They're going through a series of screens, there's the screens up there, depending on the thickness that you want, the fineness of the product, check it out. It takes a lot of water.
- Growing up in this valley, driving through orchards and vineyards, my grandfather was a 20-acre raisin farmer, I have many fond memories of swimming in ditches, driving around the farm country. You know, I think it's really one of the most amazing places on the planet. We had these lushly vegetated rivers coming out of the Sierra. We had the largest lake west of the Mississippi River. People have no idea now. It just looks like a big, empty flat valley. And a beautiful time to have seen the valley would have been 1868, when John Muir came over Pacheco Pass on horseback. And he said the wild flowers were up to his hips while he was seated on horseback. As far as you could see, this carpet of beautiful wild flowers over the valley, and he could see across to the Sierra the Range of Light. Those were the times when Tulare Lake was still full of fish, the ducks and the geese were abundant. And of course, you know, we think of it as a wilderness. In fact, it was a fairly heavily populated place. The Central Valley of California was one of the most heavily populated indigenous places in America. And there were Indians living all over this valley. They lived on islands in Tulare Lake. They lived all over the foothills, and they lived in relative harmony.
- This is kind of, you know, my private hideaway. This is a type called Excelsior, they're blades. A lot of serrations on the blades. Typically, that would be the shape of an Excelsior type. These are the, see all the serrations? And look at the size of the lake. See all the tules around the shorelines, tules and sloughs and so on. All the ones with the little tips on the bottom, those were first found in caves in Nevada. Gypsum Cave was the name of the cave. So there was a Gypsum Cave culture that made their way out here, too. See, it looks like all of these groups you find in the Great Basin eventually ended up in Tulare Lake. It's been referred to by a lot of the archeologists as a aboriginal Garden of Eden, you know, back when, especially when the Yokuts lived here.
- And the European showed up and decided to convert it into cotton farming.
- [Jennifer] Yes.
- [Lucinda] That's right, right, it's crazy.
- She's a champ driver. And the baskets, I know for sure, you know, that our people use them. And I don't know the word for it. I know a lot of people say it's art, but it's not art either. It's our stuff that we use.
- Yeah.
- And that's what I plan on doing is making these things so that we can use them again, even though we have our Tupperware and our Dollar Store, we still want to use our baskets. We're going up to Badger to gather our sourberry sticks. One of the things that we wanted to get out to our people was that when we take them to our gathering area, they have to ask permission and, you know, get in touch with the people who showed them the spot. These areas aren't protected or anything, but you don't just get in there and go and gather. Once you see sourberry sticks out here, then you recognize it. When you're driving down the road, say, there is a plant. So, when mom and I travel, we're always looking at the ground, you know, looking for different plants and stuff.
- See, these are the straight ones that I was telling you about that we're kind of looking for, that's ones that we want.
- Sourberries .
- There's still a lot in there, but I don't like to struggle .
- The European days, I try not to think about it, 'cause that's all in the past, but I know when my kids see the documentaries, you know, it makes them very angry. And I know we have things to be angry about, but it's not going to help anything, you know? So we just, I don't know. I just try to educate people on what we're doing and why we're doing it now. And, you know, just trying to keep the togetherness, and getting our traditions to come back and stay alive. I mean, you see how many different tribes that it's brought together today, and this is Monos, Tachis, Wukchumni and, you know, just that many different tribes all together. And this material that we're picking today is for the cradleboards. And that's where we carried our babies over our backs.
- Yeah, these are pretty, straight ones. There you go. Makes me feel good, really. You don't know how it makes me feel to see the new generation gathering. It a sight to see for an old person, . It's a real nice feeling.
- [Jennifer] See how pretty red they are, for the color? That's the kind you want.
- This was all open water when there was a big lake here. And now this is a big evaporation pond for agricultural wastewater. The soils of the western San Joaquin Valley are underlain by a clay layer, the bottom of the ancient Tulare Lake, that blocks the downward percolation of applied irrigation water. What's ever in the soil that gets dissolved goes in the shallow groundwater and can get into food chains, plants, and then it gets in the insects, and then it goes on up through birds and mammals and humans. And of course, the real problematic one is the selenium. If the selenium level exceeds two parts per billion in the water, it becomes dangerous for wildlife. It's like a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool. And so it's poisonous water, and they have to find a way to get rid of it. And the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of it is to evaporate it. There's your salt crust. This is what brings down civilizations. Too much of this and nothing grows. It looks like, I don't know, it's gotta be four or 500 acres right here. So, this is Rachel Carson's silent spring and it's not pesticides that's the poison, but it's minerals that occur naturally in the soils on this side of the valley. And the problem that they've been unable to solve for half a century is where do we put all this salt and the poisons, the trace elements, the heavy metals?
- I think it all depends on your intentions, and what it is that you want the landscape to do for you. My grandmother was born here on this piece of property, 120 years ago today. And she's very sentimental person. So I think she'd be very happy that I'm here 120 years later. I don't know what she'd say about the state of what her parents' ranch looks like today. Somebody moving here from out of state in this day and age, they see brand-new subdivision with nice street lights and maybe a gate across, you know, in front of them. And they might say, "Oh, okay, really nice place to live." Somebody who's lived here longer than that, my father would see that subdivision as a very sad thing, because that paved over what was once his family's farm. You know, it's almost like that lake never, ever existed. You know, only two photos out there that we've found. It's almost like it never was. And so, the landscape changed its course. It's just too bad that it happened so quickly, so drastically. And I think, with little concern for how it was going to affect a few generations down the road, is what it comes down to.
- You know, when driving around the lake bottom area and you hit some of these small towns, this is Stratford, you know, you try to assess why these communities are impoverished. Is it because of the drought, and whether it's environmental regulations, or was it the San Joaquin River restoration and bringing Chinook salmon up the river? Like today, that's a lot of argument over that. So, you know, the first time I came to Stratford, I saw this and I asked, "When did this occur?" I mean, is this in the last five years or 15? Is this decades we're talking about? Yeah, this must have been the watering hole, the local tavern. Stratford is in the 20th Congressional District. And this district is ranked 435 of all the districts in the United States, as it relates to poverty. It's at the bottom.
- Well, some of the, if you know some of the vacant buildings on these streets, it happened over a series of several decades, obviously, basically since the mechanization of farming. This town was originally a farm labor town. It was also a railroad spur where they'd load up the railroad cars with wheat. And as farming became mechanized, obviously, the town shrank, businesses left. And then this next wave is actually from the lack of farm water, where there's just not enough water for the farms to farm. So there's no work for the farm laborers.
- What do you think would bring this town back to life?
- Well, for some of these vacant buildings, they're obviously too far gone to do anything. The biggest thing that would help this economy is water. We need water here, and that would supply jobs and bring new businesses to this area.
- [Steve] Where water goes, food grows.
- Where water grows, food grows.
- See, this been going on for decades, a battle over water, who has first rights to it, who has control over it? Drinking water, water for irrigation, proper treatment and reuse of water in these types of communities is a real challenge. So, you know, when you tell a farm worker or a family that your water is high in arsenic or high in nitrates, you know, it raises lots of questions.
- We were promised when the water went up to $45, that we would get clean drinking water. We would receive clean drinking water, which has not happened.
- We are here as residents and we are all low-income, and we're here to protest this because we need the board to be figuring out solutions, how they can provide us safe drinking water for a fair rate.
- [Man] Our water in Alpaugh is okay. With the filtration system coming in, we will have better drinking water if the community will pass-
- [Woman] I'm sorry, do you think the water is potable? The water's drinkable?
- Stop, stop! If you're going to do this, you can leave! This is a community meeting and you are going to behave or walk out of here!
- There's these communities that are struggling to exist, and don't look down on us, but try to work with us. Don't just come and say, "Here's all the things that you're doing that aren't right. But here's how we can help." And I think that would go a long ways.
- Try to simplify the water issues. It's where should the water go and why, and who is going to determine its highest and best use. We had an opportunity, for example, this winter, to store a lot of water in San Louis Dam, but a decision was made that that water needed to flow out the Delta to protect fish. They didn't store that water, and now we're in a drought that's probably the toughest drought we've been in in 30 years. Without water, you have nothing. Without water, you don't have any crops. Without water, you don't have any life. So water is the key. Winter time, this is where it starts for us. This is a critical time of year as you wait to see what type of snowpack develops and know how much water you're going to have for next year's crop. And then in the spring, as the snow melts from the Sierras, the water will start flowing down the river for agricultural use, for crop irrigation.
- One reason why snow is so important to California is that in most years, when we're fortunate, it accumulates during the winter, you know, November through March or April, a rather large volume, and it's essentially a frozen reservoir. Our built reservoirs are relatively small, very small compared to the volume of runoff from the snowpack. As we deplete reservoir storage in the summer and then through the winter, we depend upon the melting snow to replenish that storage, to refill the reservoirs. Call it 59. And that's what's so dicey now with, you know, all the issues of climate change. We're getting that ice down on the bottom. Is because instead of accumulating snow, say, at this elevation, five-nine, five-six, if you're getting mostly rain, that runs off immediately, so you don't have that effectiveness of the storage that the snow provides. It's just not really practical to think of building sufficient reservoir storage, to provide the level of water supplies that we currently enjoy now with the snowpack.
- [Derick] Right here. I don't remember ever having to do this.
- The combination of the snowpack storage and reservoir storage, really has allowed California to develop in the way that it has. If we go from snow-dominated to rain-dominated winters, then how reservoirs are managed is going to change very dramatically. Highway 41 is the historic shoreline for Tulare Lake.
- This highway? Yes. Yup. Kind of interesting about the road because it runs north to south. It really shows a stark contrast about here on the west side, here's the Kings River flowing, pretty much intact, flowing into the Tulare Lake basin, and ultimately, how it ends up down in the lake bottom. You see these gates? From that point on, there's no river. So the water is headed towards Tulare Lake down this canal. All the way out, that great expanse would be the Tulare Lake, that dry area right there, the Phantom Lake. If you do see water on the surface, that's more a mirage at this point in time. You know, we just crossed the highway and you look there and you see all the trees. You know that's a living river. Then you look here, you see some of the trees and you just look out there towards the historic lake, and it turns into canals with gates, water diversion systems. And water in the lake, the decision for that water is for agricultural purposes only. So that this is the Tulare Lake today. The question is, is there a way to still grow cotton, have this type of infrastructure, as they would say, or canal system, and restore the river and the lake, just like it was on the other side of that highway. The water is there, even though it's a canal today. You would engage the farmers. You would engage those rural communities and the environmental community as well. Instead of building bigger dams up in the Sierras, you let those waters flow down, and you have it come down this Kings River, and you have it come into the Tulare Lake. The lake bottom area may have no more than 12 landowners, major landowners, and 60 residents. And just imagine that you're only going to use 10% of the lake, to start with. And that's multiple beneficial use, good drinking water, as well as to lay water on the lands for irrigation purposes, and for the environmental benefits and for recreational purposes, what's called quality of life.
- Almost everything on the floor of the valley today is managed water. There's very little water that is not, I mean, it all belongs to somebody, to an irrigation district, a grower. You know, it's on its way somewhere for some sort of use, a town, primarily farmland though. The majority of the water in the Southern Valley is still agricultural water. The spot where we're standing is where the tractor has a siphon down in the water. And it's using a pump to suck water up out of the large canal. It's following through the pipe here, being placed out in a wetland here, where the farm ground was relatively marginal. It was pretty tough to grow good crops here. It's the sort of ground where water on that same ground can support tremendous habitat and wildlife values. And that's what's been done here with an interested private landowner. To really get a feeling for a tule marsh, you just have to get in the tules. There really was no easy place to cross the tule marshes in those early days. As farming has changed the landscape, we're literally in what might've been farmland five years ago. We're near the southeast shore, watching a female grackle come across to land in the tules, and red-winged blackbirds and dozens of ibis. There's just a richness of wildlife here that are here because this literally is the Tulare Lake. This is a restored remnant of the Tulare Lake. The same kind of marsh vegetation, the same kind of birds, nesting birds like ibis. Their silhouette is intriguing because they have a long neck and a bill that curves down. And then their long legs and feet trail out behind. Right at the edge of the water where it was shallow, this is where the plant grew that gave the lake its name, the Spanish word from an Aztec word for the kind of plants that grow in a marsh. And so a marshy area where tules grow was called tulares, los tulares, which are the tule marshes. When I was a college student in Fresno, this is a sort of thing I would do between classes. I'd walk with usually bare feet or tennis shoes out into a tule marsh to look at bird nests. It's an egg of an Ibis. Now here, there's one spot where a little bit of dried tule stem stuck to the shell to see the original color. This one is one that never hatched. That's why it's been bleached by the sun, but you can see the original color on this side was a really gorgeous kind of sky blue, robin egg blue. But this was in a nest where some eggs did hatch. This one may have been infertile. Something may have happened, and so this one was left in the nest. I'll just put this back where it came from. These were the plants that the Yokuts would gather and, you know, tie into a bundle, shaped like the pontoon of a catamaran that allowed them to go out and fish and hunt for waterfowl out in the marsh. There's just a remarkable richness of life in this kind of a place.
- The language, the reason we started was because mom said she wanted someone to talk to. And that was my main goal, was to be able to talk to mom. When you understand the language, that's who you are, like the hellos in the different languages. That's how it tells me what tribe you are.
- [Marie] Oh, we just say, hihde. That's hello, hihde.
- The Tachis, they say heyet. So when somebody tells me, heyet, I know that they're usually Tachi. Well, in the olden days, they were for sure Tachi.
- It's just, actually, it's just the fluent is Jennifer's and Dave's uncle and he lives in Orosi, Jen?
- [Jennifer] Yeah.
- His name is Felix Icho, and Saturday is going to be his birthday, 96, huh?
- [Jennifer] Yep.
- And me, I'm just learning again. So we're the only two that actually do speak our language, and he's a Wukchumni.
- And we travel a lot together, and so I'm able to hear her more. And then we, I tell her silly stuff when we were driving down the road and things like that. So we have fun with the language.
- Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a?.
- Ihneshat'a.
- Ihneshat'a, yeah.
- Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a.
- Yeah.
- Is, how are you feeling? Haa'a ma'ihneshat'a hechi? How are you feeling today?
- We don't have a goodbye, 'cause we never said goodbye. We just said, we'll see you later when you return, and all that. Haudau ma xuiwihn . Eka na mam haudau ma xuiwihn. That's, I'll see you when you return .
- This is along the edge of the largest river that filled Tulare Lake. The Kings River was and still is the largest of the rivers that flow out into the Tulare Lake Bed. The Kings River, historically, was a year-round river. The connection with Tulare Lake is one that the Native Americans would have known immediately because every year, they would get in a boat that they would build up along this stretch of the river. And they would follow the river all the way to the Tulare Lake. At certain times of year, the lake was so full of fish and waterfowl that that's where they would make their living. And then they'd have this sort of annual migration where the people would then move back up into the low foothills, and stay along the edge of the river here. Now, here it is, the 21st century and it's still possible in the hustling, hustle-bustle growing valley that we live in to find a spot, kind of off the beaten path. You know, we could hear the train travel by earlier. I can hear other vehicles in the distance, but this is a spot that's still remarkably quiet. For most of these native habitats, at least on the floor of the valley, the numbers we usually hear are that for most of these areas like this, we're down to somewhere between one and 5%, that usually somewhere between 95 to 99% of the original prairie and vernal pools, and marshes and forest areas, have been converted to farmland or neighborhoods or urban areas. So there's very, very little left. We've got just remnants here and there. Okay, now here's a remarkable contrast and the contrast is very dramatic. It's forest, and then a dirt farm road. And then right on the other side, a relatively new orchard. I think that you can see here that that orchard is doing quite well. Got some drip irrigation running on it right now. And the forest at our back that we've just wandered through is doing extremely well. I guess, really, my fondest hope is that we can come to an understanding in the valley where agriculture and environmental or habitat conservation can go hand-in-hand, because I think that in almost all parts of the world, they do, and they should because they really, they are allies in many ways for the need for water and for clean air. All the same sort of things that benefit the farmland are things that typically benefit wild habitat as well. I don't think there needs to be an adversarial situation between those two entities. If we are allowed to view ourselves as being in opposing camps, I don't think it's good for either one. I think it ends up creating an artificial hostility that doesn't need to be there.
- Who knows what's going to happen to this? You know, they may start farming it again. Or they may just let it grow over with weeds. Just not sure. I suspect at some point, the lake's going to come again. I think there'll be times when you just, there's just more water than these reservoirs and these dams can hold back. And this is all going to flood again.
- I started about 19 years ago, working with Clara Charlie. She didn't have anybody to work with and me and Mom were going to her classes, and I really wanted to keep making baskets 'cause I knew it had to be in me somewhere.
- This is my first time, I don't know. I just try to educate people on what we're doing and why we're doing it now and getting our traditions to come back and stay alive.
- We're supposed to be the caretakers of the land. You receive from the earth, you had to give back to it.