A Native People’s Story of California by Tyler Eash

Notes from “The Grave” essay, Eash’s new work on asserting Indigenous sovereignty as active protest

Images that circulate widely on social media play a decisive role in shaping how social and political realities are produced, perceived, and contested. Far from being neutral, these images contribute to the formation of cultural and territorial identities, reinforcing dominant narratives while also holding the potential to disrupt, reframe, and resist them.

Within this context, Der Greif “Local Voices” continues to foreground situated perspectives and collaborative authorship as a way of slowing down image circulation and re-embedding images within their social, cultural, and political conditions. Through an ongoing exercise in co-writing, the project examines how visual practices can counter homogenizing narratives and support more plural, democratic forms of representation by insisting on specificity, locality, and dialogue, foregrounding situated knowledge over dominant or centralized narratives.

This month, we share an edited version of Tyler Eash’s longer-essay. In the artist’s words, this text is developed as a way to communicate tensions and definitions that are strung by the creation of fences and borders which divide identity, time, and place. It presents the topic and history of an epicentre of occupational violence, drawn from someone who is both Indigenous to and a Settler of such a place. As such, this writing can be interpreted as an assertion of diplomacy between historically opposing but currently unifying selves. The essay was written after getting the confidence and support from making the show "Breaking / Briseadh / Wa'aidom" with Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and the team at Rettberg Gallery in Munich. Eash sees the essay as a result of the solidarity he found in Munich.

Hesasakade minke kodoidi? (Hello, how are things where you are from?) This writing is dedicated to Indigenous women of the world, who I acknowledge as my greatest teachers, and who have shared with me their wisdom in ancestry, in spirit, and in person.

Just past the motel where my nieces and nephews lived, and just under the bridge, but just before a sign that reads “Welcome to Marysville, Gateway to the Gold Fields”, settler families comprised of mostly white men and their sons leaped and bound on dirt bikes over mounds of sandy shifting earth on the banks of the Yuba River. My mother recalls relaxing under the canopy of the riparian

forest of cottonwoods and wild grape, and bathing in the clear river waters after working since sunrise, picking peaches. From the car window on the bridge, she exclaims her disgust at wealthy out-of-towners turning her paradise into literal dust; the trees felled, the water dirtied. Somehow this daily observation of seeing kitted and booted suburbanites hurling themselves on raging engines below the bridge hit a dissonant chord every morning on our commute to ‘town’. Something about it felt inexplicably heavy and infuriating. This is also the site, where for sixty years my mother has collected elderberries and I’d be tasked with trying to distinguish the ripeness of the tiny fruits from the broken window of a rusty pick up truck speeding down a highway. This place had purpose and carried its own time. Elderberry picking was annual and the gathering of hands marked summer for my family. There is this belief in Yuba County, that the word ‘Yuba’ came about over a mishearing of the Spanish ‘uva’, meaning grape, and given for the wild vines that coiled in the area. It wasn’t until recent years that I was told by a fellow Maidu who monitored dig sites, that there was at one point a village of Maidu called the Yú-ba, this was until they were hunted to extinction or who were

taken from this place as survivors into servitude. Their village site, and the site of their cemetery was under the manufactured shifting dunes of these suburbanites who continue to claim any sandy bank along the rivers as a place for motor sports. Their place of joy was a grave, some known, some unknown. My father too, and my late brother Shane (yatam) would ride these mounds, unknowing of who might lay beneath. Ever since, every tire track I see makes me mark a

grave, or at least wonder what lay under hot asphalt; parking lots for incoming Walmarts or streets for slap-dashed OSB Plywood homes always encroaching and beige. Under the glimmering blue waters of man-made reservoirs are our ancient histories and identities hidden. Under Lake Shasta is the Wintun, under Lake Oroville is the Konkow, and under Lake Almanor is the Maidu; behind glorious dams are our histories, submerged and poured over. This is where these same suburbanites would roar their jet skis and motor boats under exploding fireworks for the 4th of July. I too would be amongst the bobbing blonde heads of settler children in neon life jackets, but I did not then understand the source of my fear of deep water. Our histories were harmed for man-made lakes for hydroelectric power. Our rivers are dammed to control irrigation to grow 70% of "america's" fruits and vegetables.

The death of Indigenous peoples is often justified by settler society for progress itself. There is this belief that long term cohabitation between settler and Indigenous is unlikely and co- governance is an impossibility. Genocide, quick or slow and in all its forms becomes the primary goal of settler nations, where in Indigenous culture exists as the bedrock for all settler foundations. If Indigeneity lives it shifts the Earth and questions the stability of whatever has been

built upon it. It makes anyone who has identified with “american” identity itself feel unstable. This is why our Indigenous identities are lidded, capped, enclosed, enshrouded, and buried underground or underwater or rather beneath bureaucracy and paper work, but we are still demonstrating signs of life despite it all.

I think of Mark Fisher’s “gothic flatline,” (1999) which describes the total collapse of cultural momentum and loss of collective imagination, where the future feels permanently replaced by the endless repetition and recycling of past styles. These revelations and ponderings come from an artist of an Earth worshipping culture, where in what lies beneath a horizon of existence is a source of life. Dichotomies of living and dead aren't perceived in the same way between those who have lost their ancestral cultures and people who have protected them. Or rather, I wonder if it is the reality of people who experienced genocide to make certain history is perceived as living; an effort that drives us to continually cultivate the soil of our endangered histories. We were called ‘diggers’, because we dug the gold, but I think now too, we are digging our way out from the grave of collective wilful disremembering. We are subterranean to people who are perceived as living and ‘contemporary’ no longer.

[...] In 2026, paperwork has become the covert mode of violence that is permitted to erode the rights of life of my people. The task at hand for myself, as someone who is both occupied and occupier or Settler and Native, Indigenous & Diasporic is in how to try to tell these stories in a way that leads to further understanding of anti-Indigeneity without generating more fodder for the continued production of the NDN (meaning ‘Indian’) Extinction Fantasy. Speaking of Indigenous death and genocide as well as disenrollments and tribal terminations is a requirement for laying a foundation for land returns, reparations and protections for living Indigenous peoples. However, there is often an excitement in the minds of settlers when stories of extermination justify desires to dismiss us for being “too few” or "too far gone” to be present for diplomacy. [...] This eagerness for the NDN Extinction Fantasy is fuelled by a desire for the relief of a heavy grief present within the collective settler conscience. We have to serve as plaintiffs for the federally orchestrated slaughter of our ancestors and speak of tragedy so often to make our ongoing fight for safety ‘real’, yet speaking of tragedy by the simple acknowledgement of graves destabilizes the expanse of empire over unceded land. It subjects us to further violence when we simply live fully. This fullness of life becomes a defiance of the empire. Indigenous life itself becomes an inherited protest.

The acknowledgement of a grave somehow makes us understand how history, and therefore Land lives. Death seems to mark and define living survivors of genocide, so for us Maidus we understand how the ultimate dichotomy of existence is non-dualistic. Being Maidu means oscillating between the living and dead. For instance, within the community of other Indigenous Californians, my tribal community is perceived as living fully, as Maidu, as contemporary; yet to the general public and to the US governments some of us or often all of us are perceived as partially dead, conquered, assimilated, terminated and perpetually past-tense. This forceful perception of living-death does not permit us to be regarded as figures capable of diplomacy. In this way, we can understand how genocide pervades with permission. Oftentimes race itself is constructed as a casket that creates a barrier between an Indigenous body and the Earth that envelopes it.

[...] It is a targeted attack on Land that serves as the basis of identity for living

Indigenous peoples. In a moment where archaeologists possess the technology to carbon date ancient bodies of ancestors and whilst they continue to find graves and sites of civilisation that prove existence of Indigenous Peoples significantly earlier than settler-archeologists had written, there exists an orchestrated attack on Land deemed dead. This is because with the finding of

graves, living Indigenous peoples are emboldening their lived Indigeneity. We are waking to the realization that the history of colonial violence and its resulting assimilation is brief in comparison to the time we have developed our religions, languages and cultures. The creation of borders aims to invent divisions between peoples of shared ancestry. We should see the timing of this assault on our Land as an act of aggression aligned with ICE and as a response to a waking of a

Pan-Indigenous giant that is internationally uplifting but informed by the terrain beneath every Indigenous person’s feet respectively. Land becomes undivorceable and indistinguishable from death with the presence of a grave, yet it remains living through its cultivation by the living. Indigeneity is marked by stewardship of Land. Culture has the ability to be repossessed by the

descendants, because culture is retained in the land. In this way we can understand the Indigenous view of nature as an all encompassing reality, not separated from man and inventions of man. That duality is a colonial import. In Maidu nature is Yawónope, it is synonymous with all aspects of existence. To be Maidu is to tend to all aspects of Yawónope on Maidu land. That

includes stewardship of nature and all its subjects; man (foreign born or domestic). Indigeneity is rooted in care for all of nature, even aspects of nature (settlers) who have been harmful to Land.

An Indigenous person is a host and protector of all people seeking shelter and safety, but what is the law of Land? If we possess land, does the mere occupation of a person, family, farm or fences fully obfuscate all the religious rites, or philosophies and moralities that inform law? The extent to which we deem a law as authority, is measured by whether or not we deem the authority lawful. How can a law die if the law of the land is being acknowledged and respected by those who still live? Does the Land speak by some other people other than those who cultivated and protected Land? Does Indigenous stewardship have a place in international law? Is the Land the true subaltern, for only being animate in laws deemed dead? Does not a law of Land inform a philosophy of living?

My speaking of being or rather remaining Maidu deepens the history of a place but also speaks to a void, or hollow within the settler subconcience. I live a law of Land deemed dead by 99% of the population who lives on Maidu Land. By being Maidu, asserting Maidu nationhood despite ongoing attempts and invalidations by an occupying government, by simply and stubbornly living, and demonstrating signs of life it allows us as a people to contest the efforts of death inflicted on us. Yet it should be understood that the living/dead dichotomy, as a verticality of existence/non existence in this writing, and as well as in Fisher’s conception of a flatline, does not negate the horizontalities in ways which life is captured by, monitored by, or destroyed by the confines of an archive, record, or evolutions of a bureaucracy threatened by Indigenous Sovereignty. This thinking is not conclusive but rather generative to more discursive philosophies and ontologies; ways of being Indigenous by cultivating Indigeneity in contemporaneity and well into the future. Black and white movies of “Wild West” scenes of shoot outs flash in the colonial imaginary when the subject of NDN-ness or NDN-ism is addressed. Within California, where treaties were unratified, the idea of NDN as diplomat is painted over as NDN as savage, when really it was NDN as bounty, NDN as target, NDN as threat to empire. The NDN extinction fantasy is a means to make distant and therefore more comfortable the crimes of cowboy occupation. The settler in me argues that a pathway towards belonging to place is shaped by an interrogation and atonement for the ongoing violence of occupation. California history itself seems to be a consideration of a grave; its finding, its looting, or its protection conjures concern of curses. There is a panic, or confrontation of a reality horrifying enough to the settler social-psyche that the history of occupation has become the basis of multiple horror films; created for instance by Stephen King. The confrontation of the fact that settlers only recently illegally inhabited a place cultivated and shaped by Indigenous Californians (who have existed long enough to butcher Mastodons) is consoled by NDN Extinction Fantasies, or rather productions of Indigenous unrealities, which are employed to distract from the inarguability of real history when a grave (evidence of our material existence) is simply found. These fantasies and unrealities are orchestrated to depoliticise peoples with real and valid pathways towards reparations and land returns. We exist in a state of being ‘undead’, between the liminality of real and unreal within the settler’s imaginary.

We have been perceived to be in such a state of decay that death is prescribed as a resolution. This is not an analysis but rather a propaganda to conceal how vividly and robustly us Natives live. We are shouting from the void to find those who hear it as music.