Yulica

I have lived on the campus of John Woolman School, later known as Sierra Friends Center, for close to twenty years. For most of that time, I lived here with my wife, Karen Davidson, until she died last May.

College Park Quarterly Friends Educational Association began its work here in 1963, when it launched the Woolman Program, a four-year boarding high school. By the time we arrived in the early 2000s, the Woolman Program had been replaced by the Woolman Semester, a single-semester program for high school juniors, seniors, and “gap year” students. To us, the program was magical, provocative, and powerful. The quality of the staff, the commitment of the students, and the integrity of the program all combined to immerse the students in social issues and sustainable agriculture by providing them with actual involvement and personal experience. This opened the students’ eyes and hearts and introduced them to new practices that they could carry back into their daily lives. After graduation, many of these students continued to come back to campus for visits.

Ultimately, the program was unsustainable. The problem wasn’t the program itself, but fund-raising. A failure to secure the funds needed to cover the program’s costs was an issue that recurred regularly.

During our time here, we lived through two school closures, and both times the property was put up for sale. The first time, the place was saved by the Jones Fire of 2020. After the fire caused extensive damage, the board pulled the property off the market, obtained a fire insurance settlement, and engaged in almost two years of rebuilding. The campus re-opened as a “Center” instead of a “School” in 2022. The plan was to offer classes to school groups and the general public, with offerings that emphasized sustainability, and arts and crafts. This plan did not work out. The board decided to shut the program down and seek another nonprofit to buy the property. This upset me very much, until I heard that the board was in negotiations with a nonprofit representing the Native tribe of our area, the Nisenan. This nonprofit is known as CHIRP or California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project. I cried with joy when I heard this.

The meetinghouse of Grass Valley Friends Meeting, our meeting, sits on the Woolman campus. About two years ago, our meeting began conducting monthly adult education programs, each presented by a different member of our community. As it turned out, many of these programs ended up helping us to prepare for the unforeseen possibility that title to the land beneath our feet might be transferred to a new holder. That transfer is now in escrow.

During one of these adult education sessions, we silently walked across the property and trekked uphill to a huge outcropping of rock, next to Mel’s Pond. Our presenter directed our attention to hollowed-out indentations in the rock – about the size of softballs – and informed us that these were grinding areas that the Nisenan used to make flour from acorns. (Later, Nisenan tribal members told us that these indentations were actually used for grinding Medicine preparations.)

I stood near this rock with our quiet group and realized we were standing on a high point. I slowly turned in a complete circle, looking out at the majestic horizon of mountains. I began to cry, remembering a guided tour that I had taken more than twenty years earlier. That was at Empire Mine State Park in Grass Valley, where the docent told us that if we were transported back in time to that same spot in the 1850s, we would not recognize the surrounding landscape. For miles in every direction back then, we would have seen bare ground, as every tree in the area had been cut down to feed the furnaces that ran the underground mining equipment. What collided together in my mind, as I stood with Friends near the grinding rock, was the awareness that the Nisenan, who gathered acorns from the black-oak trees that were predominant in this area, not only experienced the desecration of this landscape back in the 1850s, but they also experienced the total destruction of their ancestral way of life. The once-abundant natural resources of the area were wiped out to feed the gold mines.

Our adult education program did more than provide information. It touched our souls.

Another member of Grass Valley Meeting brought us a program about the Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine was a Papal decree from 1493. It gave permission to European explorers, like Columbus, to seize any land they set foot on. Still to this day, the decree has not been renounced by any Pope. And it still forms the basis for some of our current property laws. Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited it to support a Supreme Court decision in 2005.

In another Grass Valley adult education session, we studied the effects of the Gold Rush on the local Nisenan. In 1848, the Mexican-American War ended, and the United States took possession of the far western lands of the continent, creating the new state of California in 1850. The Gold Rush began soon after, sending floods of would-be gold miners into rural counties like our own Nevada County. Other settlers and migrants flooded in also, and the new state government dealt with this rapid influx of new people onto already inhabited tribal lands – not by forcibly moving the original residents off the land – but by condoning their murder. Immigrants gave deadly new diseases to Native peoples, drove them off their properties, and destroyed their food sources. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Nisenan have lived in this area for more than 11,000 years. Their population dropped precipitously during the generation after the Gold Rush, falling from approximately 9,000 people in 1850 to about 2,500 in 1895.

Those who remained were marginalized. Then, to add insult to injury, the U.S. government sent federal agents throughout the country to raid Native homes, forcibly capture Native children, and force them to attend far-away boarding schools – with the express intent to “kill the Indian within the child and make them American.” The U.S. government supported more than 400 Indigenous boarding schools throughout the country, and as far as we can tell today, Quakers ran about thirty of them. The Nisenan are among the many Native communities that were robbed of their children in the 1850s and well into the 1900s, and whose children were robbed of their ancestral cultures.

More recently, the U.S. government struck yet another blow to the Nisenan. In 1958, Congress passed an act that terminated legal recognition of fifty distinct tribal groups in Northern California, one of them being the Nisenan. This group of tribes responded by suing the government, and they ultimately won back federal recognition of their tribal status. However, due to a record-keeping error, the Nisenan were accidentally left off the list of tribal groups that were reinstated. To this day, the federal government refuses to acknowledge the Nisenan.

A lawyer who represents the Nisenan came to Grass Valley Friends Meeting recently and gave us an update on the tribe. He shared that, over the past two years, the Nisenan have been working to document their distinct tribal identity, as well as their long-standing presence on this land. They plan to bring a new lawsuit this year against the federal government, suing for federal recognition.

The site that we have been calling (for just a few decades) John Woolman School and Sierra Friends Center was also called – for many centuries – the Nisenan village of Yulica. The present-day transfer of the title to this land, from the Quakers to the Nisenan, represents the passing of the keys to this home from its current inhabitants back to its original inhabitants, and allowing their descendants to come home. As this land has been sacred to us, it is sacred to them. Soon, again, it will be known as “Yulica.”

Both the Quakers and the Nisenan are deeply rooted in a sense of “that of God in everyone.” The difference between our communities is that “everyone” for the Nisenan has always included the trees, the plants, the water, the air, the sun, and the animals. All of nature.

I am beginning to see that too. I think many other Friends are as well.

More and more, I can see that all of life is sacred, everything is alive, we all belong, and we are all connected. All of life has a purpose, is meant to be valued, needs to be respected. We humans are the youngest creatures on the planet, the last to be created. We need to learn from our elders, the trees, the plants, the animals, the water, the air – all those who are our elders and from whom we have so much yet to learn.

To learn more about the ongoing journey of the Nisenan, please visit their website: chirpca.org ~~~

Dean Olson was deeply affected by the book Braiding Sweetgrass, which opened his eyes to life from a Native People’s perspective, so that he’s now saying, “that of God in every living thing.” He is a member of Grass Valley Friends Meeting (PacYM).