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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. Joining me is local historian, Jerry Rohde, who has written a new book, "Northern Humboldt Indians," published by the Press at Cal Poly Humboldt. And he's joining us to talk to us about the history of Native American tribes here in Northern Humboldt County. Welcome to the Econews, Jerry. Oh, thank you. So you are yourself a good environmental activist and have been involved in the environmental movement. The environmental movement of this area has been deeply engaged in issues of Native American sovereignty. And so I'm really proud of us as a movement. This is part of the core of the ethos of this area now. So let's start by defining the tribes, the languages of the tribes, and the areas that they tended to in prehistory, prior to European contact.

JERRY ROHDE:

Well, I've done two books on the Indians of Humboldt County. The southern Humboldt Indians had six tribes in the southern part. And now this new book, Seven Tribes in the Northern Area, only a few of those tribes are really familiar to most people, I think.

Of course, right here on the coast, the Wiyot tribe, starting about at Bear River Ridge, south of Ferndale, and going up to Little River, inland to the first main range of mountains. North of there, you'd have the Yurok tribe. So from Little River all the way into Del Norte County to a place called Wilson Creek was their territory. And then up the Klamath River, almost to the town of Orleans. East of them then, from an area slightly west of Orleans and on into Siskiyou County, was the Karuk tribe.

South from there, you would have the Hoopa tribe, where the reservation came pretty close to encompassing the traditional territory of the Hoopa tribe. Then southeast of that was a tribe that's called the Tsnungwe on the South Fork Trinity River. And part of the main Trinity River and on down towards the boundary with the Hoopa tribe. West of them was the Whilkut tribe that occupied most of Redwood Creek. And south of them was the Mawenok tribe that was on a stretch of the Mad River from about Blue Lake up to a spot called Bug Creek, 18 miles upriver from there.

Four of the tribes spoke Athabascan languages. As it turned out, during the Humboldt County genocide that started in 1850, those four tribes gradually formed an alliance and worked together. Hoopa, Tsnungwe, Mawenok, and Whilkut would have been the Athabascan tribes. The Karuks were a Hokan-speaking tribe and their territory went more over to the east in California. The Yurok and the Wiyot spoke languages that are somewhat similar, and they sometimes call them the Algic or the Ritwan group. But it's really hard to find a lot of comparisons between the two, so they're almost separate.

WHEELER:

As I understand it, the languages spoken here were unique relative to other tribes in California and the tribes that we might have relations to in language. If you're Yurok or Wiyot, we're thousands of miles away.

ROHDE:

It's difficult to explain, I mean a lot of ethnologists, linguists have bent over backwards to try to find explanations for how you have these groups here, like Apache tribes which speak languages similar to the Hupos and these other Athabascans. They come up with all sorts of explanations, but they don't know how it happened. But there were certainly migrations at different times. Boy, if an Indian tribe wound up here in Humboldt County, they didn't want to leave because

WHEELER:

It was a perfect place to live, right? So let's talk about the historic diet of the tribes and how they lived on the landscape and lived in harmony with the landscape.

ROHDE:

They had actually three staple foods, which is a much more generous serving of foods than you would find in most areas. Salmon and other fish, elk and other game, and you had the acorn. With those three as the basis for their diet, they could add things like edible bulbs, shoots from different plants to give them more vegetable material, things like that. These tribes in Humboldt County could rely on those three basic staples. And if you had, say, a bad run of fish one year, well maybe you were able to compensate by having more game that you killed and ate. For the most part, starvation was not an issue for these people. Occasionally a tribe like the Lassik tribe in southern Humboldt had lean years, but the other tribes in the area pretty much stayed in their home territories and were very happy just to be there because they had the food supply they needed.

WHEELER:

What was the village life like relative to that governmental structure?

ROHDE:

Well, the structure for most of these tribes was very basic. The family unit and extended family was very important to them. The village and the surrounding area of a village was very important. Sometimes there'd be a tribal subgroup that claimed a certain part of a watershed, maybe a small watershed in its entirety, and when the ethnographers came here and asked these people, well, what are you called, they would say, I am called the people of, and the people of like the Van Duzen River in a certain stretch. So that's how they identified. It was geographically, it wasn't politically in any other sense.

One of the main links that allow us to call some of these groups of people "tribes" was their language. They spoke a language that could be understood throughout the tribal areas and the nearby tribal areas also. That allowed them to link up more closely than they would have, say, to another tribe that spoke a different language a little ways apart. Then you had the family units, which were within the village structure, and that was really important because you needed a stable and strong family unit to see you through, well, conflicts, for example. The family unit could be that cell that operated at the most basic level. A good example is with the Yurok tribe, they had what they called the river Indians on the Klamath River, and the coastal Indians came from, oh, the Requa area on down to Little River. It was very common for a member of the river Indians to marry a member of the coastal Indians, and when you had the family connection like that, you could switch back and forth, and you could go when the salmon were running, you could go over onto the river and fish with them. When you needed kelp and things like that, you could come out to the coast.

So the family unit was really strong because it allowed them that kind of flexibility and the access to more foodstuffs and basket-making materials, things like that.

WHEELER:

I do know that the tribes of our area share this renewal concept. It's central to a lot of their practice. Can you talk about that?

ROHDE:

Well, most of the tribes, the ones that are better known, like the Hoopas and the Yuroks and the Wiyots, had World Renewal Ceremonies, as they've been called. There were several of those. There was the Jump Dance, there was the White Deerskin Dance, and for special ceremonies, they had other dances. But the idea was that you have a year, and it goes along, and things kind of deteriorate. Bad things happen, like a car maybe breaking down, and then you need to fix it. These annual ceremonies would allow them to recognize that things were out of balance, and then attempt to restore balance through the ceremonies. It seems like it worked pretty well for them overall. You don't hear about a social or political breakdown occurring in these tribes. I think they invested a tremendous amount of significance in the ceremonies. I've seen some of the photos of the dances where you can sense the power that's there, especially in the White Deerskin Dance. These people would have been captured by it, I think, and would have connected with it, and felt that this was a successful way of dealing with their current situation.

WHEELER:

We're in a special time because we are seeing tribes again, take up the renewal ceremonies with the transfer back of.

ROHDE:

Island, but I have a good example from the Kauruk tribe up near Orleans. They were decimated probably more heavily than any other tribe. There were gold miners up there who were utterly rapacious. They wanted gold. They wanted the Indian women. They wanted anything they could get their hands on. There was really no political or military presence up there. At the time, they were in what was called Klamath County, which basically had no government. They were very far away from the coast where they might be able to send troops out. So mostly it was just a wide open killing field for the miners who were very vicious and wanted to move the Indians out entirely and kill as many of them as they could.

So you had that kind of situation going on right from 1850, as soon as the whites hit those areas. You really had no successful way of stopping some of that Hoopa Valley Reservation. Indians could come in there and be relatively safe, and the Indians who'd been conducting a very successful guerrilla warfare had agreed to stop fighting the situation, both for whites and for the Indian tribes. It wasn't perfect, but at least it brought the killing to the end. The Kauruk, they had a ceremony. It was actually, the white deerskin dance was the one that they staged there about three or four miles west of Orleans, where there'd been very heavy hydraulic mining, and wonder didn't destroy everything, but they had a dance ground there called Tushonic. Back in the early days, that was one of their two or three main staging areas throughout the tribal territory.

Well, of course, the Kauruk Indians lost all of their land. There was never any reservation established for them. It turned out that after the hydraulic miners left, there wasn't too much interest in the Tushonic area. The tribe did conduct white deerskin dances up until about 1911, but then you had generational changes, and a lot of the people weren't too interested in it, and there'd been a destruction of their cultural fabric, and so the dances were terminated. Then back in 1990s, they started staging them again at Tushonic. This was an elderly man living in the Bay Area who owned 200 and some acres, which is where they wanted the ceremony to go. I don't think he had any intent of using the property. It was worked over mine tailings and areas that had been hit by various floods over time, so they didn't have any formal agreement that I know of, but he just said, okay, you can go ahead and have your ceremonies there. Well, I was working for the Cultural Resources Facility up at HSU at the time, and we sent out a team of three archaeologists and I was a historian that went up and assessed the Tushonic area, and we applied for a National Historic Register nomination, and that was accepted, even though the tribe didn't own it.

It now had a status that formalized that this was an important spot and shouldn't be messed with. The Kauruk tribe was able to gain enough financial solvency after all these years where they could finally buy that property, and now it is part of the Kauruk tribe's land, and now in peace and with total legitimacy can conduct their ceremonies there again.

WHEELER:

Besides an early 1806 or something like that, trappers coming down the coast, we were relative to the west coast of the United States. This area didn't have European settlement till

ROHDE:

1850, after an expedition from the gold mines came out to the coast and rediscovered Humboldt Bay, went south with that information, and as soon as people down there knew there were good gold diggings inland, that there was a bay here that could be a port city that could establish transportation routes out to the mines and supply them. And then all of a sudden you had just about every ship that was there in Humboldt Bay being rented out by some group that wanted to come up here and claim part of the land. There were four towns on Humboldt Bay and then one town at Trinidad Bay that were established as the supply ports originally. And then you had the miners going to what I call the Golden Rivers, which were the Trinity, the Salmon, and the Klamath, where there were substantial amounts of gold on each of those.

So what happened? Well, the whites who came in just wanted to do whatever they wanted to do. That meant getting the Indians out of the way, continual killing of the Indians. When we had this series of massacres, the idea was that you removed any obstacle you could and there wasn't much to stop them. So you had four of the Athabascan-speaking tribes that were between some of the main gold areas and the coast. They formed this alliance and they sent warriors out in combination with one another. And for years they fought a guerrilla warfare that was interfering with the progress of commerce and with the ranching that went out there.

So to get from, say, Humboldt Bay to, oh, the Klamath River up by Orleans, you had to cross several ridgelines and several large streams or rivers to get there. Well, those were all obstacles, plus it was rugged territory already inhabited by people that knew everything about the land. What would happen is small raiding parties of these Indians, that was very important. Once they got guns, they would wait there and they would ambush, pack trains, they would kill mail carriers, they would burn ranches, kill the ranchers. It reached the point where there was not a ranch building left standing anywhere from the lower Klamath all the way over to the lower Trinity, also in the Redwood Creek area. These guerrilla warriors were so successful. They had opposing them, troops who were a couple of fixed points, Fort Gaston out where the reservation is in Hoopa and Fort Humboldt here on the coast.

But what could they do? They might be at point A and the guerrilla warriors knew, okay, well, we can attack something else 10 miles from there. By the time word gets out, we've melted back into the forest, but the damage had been done. There never were enough resources for the government to provide enough soldiers to actually go out and do the kinds of things, say, planned killings of the enemy. That meant that commerce came to a standstill and it was at that point, finally, that there were negotiations and the tribes did agree to lay down their arms in exchange for having a fairly large reservation. Largest in California, in fact, yeah. To my knowledge, the only reservation was the boundaries of which and the conditions under which it was established were a product of negotiation. You know, in other places, the military would say, okay, we're going to put you on a reservation. It's going to be here and you have to go here. In this case, there really was a compromise. I think that was pretty significant.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. Joining me is local historian, Jerry Rohde, who has written a new book, Northern Humboldt Indians. We have currently more tribes per capita here than anywhere else in California. Is this a product of us having settlement later in time? Is it a product of this backlash, the guerrilla warfare that was conducted by the tribes? Is it a product of our geography that it's just so much more difficult to try to colonize an area like this where there are so many more little places that one can hide out? Why do we still have tribes in the way that we do here, whereas you go other places in California and tribal life is much more extinguished?

ROHDE:

Well, for one reason is that there were a lot fewer whites up here than, say, down in Southern California where they could create a very large force of troops. Also, if there were Indians up here, they knew how good it had been, and once the killing was done by the whites, they could come back and reinstate at least part of their usual internal economy and use of the land. First it was gold that was driving the whites to come in here and attack the Indians. That lasted for a while, and then it devolved into hydraulic mining, which was tremendously destructive to the fisheries and to the mountainsides and all that, is when they realized that they could bring redwood timber out of those areas. People for a long time knew that the timber was there. They'd cruised timber, like even in the 1890s.

Well, eventually they solved that problem by having heavy-duty logging trucks that came into use and building better roads. They had what they called the Klamath to Korbel Road, where Simpson Timber Company could use these huge off-the-road trucks and just move timber from the Klamath River down to their big mill in Korbel. Once that sort of thing became a possibility, then the whites were after a new resource. A lot of the timber by then had been allocated back to Indians along the Klamath, for example, and so they would have an 80-acre parcel of land that the government had ceded back to them. And the fraud, the intimidation that took place during that time period, I think was incredible. But timber companies would work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to go out and persuade Indians to sign their timber rights for cutting of the timber and say, well, the government needs this, and will you do it? It turned out they were signing off the entire deed to the property, so the timber company then wound up owning it forever, or as long as they could keep it.

There are other cases where they just forged names. I knew a Yurok man by the name of Beebe White, went in and tried to find out what had happened to his family's property, and he saw the deed, and he saw that his dad's name had been forged on the property. So that sort of thing happened a lot in the 1950s and 1960s. You saw these huge swaths of land on the lower Klamath and other locations that now had been left alone because you couldn't do anything with them, and now the timber companies got their hands on them and just cut as thoroughly as they could.

I want to move back just a little bit in time to about the 1980s, which is when I was doing a lot of environmental work on the herbicide issue. That was an issue that affected rural Humboldtians. But early spraying phenoxy herbicides, especially 2,4-D, you were doing two things. You're contaminating the water, and you're contaminating the air. The people that suffered the most were the rural people on the rivers, and these were often Indian people. I was working with a group called the California Coalition Against Pesticides, usually situated around a single town. There were no Indian tribes directly involved, but they would become allies when we had to go and speak before the water board or when we filed a suit. The Hoopa tribe was especially active in those days in doing this kind of thing, and they, even back that long ago, had a no-pesticide policy on their territory. The tribes did form alliances with the traditional white environmentalists who were starting to be active in those days.

The turning point for me was in about 1986, when the Department of Food and Agriculture wanted to early spray for a pest they called the apple maggot. They actually would just break down fences and go on anybody's land they wanted to, and spray. Well, the Hoopa tribe had a no-pesticide policy, so they informed the Department of Food and Agriculture that you can't come out on our sovereign land and do anything. Well, one day, Food and Ag stationed down in Willow Creek, drove up under the tribe's land and the reservation, and did some spraying. Next day, at the tribal boundary, tribal police formed a barricade and refused to allow the spray trucks to go on. People involved in the spraying said, oh, well, we'll be back tomorrow or the next day. They couldn't get federal support, and they never went on the reservation again. Food and Ag had claimed right from the start that if we can't eradicate the pest everywhere, then it's going to proliferate and proliferate again.

So now you've got this huge area out there, the Hoopa Square, that they can't spray on. How often do you have an actual government-to-government confrontation like that, with armed police actually preventing these other people from coming on their land?

WHEELER:

... of the salmon war issues that were being fought by Yurok tribal members on the river and in court. So there was always a defense of culture. I wonder, am I right in feeling that there's something different now and can you define where we are and where there might be a good starting point?

ROHDE:

Well, I think for a variety of reasons, the tribes have regained a tremendous amount of power. Some of that is just because some of them have money. If they've got casinos, they're gonna have money to do some of this. The Wiyot tribe on Table Bluff does not have a casino, but they've been a real presence. What's going on? A ton of social power. Yeah, yeah. There's been a progressive attitude building in this county for a long time. And part of that is the sensitivity to what has happened in the past that was so wrong and a realization that the Indian tribes had cultural wisdom that everyone needed because they knew how to live in balance with the earth. They knew how to do things like controlled burning, which for years was prohibited. There were Indians arrested for doing it. Ranchers couldn't do it. Of course, the government didn't want to do it. Finally, when they saw, oh, like in the Bald Hills where Redwood National Park is, where they stopped, they used to have herds of sheep and herds of cattle up there. Then the park took it over. No more animals up there. Pretty soon, you started having conifer encroachment. You were losing the prairies.

Eventually, I was at some of the meetings when Redwood National Park officials were discussing this. They said, there are two distinct groups. One is, well, we're a national park and we're just supposed to leave everything alone. Just let it return to nature, whatever. Then they began following the old Indian patterns of burning. Of course, now that's being done in many, many areas and it's had tremendously positive effect.

WHEELER:

So you're a white guy. As am I. We are guests on this land. You've studied this obviously way more than I have. I'm training to you for kind of guidance on how we can be good allies, good, good guests on this land and how we can continue to struggle through this thing together. Like what, what the next 50 years might look like in your mind if we're doing this.

ROHDE:

Yeah, this is a gradual program of progress that seems to be accelerating all the time. You have more non-Indian people becoming much more aware of what has happened in the past, much more aware of what the Indian way of life has to offer and how many good things came out of that. There's an increase in the desire to forge these alliances with the Indian tribes, the Indian people.

Using the Wiyot tribe, for example, they now have a visitor's center down in Old Town. They have displays there. It's a museum and visitor's center. People can come in and talk to Wiyot people. And then there's the give back the land. And the tribe now has been very successful in achieving that, where the progressive government we have up here is willing to and will actually try to return land to the tribe. All of that builds confidence in both parties that we can work together. Plus, I think it's just tremendously significant that for the Indian people especially, but for the other people too, that we are returning to an earlier state of things. And it's obviously not universal, but even in these small segments that we are acknowledging, first of all, that this land belongs to someone else besides the dominant culture now. And secondly, what that land has to offer and what we can put back into that land. I'm tremendously optimistic about that. I'm optimistic about what the Karuk and the Hupa and the Yurok people are doing in terms of habitat restoration, the controlled burning, trying to heal the land and restore it to a place that was pretty similar to what it was like before the whites were here.

Up on the Klamath National Forest, they had a policy that was called Brown and Burn. They wanted to eliminate all the oak trees, which to them were not useful as a commercial source of wood. So, they would go in and brown, which meant use herbicides and just kill them and then cut them down and get them out of the way. And then they would replant with fir, in some cases pine, but trees that grew well in that environment but were commercially viable. They did that systematically in a lot of areas. So here's this policy that is intentionally converting the land. It's not just cutting some trees down and then waiting for them to regrow and see what happens. They were doing species conversion. So they were trying for a massive change in the environment.

What's not realized very well, even today, is how important the acorn was to the Indian tribes. Along with the salmon and along with large game like elk, those were the staff of life for these people. Especially valuable was the tan oak acorn. That was their favorite. There were vast groves of tan oak throughout Humboldt County. They were decimated by the leather tanneries that wanted the bark of the tan oak tree to use as a tanning agent for their leather. So it's very hard today to find mature tan oaks. They're second growth trees. They'll come up often. Now they're understory species and they don't do so well. The only place I've seen a real stand of old growth tan oak is on Peavine Ridge above Bull Creek in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. You go up there today and there are tan oaks that are 150 to 200 feet tall. It's amazing. But these are true old growth trees. You have no idea if you go anywhere else in the county that that kind of thing exists.

Back 150 years ago, that was the usual state of things. You had these in a lot of different places. Places where you didn't have redwoods, where you had oak woodlands and prairie areas intersecting. Vast groves of these trees. So another tree, it wasn't exactly a species conversion or at least not an intentional one. Still hasn't regained its old situation at all.

WHEELER:

And we are still, unfortunately, killing tan oaks in Humboldt County with the same pack and squirt methods. The problem persists and now we also have sudden oak death. Tan oaks are remarkable. Yeah. So I'm on the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District Board, which has a lot of care and duty and responsibility for what we now refer to as the Mad River.

ROHDE:

Well, at least four tribes of Indians, as well as I can count, had sections of the Mad River that were in their territory, and they each had their own name for it. They spoke different languages, and they had different names. In 1849, the Gregg party that came from the Gold Country and came over to Humboldt Bay and brought word south, they were not a happy group, and eventually they split up into two groups. But when they got to the Mad River, they had a big argument. They got mad. So one of them said, okay, we'll call this the Mad River. Yeah. And it stuck. And they came up with white names all over the place, that almost never did they keep an Indian name for a place.

So you now have, in Wiyot territory, what they would have called the Baduwat River, from the mouth up to almost Blue Lake. And then you would have a stretch of river, the Mawenok tribe, further upriver. And then you go a little farther, and you had a stretch belonging to the Nongatl tribe, which was mostly on the Van Duzen River, but spilled over a little bit. When you got up to Highway 36 and went maybe, I guess, four or five miles south upriver, you had the Lassik tribe. And they, to my knowledge, they controlled the rest of the drainage.

So there's four tribes. The Mawenok don't exist as a tribe anymore. The last speaker of the language, Harvey Maple, died in 1970s. I've got the only copy of the only interview done with Harvey Maple, or with his parents. I don't know a name for that the Nongatls had, or the Lassiks. I'm sure they had names, but we don't know what they are.

It's going to be tough, because if you're looking for somebody who can tell you about the Nongatl name for it, well, it might be in one of the ethnographers' notebooks. You do have a few descendants of Nongatl people at the Bear River Rancheria, and probably some other rancherias, but they would not have that knowledge. They would just have knowledge that their ancestors came from that area, but the language wasn't transmitted back up to where they'd have that. If you switch it to the Wiyot name, that's where most of the people are going to be, and where the name would be used most frequently. But it's another kind of cultural appropriation, in a way, to take it over.

But I don't know. There was a situation about 15 years ago, where Caltrans was replacing a bridge down near Garberville over a spot called Bear Gulch. Different Indian tribes found out that that was happening, and they all had their feeling about what it should be called, and they wanted to reflect them and them alone. And they never could reach a compromise, so eventually they put a plaque there with the names of the tribes and their word for it, and I don't know what they have for a single name for it even today.

WHEELER:

Oh, this is, this is the, the problem of trying to unravel this history. So I should give a plug for this book, which is fantastic. One of my favorite things as the colorization of old photographs, the direct quotes that you have in this book from folks that have been preserved. We don't have a long written history here. It's remarkable how few generations have gone past. This is a wonderful way to get in touch with some of the history of this region. Check out the book, Northern Humboldt Indians.

ROHDE:

And there's a free electronic version. So if you go to the Press's website and you just click on a hotkey, and it'll give you a download of that particular book. And then you have it on your computer. That's it.

WHEELER:

And I will post a link to that on the show notes, which are on the lostcoastoutpost.com.

ROHDE:

Great, that's wonderful.

WHEELER:

Jerry, thank you so much for joining the Econews.

ROHDE:

Well, I'm very glad to be here, Tom.

WHEELER:

Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.