Sophie's Thesis

The dissertation was four hundred pages and it was due to her committee in three weeks, and Sophie had spent the whole evening on a single paragraph about a meadow. It was late, past ten, and the fourth floor of Getchell Library had emptied out around her until there was only the hum of the ventilation and the librarian somewhere down at the desk waiting for closing, and Sophie sat with her laptop and a stack of photocopies and a paragraph that would not come right.

The meadow was in the Sierra, above the lake her people called Da ow, the lake the settlers had heard as Tahoe and kept. Her family had gone up to the meadows every summer for as long as there had been summers, gathering, fishing, the whole valley moving up out of the heat into the pines, and then in one long lifetime that had stopped. She had the documents. She had the allotment records from 1893, the parcels handed out under the Dawes Act a full six years late, up in the pinyon hills where the soil was thin and the water rights had gone to someone else. She had the Forest Service correspondence and the timber contracts from the Comstock years, when the mountains around the lake were cut nearly bare to shore up the mines under Virginia City. She had, in a folder, the assessment that her people had effectively lost the land by 1862, which was to say fourteen years after the first wagons and three years after the silver.

What she did not have was a sentence that could hold both the documents and the meadow at once.

She had grown up hearing about the meadow from her grandmother Lena, who had grown up hearing about it from her own mother, who had watched, as a young woman, the river below the town get turned by an act of Congress and a senator’s name into a ditch for somebody else’s fields. That was the shape of the family story as Sophie had received it. A woman watches the water leave. A generation later a man goes to work on the thing that takes the rest. Her own father had poured concrete for the interstate in the sixties, the freeway that cut the north of the town off from the river, and he had done it because it was work and there was a family to feed, and he had never once, that Sophie could remember, spoken about the irony of it, because to him it was not irony. It was Tuesday. It was a paycheck. It was the valley his grandmother had watched fill up with a town, now getting a road.

Sophie was the one who got to call it history. That was the thing she turned over on the late nights. She had a fellowship and a carrel and a committee, she had access to archives her grandmother would never have been let into, and the price of that access was that she had learned to write about her own family in the passive voice, in the vocabulary of dispossession and land tenure and cultural continuity, and some nights the vocabulary felt like one more thing that had been handed to her from the outside, poor soil, no water.

She got up and walked to the window. From the fourth floor she could see most of the campus, the old Quad with its trees, Morrill Hall lit at the south end where the university had started in 1886, the dark bulk of the Mackay building. It was a beautiful campus. She was not immune to that. It sat on the north edge of the Truckee Meadows, on ground that had a Washoe name before it had a survey, and the students who crossed it every day, sixteen thousand of them or near enough, mostly did not know that and had no reason to, and Sophie stood at the glass and understood that her four hundred pages were an argument, in the end, that they should.

Her advisor, who was kind and thorough and not Washoe, had suggested she foreground the baskets. It was good advice, professionally. Everyone knew the baskets. Louisa Keyser, whom the dealers had renamed Dat So La Lee and displayed like a marvel, had made her degikup in Carson City for buyers who wanted the maker to be the last of something, and the baskets sat now in museum cases behind glass in Carson City and in Washington, coiled tight and perfect, and people came from everywhere to look at them. A chapter on the baskets would sell the dissertation. Sophie knew this and she had written the chapter and it was good, and it was also the part of the work she trusted least, because the baskets were the part the world had already agreed to love, and it was easy to love a thing in a case.

The land was harder. The land was still a fight. Just two years ago the Forest Service had finally closed Cave Rock to the climbers, the rock her people had kept away from for reasons that were not the climbers’ business, and even that, a single closed cliff face above the lake, was being argued in the courts, was not settled, might not be settled for years. Back in the late nineties the tribe and the Forest Service had signed the first agreements about the meadows, the beginning of the Washoe having any say again over the ground at the lake, and that was real, that was progress, and it was also a memorandum of understanding, a piece of paper, ninety years after the parcels in the pinyon hills.

She went back to the carrel. The librarian would come through soon and turn the lights off in sections, the way she always did, front to back, so that the room emptied of light like water going down a drain, and Sophie would pack up and drive south through the sleeping town, across the freeway her father had poured, past the exit for the Colony that the government had bought for landless Indians in 1917 as though her people had misplaced their land rather than had it taken, and home.

She read the paragraph again. Then she deleted the passive verbs, all of them, every place she had written that the land had been lost, as though it had wandered off. She wrote instead that the United States took the meadow. She wrote who signed and when. She wrote that her great great grandmother had been alive to see it, and had a name, and that the name was in the family and not in the file.

It was not finished. It was one paragraph and there were four hundred pages and three weeks and a committee who would want the passive voice back for reasons that were about tenure and not about the truth. But it was closer to the meadow than she had gotten all night, and down the room the first bank of lights went dark.

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