The Indian Hunter
James Benney is so inspired by the East Bay's dozens of Native American sites that he published his own guidebook about them. So why do all the experts wish he hadn't?
By Nate Seltenrich @nateseltenrich
- Jenny Pfeiffer
- James Benney believes that the benefits of increased awareness are too important to be overlooked.
As James Benney approaches the site of what he believes was once a year-round Native American village, he can hardly contain his excitement. He has visited this location in the East Bay hills on more than twenty occasions since 2001, but still recalls with enthusiasm his first trip here.
"I continued on over this way, and then I saw this," he says. He is pointing toward a two-foot-tall sandstone rock that contains two or three shallow bedrock mortars — softball-size depressions in which natives ground acorns and other foods using stone pestles. Then Benney hikes toward a flat, clear area ten feet across encircled by a partial ring of rocks and more mortars of various depths. "This could've been a house pit," he continues.
Soon he is standing at the center of a football-field-size plain, nearly surrounded by small sandstone boulders with mortars of myriad sizes and arrangements. Their high concentration suggests to Benney that this must have been an active village site for thousands of years. Though he has no formal training in archaeology or cultural anthropology, he speculates on the location of retreat routes, lookout points, defensive positions, and even a major trading ground nearby. "I still get thrilled by every one of them," he says with a sense of awe in his voice.
At one large rock, he pauses to demonstrate a practice he calls "daylighting." Reaching his hand deep into a mortar — enough to fit his outstretched fingers and wrist — he scoops out a handful of accumulated leaves, branches, and dirt. To Benney, merely placing his hands where native peoples once put theirs is an innately spiritual act. He believes it's important to open up the mortars to the air instead of allowing them to fill with detritus and eventually disappear. He considers daylighting a harmless and imperative part of appreciating these primitive food-preparation areas.
On the contrary, this seemingly innocuous act doesn't sit well with a host of archaeologists, Native American descendants, and East Bay Regional Parks District employees who consider daylighting a form of vandalism. But in their eyes Benney has also done much, much worse. Five years after discovering this site while wandering from a ranger-led bedrock mortar tour, he self-published a detailed guidebook containing driving and hiking directions to this and some forty other Ohlone, Bay Miwok, and Northern Valley Yokut sites here in the East Bay hills.
Most of those sites sit isolated and unprotected on land owned or managed by the East Bay Regional Parks District, the nation's largest regional park agency. The parks district is prohibited by state and federal law from publicly disclosing the locations of these and many other anthropological sites, due to their vulnerability. Laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 dramatically increased legal protection for such sites by entitling them to certain safeguards, one being nondisclosure by public land stewards. But there's nothing to stop private citizens from revealing the same information.
No one will debate Benney's right to be enthralled by the first village site he found. With 630 visible bedrock mortars, it's one of the most significant Native American sites in the state. Even if it wasn't actually a permanent settlement, it clearly saw a lot of use, and could hold important clues about how the region's earliest inhabitants lived. Most remarkably, it's been virtually untouched for more than two hundred years — since Spanish explorers arrived in the 1770s and began forcing Native Americans away from the East Bay and into missions in San Francisco and Santa Clara. Today, the site sits on land owned by the parks district and the Contra Costa Water District.
What most upsets Benney's critics is that he provided GPS coordinates for the sites in his book. With portable GPS units available to the public for under a hundred dollars, the sites can now be accessed by virtually anyone who wants to hike out to them. Benney's book is the first of its kind to reveal this information, and critics believe it could expose the few remaining preserved native sites in the Bay Area to irrevocable damage.
Opponents are worried that Benney's book could serve as a treasure map for potential looters, or "pothunters," who have been known to dig up sites in search of artifacts such as arrowheads, pestles, grindstones, and spearpoints. It is illegal to remove them, but they can be stolen and sold to undiscriminating buyers for modest sums. A rare intact arrowhead with a sharp point can fetch hundreds of dollars.
"There are relatively few people doing this, but their impact is absolutely huge," said Gregg Castro, a Native American descendant with Ohlone ties who has worked for fifteen years to preserve native culture. "The first and only time it happens will totally decimate a site. We know from decades of experience that the more people that know about these sites, the more damage is going to happen, and there's no getting around that. ... We all wish this book didn't exist. This isn't the first time this has come up, but it's probably the most egregious."
Comments (6)
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One can agree with Micheal Newland that "there are circumstances where it's in the public good to withhold information"--national security crises come to mind--without agreeing with him that no one should be allowed to reveal the location of bedrock mortar sites on public land in the East Bay hills. Bedrock mortars are holes in rock and are not easily damaged, especially not by daylighting, which removes feces, twigs, leaves, and other detritus from the mortar "cups." After 200+ years of disuse, the only "microscopic food remains" left in the mortars are tightly bound with the rock surface and typically covered by a thin layer of dirt and/or vegetation. One daylights with one's fingers, not a router. To call this "vandalism" as Newland does, is perverse and verges on name-calling. So, what are the "circumstances" that would justify the suppression and prior restraint of a book like James Benney's? The threat to our "shared heritage?" In matters concerning free speech and individual freedom it's important to put things into perspective. Raids by a few pothunters on the half-mile long Morgan Territory village featured in the article would barely scratch the surface of that site. Our shared heritage would not be compromised by unauthorized excavations because the village is too large for them to matter. Newland and others may well believe that the threat of any damage to an archaeological site is sufficient to suppress information about its location, but they are going to have to come up with more than exaggerations and ad hominem attacks to get their point across. I defy Michael Newland to produce a quote from James Benney wherein he claims to speak for the public. This is a serious misrepresentation. James Benney speaks for himself, but if you listen to Newland, Potts, and Curtis, there's something outrageous, even improper, about this. Potts even says Benney "has no right to take matters into his own hands." Do these three live their lives so enmeshed in bureaucratic processes that they can't imagine someone speaking out for himself and not for some group? Is their notion of civic life so limited that they think only groups--stakeholders--are entitled to act? My impression is that Newland and other Benney-detractors look down on us John and Jane Does who like to hike and explore in the East Bay hills. They are the trained experts, we the public rabble. They know what's what, while we're "simplistic" and "uninformed." No wonder they don't think we're responsible enough to visit Native American sites on our own. However, I have news for them. Father doesn't always know best.
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Manifesting Others’ Destiny I too want the legacy of Indigenous People to be preserved for the public and future generations to learn from. Benny names how preservation could benefit us. But there’s something insidious and frighteningly familiar about a person of European descent deciding for themselves what’s best done with Indigenous People’s legacy. Benney intentionally avoids consulting living native people, and worse defies their expressed positions and those coded into law. James Benney represents that spirit of Manifest Destiny that is so well rooted in the psyche of white America, namely that the world is here for our consumption; that we can assume to know what’s best for others; that we can ignore established rules without fear of reprisals; and that if we offend indigenous people there won’t be any consequences, anyway. As a white man with both class and white skin privilege, I can’t just roll my jaded eyes over this story and cynically go on minding my own business. The East Bay Express has gifted free publicity to this misguided man, helping him profit off of the further marginalization of Indigenous people. When there are so many stories of Indigenous People’s resistance to marginalization, it is distressing that this is the type of coverage the express chooses to give. If it bleeds it leads and in this case, on the cusp of Indigenous People’s / Columbus Day, the blood’s still drawn by a cowboy “Indian Hunter.”
regarding the actual story, it's certainly a shame that it takes only one man to threaten an entire history of site protection. the delicate balance between public outreach and preventing abuse to sites is incredibly tricky and constantly weighs on the minds of every cultural resources manager. unfortunately, Benney completely refutes this complex issue in his simplistic and uninformed notion that "the more people know", the better. i take this quite personally as an archaeologist whose entire career is based on measuring human impacts on archaeological sites. every year i visit sites (in wilderness areas, no less!) that have seen some kind of damage resulting from visitors' actions. pertaining to the question posed by randall, the role of journalism is to inform the public by presenting all sides of a story. which is exactly what this article has done--they not only explained the situation in general (i.e., the "news"), but gave the readers an insight into Benney's motivations and character while simultaneously offering a wide arena within which the opposing argument was presented. the reporter and publication are certainly NOT accomplices in anything.
What is the effect of this article? The stated goal is informational, but isn't that the issue here? By giving more publicity to a book that is clearly not in the interests of native peoples nor the park service, doesn't this artcle simply create more trouble? It seems obvious that Mr. Benney does not represent any real constituency other than himself and has no right to take matters into his own hands. If he wants to protect these sites, then he should provide the resources to do so, or help others to do so. By publishing this article, the Express has overstepped the bounds of journalistic ethics and has become a willful accomplice. The fact that disclosure of these sites, by people who are not supposed to know about them in the first place, is legal merely draws attention to a loophole that thus far has not been exploited. The fact that this loophole exists at all is a significant reminder of the low level of respect accorded native american interests. This article is a shameful reminder of a long and continuing pattern of abuse directed at native americans.
I agree that this book should not have been published, or if it had been published with restrictions where the books would be allowed only in American Indian Libraries, that might have OK. The Indians were slaughtered, their cultures stolen, their burial sights desecrated and not honored, and today so many American Indians live in such total poverty, perhaps Mr. Benny should offer residuals from the book to the Olone people who can no longer be found in the Bay Area.
I wish the author had followed up a little more on our conversation--specifically, scooping out the mortar cups--what was termed as "daylighting"-- has a direct impact on the archaeology of these sites. It may sound harmless enough but when he does this he scoops out microscopic food remains that give us a better picture of ancient foodways. It's vandalism, and there's no way around that. The other real problem is that Benney thinks he speaks for the public, but he speaks for no one but himself--not the native community, not the general populace, not the scientific community, not the parks that are trying to keep these sites safe. What he's doing is unethical and its risking our shared heritage for his own personal satisfaction and desire for glory and self promotion.
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