After wildfires destroyed 95% of this California tribe's forests, members uncovered 1,200 ancestral sites

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Set us as preferred CONCOW, Calif. — Until recently, when members of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu pulled up a map of their ancestral land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, only about two dozen of their historic sites appeared.Disease, violence and forced labor had separated California tribe members from their history.Without routine Indigenous fire to clear out the foothills, the landscape — much of it now managed by the U.S.

Forest Service — grew dense with conifers, obscuring the signs of their enduring presence.As a result, archaeologists’ picture of the tribe’s past was spare.No more than 500 people.

Going back about 3,000 years — a fraction of the time other tribes are known to have lived in the state.Then the forests burned.In less than a decade, wildfires destroyed forests across 95% of the tribe’s homelands.

The Forest Service turned to the tribe for help healing the land.As members walked the wide-open moonscape, they found evidence of their vibrant history everywhere.Now just a few years later, their map shows more than 1,200 sites.

Each one is itself a collection: Arrowheads.Rock art.

Milling stations where ancestors used cups carved into rock faces to grind salmon, manzanita berries and bay leaves.The circular pits of winter houses, where they sat around a fire under a cedar roof.Now, as Tribal Chairperson Matthew Williford Sr.

walks these lands, he imagines a much more vibrant past than the one traditionally portrayed by archeologists.For millennia, upward of 5,000 ancestors living in the basin, many trekking to higher elevation to gather food in the summertime.Husbands venting about domestic life as they shaped their arrowheads on one side of the hill; wives doing the same at the milling stations on the other side.

Now, to better understand the tribe’s past, the Konkow Valley Band ...