As Snooks explained to a reporter, Lassen Volcanic’s features were “the spiritual lakes and mountains of the Atsugewi.” Snooks became an Elder of the Atsugewi band of the Pit River Nation and continued to spread Atsugewi culture and environmental consciousness throughout her community. Snooks and her family also emphasized their cultural ties to the park environment. “I never try to make a basket unless I know the design,” Snooks explained. Snooks tied her culture’s spirituality to the way she designed her baskets. 3 Snooks and Jenkins served as consultants on a project surveying Atusgewi language, cultural stories, and traditions, including basket weaving. Snooks’s mother joined LaMarr in her cultural preservation work in the mid-1950s, followed by Snooks and her sister Laverna Jenkins in the 1970s. Her aunt, Boonookooeemenorra (or Selena) LaMarr began working as a naturalist and Atsugewi cultural interpreter at Lassen Volcanic in 1952, leading demonstrations in basket weaving and acorn pounding. 2Īs an adult, Snooks responded to this experience by actively claiming Indigenous culture, following in the footsteps of female elders. Snooks lost the ability to speak Atsugewi fluently and experienced the alienation and loneliness that was common among boarding school students. Like thousands of Native American children who attended boarding schools created by the US federal government to promote assimilation, Snooks was separated from her elders and prohibited from speaking her Native language. At the age of twelve, Snooks and several siblings began attending the Sherman Institute, a boarding high school for Native American students, located in Riverside, California and far from their Northern California origins. After McGarry’s death, Snooks’s mother ran a farm to support her six children and mother. Snooks was born on May 20, 1927, to Atsugewi parents, Karrahtahtmenoo (or Dessie) and McGarry Snooks. She was part of an extended family of women who pursued this work at Lassen Volcanic National Park and other sites in a concerted effort to reject the US assimilation campaigns that they had endured as children. Lillian Bernice Snooks was at the forefront of the late-twentieth century campaign to preserve Atsugewi culture and traditions. NPS/Dave Ashcroft Article Written By Emma Chapman The prospect did not move me to fear yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.Lillian Snooks demonstrating Atsugewi crafts in 1996. In that hour I should die and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. And then I thought again of his words – “I will be with you on your wedding-night.” That, then, was the period fixed for the fulfillment of my destiny. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the mainland. I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me. I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean. All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears.
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