The Sierra club is happy. It has a large corporation to blame, a native hero to champion, and a water story to unfold. Even if it does mention those tiresome beavers.
PG&E, the Mountain Maidu, and a Very Powerful River
A group of Mountain Maidu has reclaimed its former lands, but not the
In the spring of 2021, a crew of nine workers arrived at Tásmam Koyóm, at the headwaters of Northern California’s Feather River. They began to cut down saplings, dragging them over a fast-moving creek that ran through a meadow, then bending them into a tangled weave of trunks and branches that held strong in the current.
The landscape around them was an artifact of decades of cattle grazing—the utility that once owned this land, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), had leased it to ranchers. The cattle had compacted the soil and dried out the meadow’s outer reaches, transforming what had been a wetland into a field of dry grass. As the work progressed, and the sapling dams blocked the current, areas of the parched meadow began to fill with slow-moving channels of water.
The crew—made up of Mountain Maidu youths and employees of a local habitatrestoration outfit called Swift Water Design—called themselves “beavers.” Actual beavers haven’t been seen in this region for years, and it is forbidden by state law to introduce them. Some researchers claim that beavers have never been here at all, although there are dozens of words for the species and its handiwork in languages native to this region. The beaver dam analogs would, hopefully, create an inviting habitat for any beavers who happened to make it this far upstream, encouraging them to keep the dams up and running in perpetuity. (more…)
