A series of verdant hills, valleys, and creeks are layered upon one another. In the background is the blue sky and a rising sun. The landscape is peppered with oaks, and wildflowers are sprouting from the hills in the foreground. Upon closer look, one notices that the hills have faces, and the creeks are pools of tears emerging from their vacant eyes. The hill-face in the foreground is looking up and screaming, and as the river gushes out of their open mouth, an orbitoclast pierces their eye.
Disabled Ecologies of the Yolo Bioregion
An orbitoclast is a surgical tool resembling an ice pick that was developed in the 1940s by Walter Freeman to conduct lobotomies, a process by which the frontal lobe of the brain was separated from the thalamus, thereby rendering an individual unable to perform cognitive functions – in short, unable to think. This painting by Ooti Maxine represents the land being lobotomized, controlled, and broken – so it can’t think for itself.
Ooti Maxine is an urban Indian and a visual artist, living and working in her Maidu homeland. This homeland was the epicenter of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. The Cache Creek watershed, which is in the neighboring territories of the Patwin/Wintun and Pomo peoples, has been a vital source of gravel mining since the early 1900s. Currently, there are four construction companies mining into the aquifer along the banks of the Cache Creek, with plans to significantly expand deep-pit mining operations across a 14-mile stretch of the western Sacramento Valley over the next 30 years.
In 2022, Yolo County approved a deep-pit mining operation for Teichert, which allows the company to extract “35,400,000 tons (30,000,000 tons sold) of aggregate resources (sand and gravel)… over a 30-year period at an annual rate not to exceed a maximum of 2,117,648 tons mined per year (1,800,000 tons sold)”
This is enough gravel to cover 3,687 football fields 3 feet deep with sand and gravel extracted from along the creek basin from just one mining operation. There are 2150 acres currently permitted and in the process of being mined, and at least 1000 more acres of mining planned along lower Cache Creek in the foreseeable future.
Teichert got its start building sidewalks in the burgeoning city of Sacramento and has grown – thanks to the riches of Cache Creek and other aggregate mines – to be one of the largest road and infrastructure builders in California. Teichert Construction holds California State Contractor’s License #8, the oldest active contractor’s license in the state.
Currently Teichert is heavily involved in the expansion of the 1-80 highway near Sacramento. In 2017, a local jury implicated Teichert in a serious violation of the due-process clause of the U.S. constitution for manipulating Sacramento County politicians into shutting down two small, family-owned gravel operations. The lawsuit fined Yolo County a whopping $100 million in judgement, putting taxpayers on the hook for this company’s wrong-doings.
Much like a lobotomy disables an individual’s psychic capacity to think and feel, modernity has disabled the depth of our collective feeling for our animal, plant, and elemental relatives. While Native communities worked with the intelligence of the lands, waters, plants, and animals, to steward the region, modernity has devalued and severed the connection to traditional ecological knowledge, prioritizing control of the land and its “resources” instead.
For artist/scholar, Sunaura Taylor this is fundamentally a disability justice issue, for it is founded on the ableist argument that non-humans lack the ability for intelligent thought, culture, imagination, and an inner life of their own. The disabled ecologies and impaired landscapes that we have inherited and are now grappling with are a direct result of knowledge systems that value control over collaboration. The focus on domination and extraction has disrupted the natural rhythms and circulations of the wetland and riparian ecosystems that were thriving in the Yolo bioregion for millenia. In only two hundred years, mining has impoverished and compacted soils, significantly lowered sections of the creek beds, released enormous quantities of mercury into downstream ecosystems, and depleted the aquifers of this region.
Lobotomies and Implicit Bias
This attitude of control permeates all aspects of colonial knowledge-making, as the dark history of lobotomies demonstrates. Lobotomies began in the early 1900s as a remedy to overcrowded asylums, and as a method for dealing with ‘unsavory’ social elements such as criminals and homosexuals. They quickly became popular because they rendered the patients demure and docile, perhaps losing personality, but ultimately benefiting due to the loss of symptoms that were deemed socially unacceptable such as anxiety, uncooperativeness, and a refusal to engage in domestic responsibilities. These qualities, of course, were particularly antithetical to the social concept of being a good woman and wife. And so by 1942, women were the overwhelming majority of patients receiving lobotomies, accounting for 75% of them.
As pathologization of women’s deviations from expected norms abounded within medical communities, similar diagnoses were levied against the land as well. The natural flows of rivers and creeks were seen as inconvenient for desired settlements of Euroamericans, and so practices like damming and concrete slab channels became the goal – to create arteries of extraction for the benefit of a few at the expense of all future generations. The ability to extract resources from the land was viewed as more important than the ecosystems that supported and were supported by the land.
Implicit bias is a predominant factor in understanding why lobotomies have overwhelmingly been given to women historically. The unconscious prejudices that lurk beneath the surface of our decisions can tell medical practitioners that women are inherently disabled, and that they are less reliable, more unruly, and in need of managing. This parallels the implicit bias encoded in Western knowledge systems that devalues indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and the inherent value and intelligence of all forms of life.
And so we see a line connecting violence against the feminine and violence against the land, a line taking on the name of disability. Diversion from that which extracts profits is seen as an anomaly that must be cured, a problem to be solved. Seeking control, efforts are made to seize the subject, restrain her so she performs as desired, not as she naturally wants.
Coda
While these larger conflicts are embedded in the painting given the Native Californian cultural contexts that Ooti is working in, she emphatically states that this was not her starting point. She sought to address a much simpler and more fundamental issue through this painting – one that cuts across all genders and identities – the mental health crisis. For Ooti, painting is not only an art form but also a strategy and a tool for managing her own depression. While many of her works deal with dark or difficult themes, her paintings are also characterized by vibrant colors and a movement toward healing. For example, the flowers sprouting from the hilltop in the foreground of her painting not only counter the violence of the image, but also remind us that access to nature and embodied outdoors experiences offer a vital pathway to health and regeneration. The orbitoclast is positioned to strike, but it has not severed the connection yet. There is still time for us to transform our culture and our values, but for that to happen we must first lay the tools of domination and extraction aside.
