Talk:Wiyot people
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[edit] References
Please cite your sources. I'm trying to figure out how to repair this page back to a state where the few references that are cited are cited correctly without undoing other useful edits. I suppose I'm going to revert back to the 23:56, 18 November 2006 verion by Mike Dillon and then try to recreate the sections and categories that were added later by others. Vampyrecat 06:42, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] An article to use as source
THE NORTH COAST: A Kayak Adventure GOING HOME AGAIN On a sacred island in Humboldt Bay, descendants of the Wiyots -- an Indian tribe nearly wiped out by massacres in the 1800s -- forge a future from the remnants of that tragic past
Paul McHugh, Chronicle Outdoors Writer
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
When you must stay in a place awhile, it's good to speak with folks who have been there quite some time.
Bad weather forced a pause in our sea kayak voyage from the Oregon border to San Francisco. Bo Barnes, John Weed and I had to stay in the port of Woodley Island, on Humboldt Bay, for at least three days.
On Friday afternoon, we met with Cheryl Seidner and her sister, Leona Wilkinson of the Wiyot tribe. Nobody is known to have dwelt in the Humboldt Bay region longer than the Wiyots.
"We have been here in Humboldt Bay for about 10,000 years," Wilkinson said, as she led the way out to a sacred site on Indian Island, just offshore from Eureka. "Evidence takes us back at least 8,000 years."
During the last 200 years of that vast history, things did not go well for the Wiyots.
On earlier research trips to the North Coast, I met with Marnie Atkins, the tribe's cultural director, and Seidner, the tribal chairwoman. They spoke of the tragic past of the place now called Indian Island. Wiyots knew it as their sacred village of Tuluwat.
During the tribe's world-renewal ceremony in 1860, it became the scene of a massacre by a gang of settlers. After, Tuluwat vanished under an industrial boatyard.
But now this low island is back in the hands of the Wiyots. They are dismantling dilapidated structures and cleansing the land. They intend to raise a dance house here again, that Wiyot singing will once more echo over Humboldt Bay.
After the massacre, Seidner told me, the people of Eureka found an old woman out on a mudflat, singing a mourning song. They found a little girl, a toddler, still alive. And under the body of a dead woman, they found a live baby, still trying to nurse. That infant was the son of the headman, called Captain Jim, so he was named Jerry James.
"Jerry James was my mother's grandfather," Seidner said.
She has flowing dark hair, a broad face, warm and lively eyes, and a direct, forthright manner. She's held the tribal chair for five two-year terms.
"Here's what I want to do," Seidner explained. "Achieve major economic development. Finish this island project. See our language revive. And I want to bring back the dancing."
In June 2004, wearing a white deerskin cape and traditional necklaces, Seidner sat in a redwood dugout canoe paddled near Tuluwat by boatmen descended from Wiyot, Yurok, Hupa, Maidu and Pit River bloodlines. In a ceremony, they took possession of 67 acres transferred to the tribe a month earlier by the Eureka City Council.
That land added to 1.5 acres of pivotal ground that the tribe bought from the boatyard owners for $106,000 in 2000.
"When we paddled away from the island, I thought, 'Wow. We did it!' I knew we could. Until that moment, I was not quite believing it," Seidner said.
As Seidner watched us Friday from the shoulder of Highway 255, which touches down on Indian Island on its way out to the Samoa Peninsula, Wilkinson led me, Barnes and Chronicle photographer Michael Maloney down a muddy path where few are allowed. The boatyard's hazardous waste and trash are considered too dangerous.
"We're almost done with that part," Wilkinson said as she stepped gingerly around jagged metal, oil-soaked earth, a marine railway for hauling out boats.
"We had four barges of trash, each holding about three tons," she said. "The previous owners had even piled up old engine batteries to make a seawall."
One big metal shed is left on the site, plus several rotting wooden shacks. They sit right atop a high, wide shellmound and Wiyot burial sites, the historic record of their long occupancy of the site.
Several woven basketry skull caps washed up during the cleanup, Wilkinson said. "We'll rebury those at an appropriate time," she said.
We stood at the edge of the mound, where the Wiyots plan to sink metal sheets into the ground, to halt tidal erosion. On nearby mudflats, tawny sandpipers, willets and other shorebirds probed for dinner.
"I like to stand out here sometimes and imagine this all without the city lights," Wilkinson said. "I think of how it was, with all those dugout canoes coming over the bay, people dressed in their finest as they arrived for ceremonies."
The first two settler massacres of the Wiyot took place in 1852 and 1858. Next, early on the morning of Feb. 26, 1860, a locally infamous brute (allegedly named Larrabee) and a few confederates rowed out to the island to attack the Wiyots with hatchets, clubs and knives. They didn't want gunfire to arouse sleeping Eureka citizens.
The victims were mainly women and children; Wiyot men were away gathering food and supplies to bring to the festival. Two other villages, on the Eel River and on the bay's south spit, were also attacked.
Tuluwat had been sold out from under the Wiyots. A man named Gunther had "bought" it just a few days earlier.
By the end of 1860, there were fewer than 200 full-blooded Wiyot left; by 1910, fewer than 100. The last fluent speaker of the language died in 1962. Surviving tribal people were herded to Fort Humboldt, then off to distant reservations.
But always they sought to return home. The last corner available to them was Table Bluff, at the south end of the bay. Now there is a small reservation of 88 acres and 465 people on tribal rolls.
And the people of Eureka are helping. Wilkinson expresses a great deal of gratitude to local oyster growers for contributing shells to stabilize the mound, to a seafood restaurant that underwrote the cost of the trash barges, to citizens who have contributed to the Tuluwat restoration fund and participated in annual memorial ceremonies.
She stood atop the shellmound at the center of Tuluwat.
"Everyone in the tribe has a different feeling about this," Wilkinson said. "But young people and the elders are all excited about coming out here again.
"When I'm here, it doesn't make me sad. This is where our family came from. It feels good to work here with family and friends, bringing it back. It will happen in my lifetime. A dance will take place here within three years.
California's North Coast offers some profound examples of resilience and hardiness.
Gray whales that migrate along a 10,000-mile loop offshore were reduced by whaling to 1,500 individuals or less. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, they have rebounded to a yearly parade of 20,000 animals.
Ancient sequoias, coast redwood trees, if sawed down, often resurrect by sending up vivid green shoots, or "burl sprouts," from their root balls.
Now, among the resilient, number the Wiyot, as Tuluwat -- like a Brigadoon or Avalon for Native Americans -- once more emerges from drifting bay mists.
A thing to bear in mind is that as they do that dance, it's a world renewal ceremony. Resurrection of Tuluwat is a sign of hope for all of us. THE SERIES
Chronicle outdoors writer Paul McHugh is kayaking 400 miles down the North Coast, from the Oregon border to San Francisco Bay, reporting on its rugged beauty and on the people who make their lives there.
-- His adventure also can be followed at sfgate.com/northcoast.
-- To find out how to assist in rebuilding Tuluwat, go to www.wiyot.com and click on "Support Wiyot sacred sites."
E-mail Paul McHugh at northcoast@sfchronicle.com.
