Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Here on the Mendocino Coast, we start with the wreck of the Frolic in 1850 and the arrival of the first sawmill at Big River in 1852. Absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on this land long before Euro-American settlers arrived. The current exhibit at the Kelley House Museum—“Northern Pomo: Mendocino’s First People”—seeks to correct that oversight by presenting a Pomo point of view on the past 172 years.
In this c. 1870 John P. Soule photo, a Pomo woman makes a basket at Be-dah-to, a village near Ten Mile River. (Gift of Alice Earl Wilder)
In conjunction with the exhibit, our bookstore is featuring “California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History,” by William J. Bauer, Jr, a historian and enrolled member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Although the history of Indigenous people in Northern California extends as far back as 8,000 BCE, Bauer focuses on what happened “after contact” with settlers in the mid-19th century: the colonizers drew maps, displaced the natives, and renamed and reshaped the land and everything that lived on it. Using oral histories collected from elders in Northern California tribes as part of a New Deal federal works project in 1935, Bauer examines what the Indigenous people made of those acts and their effects on them.
As part of the same Works Projects Administration initiative that produced “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States” by interviewing formerly enslaved people, Indians on the Round Valley Reservation were asked to share tribal stories and individual recollections about life before and after the California Indian Wars. Northern Pomo, Lassik (from the Eel River and its tributaries) and Concow (originally from eastern Butte County) people participated. Bauer, who is a professor of history and program director for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, reads the stories as revisions of the usual narrative of Indian defeat and disappearance.
Lucy Young, also known as T’tcetsa, lived on the Round Valley Indian Reservation with her third husband, Sam Young, a Wintu from Hayfork, in Trinity County. Born in the late 1840s, Young survived the traumas of California’s colonization. In 1861 and 1862 U.S. troops and volunteers wiped out her male relatives and marched her female relatives to Fort Seward, located along the Eel River northeast of modern-day Garberville. After she arrived at the fort, settlers abducted her and sold her into indentured servitude. She eventually married one of her employers, though probably not because she wanted to. She recalled, “We were very healthy till after the White people came in among us. But after about two years, between guns and sickness, our people began to die off by the hundreds. There was sickness all the time and it has been so ever since.”
California Indians understood themselves as a people of a place. Creators made the land, and the plants and animals on it, for a certain People and a unique People for a specific place. Polly Anderson, a 77-year old Concow woman from Round Valley recalled, “My people said that on the Feather River there were big flat rocks where they could stand right out over the river and catch fish. The creator made those rocks for them.” But between 1820 and 1935, settlers appropriated most of the native places and renamed them on the assumption that they had just “discovered” them. That, of course, made the places “theirs.” That history is still being righted today with government efforts to change derogatory names associated with Native Americans and to return some land, however minimal the acreage might be.
By 1935 many people in Indian Country had begun to agitate for changes to biased federal policies. In 1911 educated American Indians had formed the Society of American Indians, which lobbied for American Indian citizenship and improved reservation conditions. After the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Indian intellectuals continued the battle and their efforts culminated in the 1928 “Meriam Report,” authored by Henry Roe Cloud, a Yale-educated Winnebago from Nebraska, and anthropologist Lewis Meriam. The report found that wars, removal, and the policies of confinement (on reservations) and forced assimilation (in the infamous Indian boarding schools) had damaged Indigenous people and their lands.
Changes recommended in that report had not been made by 1935, and many of them have not yet been made, but some of the Native American voices captured in “California Through Native Eyes” sound hopeful; all of them sound unbowed.
“California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History” can be purchased for $30 through our online store or at the Kelley House Museum, which is open from 11AM to 3PM Thursday through Monday. Come by to see the Pomo exhibit!