Born: 20 May 1927, United States
Died: 21 February 2009
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Lillian Bernice Snooks was at the forefront of the late-twentieth century campaign to preserve Atsugewi culture and traditions. 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.
Snooks was born on May 20, 1927, to Atsugewi parents, Karrahtahtmenoo (or Dessie) and McGarry Snooks. After McGarry’s death, Snooks’s mother ran a farm to support her six children and mother. 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.
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. Snooks lost the ability to speak Atsugewi fluently and experienced the alienation and loneliness that was common among boarding school students.
As an adult, Snooks responded to this experience by actively claiming Indigenous culture, following in the footsteps of female elders. 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. 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. Snooks and Jenkins served as consultants on a project surveying Atusgewi language, cultural stories, and traditions, including basket weaving. Snooks tied her culture’s spirituality to the way she designed her baskets. “I never try to make a basket unless I know the design,” Snooks explained. “The design comes to me in a dream. Then I make the basket.”
Snooks and her family also emphasized their cultural ties to the park environment. 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 died in 2009, about ten years after her husband, Leo Cantrell, a WWII veteran and fellow Native American from Shasta. She left behind a son, a granddaughter, and numerous great-grandchildren. She also left a legacy of cultural preservation and pride that has allowed the Atsugewi culture to continue and remain connected to its homeland into the twenty-first century.