Protecting a sacred rite

The Coming of Age ceremony is the biggest step a young woman in the Winnemem Wintu tribe can take. After four days of prayer in a traditional birch hut and visiting the sacred spots of her people, she swims across the McCloud River to join her tribe, emerging on the opposite bank to celebrate her newfound womanhood. It is a deeply revered tradition passed down by people who have inhabited the area for more than 6,000 years.

So when passing Lake Shasta boaters yelled taunts and racial slurs, revved their engines and flashed breasts during such a ceremony in June 2010, the tribe considered it profoundly disrespectful. Tribal spokesman Gary Hayward Slaughter Mulcahy offered a comparison.

“Let’s say a priest was in a prayer during Mass and someone blew a blow horn in the middle of church,” he said during a recent interview. “It’s about that disruptive.”

For the last six years, the 150-member tribe has unsuccessfully lobbied the U.S. Forest Service to close a 400-yard section adjacent to the McCloud Bridge Campground on Shasta Lake to ensure a peaceful ceremony. But a recent outpouring of local public support—including hundreds of phone calls and letters to Washington D.C. and Regional Forester Randy Moore—prompted the Forest Service to announce it would close the McCloud River to boaters for the four-day ceremony beginning June 30.

The Forest Service cannot, however, prevent passersby from entering the campsite—not without federal recognition of the tribe from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“Unless the BIA tells the Forest Service, ‘Yes, these people are recognized descendants of California Natives and they are afforded the rights of all other Indian people,’ they can’t close the campground,” Mulcahy said. “The Forest Service has gone as far as they legally can. It’s ridiculous to have one federal agency causing the other so much trouble because of their inaction.”

This year’s ceremony is particularly important. Chief Caleen Sisk’s 16-year-old niece, Marisa, will undergo the Coming of Age ceremony in preparation for her duties as future leader of the tribe. As the rite must be performed before a girl turns 17, this year represents a now-or-never moment for Marisa.

Chief Sisk and her nephew, Arron, have been fasting in protest since June 19, and plan to continue until the BIA grants the Wintu tribe federal recognition and their ceremony can take place away from the public eye.

The Wintu have been inexplicably missing from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ list of Native American tribes since 1985, Mulcahy said. Until then, they received all the benefits a federally recognized tribe would expect, like health care and scholarships. Mulcahy speculates a decades-old bureaucratic error is to blame.

The list, originally compiled in 1979, accounted for tribes with ratified treaties with the U.S. government and tribes with assets held in trust, he said. When Shasta Dam was constructed and Wintu tribal ground was flooded to create Shasta Lake, the Wintu were promised land and a cemetery in their name as compensation for their displacement.

“They made the cemetery, but they named it the Shasta Reservoir Indian Cemetery and they did not provide the lands,” Mulcahy said. “When the BIA went through making their list, there were no assets in the name of the Winnemem Wintu, so they just overlooked us.”

Mulcahy hopes the BIA will correct its mistake, much like it did earlier this year with the Tejon Indian Tribe in Kern County. The BIA conceded to omitting the Tejon Indians in error and granted them federal recognition in January.

“They have taken away our right to eagle feathers, our right to scholarships and our rights to protect sacred places and be Winnemem,” Chief Sisk said in a statement. “It’s time we take those rights back.”

Despite their ongoing struggle with the BIA, Mulcahy says relations between the Wintu and the Forest Service have improved dramatically over previous years, when the tribe felt its requests were falling on deaf ears.

“[Regional Forester] Randy Moore stepped up and did what was right,” Mulcahy said. “He saw what happened during the last two Coming of Age ceremonies. He saw the harassment, the threats and the possibility of some serious things. He did the right thing. He’s closing the river.”

Mulcahy credits the closure to the overwhelming public support the tribe has received in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. One such supporter is Heidi Silva-Strand of Whitmore, who met members of the Wintu tribe through a community breakfast. When she became aware of their plight, she began reaching out to officials at the Forest Service.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said of her efforts. “This is where they have always lived. Not allowing them to hold their own private ceremony is offensive. They only ask this because they have been heckled and trashed.”

In the meantime, Chief Sisk and her nephew will continue fasting in hopes the BIA will rectify its decades-old error and her tribe will be able to celebrate Marisa’s Coming of Age without incident.

“We are fasting and praying because they need to come to the table and fix their mistake,” Chief Sisk said. “We are the indigenous people from here. Recognized or not, we have the right to hold our ceremony in privacy.”