For most of the past century, Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to the Mountain Maidu tribe, was in the grip of a utility company. Washington’s White Salmon River was saddled with a fish-obstructing, inefficient dam, and the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland was unacknowledged within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park.
Until people decided to reclaim them.
In Reclaimers, Ana Maria Spagna drives an aging Buick up and down the long strip of West Coast mountain ranges—the Panamints, the Sierras, the Cascades—and alongside rivers to meet the people, many of them wise women, who persevered for decades with little hope of success to make changes happen. In uncovering their heroic stories, Spagna seeks a way for herself, and for all of us, to take back and to make right in a time of unsettling ecological change.
Table of Content
Prologue: The Low Ground
Part One | A Red-Lettered Sign
1. Homeland
2. Willkommen
3. Revisit
4. Remediation
5. Talk Talk
Part Two | Face-to-Face
6. The Red Fox and the Tule Elk
7. Tending
8. Without an Invite
9. The Circle of Life
10. What Now?
Part Three | When the Walls Come Tumbling Down
11. Unequivocal
12. She Who Watches
13. Bypass
14. Restored . . . Salvaged
15. Hope without Hope
16. No Difference at All
Coda: The High Ground
Acknowledgments
About the author
Ana Maria Spagna teaches creative nonfiction in the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program at Northwest Institute of Literary Arts and is a UWP author of Reclaimers (2015). She is the author of Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness (Oregon State UP, 2011), finalist for the 2012 Washington State Book Award, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey (Bison Books-Univ of Nebraska Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw (Oregon State UP, 2004), named a Best Book of 2004.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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