Flood in the Desert |
Digital Short
Owens Valley Paiute
The Paiute people were the Native inhabitants of the Owens Valley territory in what is now the State of California. They built sophisticated irrigation canals to channel water runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Los Angeles Water Bureau piped water from the Owens Valley to fill the reservoir at the St. Francis Dam and gradually removed the Paiute from their ancestral territory.