William Barrios

In 2023, a rare and powerful storm revived California’s “lost lake,” flooding the Tulare Lake basin after years as dry, dusty farmland. This project explores how human intervention and shifting landscapes have shaped Tulare Lake’s fate. Working closely with the local Tachi Yokuts Tribe, we combine indigenous oral histories with paleoclimate records, archival photos, and drone technology like LiDAR and multispectral scans to reconstruct how people, water, and industry reshaped the land over centuries. By centering tribal knowledge and non destructive science, this work is both novel and urgent: it connects cultural memory to climate science, informs water justice conversations, and creates digital tools that communities can use to steward their landscape into the future.

This project will digitize archival material, leverage remote sensing and GIS technologies, and create online platforms to decolonize the past, and present, of what was once California's largest body of water. Community engagement, emerging archaeological methods, and historical ecology will enable us to present a neglected part of California's history that has sweeping implications for contemporary communities, water access, and climate justice. Reviving memories of Tulare Lake through indigenous histories, the stories of marginalized settler groups, and ecological modeling will aid in confronting the past and preparing for the future in California's complex, vulnerable heartland.