Return, Removal, and the Plateau

Jessica Mullin was far from her home in Oklahoma when she first visited the country near Tule Lake. The landscape looked different, but it felt familiar. “The feeling is that you are in a familiar place,” she told Jefferson Public Radio. Mullin is a member of the Modoc Nation. Her ancestors came from this country.^[1]

The Nation’s Homelands Program is helping members reconnect with it. Their return is taking place among people who remained, including Modoc people within the Klamath Tribes.^[1] The story holds both histories: what happened to the people who were sent away, and what happened to those who continued living here.

Being sent away is not the same as choosing to leave. Making a life elsewhere does not mean the separation cost nothing, just as remaining does not mean nothing was taken. I want to understand what coming back can make possible without asking either history to disappear. That begins with remembering how the separation happened.

The absence was made

The Modoc War did not begin the violence that made exile possible. Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide documents earlier campaigns against the Modoc and neighboring peoples, including the Achumawi and Atsugewi of Pit River country.

In November 1852, Ben Wright’s men attacked Modoc people who had been invited to a peace meeting on Lost River. Accounts disagree over the number killed, but describe a massacre of dozens. The following April, the California legislature appropriated $23,000 to reimburse Wright’s company. This was not simply violence committed beyond the government’s reach. Public money helped reward it.^[2]

The campaigns crossed between the countries of distinct peoples. John D. Cosby’s 1856 militia expedition attacked Modoc, Achumawi, and Atsugewi communities. In 1859, William Kibbe’s Pit River Expedition carried violence and forced removal through northern California. That December, Kibbe brought approximately 450 prisoners to San Francisco on their way to the Mendocino Reservation.^[3]

The people caught in these operations were not anonymous to one another. In Madley’s account of the September 1859 massacre near Rolf’s Ranch, a man who later became chief of the Fall River band recalled watching from a hill as the attackers killed people in the camp below. He later learned that his mother, sister, and grandparents were among the dead. His testimony gives the event a different scale from a campaign report: not merely a number of people killed, but a family and a community whose lives would have to continue through what had been done to them.^[4]

The 1864 treaty brought another form of constraint. Its terms provided for a shared reservation in Oregon for the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin signatories, required relocation to that reservation, and secured specified fishing and gathering rights there. The treaty constrained where people could live while securing rights that would remain important to their descendants.^[5]

Kintpuash, also known as Captain Jack, and his followers returned to the Lost River country. The attempt to force them back to the reservation led to the Modoc War of 1872–1873. During the war, Modoc men killed General Edward Canby and the Reverend Eleazar Thomas at a peace meeting. The next day, General William Tecumseh Sherman transmitted President Ulysses S. Grant’s authorization for an attack that would justify “their utter extermination.” The order authorized more than the arrest and trial of the men responsible.^[6]

After the war, Kintpuash and three other Modoc men were executed at Fort Klamath. More than 150 Modoc men, women, and children were deported to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Madley describes the disease, neglect, and corruption that followed their arrival; more than a third had died by 1881.^[7]

Madley argues that the larger history of California’s campaigns meets the United Nations Genocide Convention’s definition. That is a historical argument supported by evidence of acts and intent, not a claim that the peoples ceased to exist. Genocide does not require the complete disappearance of a people, and survival does not make an exterminatory campaign something less than it was.^[8]

The United States did not create Modoc identity by deporting Modoc people. It imposed a separation upon an existing people and placed the survivors under different federal administrative arrangements. Those arrangements would shape later possibilities without exhausting the lives, relationships, or political agency of the people living through them.

This is why the language of simply having “moved away” is inadequate to the history. Whatever choices descendants later made, the original departure was not a choice among homes.

The people who continued

Jaime de Angulo’s Indians in Overalls brings us into Pit River country in the 1920s. It is a different kind of source from Madley’s history: an outsider’s retrospective memoir, shaped by literary reconstruction and by assumptions about Native people that should not be mistaken for their own understanding of themselves.^[9]

Yet the people in its pages are not merely examples in the author’s account. Jack Folsom teaches language, explains relationships, makes judgments, and tells de Angulo when he has misunderstood. Other people organize gatherings, dispute decisions, care for the sick, and remember the dead.

Their circumstances bear the marks of dispossession. De Angulo describes government-provided pieces of land that were often rocky and without water, seasonal work on ranches, and makeshift housing. Folsom describes people becoming ill in inadequate homes. But those descriptions do not exhaust the account, nor do they describe every household alike. Folsom himself has a well.^[10]

What continues is a shared life: speech, obligations, disagreement, humor, knowledge, and decisions about how to live together. These are not isolated survivors waiting for someone else to declare that their culture still exists. Nor does the sophistication of their language have to impress a visiting linguist before their lives deserve recognition.

One episode concerns Sukmit, also known as Frank Martin, whom de Angulo describes as a Pit River doctor. In the memoir, Sukmit travels with his mother to Berkeley and becomes distressed at being far from home. De Angulo represents him as saying that the powers with whom he has a relationship cannot hear him there: “they don’t hear me; they don’t come!” He and his mother return north.^[11]

His trip was not a forced removal. The episode is also not a rule about what every Native person can or cannot sustain away from home. It is one account of one person’s distress, mediated through the writer who published it. What it asks us to notice is that leaving a place can mean losing access to relationships that are not interchangeable with whatever is available elsewhere.

That does not authorize us to explain Mullin’s experience through Sukmit’s, or to treat Pit River and Modoc religious understandings as the same. Mullin has described her own experience. She does not need another people’s account placed over it.

The connection I see is more modest, but still important. A person can build a life elsewhere and remain separated from something that matters. The ability to survive away from home does not establish that the separation cost nothing. Nor does the desire to return deny the life that people and their families made in exile.

Distinct peoples, connected lives

De Angulo also records relationships that do not fit a picture of neighboring peoples living in sealed compartments. At a gathering, a mixed team of Modoc and Pit River players competes against a Paiute team. In an argument about someone’s identity, a relationship term enters the conversation: brother-in-law. When Folsom’s wife Lena is gravely ill, a Modoc medicine-woman named Kate is called to help. The doctoring takes place in English because the Modoc and Pit River participants do not understand one another’s languages.^[12]

The differences matter. Kate is not made Pit River by helping Lena. The people do not need to be the same people to have relationships through which assistance, knowledge, and obligation travel.

Nor was this a world without violence between neighbors. De Angulo records an older woman he identifies as Kate Gordon, remembering that Modocs had killed her father and taken her mother captive. Kinship and cooperation existed alongside memories of injury. A truthful account cannot turn the plateau into an image of harmony any more than it can turn it into a collection of unrelated populations.^[12]

Folsom’s description of his marriage to Lena offers another view of the connection between people and place. He describes reciprocal exchanges with her family that included his receiving the right to fish on Hat Creek. Access, in that account, came through a relationship. It was not simply a matter of being physically present or pointing to an individual possession.^[13]

The stories printed with Indians in Overalls carry relationships to place as well. They were collected by Jaime de Angulo and L. S. Freeland from Mary Martin of the Atwamzini group, who said she had learned them from Captain Jim. In her telling of the Loon Woman story, Tule Lake, Honey Lake, Goose Lake, and Upper Lake belong to the story’s geography.^[14]

That is Mary Martin’s telling, transmitted through the collectors and the published text. It is not a warrant to speak for every Achumawi storyteller, and it is not a map establishing present-day territorial rights. But it does show why the history of a country cannot be understood only through the boundaries later drawn across it.

We should not turn a story into a deed. Neither should we mistake a deed for the whole history of a place.

The lesson is not that modern Tribal governments or citizenship rules are unreal. It is that political distinction and human relationship are not opposites. Distinct peoples can have shared histories without surrendering their distinctness. Remembering those histories should deepen the responsibilities involved in return, not provide an excuse to bypass them.

Return among people who remained

The Modoc Nation’s present work is more than a visit to an ancestral landscape. JPR reports that it has purchased more than 3,000 acres in Siskiyou and Modoc counties. Its Homelands Program includes land restoration and opportunities for members to reconnect with the country. The Nation also describes cooperative stewardship on federally managed lands, so purchase is not the only form its return takes.^[15]

On land near the dry bed of Lower Klamath Lake, Homelands Director Ken Sandusky describes a landscape where wocus, a water lily used for food, once grew. Homelands Manager Brian Herbert speaks about the possibility of restoring wetlands. The program’s ambitions include native foods and the eventual return of bighorn sheep. These are plans and continuing work, not evidence that ecological recovery has already been accomplished. JPR also reports state funding to acquire another 874 acres; approval of funding should not be confused with a completed purchase.^[15]

That distinction between possibility and accomplishment matters. So does the distinction between purchasing land and receiving restitution. A purchase can recover access and create opportunities for repair without settling what was taken, who bears responsibility, or what further repair requires.

The return also takes place within a living Tribal political landscape. The Klamath Tribes comprise Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin-Paiute people. In JPR’s report, Chairman William Ray Jr. emphasizes continuous presence: “We didn’t move away, the families of the Klamath Tribes.” He also states, “The treaty of 1864 belongs to the Klamath Tribes.”^[16]

His responsibility to defend the Tribes’ rights deserves to be understood as a responsibility, not dismissed as possessiveness. The Klamath Tribes’ treaty rights are not just another preference competing for attention. Federal termination policy reached both communities. The Modoc Nation regained federal recognition in 1978, and the Klamath Tribes in 1986. For the Klamath Tribes, restoration of recognition did not restore the former reservation land base. Continuous presence did not mean undisturbed possession.^[17]

Acknowledging that history does not require treating the Oklahoma Modoc’s exile as a severance of all relationship. These are different questions: who belongs to a Tribal nation, who owns a particular parcel, who holds a particular treaty right, and what an ancestral homeland means to a person or people. They cannot responsibly be answered as though they were interchangeable.

Herbert’s place in the reporting makes that especially clear. He is both a Modoc descendant and an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes, working as the Modoc Nation’s homelands manager. His comments concern restoration. They should not be recruited as a statement of disagreement with Ray or as an official position of the Klamath Tribes. But his presence does caution against imagining two entirely separate populations confronting each other across a clean line.^[16]

Mullin reports another response to return: some people have told her, “If your ancestor really wanted you to be here, they would have come back when they could have.” This is an unnamed sentiment she reports encountering, not a position that can be assigned to the surrounding community or to the Klamath Tribes as a whole.^[1]

The statement nevertheless expresses a troubling test. It asks a later decision to stand as proof of an ancestor’s desire, while leaving the circumstances of that decision unexamined.

The Modoc Nation’s history records that 29 people returned to Oregon after the 1909 legislation. The law itself was more complicated than an offer to come home or remain outside. It directed the restoration of specified Modoc people and their living descendants to the Klamath Agency rolls, while making allotments on the reservation conditional on relocation there. Enrollment under that provision was not simply conditional on making the journey.^[18]

Neither the law nor the number who returned tells us why each family stayed or left. Nor was the opportunity to relocate to the Klamath Reservation equivalent to unrestricted recovery of the California homeland. A family’s decisions about work, care, relationships, and the life already built around them cannot be reduced to a measurement of how much an ancestor wanted to belong.

The same care is necessary when different histories of dispossession meet on a particular parcel. The Modoc Nation’s 2018 purchase of the Tulelake Municipal Airport became the subject of litigation by the Tule Lake Committee, an organization representing survivors and descendants of Japanese American wartime incarceration. In 2024, a California appellate court affirmed dismissal of the Committee’s challenge to the sale on tribal sovereign-immunity grounds. That outcome did not decide whose historical connection mattered more.^[19]

Neither history should be used to make the other disappear. Recognizing Modoc return does not require indifference to the memory of incarceration. Protecting that memory does not require describing Modoc people as strangers to the land. The difficult work concerns how those responsibilities can be honored without making one injured community carry the whole burden of resolving them.

What return can make possible

Modoc Nation Chief Robert Burkybile tells JPR that he wants members coming to California to connect with members of the Klamath Tribes as well as with the land. “We’re not there to take a slice of the pie,” he says. “We feel we’re trying to add to it.”^[20]

That intention does not settle disagreements by itself. It does offer a place to begin: not with a demand that one people’s survival invalidate another’s, but with the possibility that restoration can create something worth sharing without dissolving the authority of the nations involved.

A responsible return requires more than welcoming language. It requires attention to access, water, restoration, cultural work, and the responsibilities attached to each. Agreements must be made by the people and governments whose authority is actually involved. Public agencies should not use disagreement among Native people as a reason to withdraw from their own responsibilities or treat every consequence of removal as an internal Tribal problem.

What I resist is the idea that the consequences of removal can become a sufficient argument against return. The historical record explains why a people was absent. It cannot honestly be turned into evidence that the absence was what they wanted, or that the relationships interrupted by it no longer deserve attention.

Those who remained should not have to surrender their history or rights to make room for those who were exiled. Those who were exiled should not have to disown the lives their families sustained elsewhere to show that the homeland still matters. Return should make it possible to carry those histories forward without asking either to become an argument for the other’s erasure.

Forced absence should not be made to finish the work of removal.