Irrigation History in California

Tribal elder brings water history to life for Berkeley students

California’s record-breaking drought may be a wake-up call for many Golden State residents. But for Harry Williams, a Bishop Paiute elder whose reservation occupies 900 parched acres near the California-Nevada border, water scarcity is anything but new.

Back home in the Owens Valley, starting point of the aqueduct that makes metropolitan Los Angeles possible, “we have our own man-made drought,” Williams told a group of Berkeley undergraduates recently as they pored over rare archival materials on California water history. (Story continues below slideshow.)

Williams is a Native water activist whose intimate knowledge of the Owens Valley — a narrow stretch of Inyo County tucked between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountain ranges — makes the undergraduate course “Researching Water in the West” anything but dry.

A tradesman and archaeological technician by day, Williams has spent several decades exploring, in his spare hours, the remnants of a sophisticated network of ditches created by the original inhabitants of the valley. Long before the arrival of white settlers, his Paiute ancestors designed these channels to flow at a specific gradient, directing water into the valley from creeks running off the eastern face of the Sierra.

“The ditches were like plumbing” that raised the water table, made the high desert bloom and served Paiute communities’ daily needs, says Williams. Ironically, for many years the modern Paiute themselves had little knowledge of “these ancient ditches. We never were taught.”

That has changed. The Owens Valley Paiute are now quite familiar with the area’s ancient irrigation system — and how it could strengthen tribal claims in continuing struggles with the L.A. Department of Water and Power — thanks in large part to Williams and to contributions by Berkeley students and staff, collaborating with Williams, since the launch of “Water in the West,” a spring course, four years ago.

Pivotal water struggles

Patricia Steenland, a lecturer in College Writing Programs, designed the course to teach undergraduates how to use primary-source materials — complemented by recent popular accounts — to understand pivotal water struggles over the fate of the Owens and Hetch Hetchy valleys. To deepen students’ experience (and fulfill their American Cultures requirement), she has them explore how different populations, the Paiute among them, figure into these histories.

In sessions at the Bancroft, teaching librarian Corliss Lee and curator Theresa Salazar introduce students to archival materials from the library’s vast Western Americana collection, available for them to describe and interpret: original letters to East Coast allies (signed “Ever yours, John Muir”) penned during the legendary conservationist’s campaign to save the Hetch Hetchy valley, early photographs of the High Sierra, ethnographies of California tribes — including stories, myths and plant knowledge of the Paiute — conducted by Berkeley anthropologists in the early 1900s.

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Taxonomy

• Irrigation
• Irrigation & Water Management
• Irrigation Management