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The Gasquet-Orleans RoadOriginally at http://www.humboldt1.com/~apc2/goroad.htm, this article is now housed at IBSGWATCH with the permission of the author, Andy Cochrane.
The Siskyou Mountains are a small range in northwest California
and southwest Oregon. In the southern part, they contain parts of the Klamath
and Smith River watersheds. These watersheds are the traditional homelands of
several Native American tribes including the Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa tribes of
northern California. These tribes have considered the high country to be of a
special spiritual importance since times predating recorded history. Two of the
rocks at the peaks of the high country are now called Doctor Rock and Chimney
Rock, at about 4000 feet. This region is held to be the center of the spiritual
universe because it is believed that the original inhabitants of the world, who
left just as the humans appeared, climbed up through holes in th e sky, and
these high peaks are the last places they set foot on earth, hence the high
concentration of spiritual powers here. The high country is the site of a ritual
performed individually and involving days of fasting and meditation to obtain
spiritua l purity amidst silence and undisturbed serenity. The few members of
these tribes who feel the call to become medicine people derive their powers
during these rites. The medicine people are spiritual leaders and are an
integral part of the culture. Al though few individuals ever enter these areas,
they are of incalculable value to the entire society.
Since the discovery of gold by the European Americans in the
middle of the 1800's, these tribes have met with the same fates as other Native
Americans, namely, they have lost access to their homelands, their populations
have been decimated by disease and intentional genocide, and much of their
culture has been lost because of the forced policies of assimilation. The
practice of their religion has been at times forbidden by US law. Policies of
forced repatriation, and then allotment of their reservation s to private
ownership have resulted in the loss the land they consider sacred and from which
they derived their food, clothing, housing, and medicine.
The Siskyous were transferred mostly into the hands of the US
Forest Service, and until the 1950's were mostly ignored. At this time, the
post-war economic boom coincided with the depletion of the nation's timber
resources in more easily accessible loca tions, and the Forest Service began
ambitious plans to open rugged areas to lumber interests. Roads began to
crisscross formerly untouched areas of wilderness on Forest Service maps, and a
road through what is now called the Six Rivers National Forest wa s planned from
Gasquet to Orleans, called the GO Road. Gasquet is on the Smith River in Del
Norte County, and Orleans is on the Klamath River in Humboldt County. The road
would allow logging of an area rich in conifers and would provide an economic
boom to the relatively isolated Del Norte lumber mills. The GO road was started
in 1957 and its route was along the stream beds, because this was considered the
easiest way to build roads through these rugged mountains. Yearly flooding,
especially, the mass ive 1964 flooding demolished so many Forest Service roads
in northwestern California, that a new method was adopted; building roads along
the ridge tops. The ridge top route of the GO road, brought it directly to
Doctor Rock, Chimney Rock, and other high country areas. The road building
method was for the Forest Service to put each section of the road out to bid to
private contractors. In this way, it would be built in 5-15 mile stretches, from
both ends to the middle, the high country.
Throughout the 1960's, the environmental movement was growing
as people began to see and understand many ecological problems. The vociferous
environmentalists in northern California were concentrating on the formation of
Redwood National Park (RNP). Re dwoods became an easily identifiable megaflora
around which people rallied. RNP was formed through many hard fought battles and
compromises involving the trade of unforested public lands to private interests
in exchange for their recently clearcut redwoo d habitats, which now constitute
much of RNP. Attention soon turned to the Siskyous, which are inland and contain
redwoods only in their coastal foothills. The prevailing attitude of the
entrenched Forest Service and private lumber companies was that th ey had just
given up their prime land, and now their next best source of income was being
targeted.
In 1969, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) was
passed by congress, and this mandated more public input in Forest Service land
use decisions. Opposition to the GO road had been token until then, and even
after, the Forest Service thwarted efforts at public review. In 1972, the Sierra
Club successfully sued the Forest Service saying NEPA guidelines were not being
followed. There was the beginning of a cultural reawakening among these tribes
at this time, and environmentalists approached m embers of the Yurok tribe in
order to encourage opposition to the Forest Service plans.
There had been an absence of Indian opposition for possibly
several reasons until this time. The ceremonies practiced in the sacred high
country are shrouded in secrecy to a certain degree within the tribes, and
especially to foreigners. It is consider ed distasteful to discuss these rites
openly, which is understandable by itself, and even more so when we consider
that in the past, letting the US government know that something is valuable to
native peoples was the most certain way to assure its destruc tion. Another
possible reason is that many of the Indians at this point were enjoying the
economic benefits of participating in the lumber industry, and due to the loss
of cultural pride and identity, it was easy for them to ignore the damage they
were c ausing to their traditional practices. Perhaps most importantly, history
showed no example of successful opposition to US policies of land use. The sum
of US-Indian relations has been that of unilateral decision making by the
federal government, enacted through the use of force.
In September of 1973 was the first public Indian opposition to
the GO Road, voiced at public hearings in Eureka and Crescent City. This was
just after the first anthropological study conducted by the Forest Service,
which stated that there was no cultur al significance to the area. The rest of
the decade saw a complex batch of expensive legal battles, Forest Service
deception, and slow but steady progress on the GO Road despite numerous
injunctions. A subsequent anthropological report commissioned by t he Forest
Service and conducted this time by a recognized authority on the Yuroks, claimed
that building the GO Road would greatly disturb these sites, and would in effect
seal the cultural death of the tribe. Although the Forest Service attempted to
ign ore this report, it was used as the basis of a claim that the GO Road would
deny freedom of religious practice as guaranteed in the First Amendment to the
Constitution.
In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Religious Freedom Act,
stating that the federal government must take tribal sacredness of land into
account when determining the uses allowed on it. Even the legislators who passed
this act admitted it was toothless, as it was vague, and there was no
stipulation of how much consideration these factors should receive, or what
would happen if they were ignored.
In 1984, environmentalists won a long battle culminating in the
formation of the Siskyou Wilderness Area. A Wilderness Area is a designation of
public lands wherein areas that are roadless shall remain roadless. This is a
recognition of the harm caused by roads. The Forest Service however had the ear
of the legislators who drafted the final version, and a 1200" corridor was left
between the two pieces of wilderness that bordered the planned route of the
partially completed GO Road.
In 1987, the religious freedoms case had wound its way to the
US Supreme Court after winning an injunction in the Circuit and Appeals Courts.
By this time the Forest Service had spent much more on the road that the experts
claimed it could yield in timb er revenues. The case was much bigger than a
single road; the Forest Service was trying to prevent a precedent from being set
that would force them to consider tribal religious practices when determining
land use. This was the first time a case making t his claim had made it to the
Supreme Court. Other similar cases had been defeated at the Circuit Court level,
including attempts to prevent dams in Glen Canyon and by the Tennessee Valley
Authority which put sacred lands under hundreds of feet of water.
The injunction was overturned by the Supreme Court in a 5-3
decision. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated in her majority opinion that the
construction of the road did not prohibit the practice of the religion. She said
that if the Forest Service had be en trying to prevent Indians from entering the
area, it would be a different situation, and she likened the government's right
to build a road on its own property to its right to issue every citizen a social
security number - a right which had already bee n established by an earlier
court. The dissenting opinion was written by Justice William Brennan who claimed
that the court was refusing to acknowledge the constitutional injury the
respondents would suffer. Brennan wrote that this decision left the Ind ians
with no constitutional recourse to the gravest threats to their religious
practices.
Meanwhile, on another front, efforts were being made to close
the corridor in the Wilderness Area. In 1990, as a rider to the bill that
established the Smith River Wild and Scenic National Recreation Area, the matter
was finally decided, and the corrido r was closed. The uncompleted section of
road was less than 7 miles, with a wide two lane paved road suddenly ending into
forest on both sides of the uncompleted section.
The GO Road battle was won on environmental grounds, not on
grounds of religious freedoms. As one Yurok stated, to establish the area as
wilderness is to completely miss the point. There is no word for wilderness in
the Yurok language, as the entire wo rld is considered a whole, of which people
are part. The term "environmental racism" is commonly used often in conjunction
with targeting minority neighborhoods as toxic waste dumps and for polluting
industries, but I believe it would just as appropriate ly be used here. The
Forest Service policies enacted across the nation are an extension of the
policies of genocide present in US government since its inception. The Native
Americans have been unable to prevent their losses of cultural identity, lands,
and untold lives in the past, and this trend is disturbingly present today.
Perhaps some of the successes of the environmental movement
could be viewed as a model for advocates of Native Americans. The Endangered
Species Act has been interpreted to protect not only the individuals of a
species, but also its habitat. Justice O' Connor's decision is incomprehensible
to me, and perhaps if a parallel were drawn between the land needed for an
animal species to survive, and the land needed for a culture to survive,
opinions could be swayed. In order to energize the majority of apath etic
citizens to care about the salvation of tropical rain forests, the forests'
value was framed in a manner that more directly benefited average American
citizens. It has been posed that we could miss the miraculous cure for cancer if
we destroy the on e species of tree that produces the "magic bullet". If
cultural diversity is not going to be appreciated for its intrinsic value,
perhaps it could be appreciated if people believed they could attain spiritual
enlightenment by studying or participating in the many indigenous cultures
present in America.
References
Boham, Russell V. GO Road Conference, Nov 30, 1987. Video Cassette. Humboldt
State University Media Services.
Dale, Robert Y. The Gasquet to Orleans Road: A case study in Forest Service
decision making. Masters Thesis. 1992. Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA.
Norton, Jack. 1979. When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern
California. Indian Historical Press. San Francisco, CA.
Simpson, David. The Next 200 Years: A look at a land-use issue in northwest
California: The Gasquet-Orleans Road controversy. Video Circle. Berkeley, CA.
1976.
United States. GPO. 1991. Supreme Court Proceedings: 485 US 439 (1987). Lyng
Vs. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association.
December 11, 1996 |
