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Audio Transcript: Lost to Me
This photo was taken probably around 1918. This is my great grandfather Johnny. We called him grandpa. He’s standing with my great aunt Florence on my great-great-grandmother Ida’s allotment on the Yakama Indian reservation. My great-great-grandfather Foster had an allotment as did at least 5 of their children, including my grandpa. None of these parcels remain in my family. Grandpa told a lot of stories about this land, about hunting and feeding baby lambs with ketchup bottles full of milk. He talked about the fruit trees and Ida cooking huge lunches for all of the farmhands. And although I have stories of this land, the land itself is lost to me. One day I tried to locate these allotments on google maps. Allotment #588, #748, #4094, #4430. But between confusing record-keeping and changing land boundaries, it became a guessing game and a moot one at that. Lost to Me is a work in progress, a concept where land, history, and identity return to one another. |