For most of the past century, Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow
sacred to the Mountain Maidu tribe, was in the grip of a utility
company. Washington's White Salmon River was saddled with a
fish-obstructing, inefficient dam, and the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland
was unacknowledged within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park.
Until people decided to reclaim them.
In Reclaimers, Ana Maria Spagna drives an aging Buick up and down the
long strip of West Coast mountain ranges--the Panamints, the Sierras,
the Cascades--and alongside rivers to meet the people, many of them wise
women, who persevered for decades with little hope of success to make
changes happen. In uncovering their heroic stories, Spagna seeks a way
for herself, and for all of us, to take back and to make right in a time
of unsettling ecological change.