Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,68
to support Mary and Carrie Dann as they prepared to face attack from the government. They were grand, fearless matriarchs, the most unsubjugated women I ever knew, queens of their household, heads of their ranch, capable of fixing a generator or taming a mustang from their vast herds, cheerful and pithy as they spoke to us in English and to each other in their own language. (Savage Dreams, my book in which they were principal figures, foregrounded a lot of charismatic women and women’s groups, but I don’t know if anyone recognized it as a feminist book.) To be around them was a revelation; it was to be where family memory reached back to before white people arrived, land was sacred, women were in charge, and actions should defend what mattered for the long future. I was getting an education about tangible things like the lay of the land and the history of the West, but also about matters of the spirit and questions of how to live your life.
Joining the project meant spending weeks at a time on the Danns’ remote cattle ranch in northeastern Nevada, living out of my truck or an old trailer near their house, where I could plug in the desktop computer and printer I’d hauled out. It meant joining some friends from the antinuclear movement and some people I’d never met, indigenous and otherwise, as a coalition and attending tribal meetings and gatherings. It meant, in my case, ghostwriting letters and statements for Carrie and writing a lot of the literature for the project, press releases, and backgrounders (researching the long overview article I’d written after that immersion in the microfilm record had taught me a lot). And it meant waiting, because now that the courtroom conflict was over, the government was threatening to seize their livestock.
The violent assault came on April 11, 1992. An organizer at the ranch ran into a woman who asked him about all the sheriff’s cars outside the community center in the nearest hamlet. The government had hired a roundup team to confiscate cattle, and law enforcement was there to back them up. I got the news by phone and within an hour had canceled all my plans and grabbed my stuff and headed east in my car, across the Bay Bridge, the East Bay, across the Sacramento River and the wide Sacramento Valley, up through the oak groves and then the pine groves and over the Sierra Nevada, and into the desert, dozed a couple of hours at a truck stop, and at dawn resumed driving the five hundred miles between my home and theirs. It was the first time I ever moved toward violence.
At ten in the morning, I found the heart of the ranch—the house, corrals, outbuildings, trailer—almost deserted. The conflict had happened elsewhere, on horseback, with the federal roundup team going after the livestock and the Shoshone supporters running interference on some of the Danns’ tough saddle-broke mustangs. Carrie had argued about land rights and treaties with the federal agent and the local sheriff at the portable corral some of her cattle had been herded into, and the agent grabbed her arm to try to hinder her from intervening. She broke his grip and jumped into the corral and blocked the loading of the cattle. Unwilling to escalate, they went away. She won the battle, though the war dating back to the 1850s didn’t end.
The struggle was never resolved, through difficulties, through conflicts within the tribe, through changing times, through the arrival of gold mines that scraped and developed and polluted their valley and pumped out its water and flooded the Dann family cemetery. I was sad about their stalemate and the government’s war of attrition and grateful for my time with them. But the larger shift taking place made me hopeful as never before. I saw the power of people on the margins to change foundational stories, saw something absolutely unforeseen emerge, saw how, as those changes spread, signs and school textbooks, monuments, place names, land management practices, and sometimes laws changed, how museums gave back the bones and the relics to the people whose ancestors and treasures they were, how gradually all these tangible things meant something more important and less tangible.
It did not mean that everything was fine, but it was a profound shift with practical consequences, including in the understanding and management of natural systems and