Help Our Tribe Hold A Sacred Ceremony in Peace

I was teaching my daughter to grind traditional medicines near our sacred Puberty Rock when the boaters intruded upon our ceremony site.

Their beer-infused shouts echoed across the McCloud River canyon, and as they passed they called us “fat Indians”, chugged alcoholic drinks in our sacred space, and even flashed us.

Recreational boaters had been interfering for the full four days of my daughter’s Bałas Chonas, or Coming of Age ceremony, but now Marine was about to complete the ceremony by swimming across the river where her tribe would receive her as a woman.

As the Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu, I was supposed to be laying down blessings. I was supposed to be in a ceremonial state of mind, but instead I was furious at the thought of my daughter having to enter the water with those people on it.  How would you react if a band of motorcyclists barreled through your daughter’s christening?

At our two recent Bałas Chonas ceremonies, Marine’s in 2006 and last year’s, uninvited intruders have harassed us and filled us with constant dread and unease, marring a ceremony that’s vital to the fabric of our tribe.

What is most infuriating is that federal and local officials refuse to protect our religious freedom by closing the river to outsiders during the ceremony. They have the power and authority to provide us the privacy and sanctity we require. They simply lack the will to do what’s right.

The U.S. Forest Service now oversees the ceremonial grounds, a traditional Winnemem village site, and runs it as a campground. For a third time, we have asked them to close a small 300-yard stretch of the river to protect the sanctity of our Bałas Chonas this July, which will be held for our future leader.  Still, they refuse.

A provision in the 2008 Farm Bill gives them the power to make the closure for an American Indian ceremony, but they say we don’t qualify because we’re “federally unrecognized.” To them, our religion is not worthy of protection because we’re not "officially" a tribe even though we have a well-documented history and a vibrant, living culture. And nowhere in the law does it say they can't honor the requests of "unrecognized" tribes for peaceful access to traditional lands; their reasoning is suspect, at best, and not in keeping with the spirit of the law which was meant to protect indigenous religious practices.

By closing the river for us, they say they would be unfairly favoring our rights over those of the “recreating public." Instead they will only enforce a “voluntary closure,” an ineffective tactic.

It’s members of this recreating public who regularly ignore the voluntary closures, including a fisherman who parked his houseboat a short distance from my daughter’s barkhut in 2006. When we asked him to move, he grew irritated and told us he had been “fishing there for 20 years.” To a people who have lived here for thousands of years, this reasoning didn’t resonate with us.

But this is the same attitude we face from the Forest Service: dismissive, disrespectful and completely unwilling to acknowledge our special connection to these lands.

This July, Marisa, the young woman who is to become our next chief, will have her Bałas Chonas, and any more painful disruptions could permanently damage the future of our tribe. This is about religious freedom, but it also about our ability to exist as a traditional culture.

We are a water people. At the time of creation, we bubbled into the world out of our sacred spring on Mt. Shasta, and at the end of her Bałas Chonas, Marisa will emerge from the river in a new form, a woman ready to find her place as a healer and caregiver within the tribe.

Until our river is closed, we will be delivering our young women from the water’s womb into the middle of a spiritual war zone.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  You can give the authorities the will to respect our freedom to exercise our religion.

Tell California Senator Feinstein and seven other officials to close the river for our Bałas Chonas by signing our petition.

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