ES Podcast Series, "Flows: Mapping Dispossession and Reimagining Kinship in Payahuunadü"

Flows: Mapping Dispossession and Reimagining Kinship in Payahuunadü

Flows: Mapping Dispossession and Reimagining Kinship in Payahuunad, Dr. Lydia Heberling, Dr. grace yeh, Aya Trussell, & Edwin Majano Villalobos. 2026

"Flows: Mapping Dispossession and Reimagining Kinship in Payahuunadü" is a podcast series that follows water through the arid, gorgeous, and deeply storied landscape of the Owens Valley, or Payahuunadü, “the land of flowing water,” to examine the connections and intimacies between Japanese American WWII incarceration at the Manzanar War Relocation Center and Paiute land and water relations.

ES Faculty members Drs. Lydia Heberling and Grace Yeh worked with students Aya Trussell and Edwin Majano Villalobos, visiting Manzanar National Historic Site and Three Creeks (Paiute land back in Owens Valley) and researching and reading together. The socio-political and ecological landscape of the Owens Valley has been forged out of struggle around the rights to water since settlers first entered the valley in the 1860s. Following water in the Owens Valley reveals a vast and networked complex of social and political cartography. This story project focuses on this idea through the concept of “flows”: that is, the flows of Paiute and Japanese American bodies across a transformed landscape, as well as the flows of water—natural and diverted—that shape Owens Valley.

ES faculty and students during Manzanar trip, 2025

"Flows" was made possible with support from the Teacher-Scholar Mini Grant Program awarded by the Cal Poly Office of Research, the College of Liberal Arts Summer Undergraduate Research Program, CLA ACE Program, and the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society.

This story project also came out of the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage made possible by the IRA funding. The StoryMap site also includes student reflections and lessons learned on these trips. 

 

Read the full StoryMap Page here