I am so frustrated, sitting down to write this article. I am so ashamed. How can people live their whole lives in California, go to school, read newspapers and many books, interact with their neighbors and yet remain so comfortably ignorant of the true history of this state that they are doomed to repeat the acts of bigotry and racism that have marked the past 3 centuries of California history? When does the sense of Caucasian entitlement to the land called ‘America’ end? When can these feet stop marching the misguided steps of Manifest Destiny?

The Lytton Band of Pomo Indians would like to make a home west of the town of Windsor in Sonoma County in Northern California. They would like to build 147 homes for their people, as well as a beautiful roundhouse for their spiritual devotions, a community center and a medical clinic. Their very simple wish to make a good home for their loved ones has been met with a self-satisfied, self-entitled, smug and racist reaction from the governor of California, the local government and local people, in keeping with the tune of California’s historical response to Indian people. Opponents are using every trick in the book, from questioning the federal legitimacy of the Lytton People to refusing to let them use local water. I find this so despicable and shameful that I can’t think of a better thing to spend my time writing about in a publication that concerns itself with peace and justice.

The local newspaper, The Press Democrat, has published several articles regarding the situation in Windsor, giving space on their pages to the ire of local officials and the outrageous behavior of the governor who is questioning whether the Lytton Band should be recognized and whether they have a right to build a home for themselves in California:

Press Democrat Article 1

Press Democrat Article 2

Press Democrat Article 3

Here are two telling comments on the Press Democrat articles that offer a disturbing gauge of public sentiment:

“You mean, allowed to carve out chunks of the USA to form their own independent nations and suck up all sorts of tax-free money from visitors? To collect American money by selling to Americans but not to pay a portion back to the US economy in the manner other Americans do?”

“Special rights for people whose long dead ancestors were mistreated by long dead immigrants.”

The first comment encapsulates the tone of accusatory resentment Indian People are often the subject of and the second comment demands a response.

Genocide In This Land In Our Times

The children and grandchildren whose parents and grandparents were killed at Wounded Knee in the Great Plains are still alive. When the majority of Chief Bigfoot’s people were massacred by soldiers on a snowy winter day in 1890, those who escaped with their lives told their story to their children and grandchildren, and those people are still alive. This is not ancient history. It is not something that happened 5000 years ago. It is your grandmother telling you how she ran for her life to a ravine and her mother was shot down right on top of her. It is your grandfather telling you that he was the last survivor of his family, and that he never understood why the soldiers came and butchered everyone, when all of your relatives were just trying to make it through the snow to Pine Ridge Reservation so that Chief Bigfoot could help mediate a problem that was going on there. It is your own family telling you that the gunfire sounded like someone slowly tearing a piece of canvas as it ripped into the huddled crowd of men, women and children. It is your own family telling you how the snow was drenched with your family’s blood, and how the government paid a man 2 dollars a body to dump all of your dead relatives into a mass grave.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Wounded Knee and the killing of 200 innocent travelers. Maybe you have heard mention of the Sand Creek Massacre and the murder of some 130 defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho People, or of some of the other better-known attacks on Indian People by the U.S. government and private citizens that have occurred within just the last century-and-a-half. These things are not ancient history. They are very, very recent, making it small wonder if you have heard of them. But chances are, even if you live in California, you have never heard of the California Genocide that exterminated some 90% of California’s earlier inhabitants. If you manage to find and read the right books, you will quickly learn that even the devastation suffered by the early Peoples of the East Coast, the Great Plains and the Southwest cannot compare to what happened here in California. When you know the truth about California’s recent history, hateful attitudes like those being expressed by the people of Windsor who are attempting to shun and outlaw the Lytton Band make your stomach turn over. You look at the attitudes of precedence and entitlement and you just want to cry.

Terrible times came to the land called California with the Spanish Army and Franciscan missionaries in the 18th century. They kidnapped, enslaved, tortured and murdered the west coast people, all out of greed and a psychopathic interpretation of Christianity that had literally no relationship to the teachings of Jesus Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that if the actual person, Jesus, had gotten to spend time with Native American Peoples, he would have loved them. The intense sense of gratitude for life, the beautiful appreciation of the natural world, the inherent practice of service to one another and respect to higher powers that are the hallmarks of many Native American lifeways are so evolved and splendid that they would earn respect and admiration from any person of goodwill. But the deranged Spanish friars were tragically blind to the spectacular spirituality of Native Peoples and, in their maniacal quest for power, turned the once-joyful inhabitants of California into the tattered and miserable remnant of a people.

Those California Indians who managed, somehow, to survive the disease, enslavement and death brought to the region by the Spaniards then had to face the murderous Americans who poured into the newly-acquired state in the mid-1800s…very recent times. John Sutter, whose name is still given macabre honor in Gold Country towns and place names, kept California Indian male and female slaves locked in a large room at night to keep them from escaping slavery in his gold mines. Frankly, this is the least of the evil things that have happened in recent California history.

The state and federal governments subsidized the murder of California Indians. That is the bottom line. Insane with the self-serving nonsense of Manifest Destiny, those newly arrived in California during the Gold Rush felt entitled to exterminate all Native Peoples in order to make room for ‘civilization’. And the government paid for them to do so. A group of white men would arm themselves and set upon Indian villages, murdering all whom they found living there, and then would be paid by the head for the victims of their killing sprees. These attacks on innocent and defenseless people were documented without a shred of remorse or conscience in California’s newspapers:

“We hope that the Government will render such aid as will enable the citizens of the north to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed. Extermination is no longer a question of time–the time has arrived, the work has commenced and let the first man who says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.â€
- Yreka Herald, 1853

I will never forget an account I read of Native Peoples being rounded up onto boats in Northern California, taken out to sea and drowned in the ocean, en masse. Such peoples who were not massacred were enslaved by the newcomers and the kidnapping and enslavement of Indian children was common practice during these times, just a couple of generations ago. It is so important to me to repeat that 90% of the early inhabitants of California were murdered by the invading Americans. It is so important for all people now living in California to understand that this is the history of the ground we are now walking on, just the blink of an eye later.

Moving toward the turn of the century, the kidnapping of Indian children continued to be seen as the necessary work of ‘civilization’. Now, they were stolen from their families by force and sent to industrial boarding schools where they were abused and forbidden to express their culture. As I write this, I am thinking of a wonderful elder of the Karok People, Charlie Thom, and his account of being the last child left in his tribe on the rivers of Northern California. The last child.

Meanwhile, the trail of Government interference continued into the 20th century as ‘officials’ took it upon themselves to decide which Native peoples would be federally recognized and which wouldn’t; who could have a reservation and who couldn’t. As if it were up to them. Set against the backdrop of the wholesale murder, the theft of nearly all land once cherished by Indian Peoples and the trail of broken treaties, the spectacle of the U.S. government making decisions about Indians makes me sick, plain and simple.

And this is the setting for my total disgust over what is happening right now, in 2009, in Windsor, California. If you are a Native person whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your family members were murdered, kidnapped and enslaved. If you are a person of European descent whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your relatives either participated in the California Genocide or, at the very least, read about it in the newspapers while eating breakfast. And, if you are like me, with both Native and European ancestry, and your family has been in California for a few generations, you look at the whole situation with horror and terrible shame.

The Bottom Line
The local government and misguided citizens of Windsor who are trying to keep the Lytton Band from making a home for themselves need to be publicly condemned for their racist attitudes, in no uncertain fashion. I don’t care if the Lytton people are federally recognized. As Native Peoples, their roots in this land go back so far before George Washington that it is simply ludicrous for this to be an argument of any kind. I don’t care if Windsor’s zoning laws say that the Lytton Band wants to build too many houses for the area. I say, thank God! Thank God there are enough survivors of the California Genocide to build a wonderful new place to live in 2009. I wish there were 100 times that many Lytton Band folks.

I don’t care if the Lytton People want to chop down trees to build their houses. We are all living in Indian Country, whether we want to recognize that or not, and what gets done with the land is best decided by Indian People. It is absurd that anyone living in Windsor, where that giant and practically empty downtown section was recently built overnight, would put up a fuss about a housing development. Absurd. It is incredibly repugnant to read of a refusal of water to the Lytton Band. That Americans would refuse the once-clear waters that they have so polluted over the past 150 years…well, it’s just unbelievable to me. Additionally, I am in absolutely no mood to hear worries that the Lytton Band might build a casino in their housing development. Indian gaming is such an old pastime, I don’t think anyone knows when it started and it certainly isn’t up to newcomers to dictate what kinds of games the older inhabitants of California can play. I personally don’t care for casinos, but frankly, if the Native People wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Windsor, it wouldn’t be up to me to tell them they couldn’t. This is their land. No one, and I mean no one, should be walking around in a frame of mind thinking they can tell Indian people what to do in this land known as ‘America’.

And therein, I believe, lies the crux of this utterly frustrating problem. If you think of this land as America, and you attach that idea to this being the province of the U.S. government and your reality excludes the fact that this part of the continent is inhabited by many, many sovereign, independent nations that have absolutely nothing to do with the recent invention of the U.S. government, you are not seeing the picture of what is going on here correctly. If belonging to the Windsor City Council has given you the notion that you can have votes and make laws and govern the lives of Peoples who have called this land ‘home’ since time immemorial, your sense of your own importance in the grand scheme of things is disturbingly distorted.

It is the newcomers who should be petitioning the Native Peoples for permission when they want to build a housing development. It is the ‘Americans’ who ought to have been asking, from day one, if there was room here to share the land and to realize dreams of life and liberty without getting in the way of the already-resident Peoples. Judging by the overwhelming display of generosity and brotherly love exhibited by first-contact peoples towards anyone who showed up on this continent without murder on the mind, my guess is that the people we call ‘Indians’ would have made room for us with kindly hearts. But it didn’t happen that way. The Americans came to California and got it into their smug heads that it would be acceptable to kill every last Native inhabitant of the state…and the U.S. Government paid them to carry out this plan that sits in evil company with the genocidal schemes of Nazi Germany.

This is not ancient history. The assault on and discrimination against California Indians is what has been happening since the Americans first showed up here, and the pettiness, the embarrassing sense of ownership, the belief that racist attitudes will be winked at when it comes to Indian Peoples…these things being evinced by the governor, the local government and the angry citizens of Windsor must not go unchecked. These people should be on their knees, begging the Lytton Band to please come build a home alongside them. They should be pleading with fate to give them a second chance to treat Indian Peoples with the heartfelt respect and admiration they so abundantly merit. They should be asking if they can lend a hand in the building, if they can help at the medical clinic, if they can do anything, anything at all to help the Lytton Band find a peaceful and good home where they can live without threat of violence and dishonor.

Think of those grandmothers and grandfathers, their hearts torn to shreds with the loss of loved ones, their eyes filled with tears for the loss of homes in beautiful forests, on high mountains, on windy sea coasts. Think of them wandering California, the victims of hatred and evil, unbefriended by neighbors, uncherished, uncelebrated. Think of them coming home, at last, in Windsor. Think of how right that would be.

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For further reading on the California Genocide, I recommend this introductory document. It’s never too late to learn.