Watching “Exterminate All the Brutes” a moving film by the filmmaker, Raoul Peck, about displacement and the mytholgy of western history, and systemic racism, I was particularly struck by the decoinstruct of a particular myth. The film looks to dispel the myth of a land that has no people — all lands have people — and the refrain “land with no people does not exist” caught my ear.
First I felt complicit in potentially perpetuating that myth. I hike and backpack with fervor. I am neither expert at distances nor a scholar of flora and fauna — but I do feel relief and a sense of distance from people when I am in the wilderness. I carry an idea in my head that I hope to encounter as few people as possible because this land I am walking holds that possibility.
So by proxy, I think of the maps I have looked at showing the layout of the town I live in, Discovery Bay. From SoilWeb at UC Davis to ARCGIS there are many “basemaps” for setting the underpinnings of mapping the land — some highlight terrain, others highlight street names, others waterways and parks, but none offer a base map that shows the indigenous peoples of the land. I think of that map as the invisible map beneath these maps.
No one should be surprised that such descriptions of land have been erased — and exist only as invisible concepts yet to be fully surfaced — like a charcoal relief that reveals what was written on the page prior. We should not be surprised because California in our recent history made it wildly lucrative to kill Native Americans.
Image Captured from “Extrerminate All the Brutes” by Raoul Peck
In fact, California at one time paid more per scalp than any other state at any other time in American History. We have to own the myth of the “fading” Californian Native American tribes was actually a genocide we paid for — not some lone native American horseman quietly riding away into the sunrise.
So here I am reflecting on what it means to be a member of the community in Discovery Bay. A land defined commercially by the rich agriculture that surrounds it and the luxurious largely re-engineered waterways abutting it. These current qualities seem to define the town’s character. All of it sitting atop whose land? I have a child’s knowledge of the Delta being largely Ohlone land. But I know little else. What I do know is that I can’t find the people of the land on the available maps.