Letters to the Editor: As Indigenous wisdom is finally acknowledged, don’t forget the history
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To the editor: My heartfelt thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the story about wildfires that uncovered Maidu ancestral sites (“After wildfires destroyed 95% of this California tribe’s forests, members uncovered 1,200 ancestral sites,” July 16).
Those wildfires were fueled by overgrown underbrush. Gold Rush lawmakers had banned the tribes from implementing their centuries-old wisdom of routinely controlling undergrowth with fire. That wisdom is now acknowledged by the U.S. Forest Service. But there is much more to the story.
Those Gold Rush laws were the legacy of the little-known 15th century Doctrine of Discovery, which dehumanized Indigenous inhabitants of this continent. Thereby, California’s native population of approximately 150,000 in 1848 was reduced to about 30,000 in 1870. The California state government funded militias to hunt and kill the Indigenous. Those surviving were stripped of legal rights, forced into servitude and children sent to boarding schools to be “civilized,” a.k.a. to erase their Indigenous culture.
California’s history of Indigenous injustice is a microcosm of our nation’s history. That history should be lamented, not ignored.
Harold Printup, Los Angeles
