Most of you are probably unaware of this, (as I was until this week) but the world ended on Feb 26th, 1860. Only to rise again on March 28th, 2014 on a small island in Humboldt Bay. Wow. After 154 years it's sure good to be back.
Background
On the evening of February 26th, 1860 a small group of white settlers armed with bowie knives, axes, and pistols descended on an encampment of peaceful Wiyot Indians, who had gathered on Tuluwat Island for their annual world renewal ceremony. (Tuluwat was considered the center of the Wiyot universe). The young men of the tribe were off gathering supplies for what was sure to be the usual life-affirming event.
Without getting too gruesome about it, the settlers came ashore in the dead of night and went about slaughtering everyone in the camp: women, children and older folks. (The Neil Young lyric comes to mind, but in fact, they didn't even leave "some babies lying on the ground.") This attack coincided with several other massacres of Wiyot people along the Eel River. All of these loosely attributed to a vigilante group called: The Humboldt Volunteers, Second Brigade, evidently as a reprisal for cattle rustling (even though the cattle allegedly rustled were not actually taken from anywhere near Wiyot territory).
In any case. As most of the people killed in these massacres were old folks and women (read: the keepers of the stories and traditions), a lot of Wiyot culture and history was lost that night.
I am right now caught between trying to picture all this and trying not to. I mean beyond the nightmare of the carnage, imagine for a moment if you will, the heartbreak that the men of this tribe experienced upon returning to the camp from their hunt--or better yet, don't imagine it, it's just too horrible.
{I am told by the same friend who first informed me of this story, that one of the great sub plots here is the way the women of neighboring tribes later came together to help the Wiyots re-imagine their lost traditions.}
It's getting hard to write about this stuff. Gotta go kiss my son.
Okay, where was I? The surviving Wiyots, for their "protection," were taken to an Army Fort whose Indian name translates as: "The Place Where You Lie On The Ground With Your Knees Drawn Up." Which, I don't know, kind of brings this type of "protection" to mind:
{I was going to post one of those horrible pictures from Abu-Ghraib here, but they're all too awful. And afterall, this is a fishing blog--sort of. Anyway, I'm sure you all, get my analogy}.
Here's what tribal leader Cheryl Seidner says about the federal government's Indian "protection" plan:
"After the massacre, the U.S. government] decided they were going to take care of us and watch over us so nothing happened to us. That’s why they took us to the stockades up at Fort Humboldt in the dead of winter. And that’s why our children died of exposure, our old people died of pneumonia, our women were raped and murdered. That’s how well the U.S. government took care of us."
"The Place Where You Lie On The Ground With Your Knees Drawn Up."
Next, the Wiyot language and tribal ceremonies were outlawed. Tuluwat island was taken over by a man named Robert Gunther, who rather suspisciously bought the Island 3 days before the massacre and shortly afterwards turned it into a profitable dairy farm. In the 1870s the center of the world became a shipyard that went about polluting the ground with battery acid and toxic sludge--till it was condemned. But not before teams of enthusiastic amateur archeologists had pilfered the shellmounds and taken away the bones and artifacts of the Wiyot people from their sacred burial site. And finally, just in case this all wasn't enough, as a final twist of the knife, in the late '50s the Wiyots were stripped of their status as an "official" tribe and labeled "extinct." Case closed. Score one for the multi-headed gorgon called "progress."
Jack Palance as Attila the Hun (three cheers for the casting director!)
I mean, honestly. You take the worst conqueror in history... say, Attila the Hun, and his treatment of a defeated people wasn't even close to this. In fact, as I understand it, peaceful people who did not resist the Huns were by and large taxed and otherwise left alone. Not so in the land of the free. I remember an interiew with Russell Means years ago, where he was asked to justify armed resistance (like the violent take over of Wounded Knee in the early 70s). And he listed a bunch of peaceful Indian tribes and then asked the interviewer if he'd ever heard of any of them. The interviewer said, "no." To which Means responded: That's because they were non-violent, they were all wiped out. His point of course, was that the "warlike" tribes survived. And that peaceful resistance for Native Americans had by and large failed miserably. I'm not sure if he was right or wrong in justifying violence, but there's no denying he raised a valid point.
{Monkeyface News Editorial Insertion #2,854: to keep up with what's new in Native California, check out this magazine from Hey Day: Native California News.}
The Ba'mbuti Pygmies And The 27th Definition of Death
Like the Eskimos with snow, The Ba'mbuti Pygmies of the Itiri forest in Africa, recognize something like 27 words for death: dead, absolutely-dead, absolutely-completely-dead, absolutely-completely-and-utterly-dead, etc. The 27th definition is the final one. So from a Ba'mbuti perspective, the Wiyot were somewhere between 26 and 27 on the cultural death scale.
But the memories and the spirit of this small tribe did not completely die. Much was lost, but somehow a spark stayed lit, and the spark grew to an ember. And the ember caught fire. And in the 1990s the federal government recognized them as a tribe again (yes the irony of this is deep). And shortly thereafter portions of the lease for Tuluwat Island came up for sale. And the Wiyots raised the money to buy 1.5 acres of it. And from that acre and a half they started cleaning. And through a lot of fund raising and hard work they removed the wall of decayed batteries and they excavated the filth from under the island.
The center of the world
And then of course we come to the reason I'm writing this... In as much as the Monkeyface News is a type of News Letter, I'd like to make it official--even if I'm two weeks late. The world, which for a small segment of the population came to brutal end on Feb 26th 1860, was brought back to life on March 28th 2014, when a group of Wiyot people and their friends--members of neighboring tribes who collaborated to re-imagine the lost dances of the Wiyots, gathered on Tuluwat Island and danced, and sang, and renewed the world--for the very first time since the night of the massacre so many years ago.
I myself have been a devout aethiest since catholic school drilled all notions of the sanity of religion out of my head in the 1980s. But this kind of spiritual healing is something I can believe in. And whether the descendants of the Wiyot tribe dancing on a small island in Humboldt Bay in 2014 saves the world or restores a sense of lost balance, or atones for the horrors of the past, doesn't really matter to me. For whatever illogical reason, it makes me feel good to know they're dancing, to know the world, or at least a tiny corner of it, has finally been restored.
Kirk-out
4/13/14
Thanks to Lindsie for telling me this story. Again, here's a great way to keep track of what's new in Native California: Native Californa News
PS: the Douglas Sirk "sword and sandal" classic saga of Attila the Hun, "Sign of The Pagan." Is well worth watching... if you can find it.