#ladwp

“Even as terrible as the secretive machinations of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might have been as its leaders went about forcefully acquiring land and water rights, it turns out that even the dramatized accounts are missing some of the worst of the evil doing, a result of the habitual partiality with which we tell history on this continent. By which I mean that the standard accounts of the theft of water from the Owens River Valley are typically told with a focus on the White landowners in the area, who at the time were close descendants of or even possibly homesteaders themselves, and thereby the agents of displacement for the Paiute and Shoshone, who had been managing the use of the Owens River long before the LADWP ever showed up on the scene. Just take a quick skim of that Wikipedia article that I linked on the ‘water wars,’ and you’ll see what I mean; the Paiute get a mention but then just sort of quietly disappear from the story.”

New piece up at Unsettling looking at the erasure in common tellings of the story of the California water wars, and new Land Back efforts in the Owens River Valley and Eastern Sierra, also known as Payahuunadü.