The Fierce Battle for the Modoc Homelands

October 3rd 2023 is the 150th year since the hanging of Kintpuash (Captain Jack) and three other Modoc men by the US Government at Fort Klamath. 

Thousands of pages and uncountable photographs and illustrations have been written and pictured about the Modoc peoples before, during, and after “The Fierce Battle for the Modoc Homelands,” the sub-title of Jim Compton’s vital and essential 2017 book: Spirit in The Rock. 

Two centuries of invasion, conflict, killing, settlement, and displacement of Modocs occurred before, during, and after a series of pivotal events of 1872-1873 known as The Modoc War. Conflict and claim continue into this year 2023.

Photos: Rock paintings from the collapsed lava tube caves in the Lava Beds National Monument, near the Modoc stronghold on southern edge of Tule Lake basin, in the traditional territories of the Modocs. No specific relationship to the 1872-1873 battles is suggested here; simply a thoughtful proximity. 

Traditional Modoc country is centered around the hundreds of square of the Lost River watershed; lands and waters severed by the arbitrary border of the Oregon and California in the early 19th-century: the 42nd parallel. One of many mappings, namings and claimings resulting in devastating effects for the native peoples.

Lizard on the fault line

Consider certain tiny lizards, and that

long before
anyone could count
there was still math.

— Linda Kasischke

Is Art matter? Does Lizard matter? Ontological questions. What is not in doubt: Gravity. Matters every moment. Dark crevice, weightless.

Humans take gravity as granted. Antique certainty, wheels spin, rain falls, ice melts, water drips. Trickles. Remembers.  Rivers flow, flood, pool, press dams. Gravity “generates” in the techno-version of Genesis spinning magnetic jostling electrons spawning Electricity. Bonneville: god of appliance desire.

None of this new to Lizard. Lizard knows gravity. Lizard Is Gravity. Actually and metonymically. Lizard stands forth. Lizard not to be seen, omnipresence unknown. Simply gets by, gets on with it. Lizard still, then gone. We say dart, dash, disappear, adios. Gravity has its verbs.

“Climate Change” no longer grasped. Idea cracking, concept fracturing, spalling, spilling.  The Great Fault where no fault lies like polycrisis lies. Bar graphs, peaks, valleys, picturing nullspace, glacial shimmer. Cards on the table. Shards in the dust. Gravity wins. Lizard knows.

 

NOTES
— Photos: Block and Fault country, Northern Great Basin; waters seeking the deep do not run to the sea. Lizard abides, memory lingers, dreaming.
— Foreground of second photo: groundstone mortar for grinding or crushing.
— Linda Kasischke from the poem The Accident in The Infinitesimals (2014 Copper Canyon Press)

Placing Stone

This was only a theory and yet
what is a stone but a theory of change?
 — Paul Hoover

 

the stone itself in the seeing
the seen of the self revealing
gravitas congealing earth’s fire

enfolding residual continuity
a motionless shimmer
lean summer grasses shiver

do we need to think this say this
as the stone stands forth
as with every thing a theory

Photos: Warner Basin, Southeastern Oregon. A day's indeterminate walk, sagelands. The pictures appear determinate. Then we remember:  the light and angle of another day shift ... lichen moss mineral, the very weight of stone, the revelation of relations... the way.

...
Purpose is silent, as ever, patient in folds of time.
… What I've learned has been added to me — superstition and dream as sure as numbers. 

— Killarney Clary, from the poem “An Unlikely One Will Guide Me…"

Returning

Looks familiar this symbol on the rough wall of rock shelter.
Colors and tones of the stone outweigh the blaze-red of the stroked figure.
Still, profound the geometry of intent.  That’s clear.
Imagine a place of power a retreat darker in a night without stars.
The ceiling houses the terror, a returning necessity. This is not a dwelling.
A place to gather from then move taking with little other than renewal.

NOTE
Photos from visits over several years to Dog Creek Cave, North Umpqua. The massive Jack Fire in 2021 seared slopes and steep canyons, black trees standing, rockshelter spared one more season.  Poem above, DB.

Poems below:
— Lucille Clifton, here yet be dragons from The Book of Light (1993) Copper Canyon Press
— Kay Ryan, from the poem All Shall Be Restored in Elephant Rocks (1997) Grove Press.

                here yet be dragons

so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon's mouth. some
where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost
people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who
among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?

All Shall Be Restored
 

The grains shall be collected
from the thousand shores
to which they found their way,
and the boulder restored,
and the boulder itself replaced
in the cliff, and likewise
the cliff shall rise
or subside until the plate of earth
is without fissure.
 

… And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, ever more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.

beneath us the other order already moves

            What's pulled
from the earth but not translated — the mud and the red
    of it, the blood and the wet of it.
    — Traci Brimhall

Certain words bleed through to the unwritten pages.
To call this memory offers no solace.
    — Jane Hirshfield

This is what I know from blood:
The first language is not our own.
There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.
    — Linda Hogan

CODA
I.
Rock paintings on rim rock in a creek canyon in John Day river country gaze as witness, as freeze-frames, to cycles of season and upheaval, to invasion of homelands and trails of dust, to spring-light green grass.

II.
Shields and suns fading
on shimmering cliff facings
refract a time of time itself
turning through …

We cannot speak
yet we see
we see the bleeding through
ages unwritten.

III.
With what lens of time do we grasp this past? ... a then-time not departed, oscillating in the brightening-now? Witnessing catalytic displaced replaced biogeoplanet of polycrisis as political time? Economic? Geologic time or galactic? Eerily clearly Gaia days unfolding when Time is now known as only one unblinking Word. — DB

NOTES
— Traci Brimhall from her poem Translation Theory, in Saucade (2017, Copper Canyon Press)
— Jane Hirshfield. From her poem Waking This Morning Dreamless After A Long Sleep, in Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001, Harper)
— Linda Hogan from her poem Map, in The Book of Medicines (1993, Coffee House Press).