Disappeared Into Law: California’s Kern River and What Heritage Cannot See

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This is part of a NiCHE series that investigates if rivers can be heritage, and if so, what kind of heritage. A companion to our series on Canadian Heritage Rivers, authors focus on the epistemological, historical, and cultural place of rivers with lessons and parallels for Canada, including comparative stories and/or lessons.

The monster El Niño year of 1998 produced a remarkable Sierra Nevada snowpack and led to something I had never seen before: the full force of the Kern River returning to downtown Bakersfield, California. It emerged full and cold, with enough staying power to run right through the height of a Central Valley summer. My friends and I were so ready. We were in a dirtbag phase of our late teens and took every opportunity to load inner tubes into one dad’s crusty old van, beg for riverside drop-offs, and sneak stolen vodka into our slushies. We launched our vessels at Yokuts Park, named for the people whose civilization this river made possible and whose descendants were largely dispossessed of it, and floated down our new river drinking and smoking cigars. We never conceived of a childhood where this was what summers looked like.

Can a Disappeared River Still Be Heritage?

This series asks whether rivers are heritage. The Kern answers yes. A river is not a heritage site that holds still to be admired. It is a carrier, holding a place’s lifeways and carrying them across the people who come and go along its banks. The Yokuts, and three thousand years later a vanload of teenagers, floated the same water. This is the kind of heritage our frameworks are worst at seeing, which is how a river disappears in plain sight.

On maps, the lower Kern River is a defining landmark that runs through the heart of downtown Bakersfield. In most years it is a trickle or a dusty creek, and to most eyes that’s simply how the valley looks. Most residents do not know about the century-old engineering scheme that drains the river once it hits the valley floor, and most other Californians only think of the Kern as a canyon river northeast of Bakersfield that’s excellent whitewater rafting. Ecologist Daniel Pauly calls this “shifting baseline syndrome”1: each new generation accepts the degraded environment as the normal one. We never conceived of a downtown Kern River childhood as a possibility because the dry bed was our baseline.

A Century of Maneuvering to Make a River Vanish

There is nothing natural about the dryness of California’s Central Valley. It was once a marshland overflowing from Sierra Nevada rivers, so much so that early Californians formed navigation companies that ferried travelers from the valley’s northern to southern reaches. These companies also secured contracts from the State that encouraged them to “drain the swamps” in exchange for land. Bakersfield’s namesake, Colonel Thomas Baker, was a state senator and a partner in one of these companies.2 He used his state senate seat to modify one drainage contract in his company’s favor, gave reassuring answers when colleagues raised conflict of interest objections, and secured 89,120 acres of Central Valley land in the process.3 He also did a stint in federal prison for defending the Confederacy, which tells you something about the man.4 The legal infrastructure he set in motion produced the landmark California Supreme Court case Lux v. Haggin, which resulted in the Miller-Haggin Agreement of 1888.5 Miller-Haggin brokered a truce between competing claims (riparian rights on one side, prior appropriation on the other), carved up the river’s flow to satisfy a tangle of water interests on the Kern delta, and codified the agricultural canals and diversions that had already transformed the valley floor. That arrangement still holds 138 years later.

Black and white photograph showing braided wetland channels of the South Fork of the Kern River with dense riparian vegetation and a small footbridge, circa 1890.
Image 1: Head of the South Fork of the Kern River, Kern County, California, ca. 1890. The braided wetland channels visible here were already being consolidated by the agricultural infrastructure codified in the Miller-Haggin Agreement two years earlier. Credit: Carleton E. Watkins, ca. 1890. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-36783. No known restrictions on publication.

Is Absence-by-Law Legible to Heritage Studies?

Heritage scholars have developed frameworks for studying absence, but they are built for disaster, decay, and erasure: the kinds of loss that leave visible damage. Researchers Tusznio and Strzelecka, writing in environmental sociology rather than heritage studies, documented what happened when a Polish river called the Sztoła disappeared: decision-makers expected communities to accept what they called the “liquidation of a river.”6 Nobody in power asked what the river meant to the community; no one required them to. The Sztoła vanished when a mining company abruptly stopped pumping the wastewater that had sustained it. The river did not dry up; it was turned off. That the closest parallel comes from outside heritage literature is worth noting. Every existing framework assumes absence is something that happened to heritage, not something being maintained by contract.7

The Kern River does have heritage recognition. Its upper reaches, the canyon stretch of white water and granite popular with rafters, received Wild and Scenic designation in 1987.8 The boundary was drawn where the canyon ends and the agricultural delta begins. In other words, the designation recognized the Kern where it was beautiful and stopped where it became functional. The Klamath River, further north, recently became the site of the largest dam removal project in American history, a victory hard-won over decades of Indigenous-led litigation and political organizing.9 Its story is as legible as its salmon: a river, dams, fish, removal, return. But the LA River complicates the picture. That mostly concrete channel has its own constructed absence, and yet it commands a substantial heritage discourse, appears in films and television, and has become something of a cause célèbre. The difference is legibility and cultural capital. Los Angeles has the resources and the mythos to turn a concrete eyesore into a civic cause. California’s Central Valley does not. It is an agricultural working region, unglamorous by design, invisible in the same way its rivers are invisible: deliberately, and without apology.

Aerial drone photograph looking east at the Kern River flooding across the flat agricultural valley floor near the Kern River Intertie in Bakersfield, California, with bridges partially submerged and an oil pump jack visible in floodwater, May 2023.
Image 3: A view from a drone looking east at the Kern River where it empties into the Kern River Intertie fin Bakersfield, California on May 24, 2023. Credit: Fred Greaves / California Department of Water Resources, May 24, 2023. Public domain.

The Kern’s absence is not visibly dramatic in the same way as the Klamath or the Los Angeles River, but its return can be. In 2023, another extraordinary snowpack brought the Kern roaring back to Bakersfield. It returned the way it always does, through sheer accumulation of water the infrastructure could not  hold back, showing the people fighting for it what the Kern could be. The law is less sentimental. ‘Bring Back the Kern’, a coalition of Bakersfield residents organized to fight for a flowing downtown river, has been in court since 2022, suing the City of Bakersfield over its river operations under California Fish and Game Code § 5937, which requires dam owners to maintain fish passage.10 It is the only available legal hook. An appellate court has since reversed the river’s temporary flows to prioritize century-old water contracts, and the fight is now before the state Supreme Court.11The dynamic is clear regardless: a river recognized as heritage might have had standing to defend; a river that disappeared into law has none, so a fish-passage statute stands in for everything that was lost. Heritage easily sees the monumental and the legible. It cannot see this. So, the Kern keeps carrying what it always carried, the lifeways of everyone it ever made possible. It keeps coming back without permission, and we still have no language for what we lose each time it’s turned off again.

Feature Image: The Kern River channel beneath downtown Bakersfield. The infrastructure works. The river doesn’t. Credit: Curtis Perry, Flickr, 2014. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
  1. Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10, no. 10 (1995): 430. ↩︎
  2. Lois Henry, “Lawyers Allowed to Question Kern River Historian. So, Let’s Talk About Col. Baker…,” SJV Water, March 28, 2026, https://sjvwater.org/lawyers-allowed-to-question-kern-river-historian-so-lets-talk-about-col-baker ↩︎
  3. Douglas R. Littlefield, Ruling the Waters: California’s Kern River, the Environment, and the Making of Western Water Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 31–50. ↩︎
  4. Littlefield, Ruling the Waters, 31–50. ↩︎
  5. David Igler, “When Is a River Not a River? Reclaiming Nature’s Disorder in Lux v. Haggin,” Environmental History 1, no. 2 (1996): 52–69; Littlefield, Ruling the Waters, 31–50. ↩︎
  6. Joanna Tusznio and Marianna Strzelecka, “Place Loss and Re-Negotiating Local Water Heritage: The Case of Sztoła River, Bukowno, Poland,” Blue Papers 1, no. 1 (2022): 128–137, https://doi.org/10.58981/bluepapers.2022.1.13. ↩︎
  7. Sherene A. James-Williamson, Jorjan E. Dolphy, and Stephanie Y. Parker, “Absence Heritage: A Critical Analysis for Awareness, Preservation and Resilience,” International Journal of Geoheritage and Parks 12, no. 1 (2024): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgeop.2023.12.001; Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↩︎
  8. S.247, 100th Congress, Public Law No. 100-174 (1987). ↩︎
  9. NOAA Fisheries, “World’s Biggest Dam Removal Project to Open 420 Miles of Salmon Habitat this Fall,” July 23, 2024, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/worlds-biggest-dam-removal-project-open-420-miles-salmon-habitat-fall ↩︎
  10. California Fish and Game Code § 5937, https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/fish-and-game-code/fgc-sect-5937/. ↩︎
  11. John Roemer, “Battle Over a Dry River Puts California Water Rights Back on Trial,” Daily Journal, December 23, 2025, https://www.dailyjournal.com/article/389156-battle-over-a-dry-river-puts-california-water-rights-back-on-trial. ↩︎

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Vanessa Christman

Vanessa Christman grew up as an Ag kid in California's Central Valley before earning a degree in Anthropology from UC San Diego and a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from Drexel University. She has worked in public and law libraries throughout the state and is currently Principal Librarian and Section Head at the California State Library, managing the State Law Library and Government Publications collections. She is also a researcher and writer with the Maya Exploration Center, and is completing an MA in Archaeology and Heritage at the University of Leicester. Her dissertation develops a framework drawn from the cognitive science of awe and applies it to archaeological knowledge formation.

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