Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind by Louise Dunlap (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind by Louise Dunlap Gwyn Kirk (bio) Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind by Louise Dunlap, New York: New Village Press, 2022. 277 pp., $89.00 hardcover, $22.95 paper. E-book available from digital partners. Congratulations to Louise Dunlap for this unflinching account of how her family's land, in what is now known as Northern California, came to be in their hands, and their silence about the Indigenous people who had cared for this place. Dunlap describes the 80-acre ranch in Napa Valley: the massive live oaks, [End Page 253] wildflower meadows, creeks, birds, and the many plants she knows by name—California natives as well as invasive species brought from Europe. She writes: I'd felt deep intimacy and love for this piece of earth since childhood, long before I understood that my great-great-grandfather had bought it in a time of what's now acknowledged as genocide … I wanted to unearth the land's history and the roles my relatives had played in its colonization … to understand the wounding that must have taken place and how all of us—and the land—could heal. (1–2) In 1843, Nathan Coombs, Dunlap's great-great-grandfather, arrived in California from Massachusetts. He founded the town of Napa in 1847; and an outlying area, Coombsville, is named after him. In 1857, Coombs bought more than 2,000 acres of rolling hills, part of a land grant the Mexican government had conferred on ranchero and military man Cayetano Juárez for his services in protecting Franciscan missions and "subduing" Indigenous people. Earlier, Wappo and Patwin people had used this land for hunting and gathering and cared for it year-round. Dunlap's California ancestors were businessmen, lawyers, elected officials—people who showed up in archives. She traced them through newspaper reports, old maps, the County Historical Society, and faded letters written in copperplate script. Also, scholars were publishing new histories that documented "a California genocide during the Anglo wave of conquest from 1846 to 1873," just as Nathan Coombs was establishing himself (47). What Dunlap learned about her family did not fully answer her questions, however. She realized that their "silences didn't start in Napa; their mind-set had come west with them" (200). Working back in time, she discovered relatives who'd arrived on the Mayflower and were "part of settler-colonialism from the very beginning" (201). She read critical accounts of the first European settlements described by literary scholar Kathleen Donegan (2014) as "brutal places characterized by disease, death, factions, violence, starvation, ignorance …" (203). This was not what Dunlap had learned as a child. Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks (2018) calls the settler narrative of triumph and resilience a "replacement narrative" that erased both psychological trauma and the appalling brutality against those already living on this continent (203). While Dunlap is sympathetic to the hardships and violence that scarred and traumatized her kin, whose austere Puritan faith did not permit them to grieve, she recognizes their complicity in the violence against Indigenous people. In horror she writes, "We scalped and tortured, dismembered corpses …" (219). Whether or not her relatives were directly involved in specific atrocities, she argues, they benefitted from this inhumane system and still do. Dunlap warns readers that parts of this book may cause severe discomfort and cautions against a merely academic approach. Two final chapters detail how she has faced her profound shame and grief at what she unearthed and include [End Page 254] many resources for readers. She committed to becoming an ally to Indigenous people, starting with her participation in the 100-year commemoration of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1990. She's joined Shellmound Walks initiated by Ohlone people in the San Francisco Bay Area and supports the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, led by urban Indigenous women, to restore Indigenous land to Indigenous people (https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/). Part of her process has been finding points of connection with her ancestors despite her revulsion at so much of what they did or believed. She has been involved in deep questioning, strong political friendships, and...