Nina Leger

I want to write about Oroville, California. I discovered this city when my interest in the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin led me to read Ishi in Two Worlds, a book written by her mother, the anthropologist Theodora Kroeber. She describes how the Yahi people were exterminated by the California Gold Rush. Ishi is the name given to the supposedly last Yahi who left the desert in 1908 and came to Oroville. There, he was first put to jail, then into a museum in Berkeley where he was introduced to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber — Theodora’s husband and Ursula’s father. Ishi lived in the museum until his early death in 1916. With him, the Yahi people went from being objects of hatred and violence to objects of conservation. From extermination to preservation, the logic reverses, yet objectification remains.

In Oroville today the river where settlers used to look for gold now supplies the largest dam in the country. Just as in the 19th century when there was not as much gold as expected in the river, today, due to droughts and climate change, there is not enough water. It is as if the land itself revolts against its appropriation. From the Gold Rush to today’s droughts, I aim to recount how the installation of the western civilization on this territory has destroyed, covered, and submerged (both figuratively and literally) previous layers of histories. I also seek to expose how such buried or submerged histories eventually come to the surface, revealing the frailty and the violence of what has been built. The history of Oroville is one of complex, sometimes contradictory, stories linked to the city. I will address what has been erased for Oroville to rise without fantasizing the life of the Yahi. How can you inherit such histories of violence? How do you deal with these? How can fiction reveal them? These are some of the questions at stake in my project.

I will spend most of my time in Oroville and will consider my residency as a kind of fieldwork. I intend to explore the local archives and museums – the Pioneer History Museum – as well as Oroville Dam and its visitor center. I also hope to have the chance to connect with inhabitants of Oroville because to truly understand a place, observation is not enough. You must listen and hear what people say.

I also intend to spend some time in Sacramento and in San Francisco to do some additional research. In Sacramento, I would like to explore archives, museums and to meet with professors from UC Davis who teach Native American Studies as well as Environmental Studies. I plan to do the same in San Francisco, primarily in Berkeley, where I plan to visit the museum where Ishi lived and died and to explore Alfred Kroeber’s archive. I want to investigate the recent and fascinating renaming of the Anthropology Building that was formerly called « Kroeber Hall » and meet with scholars from Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology.

After having spent time learning and researching in Northern California, I would like to take a trip to Oregon to follow the traces of Ursula K. Le Guin as her writing has laid the groundwork for much of my thinking about Oroville. I want to go to Eugene and explore her archive to gain a better understanding of how she worked, linking anthropology with science-fiction. Besides Le Guin’s archive, the University of Oregon also stores the archive of many feminist sci-fi writers such as Joanna Russ and Suzette Haden Elgin. I hope to have enough time to dig into these precious documents and to see whether I can turn this material into fiction.