From time to time, when we publish news about the renaming of this park or that, we still receive questions — some innocent, some less so — about why that was necessary. We’ve always called it Patrick’s Point! Why do we have to start calling it “Sue-Meg” now? What is “Da’ Yas”? Why should I have to learn to pronounce that?

These questions are a product of the fact that 150 years and change after the fact, we still have not had a reckoning with the genocide and the horror that made that world we live in today, here in California and in Humboldt County in particular. We’ve been willing to shove it to one side for all these years because it was more convenient for us to do so, I suppose. 

This is the issue — the one with the blue cat on the cover.

This leaves us with the innocent and not-so-innocent people asking those sorts of questions. The way to tell the two classes of questioners apart is to see if they actually want answers. And if you’re one of those people who does, I really recommend the reported essay “Reclaiming Native Identity in California” by writer Ed Vulliamy in the June 22 issue of the New York Review of Books. It is the most concise and powerful summary of the history of the genocide waged against the people native to this place that I’ve ever read, and as a bonus it introduces us to some of the people of today who are working to remove the blinders from our history, most of whom are associated with the California Truth and Healing Council. They include Vice-chair Frankie Myers and Judge Abby Abinanti, both of the Yurok Tribe, and Vulliamy spends part of the essay reporting from up here.

Vulliamy starts and ends the essay with those people, and throughout details the things they are hoping to accomplish. But he never strays far from the reasons their work is necessary, and for most of us it’s history that we should have learned in high school but did not:

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. Nowhere was there such an explicit intention to “exterminate” — the word is used over and over again in state records — the inhabitants of a land supposedly “discovered.” Meanwhile, a brutal slave market for Indians flourished in California just as slavery was about to be abolished in the South.

As I said, the essay is amazingly concise — it takes about half an hour to read — but there turns out to be plenty of room to back this up. Here’s one particularly sickening passage rooted in a place nearby:

In 1984 James J. Rawls published Indians of California, which made two major contributions. First, Rawls affirmed that “although forced recruitment and Indian peonage were part of life at the missions and ranchos [in Spanish California], the actual buying and selling of California Indians was an American innovation” He compared post–Civil War “Black Codes” with California “Indian Codes” and found that “the parallels between California and the South are particularly striking.”

Rawls detailed how “a common feature of the trade was the seizure of Indian girls and women who were held by their captors as sexual partners.” The Marysville Appeal in December 1851 noted that “while kidnapped Indian children were seized as servants, the young women were made to serve both the ‘purposes of labor and of lust.’” The language is repulsive: Isaac Cox in his Annals of Trinity County (1858) described “the purchase by ‘Kentuck’” of an Indian girl eight or nine years old, “either for his seraglio, to be educated the queen of his heart, or the handmaid of its gentle emanations.”

Unfortunately for us, the essay is behind a paywall.  If you’re not a subscriber, I urge you to seek it out. The Humboldt County Library carries the New York Review of Books, and if you have a library card I believe — though I’m not positive — that you can also check out a copy digitally, through the Libby app. It’s sold at Northtown Books. You can buy the current issue for your Kindle or Kindle app for $2.99 on Amazon, or for free if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. (UPDATE: Mitch, in the comments below, says that you can just register on the site and read the article for free.)

You didn’t commit the atrocities that took place here in Humboldt County, or elsewhere in the state or the nation. They weren’t your fault. So there’s no reason you should object to telling the story straight. What would you think of a person who refused to admit to some horrific act of violence he committed on another person, or who refused to atone? Why would you think differently of a society that does that?