For centuries, the history of the Basques has been written by non-Basques – we have so little historical documentation written directly in Euskara or even by Basque themselves. Thus, when we find any hint of Basque history written by Basques, we must examine it to the fullest. The unassuming carvings left by Basque sheepherders in the American west might seem quaint or even cartoonish, but historian Prof. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe has spent his career documenting those carvings to learn as much as we can about the people and circumstances that led to those carvings. Joxe took a winding route to his eventual calling, much like the sheepherders wandered those mountains. In this interview, Joxe discusses how he became a historian, the importance and meaning of the Basque tree carvings, and his new project to further spread and preserve those carvings and his work.

Buber’s Basque Page: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you find your way to the United States?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I was born in the MontorZuri farmstead [baserri] in Munitibar, Bizkay, Euskal Herria (Basque Country). The farm sits on a hill and from there, everything is steeply downhill. As a boy I am told that I used to throw down the hill anything that rolled, including my father’s cider barrel. By age 5 I was walking the cows to pasture, and I also started school, and on the first day the teacher told me something like “From now on you don’t speak Basque, only Spanish.” I didn’t understand a word, but later I learned what he meant. 

I had an uncle priest, Luis Mallea, a renowned musician who in 1939 founded the Lagun Onak Choir (still singing) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He told my parents that I needed to go to school and at age 9 they sent me to Onati to the monastery of the Canons of Lateran; the town called the priests “Agustiñuak,” and many local boys went to school there, which was located 9 kms from the better-known Franciscan Monastery of Arantzazu.

We were all Basques, except one or two “erdeldunak” (non-Basque speakers), but the official language was Spanish; after all, those were the Franco years. I was 16-17 when I discovered the Basque language and its dire situation, thanks to older members of the seminarians who were beginning to study and write in Basque; this was in the late 1950s. When I graduated in 1964, we were publishing Erein (To Sow), a periodical, all in Euskara, though some of our superiors were not too happy.

By that time, I was active in the Basque-language world (it was so small, anyway), and the Spanish police was keeping track of us. We learned many languages in the seminary, Latin, French, Spanish, classical Greek (on the first day of class I told the teacher I had no time to study a dead language and that he should give me a zero right then and there; he did at the end of the semester), and even some English. On my own I studied a little German and more English, and because of that I was sent to New York where a group of the Canons had already been engaged by the Archbishop to minister to the Puerto Ricans. At that time, the Catholic clergy in New York had few if any members who spoke Spanish. I was there three years, until one night I was robbed by a group (of teenagers, I think, but it was dark) and to me that was the chance to get away from the Big Apple and head to Nevada where my sister and other relatives lived. I also had an uncle in Modesto, California, and several cousins in California and Nevada.

I worked three years in the Church, first in Sparks, Nevada, and then Elko until 1971. I fell in love with Elko, where there were many Basque sheepherders and others. I had a terrific chance to start writing their history then, but I didn’t, though I interviewed some old-timers and kept the notes and a few photos. However, I redeemed myself several years ago when I approached the Basques of Elko about writing their history, which the University of Nevada Press will publish in the Spring of 2025. The title is: More than Sheepherders: The American Basques of Elko County, Nevada. It was a collaborative effort, Jess Lopategui being a major source, and two local women, Anita Anacabe and Mercedes Mendive, each writing a chapter.

BBP: My uncle Martin also studied to be a priest in Onati, and very nearly became ordained until he met his future wife. Was there a specific event that diverted you from the priestly path to that of the historian?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I studied theology for four years, 1960-64, and those were the years of the Vatican II Ecumenical Council, 1962-65, that Pope John XXIII heralded as a breath of fresh air that the Catholic Church sorely needed. Indeed, but the dissenters claimed that a lot of crows flew in through that window that the Pope opened (crows are asking, why blame us?). I lived and graduated through those ideologically and theologically turbulent years.

The best example I can point out is the Latin Mass that was replaced by local languages. Our theology textbooks were in Latin, and we started objecting why a dead language was so important. There were many aspects of our education that were outdated, and we young guns were eager to trample on them. One egregious example was “Don’t look at women.” You are asking that of a 20-year-old? It was very abnormal, and yet we were committed to the vow of chastity.

Intellectually and dogmatically speaking, the Church hierarchy in the 1960s was living four centuries back, when Inigo Loiola founded the Jesuits. The church resisted change as a policy, and we can understand why. If for centuries you were saying that Mary was “covered” by the Holy Spirit and she was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, that’s a tough one to prove, but you have to stick to it and continue preaching it. There is a canon law dictating that the Church and the Pope cannot err when it comes to religion. In other words, the Church wants its Catholics to not ask any question and live forever in a bubble, but sooner or later, the bubble can burst.

There is a positive side to resisting change; it gives people an anchor that they can depend on, and many people who prefer to let others do the thinking need it. The Church possesses other virtues such as assisting the poor and the hungry, the number one mission that Jesus commanded, but human beings, not saints, make up the Church and the hierarchy, and the attention to the mission is not always a priority.

One of my parishes in NYC was “experimental” with three members, two Irish and one Basque, and some of the things we did there as “normal” were too extreme for the bishop of Reno. It became a problem when I married a couple—one Catholic and the other a Presbyterian—in the Presbyterian Church of Elko and someone told the bishop about it. The bishop said: This is not New York; you are in Nevada now. That took me by surprise. My idea of Nevada with its wide-open spaces, its casinos, its brothels, and its Old West laissez-faire attitude would find nothing wrong in getting along with a different Christian denomination. The bishop was a Midwesterner, and he didn’t understand Nevada; anyway, that is what I am thinking now. He left Reno soon after I did Elko.

The real reason I left the Church was belief. My faith wasn’t there anymore. The Catholic Church is the biggest and oldest continuous organization (you might say that the Roman Empire still exists), and its leitmotif is that change is bad. Saint Augustin, the oracle of the Church, famously said, “the truth never varies.” But we humans are not smart enough to know the truth of many things around us. One day the earth is flat and the next day it isn’t. For centuries the Church taught the heliocentric doctrine, until it couldn’t and didn’t. So, believing the Bible word for word because it is inspired by God is one doctrine that I could not believe in.

The Church thrives because it preaches ideas that cannot be proven or disproven. You cannot prove that God is one and three at the same time, but you cannot disprove it either. You cannot prove that Jesus is the son of God and that he resurrected after dying on the cross, but you cannot disprove it either. Many people, particularly in Europe, who used to believe these ideas no longer do today.

BBP: You’ve spent much of your career researching the history of Basques in the American West. What attracted you to that particular area of study?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I was always a history buff, even before I got the PhD at the University of Nevada in 1988. I soon realized that the Basques have not written enough of their own history, especially in their own language, like all other countries usually do. The history of Spain I studied in Onati did not mention a single thing that the Basque had accomplished. I was wondering why we were different from the Castilians who had attained great feats. At the time I didn’t know that Franco the dictator was cooking history textbooks.

The first book in Basque, Bernard Etchepare’s Linguae Vasconum Primitiae, was printed in 1545. We were behind most other countries in Europe, which was one reason why we were told that Euskara was not fit to express modern thought. Imagine the surprise by many critics when they learned that in Irulegi, Nafarroa, they recently found a metal piece with Basque inscriptions dated 80-90 BC.That’s about almost 1,000 years before Spanish was written for the first time. To give you an example of the sad situation that Basque historiography is in, I will mention something that used to bother me a lot. Historians, domestic and foreign alike, loved writing about the Basques and their mysterious language, while ignoring Euskara altogether. The baserri was “caserio,” Donostia did not exist, it was San Sebastian, etc., etc. Everything Basque was quoted in Spanish or French.

Early on, however, my favorite subject was not history, but linguistics. We all wanted to decipher the mystery of Euskara, but I got disappointed, because the genre contained lots of theories with few concrete facts that a majority agreed upon. It was a free-for-all. I myself had wild ideas; I saw what seemed a connection between Euskara and Sumerian. As I read Sumerian, it sounded a lot like Basque to me. Some of their place names and cities, Ur, the oldest city, and Mari, Sippar, Nagar, Uruk, Larsa, Eridu, Assur, Zabala, Isin, Girsu, Urmia, Hurria, Kisurra, and Umma are familiar sounds to our Basque ears. The name of their kings often ending in –zzar/sar (like Nabuchadnezzar) is another example; to me it was zahar, as the elders were often the chiefs. The title and the sound still endure in Persian Sha, Latin Caesar, German Kaiser, Russian Czar, and more.

But I gave linguistics up for history, which is more grounded in documents. And speaking of which, since you and I are both of Bizkayan descent, the first romance document that mentions Bizkaia says Biscai, not Bizkaia or Vizcaya. It is perhaps a small bone to pick, but there it is. The English say Biscay, and I think it should be written Bizkay, rather than Bizkaia. We don’t need the article “a.” On aspens I found several Vizcay and Biscay surnames of sheepherders carved. And funny thing, these people were not Bizkayans; they were from Nafarroa and Iparralde. So the word exists all over the Basque Country. What does it mean? I don’t know.

My first intent was to explain to myself how the Basque had survived as a different country and culture when sandwiched between two strong European monarchies that had divided us. We were not a country, the Spanish and French historians told us, we were a part of France and Spain. But that argument was shot to pieces years ago. Nation states are a modern invention, and the Basques are thousands of years older than when France and Spain made it to the map.

The first problem I encountered was documentation. We Basques had little of it, and what was available was housed in Spanish and French archives, often written by non-Basques. That is when I luckily discovered Joan Zumarraga, the first Bishop and Archbishop of Mexico. Nowadays, historians shun old friars and bishops, but Zumarraga is mostly an unknown quantity if not a misunderstood figure by Basque historians, nothing to say about Spanish ones.

His letters to his family and relatives in Durango, Bizkay–one of them in Euskara (posted on Buber’s website) constitute what I call early “homegrown documentation” written from Mexico in the 1530s and 1540s that we Basques sorely need more of. In those letters we appreciate that Zumarraga did not regard himself anything other than a Basque. He writes as a member of the Basque world. The concept of Spanish did not exist back then like it might today, but historians don’t like to check history that close unless it is politically correct. He considered himself subject of the King of Spain, Emperor Charles V, his good friend, but never Spanish. He often mentions “mi nacion” and “nuestra nacion,” always referring to the Basque Country. But historians, Spanish and most others, refer to him as a Spanish friar. In the last two decades, world history and literature—the internet, for example— are finally recognizing the Basque identity.

My PhD dissertation was titled, “Juan Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, and the Basques: The Ethnic Connection,” (1988). Actually, his name was Joan, but I had to accept his historical name. I could not believe that his many connections to other Basques had not been reported by previous historians. He particularly depended on Basque ship owners, who controlled much of the shipping and trade between Spain and Mexico. Miguel Lopez Legazpi, the future colonizer of Philippines, was his intimate friend, who at least once smuggled money and other items from Mexico for the bishop’s family and friends in the Basque Country.

The following may resonate with the Basques in the West: It turns out that Zumarraga was a sheep owner, the first that we know of in North America (he owned 6,000 head). He was a modern man in many ways, an Erasmian, in tune with the latest semi-revolutionary ideas of his time (forbidden by the Roman Church). He owned the books by Erasmus of Rotterdam that the Church forbade. He brought the first printing press to America and printed the first books (one written by himself); he brought female teachers, some of them Basques (unheard of in the Church), to teach the Aztec girls; he imported donkeys, and fruit trees, and sponsored over a dozen Basque families, whose descendants spread in Mexico, but migrated preferably to the north, where the semi-independent province of Nueva Vizcaya was formed after 1562 and was governed by the laws of Bizkay. It included the states of Chihuahua and Durango and parts of Coahuila and Texas. Its first governor was Francisco Ibarra from Durango, like Zumarraga, the name he gave his capital city. Later the Hapsburg kings in Spain disallowed the Bizkayan laws in Nueva Vizcaya.

All this makes it easier to see why Arizona is a Basque word, after a ranch and a mine in Sonora owned by a Navarrese named Bernardo Urrea. Why San Francisco was started and populated by colonists from Sonora brought in 1776 by Juan Bautista Anza, Jr. Anza Sr. was from Gipuzkoa, who governed parts of northern Mexico and Southwest US for many years; he spoke Basque, naturally, and his son may have spoken it, too.

I also have a surprise for today’s Mexicans. We know that according to the popular narrative the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, who was told to go see the bishop—Zumarraga—about building a church in her honor in Tepeyac. After some doubts, Zumarraga was convinced of the apparition and ordered the church built, but there is zero historical documentation for any of this. Historians, like the Mexican Garcia Icazbalceta think it is all apocryphal. However, I have in my possession a document of 1556 where it is stated that Martin Aranguren left a donation to the Church of Guadalupe. This means that the church was built already in 1556. That’s 10 years after Zumarraga’s death. This is crucial information because Aranguren, a man of means born in Lekeitio, Bizkay, was the bishop’s right hand man, his mayordomo, who often rescued him from his frequent money problems. When Archbishop Zumarraga died in 1546, he left all his meager possessions to Aranguren.

BBP: Much of your scholarly work has been spent examining the tree carvings sheepherders left on aspen trees. In all of your study of the Basque tree carvings, what is the most interesting or surprising thing you’ve found?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I discovered the aspen carvings of the sheepherders in Elko, one day in 1968 when on horse I was visiting a distant lonely herder of the Goicoechea outfit. He was from Munitibar and I told him: 

–Your parents would not believe if they saw you here; this is so far away! 

He quickly answered:  

–Far away, you say? Jainku ez da ona ondino eldu (God himself has yet to arrive here).

Twenty years later, when I was finishing my PhD program, I rediscovered the carvings on Peavine Mountain, which was located a mile away from my place north of Reno. I realized quickly that thousands of aspen carvings had not been recorded or analyzed properly. So, I embarked in research lasting twenty years, and even if I had continued for another twenty years, I would have recorded only a small portion of the totality.

I discovered that I had started the research fifty years too late. By 1990, 70% of the carvings etched by Basque herders on the aspens of the Americans West were gone. This is a guess, but an educated one, because aspens are shallow-rooted ephemeral trees. I will give you an example. I researched Peavine Mountain twice, the second time in 2006 and recorded some 630 carvings. Today I would be happy to find 40-50 of them.

You never know what you are going to see when you silently walk the aspen forest. It could be the name of someone from my hometown. “Munitibarko asto bat emen dabilena” (I am a donkey from Munitibar that is wandering here). You climb a mountain to 9,000 feet, and you find this lonely aspen overlooking a quarter of the state of Nevada that says: “Len neskatan, oin arditan, beti amesetan, J. Z. 1915.” (Before I chased girls, now I chase sheep, I am always dreaming). At that moment, watching the tree at that unforgettable place, my greatest regret was not knowing who this J. Z. was. Fortunately, down the road I learned that he was a bertsolari (an improvising and singing poet) and his name was Jose Zarakondegi, a Bizkayan.

Most herders brought with them a rural culture, steeped in ancient myths and beliefs, one of which refers to snakes. Christians preached to the Basques that snakes represented evil, but it did not erase all previous ideas held by Euskaldunak (speakers of Euskara). According to them, Sugar (male serpent) mated with the goddess (don’t ask me for details) and many ipuinak (mythological tales) talk about snakes crawling in bed at night and finding the woman’s breast while she is asleep. On trees I found figures of several snakes being nursed not by women but by sheep and by donkeys. And the lamb and foal? They are there too, just waiting their turn until the big snake is satiated.

You also see a lot of stars on trees, more than crosses, and I wondered why. I asked one herder if they did a lot of star gazing at night, and he thought I was naïve for sure. “We slept at night, what do you think?” he said. Then, one day, I was singing a classic popular song in which the star is identified with the loved one. I looked at other lyrics, and sure enough, in many popular Basque songs, the beloved was compared to a star.

BBP: In your view, what is the importance of the tree carvings to Basque history?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: Question: Who carves trees to communicate? Answer: Nobody, except the Basque herders. That in itself should be significant.

For thousands of years the Basque farmers and others did not write. They sang and they whistled but they did not write. When they arrived in America, some could hardly sign their names, and others were semi-illiterates. Of the many thousands of arborglyphs I recorded, I found only a few sentences carved in correct grammar. The closest who came to that were the people from Iparralde when they carved in Basque, which they often did.

Carving affected 95% of the Basques sheepherders; that is, only a few carved nothing. Even those who never carved their names, they may have tried to etch an animal, a star, or a woman. Some of the human figures are, well, primitive-looking, like the work of a five year old. The biggest thing for many of them was to simply be able to carve their name: “Jose Inza, Navarra, 1919.” They knew that the message would be read by other contemporary herders and by all who would come later. Seeing his name carved made him feel immediately more important. He was in America now and he was doing things he didn’t do back home.

When I started the research and began asking the herders and ex-herders for information on their carvings, their reaction was muted. One said: “They are not important.” Another said: “You are not going to find them,” and then he added: “Don’t look at them.” The truth is that if someone had not found the carvings intriguing and started looking at them and photographing them, the herders, left to themselves, would probably never have mentioned them to anyone. Just like extremely few of them told their children about their lives on the range. Why not? It was not important.

For many young Basques, sheepherder life came as a shock. Living alone with their sheep, donkey/horse, and dogs, but without company was too much to bear. So, during those hot lazy days of summer in the high country, when sheep nap in the shade, the herders have nothing to do but think. About their situation, dreaming about their girlfriends back in Europe, or they just wanted to get something off their chests because they had a bad day. Well, they walked to a nice aspen, and knife in hand started carving. The herders created a brand-new pastime in their new environment. They carved statements that they would never have dared to in their own towns. “Fok sgood” was a favorite. Do you think they would carve that on a tree in their neighborhood and then sign it? Feeling alone in the mountains changed these men, freed them from many Old Country taboos. for example, from being good Catholics and attending mass every Sunday. Many did not return to Church, except for a Basque funeral.

The carved data, which once was considered “doodlings,” is a primary documentation for a historian. And we have to say it: Many Basque sheepherders started toying with writing and becoming artists in America for the first time in their lives. In their own country they didn’t do any of it. What a change!

People who early on became interested in tree carvings described mostly the quaint art of human and animal figures they found. Some called it “Piccasoesque.” They understood the figures much better than the words, when in fact, the art is a minor component of the carving business. I, on the other hand, judged the carvings as historical documents that the herders left not for us, but for themselves. So, as a researcher I was privy to many intimate statements left on trees and at times I had to decide not to divulge a few of them. After recording over 26,000 glyphs, I can say that 85-90% of them include a name or a date, or both. That is pure history, because without names you cannot write much of it. Until now, historical documents were found mostly in city archives. Plain sheepherders emerging from the baserri (farmstead) changed that. If you want to study sheepherding, sheepherders, and their wanderings in the West, you must leave town and head for the mountains.

BBP: The Basque Country is famous for ancient cave paintings. Do you see any connection between the aspen tree carvings and the pictures left on those cave walls?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: It would be difficult to find a connection between the cave paintings and aspen carvings when at least 10,000 years separate them. Besides, what do we know about cave paintings? Our understanding of them is as clear as a dark cave. It is mostly conjecture; for example, we think that they painted bisons so that the hunters could have an advantage over the animals when they went hunting. You buy that? Of course you do, it is our best guess.

I do see some connections, for example, the cave painters and the sheepherders did not use the usual media—pen and paper—to communicate. And when you think of it, humans have communicated with each other long before pen and paper came along. Cavemen painted rocks and sheepherders carved aspens. So, neither group knew or used the media that has been a fundamental instrument of human civilization for the last 5,000 years (at least the pen). Some sheepherders never again wrote anything once they left the sheep, because they didn’t know how. But in the mountains they found a new type of freedom and they dared carve a bird, a dog, and preferably himself with a woman. I have no doubt that the cavemen carved trees long before they emigrated to the rock walls. It is a lot easier to mark a tree with animals or what have you.

We could talk about freedom also, if we knew something about cave painters: How free were they? What if they were considered radicals by their peers? Some observers believe that it was the shamans who did the painting. We know nothing about the mindset of cavemen, but we can say the sheepherders lost some of their Old Country mores in the mountains. What I do not understand is why there are no paintings of humans in the caves, not as realistic as the animals, anyway. Animals were more important than fellow humans? For the sheepherders, carving a human figure was the second-best fascination after their names. Was there a taboo about painting a human on the cave walls? If so, it would be the reverse of what the herders felt.

BBP: One time when my dad was in the hospital, we asked if he had ever left any tree carvings in the mountains. He wouldn’t answer. My wife then drew the outline of a voluptuous woman on the white board and asked if he ever carved anything like that. He blushed and looked away, a twinkle in his eye. You alluded to the loneliness of the herders and the somewhat risqué nature of some of the carvings. Without going into any detail, how often did the carvings reflect the loneliness of these young men so far from home?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I have met person after person who complained to me that their father never told them anything about his years as a sheepherder. One said that, when pressed, he would clam up and say: “There is nothing to tell.” It sounds absurd that a man who had spent three years or more, basically alone with sheep, a donkey/horse, and two dogs, had nothing to tell. A lot of people spend money to get to those high beautiful Sierra mountains where the herders claim nothing happened.

One obvious reason is that most of them did not enjoy their primitive lifestyle, though a few did. They were young and they thought about girls and partying much more than their work. The amazing surroundings they lived in, the views, the raw unspoiled wild nature that city folks will never taste, wasn’t enough to counter the need for female companionship. To fill the void they caved figures of women in whatever posture they liked, and your father probably did it, too.

So, even though 90% of the carvings are names and dates, the rest have to do with stars, crosses, etc., but mostly with human figures, in particular nude women in different erotic poses.

Your father, Blas, and other herders lived in a liminal condition, between a world with sheep and the unrelenting desire to be with a woman. You can say that the herders lived like the Medieval serfs, attached to the land owned by the lord, while the herders were attached to the sheep 24/7 for weeks and months. On the other hand, you can also view their lifestyle as the freest; they wandered over mountains, valleys, and canyons unimpeded; they never saw another human being and they must have felt like the owned the earth. Their carvings reflect these contradictions, so many “viva/biba” to themselves or whatever and “puta sierras.”

Because of our fixation with sex, the arborglyphs were once categorized as “pornographic.” They could do that only by disregarding 90% of the carvings and their significance.

The herders when facing that beautiful aspen trunk were usually very candid. I don’t think they lied much. They knew that whatever they carved would be read by other herders, but they didn’t care much. All of them were thinking the same thing: Women, and sometimes, money. In one tree of Elko County, Nevada, the herder says that he masturbated 12 times, and had to stop because he developed a headache. Statements about visiting the whorehouses in Nevada are found in every major sheep range. Some admitted being broke, because of it. Would these men carve that on a tree in their hometown in the Basque Country? No. If they did, everybody would be talking about them for days if not weeks. But they could do it freely in the wilds of America. However, once they left the range, Old Country culture kicked back in, and it didn’t allow them to talk about such

BBP: You’ve recently created a new website, basquehistory.com. Can you describe the motivation for creating this site? What is your goal and what do you hope to accomplish with your site?

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe: I recently started the basquehistory.com website, primarily to post the aspen carvings. I thought that the American Basques would enjoy finding the names of their father, uncle, and relatives and the places where they herded sheep. They are not going to find this information anywhere else other than on trees. Unfortunately, some will not be too happy when they see some of the statements they left on aspens. Fortunately, most of the sexual content carved is not claimed. I know who did it, but usually the herder’s name is not on the same tree where the figure is carved. What I plan to post is a small sample of the totality that I recorded, mostly the ones in Nevada and California. I donated all my materials to the Basque Library at University of Nevada, Reno, and they can continue posting the rest from the data in the videos. I also gave them a database, which should be helpful in finding the names of the old herders.

I will be posting other stories about the Basques in the West, the interviews, Kantari Eguna singing and bertsolari performances, festivals, which I recorded on video. In addition, Joan Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico, would be a target as well. I may even post some stories written by other Basques who want to share experiences about their personal connection with ranching.

And finally, I might post something about my present writing; it is not history, but fiction, where I intend to address how and when the ancestors of the Basques named themselves Euskaldunak, Euskeldunek, and Eskualdunak. It happened over 400,000 years ago.

BBP: Mil esker Joxe!