4 Payahǖǖnadǖ Water Story
Teri Red Owl
This is our water story of Payahǖǖnadǖ, our homelands. We interpret the name as being the place where water has always flowed or the land of the flowing water. I’m going to talk about our water history or land history in our contemporary issues and will do so by a discussion of the mission and work of the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission.[1]
The Commission was established in 1991 and it is charted under the authority of the Bishop Paiute Tribe, the Big Pine Paiute Tribe and the Lone Pine Paiute Paiute/Shoshone Tribe. We have six Board of Directors, two from each tribe that are either appointed or elected. I am serving as the Commission’s Executive Director. Our primary task as a water commission is to be the planning and coordinating body protecting water rights for our member tribes. We also provide other services such as agricultural and environmental other water related services, as well as provide environmental education. We even serve tribes outside of our immediate geographic area and provide services throughout California, Arizona and Nevada.
This map indicates our location: These lands constitute our homelands, located about 270 miles north of Los Angeles, and about 200 miles south of Reno, Nevada. We are Paiute people and we call ourselves Nüümü. We are water people and believe that we were put in this place, this location by the Creator to take care of the water and to respect it. It means life to us and to everything.
As it did for millennia prior to the arrival of white settlers in our homelands, which began in about 1850s, we irrigated pretty much the whole valley. We had irrigation networks that were hand dug that included 60 miles of ditches and covered a considerable area. These networks typically contained a dam and a ditch per plot of land. As Fig. 2 illustrates, we were supplying water to irrigate our crops, ditches that diverted water from one of the main creeks flowing from the mountains. Our main crop was a grass—tüpüsi/taboose—and these were the little tubers that we would eat. Given their small size, we had to manage fields and fields and fields of taboose to sustain ourselves.
To manage the water, each year the Paiute people would elect a tuvaijü, the head irrigator. This person would assess the land and decide where to spread the water that year. They then would dig these ditches and these waterways by hand; we did not have shovels but instead used what was called a pavodo, which was an eight-foot-long hardwood pole, approximately four inches in diameter. The men would get together and dig the ditches that would be used to spread the water. As part of their conservation strategy, we would alternate the areas that would be irrigated, a process that allowed previous worked land to recover. We knew how to take care of the land.
We also knew how to respect the water, to move it to where we needed it and to ensure that it eventually flowed back into its natural waterway. This Indigen