Abstract
This essay is a response to an AHR call for works on resilience: “how to revive,” as it’s framed, “after things fall apart.” It would be hard to find a case in which “things fall apart” more completely than they historically have done for Native people in California. While this history is deeper than the American occupation of Native land, the latter half of the nineteenth century evinces a particularly brutal history of violent displacement by white settlers and the political machinery supporting their land claims. The “we are still here” rhetoric that marks so much Native American political discourse is therefore particularly necessary and pressing in California. Such claims cannot help but also mark the ways we narrate that history. The massacre on Tuluwat in Eureka, California was a point so low one cannot imagine a return, and yet the Wiyot did. They are still here, and their story has much to tell us about resilience and cultural survival. This article seeks to amplify untold stories from American Indian history and move California Indians from the margin to the center by foregrounding Native voices and ways of knowing. This work, thus, moves beyond the history of American genocide by exploring the role of Native people as complicated agents struggling for their own future.
In 2019, the Wiyot Tribe captured international headlines when over two hundred acres of the island of Tuluwat on the north coast of California was returned to the tribe by the city of Eureka. The island, which is the most sacred place in the world for the Wiyot people, had been the site of an infamous massacre in 1860 during the tribe’s World Renewal Ceremony. In the aftermath, the land had been stolen by white settlers. It was not until 2014 that the tribe, under the leadership of Wiyot Chairman Ted Hernandez and Cheryl Seidner, once again performed the renewal ceremony.1 When Eureka became the first city in the United States to return land to a Native Nation five years later, the event created a blueprint for other Tribal Nations advocating for land back. With this sacred land returned, the Wiyot Tribe is now pointing to new kinds of social and cultural politics.
The call for papers for this special issue asked authors to respond to the question “How to revive after things fall apart, or perhaps more importantly, how to foster resilience so things don’t fall apart?” It would be hard to find a case in which “things fall apart” more completely than they historically have done for Native people in California. While this history is deeper than the American occupation of Native land, the latter half of the nineteenth century evinces a particularly brutal history of violent displacement by white settlers and the political machinery supporting their land claims. The “we are still here” rhetoric that marks so much Native American political discourse is, therefore, particularly necessary and pressing in California. Such claims cannot help but also mark the ways we narrate that history. The massacre on Tuluwat was a point so low one cannot imagine a return, and yet the Wiyot did. They are still here, and their story has much to tell us about resilience and cultural survival.
The massacre on Tuluwat was just one attack by settlers in a week-long coordinated genocide of other villages and part of the large campaigns of violence that mark California history.2 During the early morning hours on February 26, 1860, white settlers took boats and canoes over to the “Indian Island,” as it was known, where members of several of the Wiyot villages had gathered for the week-long World Renewal Ceremony. While women and children of the Wiyot tribe slept, the white perpetrators snuck into their camp armed with axes, swords, knives, and clubs. They circled the small island and murdered upwards of eighty Wiyot people—almost all women and children. Wiyot men were away from the island that morning, as was tradition, because they were hunting in preparation for the ceremony. After leaving the island, the militia continued its path of destruction around Jaroujiji (now known as Eureka) and Wiki (Humboldt Bay). The attacks started with the villages at Slide on the south shore of the Eel River, continued to Rio Dell, Ferndale, Centerville, Indianola, Table Bluff, and Salmon Creek. By the time the violence ended, the killers had murdered upward of 285 Wiyot people.3
Humboldt County’s presence in the history of the mass slaughter of California Indians was not limited to a single massacre, group of vigilantes, or government-sanctioned militia. Yet the militia’s business in February 1860 was killing Indians. As historian Benjamin Madley has shown, the militia violence was an officially sanctioned genocide of California Indians under United States rule.4 The violence, he argues, was widespread enough to point to state and federal governments as a “killing machine.” The violence was perpetrated by groups of vigilantes, as in Humboldt, but often the perpetrators were soldiers in the US Army or members of the California state militia. In all, Madley estimates that a minimum of “some 9,000 to 16,000 California Indians, and probably many more” were killed by US Army troops, California state militiamen, and vigilantes. These atrocities committed by settlers—with the intent to exterminate—were funded by the state of California.5
The story of Native people in California is a challenging and painful one, as we’ve come to understand through the works of Benjamin Madley, Michael Magliari, Jeanne Pfaelzer, and many others.6 Previous scholarship on the Humboldt Bay Massacres at Tuluwat, South Beach, and Eel River has illustrated the ways in which Wiyots experienced settler-colonial forces such as genocide, displacement, captivity, and forced assimilation—all part of what historian Patrick Wolfe referred to as the “logic of elimination.”7 And yet, the Wiyot did survive. And in doing so, they carved out a history of resilience and cultural survival that remains to be told in full. By foregrounding genocide, violence, and datasets, existing accounts often leave little room for understanding the humanity, resilience, and inter-generational affirmations of futurity in Native California. Pushing for future genocide scholarship that moves beyond the mindset of the perpetrators to analyze the worldview of the victims themselves, as well as the centrality of Native actions and beliefs, is paramount for correcting the legacy of white-dominant perspectives in the historical record.8 Efforts to illuminate Native voices are seen through the works of William Bauer (Wailacki/Concow), Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), Josh Reid (Snohomish), Margaret Jacobs, Karl Jacoby, Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Jeff Ostler, and others.9 Similarly, the purpose of professional organizations like the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association (CISSA) is to support and increase the exchange of California Indian perspectives, ways of knowing, and the diversity of knowledge.10
Centering the perspectives of genocide survivors and their descendants shows that Wiyot peoples encountered and engendered change and conflict through healing, survivance, and presence. The 1860 massacre at Tuluwat was catastrophic for Wiyot peoples, but its true impact can only be measured in the lives of survivors who were forever changed and the communities they reconstituted in the wake of tragedy. Nancy and Matilda Spear were young women and first cousins who survived the massacre. They escaped with their three children and an additional seven children they found and saved as they fled in a canoe to Matilda’s homestead in nearby Freshwater Slough.11 Nancy and Matilda stayed together over the course of their lifetimes, raising fifteen mixed-race children who lived to adulthood. The area of Freshwater Slough became a landmark in stories of survival for Wiyot peoples. By positioning these women and their descendants at the center of the analysis, this article sheds new light on how the Wiyot people of coastal California survived and revived their community in the face of genocidal policies aimed at destroying their families, communities, and way of life. Through resilience, the Wiyot Tribe created and stayed in the community, a fierce act of agency from a people whose numbers were decimated by the sustained settler-colonial violence of the nineteenth century.
The experience of Wiyot peoples in the years before and after 1860 illustrates the ongoing practice of plunder perpetrated against Native people.12 Plunder is a form of what one might call post-genocide oppression, including indenture, enslavement, continued dispossession, and other ways Native people’s lives and communities were plundered for white settler gain.13 Drawing on Michael Witgen’s Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, a kind of centerpiece to this history of plunder was the near-erasure of the eighteen “lost treaties” negotiated in 1851–52.14 Buried by Congress until the early twentieth century, the “loss” of these treaties enabled the government to seize land and remove Native communities without oversight or recompense. Through it all, the Wiyot maintained social relationships, cultural practices, and political identities over time and generations by adapting to changing circumstances and reasserting tribal identities at critical turning points. Examples can be found in the creation of early twentieth-century rancheria land bases, the pan-Indian organizing around the lost treaties, the creation of a unique “Indians of California” identity, and the contemporary politics of Tuluwat and the City of Eureka. Where white plunder has been a defining feature of Wiyot history since 1860, it is not the end of the story. To survive and revive, the Wiyot collaborated and engaged in cultural revitalization and intertribal healing, maintaining their community connection despite the odds.
The stories of resilience told by Nancy and Matilda’s fellow survivors and descendants, in particular, showcase the importance of Native women in how the community processed the horrors of mass violence and attempted to heal the wounds left by genocide. Notably, the voices of Nancy and Matilda themselves are largely absent from the standard historical record.15 This article incorporates sources produced by or reflect the perspectives of Wiyot peoples in order to illuminate their story and the greater narrative of Wiyot survivance: oral histories, Indian agent reports, newspapers, and photographs.
Central to the effort to remember and revive are the Wiyot History Papers—a remarkable set of documents translated and transcribed in the 1920s by Warren Brainard, a young Wiyot student who attended the Chemawa Indian Boarding School.16 These documents contain the only known statements that were both given by and recorded by Wiyots about the massacre on Tuluwat. In addition, Olive Davis, Nancy Spear’s granddaughter, compiled a 200-page handwritten family history in the 1920s, preserving important stories of the past as resources for the possible future.17 Similarly, photographs help fill lingering silences by revealing longstanding connections to place, family, and survival. These primary Wiyot documents are augmented in this project by archives that reflect local and national perspectives on the history and violence of the Northern California coast. Furthermore, in following historian Maurice Crandall’s (Yavapai-Apache Nation) invitation to scholars to utilize Indigenous methodologies originating from Indigenous communities to better understand how they experienced colonialism, genocide, and modernity, this article applies Wiyot analytical methods and protocols to survivors’ stories to highlight Wiyot ways of thinking, being, and becoming.18
Tribal archives immerse us in a space of recognizing and appreciating the ways that Wiyot people themselves understood their identity and tangible community. They also point to the ways a sense of community and identity persisted despite genocidal attempts to erase Wiyot people. This persistence mattered not just on a human level but also on a cultural level. By viewing this history of survival through the lens of Wiyot peoples, both the terminology and the stakes of the discussion shift, reflecting how Wiyots understood the politics, patterns, and unrelenting violence of the genocide being perpetrated against them. Nancy and Matilda’s choices and experiences are flattened if seen only through settler-colonial forces of violence, trauma, and assimilation. By reframing their story as one of resilience and survivance in Native American history, we see culturally specific practices of resilience. For example, the Soulatluk (Wiyot) language has expanded to encompass new terms produced by Wiyot peoples, revealing how they described and made sense of their experiences and places.19
Through its source base and concept work, this article respects the mission of Native American and Indigenous Studies to work with, by, and for Native peoples.20 This labor is a pressing issue, as recent methodological debates within and outside the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies suggest. Most visibly, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup framed the stakes of this methodological turn in their 2018 article “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn.” Unfortunately and unpleasantly, a book review that appeared shortly thereafter within the pages of this journal indicated the resistance that remains toward utilizing NAIS methodologies, while the subsequent roundtable discussion on the review, led by Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), and others, showcased their rich potential. As these roundtable contributors indicated, new and unplumbed sources yet to be discovered in contexts less traditionally archival and more in the vein of the tribal archive are poised to complement and revise strong interpretive readings of evidence from what might be thought of as traditional historical methods. This argument, indeed, follows the long tradition of asserting that there are tribal ways of reading even the standard archives. Following this methodological mission and pathway, this article seeks to amplify untold stories from American Indian history and move California Indians from the margin to the center by foregrounding Native voices and ways of knowing. This work thus moves beyond the history of American genocide by exploring the role of Native people as complicated agents struggling for their own future.
By 1860, the Wiyot way of life had drastically changed in relation to mounting white settlement, violence, disease, and the environmental destruction of the giant and ancient coast redwoods. In the 1850s, approximately 2,500 white settlers quickly overtook the Wiyot population, which was estimated at anywhere between one thousand and 3,300 people at the time.21 In 1860, at the time of the massacre, Nancy and Matilda were young mothers. As first cousins around the same age, they had both been in common law marriages to white settlers for seven years and were living in the area renamed from the original Wiyot placename to “Freshwater.” Matilda was in a partnership with Arnold Call Spear, a farmer, and had given birth to two children, George Spear and a baby that died in infancy. Nancy had briefly been linked to a white sea captain in 1853, and she had given birth to two children, William “Billy” Sykes and a daughter who died in infancy. In 1857, Nancy cohabitated with Albertus R. Hitchcock and had two sons, Stephen and Andrew Jackson Hitchcock.
When the perpetrators attacked, Nancy and Matilda, like so many Wiyot mothers and their children, were asleep. As the attackers snuck from house to house to murder the inhabitants, a handful of Wiyot people were woken by the noise and were able to flee ahead of the perpetrators’ arrival at their doorstep. This was the case for Nancy and Matilda, who fled and hid with their children on the west side of the island. Afterward, they found seven other children left alive. They put the entire group in a canoe, rowed them across the bay, and then walked to Matilda’s homestead in Freshwater.22 Wiyot canoes, constructed from ancient redwood trees, were considered to be living relatives; they reflected a relationship far more complex than simply a form of transportation.
Though Nancy and Matilda’s perspectives were not recorded at the time, their stories can still be heard in accounts left by others. Nancy later described the massacre to her youngest nephew Andrew “Jack” Spear, who she raised after Matilda’s death. He recalls her words: “They came like weasels in the night, crawling on their bellies. We were without any men to protect us. We had never fought the white men and had thought they were our friends.”23 Accounts like Jack’s speak to the violence, sadness, and betrayal of that night. The weasel, or Tsougulhayughunu’ru’ meaning “little yellow-chested one,” is a Wiyot figure who could partner with more-than-human relations as part of transformer stories and teachings that are deeply rooted in place. However, in Soulatluk there is no inherent negative connotation to the weasel figure.24 In Jack’s words, the moral judgement often ascribed in English to the weasel is clearly seen. Jack’s memory of Nancy’s statement, which he recorded in English, thus captures the complex hybridity of language in the aftermath of cultural violence.
Thanks to the transcriptions of Wiyot Warren Brainard (1872–1924), we hear the perspectives of other Wiyot survivors whose stories were similar to Nancy and Matilda’s.25 In the 1920s, Brainard, whose mother had survived a different massacre on that same tragic night, transcribed several accounts by Wiyot elders about the violence of the 1850s and 1860s. Referred to as the “Wiyot History Papers,” these documents contain the only known statements that were both given and recorded by Wiyots about the massacre on Tuluwat.26 In addition, the papers contain information from elderly Wiyots concerning murders, massacres, concentration-camp conditions on the reservations, and other aspects of Wiyot history. The fifty-one sheets of paper provide great insight into what happened that night and beyond, and they testify to the courage and endurance of a people who for years were under merciless attack.27
The papers record the harrowing stories of individuals who survived the night. For example, Polly Steve was badly wounded during the attack and left for dead.28 A young man named Mad River Billy witnessed his family murdered and escaped from the Island only by jumping into the bay and swimming to Eureka, where he alerted anyone sympathetic—settlers or other Native peoples—to the unfolding horror. Jerry James, an infant, was discovered in his murdered mother’s arms, the only survivor found the next day.29 A profound testament to community dedication, Jerry James devoted his life to preserving Wiyot ways of life and was the nation’s political leader until his death in 1924.
The voices of two women in particular shape the memory of the massacre as preserved by the Wiyot History Papers: Jane Sam and Jane Searson. Like Nancy and Matilda, Jane Sam was asleep in her home on Tuluwat when the white settlers attacked. Unlike Nancy and Matilda, she did not escape the island until much later. Instead, she survived by hiding in the community trash pile. Sometimes called Jeannie Sands, Jane Sam’s testimony represents the only known first-person account recorded by a victim of the massacre. The thoroughness of her account mentions the number of houses in the village and manner in which the massacre was carried out.30 Just thirteen years old at the time, she witnessed the event from where she was hiding. Jane Sam recalled to Brainard:
That night all sleep was 4 big houses and sweat house. Was sound sleep nearly day light. White men went in all houses blocked the doors so Indian could not get out. Some came out and run for canoes to get away. They just massacred them as fast as they come out of the houses.
Jane Searson, meanwhile, was at the home she shared with her white husband on the mainland when she watched the perpetrators leave in their boats. Eighteen years old at the time of the massacre, she witnessed the massacre from afar. Like Nancy and Matilda, she was married to a white settler and had one mixed-race daughter. Her husband’s home was located between those of two white settlers Jane Searson subsequently labeled in the Wiyot History papers as Indian killers: Thomas J. Finch and George H. Singley.31 Her husband, however, was not among the perpetrators that night. Rather, she describes him in more of a concerned role—although, notably, it seems he may have known about the massacre in advance. Searson describes how he threatened another white man named Blair, who then refused to participate in the massacre. But the violence did not end there.32
Immediately after murdering so many Wiyot women and children, the white settlers set about pillaging Tuluwat. As Jane Sam recalled, “These white men took all things such as beads, baskets, fur, hide, bows, and arrows. All the property belonging to the dead that was not taken was destroyed by burning … At break of day I saw two boat loads of white men going across to Eureka. These were the men that done the massacring.”33 This was part of the plunder, framed through the perspective of a woman who at just thirteen, hiding in a trash pile, was exposed to the craven calculus of white settlers whose violence also brought them a financial windfall.34
It began with burial. The next morning, surviving Wiyots and other Northern California Indians, some indentured to white families, buried those who were murdered. In spite of witnessing unspeakable horrors, Jane Sam’s account of the immediate aftermath of the massacre illustrates the level of care paid to the deceased, even against the backdrop of violence and displacement that was still unfolding across the region. According to Jane Sam, “The next morning they was through burying what bodies were buried on the Island. The rest of the bodies… were taken to Mad River for burial. Some were taken to the Peninsula and some to South Bay, some to Freshwater.”35
Sadly, the mourners were given little time to honor the departed. After the massacre, many Wiyots, including Jane Searson, were forcibly taken by the military to Fort Humboldt, and then to the Klamath River and Smith River Reservations. Ostensibly relocated for their own protection, the removal of surviving Wiyots was haphazard and cruel. In fact, in the Wiyot language, the name for Fort Humboldt is Jouwuchguri’m which means “to draw one’s legs up to their body”—reflecting the inhumane conditions inflicted on Indigenous people who were held there against their will in the early 1860s.36 While some historians have conjectured that the protection of a white husband—especially one with close connections to the perpetrators—may have spared individuals like Nancy and Matilda from relocation, such an explanation does not help us understand why Jane Searson was among those forcibly moved to reservation land.37 In the end, nearly 450 surviving Wiyot were forcibly removed to the Klamath River Reservation located fifty miles north of Humboldt Bay.38
Most Wiyot people did not stay; they fought to return home. Meanwhile, many Wiyots submitted voluntarily to indenture in order to remain in their home villages and sought out some sort of protection from white settlers—who could now be vested with formal and legally recognized rights to custody and service. Historian Malcolm Magliari, for example, found that in January 1861, forty-one Indian servants, at least twenty-nine of whom were Wiyots, were indentured to nineteen white employers.39 It was within this dispersed context of trauma, strategic choices, and the long reach of genocide that Wiyot people began the process of rebuilding a community.
Yet if anyone looks for justice in the aftermath of the massacres and the subsequent relocations, they will be disappointed. No arrests were ever made for the Wiyot genocide in Eureka. Newspaper writer Bret Harte nationally hailed the city of Eureka as “Murderville” and described the mass murder in unstinting detail. His words offered a heroic departure from other reporting of the time that either ignored or diminished the violence of the attack.40 Blame for the massacre was concealed, cloaking the identities of the perpetrators—many of whom had married or indentured Indian women and children and brutally enforced settler law and policy. 41 Indeed, the perpetrators were protected by the most prominent people in the community: large landowners, judges, sheriffs, journalists, and Indian agents.42 Moreover, in the wake of the massacre, the island was renamed “Gunther Island” after white settler Robert Gunther—a man who had purchased the land from another white settler just three days before the massacre.43 Although local newspapers reported his shock and horror over the massacre, his actions show little sympathy or regard toward Wiyots. Not only did his ownership result in longstanding environmental destruction of the land from oil and chemicals, he further desecrated the site by building a large Victorian house and yacht club and diking and attempting to drain the land.44 The Wiyots had little hope of achieving justice within a settler colonial framework where their elimination from the land served a narrative of replacement.45
In the long aftermath of the massacre, the family dynamics of survivance, community building, and healing illustrate the intimate ways survivors like Nancy and Matilda and their descendants re-exerted their social and cultural meanings and practices. After Nancy’s husband died in 1866, she moved in with her cousin Matilda and Arnold Spear. Nancy had six children at that time. The following year, Matilda passed away from a disease.46 During this time, it appears that Nancy worked as a domestic servant in a white household in Tablebluff.47 Subsequently, Nancy married Arnold Spear. In 1871, Arnold formally petitioned for guardianship of four of Nancy’s children.48 On this document was Nancy’s X-mark of consent to the adoption. As Scott Lyons writes, “The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack power, agency and a lack of agency… Importantly, it is always possible that an x-mark could result in something good.”49 Together, Nancy and Arnold had an additional eight children. In total, fifteen children survived to adulthood in this blended family, the eldest born in 1854, the youngest in 1879. Importantly, though their lives took many shapes and took them in many directions, they stayed in community with one another and continued to tell their stories—and the story of Wiyots—in the context of Nancy and Matilda, and other kin and community members who survived the brutal attack on Tuluwat.
The choices of this next generation illustrate a meaningful desire to reclaim and celebrate their culture and participate in community together. In 1920, many of the life stories of the children and grandchildren of Nancy and Matilda were compiled into a history written by Olive Dean Davis (1903–1985). Olive’s storytelling and passion for history preserved important narratives of the past and document a time rich with Wiyot presence and resilience. Olive was the daughter of Mary Spear Dean (1863–1940), the youngest daughter of Matilda. Olive grew up on the Spear homestead after her father passed away. At eighteen years old, she self-published a two-hundred-page handwritten family history and genealogy. Her work as a writer and historian inspired her career path as a librarian for the Humboldt County Library. Over the years, she updated the family history she wrote. In 1977, she produced her last version, urging younger people to ask questions of older relatives. Writing plainly, “if you think I wrote an awful lot about my immediate family, you’re right. After all, I know more about them than any of the others and started this thing mainly for them.”50
Olive’s history of the descendants of Nancy and Matilda is structured around space and place: the Spear homestead, both a physical location on the land and a space maintained through the traditions and social ties that bind family. The house was built in 1873. The timber for the house was cut on the Spear property and floated down the slough to the mill, sawed into lumber and hauled back by ox team.51 The house had two stories with four large rooms downstairs and three large rooms and one small room upstairs. It had two stairways, the back one leading to a large room where the boys of the family would have slept in the 1870s and 1880s. The property also included a double-sided outhouse, each with three holes, one side for men and the other for women—a fact that Olive continued to find humorous so many years later.
Four of Nancy and Matilda’s children back from a successful deer hunt on the Spear homestead. From left to right: Patrick Henry Spear (1874–1972), Margaret Spear (1868–1953), Andrew Johnson Spear (1859–1943), and Daniel Webster Spear (1872–1958). Personal collection of Yerva Nelson.
For Arnold Spears’s part, his actions demonstrate a particularly American cultural imprint on the children. He fared well, even as head of a mixed-blood family during a moment of prejudice against Wiyot people. In 1853, he filed his homestead on 160 acres. He quickly built a farming operation, cutting down the ancient redwoods, removing the maple trees, and selling sheep, chickens, hay, potatoes, and apples. Describing her grandfather’s character, Olive wrote, “he gave nothing away, even charging for soup bones and baskets of mixed vegetables … he charged relatives, friends, or strangers for staying overnight—50 cents for the man and 50 cents for the horse.”52 The children all were given only English names, although the older children could understand and speak conversational Souluk. Through their mothers, Wiyot ways of healing were practiced in the home. When Arnold Spear died in 1890, he willed his estate equally to all of his living children, six men and six women. Some descendants held onto their property or gave it to family; others sold it and moved closer to the towns of Eureka, Arcata, Blue Lake, or even out of state.53
White settlers, European immigrants, and Native Americans worked as part of the Little River Redwood Company led by John (Andrew Johnson) Spear, son of Matilda, marked in here as number 1. Members of the company also included James (Yurok), 3; Henry Kane (Hupa), 12; Henry Harris (Wiyot), 16; and William Dooley (Wiyot); 20. “1909 August Wood Gang,” Humboldt County Collection, Special Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA.
In this environment, the children of Nancy and Matilda found work at early ages in the logging and service industry. The town of Freshwater was referred to as Wrangletown, supposedly on account of the many quarrels and fighting among different residents. Male descendants not only labored but also commanded and bossed diverse crews filled with other northern California Indians. For example, Andrew Johnson Spear worked for different logging companies, eventually rising to the rank of head chain tender, called the donkey boss and chopping boss.54 The head chopper first determined which way the redwood was to fall, marking out a path where it would least injure itself and other timber. Importantly, Spear and others did not simply cave to assimilatory labor markets by swapping one form of labor out in the woods (hunting, gathering, agriculture) for another (logging). Rather, they reshaped their own lives and practices according to external constraints.
Unlike the older children, many of Nancy and Matilda’s younger children were offered educational opportunities close to home.55 In the 1870s, Arnold Spear served as a school trustee of Humboldt County, and many Spear children—and other mixed-race children—attended grammar school in Freshwater, California. William “Bill” Sykes, Nancy’s son, continued as a trustee of the Garfield school in the 1890s even though he dropped out at the age of eleven to work on the dairy ranches and in the lumber business.56 Some of Nancy and Matilda’s children and many grandchildren were either forced—or in some cases, chose—to attend Native American boarding schools. Many grandchildren attended the boarding school on the Hoopa Reservation, which was the closest school, enabling them to stay near family. For example, after Sophia (Spear) Dooley’s death, her five children attended boarding school on the Hoopa reservation.57 For some, their education took them further afield. Two children, Cromwell Dooley and Aileen Julia Dooley (Beauchamp), pursued additional education at an Indian high school in Phoenix, Arizona. After graduation, Cromwell played football in a prestigious program at the Haskell Indian Institute in Kansas.58 Aileen studied nursing in Phoenix and traveled to St. Louis, Missouri to work in a large hospital before returning home to Freshwater.59
Notably, some of Nancy and Matilda’s descendants never returned to Freshwater after leaving for school. Sadly, Andrew Johnson Spear’s son, Jr., perished at school on the Hoopa Reservation. Two of Frances (Hitchcock) McLean’s—daughter of Nancy—children, Stella and Myrtle, died of meningitis while at school in Hoopa.60 At Indian boarding schools, the deaths of children from disease, malnutrition, and violence were not uncommon. At the turn of the twentieth century, boarding schools could offer an education and opportunity to Native youth, but one structured by the imperatives of assimilation policy which rarely delivered meaningful mental and physical care.61
A story that showcases just how much the broader community continued to connect with Wiyot people through the lens of cultural production and entertainment is seen through Nancy’s son Patrick Henry Spear (1874–1972), who found employment in more a creative field. Henry Spear attended the Chemawa Indian School, where he studied to become a blacksmith.62 He also participated in the school band.63 While Chemawa’s band was designed to instill discipline through practice and occasional marching in military-style uniforms, Wrangletown had been the reverse for Henry Spear while growing up. Wrangletown was bustling with dances at the numerous dance halls, animated performances at the Spear Barn, and boxing matches. After his return from Chemawa, Henry Spear was remembered for his bouts as a welterweight in the boxing ring at Baird’s Opera House in 1905–1906. Starting at the age of fourteen, he made his own violin and string instruments, crafting folk fiddles out of burls. A burl on the Coastal Redwood is a high-quality and complex growth that can be found on the trunk or base of a tree and can grow in response to an injury, environmental stress, or be genetically activated. A burl is not conducive to the thin slicing of boards needed for the sides and tops of instruments. Significantly, the multifaceted methods Henry Spear used to create his instruments showcase his knowledge of Indigenous ways of working with wood. For example, out oak burls Wiyots created prized bowls, cups, dippers, ladles, and mortars. Wood burls tell a story of adaptation and survival as they contain seed spores and are one way that trees can regenerate.64 It was in his music, however, that Henry Spear truly thrived, and where we can see most prominently the legacy of Wiyot culture in his daily life.
Notably, Henry Spear’s musical prominence within Humboldt County had significant political content as he was an active member of a Wiyot political group called the Eureka Auxiliary of the Indians of California. Henry Spear played as part of a headlining “Indian Band” advertised across California to fundraise for this cause, serving as vice president and secretary, with his siblings, cousins, and other Wiyot leaders such as Jerry James, Dan Prince, and Ben Scott. In the 1920s, he was also involved with the California Indian Brotherhood, advocating for Wiyot self-determination. As an organizing point in the early twentieth century, inter-tribal political activism emerged from the back-and-forth surrounding the animation of the unratified eighteen treaties in California. In 1923, for example, Henry Spear was the band leader at the Eureka All-Indian Celebration held at Sequoia Park. This inter-tribal gathering was attended by upwards of one thousand California Native peoples from local tribes such as the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Yurok, Karuk, Tolowa, and Wylackie.
A postcard from the 1923 “All Indian Celebration” held in Eureka. Henry Spear (Wiyot) was the leader of the band that performed at Sequoia Park. Photography was not allowed at the event. However, at least four images were used as promotional materials for the Indian Board of Co-Operation. “All Indian Celebration, Eureka, Calif. Oct. 20–21, ‘23,” Cal Poly Humboldt Digital Archive, accessed February 15, 2024, https://cdm16166.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/palmquist/id/1048/rec/43.
Other descendants, like Daniel Webster Spear and Iyve Hitchock Ortiner, made a more active and sustained effort to bring Wiyot-centric politics and justice to the foreground of their professional lives. Dan Spear and Iyve Hitchock Ortiner organized community events to raise funds for the Indian Board of Co-Operation (IBC) and traveled across the state. Coming out the ways of kin, place, community, and culture, Dan Spear and Iyve Hitchock Ortiner found purpose in inter-tribal organizing efforts on behalf of the “Indians of California” watershed land case. This case had the potential to remunerate California Indians for lost tribal land. Following the passage of federal legislation on behalf of the “Indians of California” in 1928, a state-wide inter-tribal group of Native Californians sued the federal government in the Court of Claims for the value of reservation land that would have been set aside under eighteen treaties negotiated in 1851–52. Instead, the treaties—representing a staggering 8,518,900 acres—had gone unratified and were “lost” for decades under a congressional “injunction of secrecy.”65 When they were rediscovered in 1905, Congress was unwilling to grant outright compensation appropriations for lands promised in the treaties. Rather, it adopted a system of legislation that authorized Indian bands or tribes to sue the United States in the Court of Claims through Native American special jurisdictional acts.
Critically, when the original treaties were drafted, the Wiyot were stripped of their land without any voice. They were not mentioned in a treaty because disease had already taken such a toll on Wiyot leaders that they were too ill to meet with the treaty commissioners.66 Now, however, with the new legislation which grouped all “Indians of California” together, the Wiyot might finally see some financial compensation for the loss of their ancestral homeland. Indeed, a crucial component of the inter-tribal activism that followed the legislation proved to be the community building that would bring the legal category of “California Indian” off the page and into the lives of actual Indigenous people.
When Daniel Webster Spear and Iyve Hitchock Ortiner organized around the “Indians of California” case, they did so as Wiyots, with the full recognition that Wiyots were excluded from the original round of treaties. This work required both a sense of internal social coherence and external political recognition of who they were tribally and, thus, the very specific nature of their organizing. In this moment, their activism illustrated both a blurring together—in the sense of a newly emergent legal-political identity for “the Indians of California”—and a moment that also demanded tribal differentiation.
Daniel Webster Spear and Iyve Hitchock Ortiner were drawn to the Indians of California land case because of the grand possibilities of political and social change brought through the strategy of inter-tribal community outreach. During this time, “California Indians” across the state developed effective collective political strategies rooted in the context of entrenched legal and cultural injustice. Historians William Bauer (Wailacki/Konkow) and Damon Akins track how the emergence of a legal, political, and cultural California Indian identity “brought California Indians from all over the state and nation into contact with each other.”67 As they mounted sustained challenges with two distinct forms of politics, Bauer and Akins argue that, “California Indians actively created a statewide identity that built on local communities without subsuming them.”68 As a result of dozens of Indian-run auxiliaries across the state, California Indians organized community events, fundraised, and traveled in delegations to battle for their righteous cause in the nation’s capital. In the process, they scheduled and held meetings with Wiyot communities that helped reconfigure Wiyot identity in the twentieth century through the lens of the lands claim case.
Unfortunately, Daniel Webster Spear, and Ivye Hitchock Ortiner confronted not only the financial and legal challenges of the land claims case in their activism but the corrupt moral and financial dealings of the white organizer of the group for which they worked. The man’s name was Rev. Frederick Collett. He created an organization called the Indian Board of Co-operation. Ivye Hitchock Ortiner spent considerable time and energy petitioning the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) commissioner John Collier to stop Collett’s involvement in the claims case.
Daniel Webster Spear’s and Ivye Hitchock Ortiner’s political work had yet another distinct dimension through which they were able to assert a Wiyot identity and rally other Native people—both Wiyot and pan-Indian—and that was their case against Frederick Collett, which they argued to Collier, the BIA, and the federal government. Beginning in the 1920s, Collett became the foremost outside figure in the land claims case. Whether he was sincerely interested in supporting Native communities during this time or just saw a financial opportunity yet untapped, his engagement with Indigenous individuals and organizations indicates a clear desire to make his money off those he purported to support.
In 1937, Ivye Hitchock Ortiner was a Wiyot person prominent in the charge against Collett’s collections, as one of 154 other litigants who submitted depositions against Collett’s Depression-era financial scams.69 These depositions recited the methods and false pretenses used by Collett to borrow and solicit funds, especially from those who did not have money to spare. Meanwhile, Daniel Webster Spear attempted to sue Collett for the $1,000 he had donated to the corporation under the pretense that he was helping move the land claims case along. Collett was eventually dropped from the Methodist congressional rolls and turned from a church-going “friend of the Indian” to an alleged embezzler and racketeer—a man who offered legal and political support to Native organizing while taking most but not all the money he helped raise to line his own pockets. In the middle of all this politicking, Henry Spear, Daniel Webster Spear, and Ivye Hitchock Ortiner represent a socially functional and culturally-continuous sense of Wiyot community that was both enduring—that is, powered by Wiyot memory and kin—and emergent—that is, transformational and responsive to new conditions.
Daniel Webster Spear never married or had children and split his time between Siskiyou County and his home on the Spear homestead, where he worked a bulb farm. On the one hand, his fusion of labor and travel suggests that he served as a kind of mobile hub for a sense of Wiyot community that was kin and network based and regional in nature. On the other hand, his continuous residence on the Spear homestead suggests that land was also a grounded hub for Wiyot community. In the 1920s, Ivye Hitchock Ortiner moved with her family to live within a Wiyot community on the Blue Lake Rancheria. Their work on behalf of the land claims cases followed a forward trajectory seeking recognition of land and history after nearly sixty years of land theft, relocation, and injustice.
The Spear Family Cemetery. Photograph by author.
In the 1910s and 1920s, three land bases were purchased in Wiyot homelands and are federally recognized Tribal Nations: The Wiyot Tribe (Tablebluff Reservation), The Blue Lake Rancheria, and Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria. These land bases were purchased due to the activism of Native Californians and the advocacy of C. E. Kelsey of the organization called the Northern California Indian Association, who lobbied the federal government.70 These Rancherias were land bases on which California Indigenous communities lived collectively and received federal appropriations, sometimes for the very first time. In total, fifty-four Rancherias were purchased by the federal government for landless communities of Native Californians. With the purchase of these land bases across California, the social and economic conditions of Indigenous people in California changed.71
Taken together, the lives of Nancy, Matilda, and their descendants constitute part of a visible and material Wiyot community, telling stories of both change and continuity before and after the massacre. In the twentieth century, their descendants adopted new techniques and tools to rebuild community while sustaining and revitalizing cultural values. Three of Nancy’s children lived past the age of ninety, including the eldest child, William Sykes, age one hundred, Henry Spear, age ninety-eight, and the youngest child, Flora Spear Anderson, age ninety. The lives of these descendants bridged an important gap in the history of Native California. Nancy and Matilda’s story of survival remained part of their children’s lives and a thread between generations of Wiyot, even when their educations, professions, and interests took them in divergent directions.
The stories, oral histories, and cultural practices inspired by Nancy and Matilda as survivors of the massacre generated meaningful cultural memories for their descendants and the Wiyot tribe more broadly. Their legacy of survival illuminates the intergenerational work of fostering resilience and asserting affirmations of Indigenous futures in the historical Wiyot homeland on the North Coast of California. The Spear Family Cemetery in Freshwater serves as a material reflection of complex family, community, and kinship connections across multiple and often geographically scattered generations. The defining aspect of their story was not Indigenous elimination but rather survival and continuance. Nancy, Matilda, and all the Spear children are buried together, including with some grandchildren and great-grandchildren.72
Wiyot peoples, lands, and waters, were violently restructured by genocide. Yet, Wiyot peoples survived, endured, and developed strategies so that they, too, remade and reshaped California. Today, there are hundreds of descendants of Nancy and Matilda. Some are enrolled members and leaders of the Wiyot Tribe, Blue Lake Rancheria, and Bear River Rancheria. As if in reflection of this thriving future, a generation of younger Redwood trees surround Freshwater where once the land had been clear cut. The remnants of railroading and mill towns are encircled by green meadows, flourishing home gardens, and grazing animals. The land has survived and recovered, as have the Tribal Nations that call this land home.
By centering Native peoples and incorporating sources not just produced about them but by them, the cacophony of violence gives space to Native voices, foregrounding their experience of surviving and continuing into a future beyond genocide. By viewing this history through the lens of Wiyot peoples and incorporating their own terminology to describe the politics, patterns, and unrelenting violence of the genocide being perpetrated against them, we see Native agency and resistance against the plunder through which settlers stole children, land, and resources. Nancy and Matilda’s descendants illustrate how their lives were not simply or fully assimilated into settler-colonial politics, economies, and settlements—they raised children, purchased land, and cultivated resources to build back community on the so-called “lost” coast.
In the long aftermath of the massacre, the family dynamics of survivance, community building, and healing illustrate the intimate ways Nancy, Matilda, and their descendants lived their lives. The two women—and other survivors—assumed a kind of deep cultural status as multigenerational markers, making them sites of memory for their children, grandchildren, and many others. Their descendants borrowed or were granted a kind of cultural authority by virtue of these two women survivors, and their familial connection anchored their various expressions of Wiyot resilience across time and space. Some of Nancy and Matilda’s descendants reshaped their lives and practices within the external constraints of the agricultural economy by bossing inter-tribal timber crews characterized by care for each other and care for the land. Some attended Indian boarding schools and became business entrepreneurs and successful musicians. Some left the area to find work or new adventures. Others continued to find purpose in California inter-tribal organizing efforts on behalf of the “Indians of California” watershed land claims case. Importantly, these descendants stayed in community with one another and told their stories in the context of the survival of Nancy and Matilda.
Native Californian leaders and community members have embraced the hard reality of attempted genocide while rejecting any sense that it was successful—a sentiment that reverberates through the collaborative multimedia project of which this article is an outgrowth. Steered by myself, film director Michelle Hernandez (Wiyot), the Wiyot Tribe, and editor Richie Wenzler, Tuluwat Reclaimed is a digital project that provides a critical snapshot of how the massacre is currently remembered on the land and showcases the linkages and legacy between this defining historical episode and the contemporary work of the Wiyot Tribe.73 The short film component (Tuluwat Reclaimed, 2023) illuminates the ongoing stakes and significance of the central themes of resilience, survivance, and environmental protection that weave their way through the history of Nancy, Matilda, and the generations since. It features five interviews with Wiyot Tribal leaders and community members, tracing the indefatigable efforts of intergenerational political activism and environmental cleanup to reclaim the village of Tuluwat, the Wiyot Center of the World. As Native Studies scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa/Yurok/Karuk) reflected in the film, “That kind of strength in the midst of atrocity and violence speaks to the fact that Wiyot peoples understood how cultural ceremonies connect with place to bridge historical memory for future generations.” Highlighting important historical legacies within intersections of Wiyot memory, lands, and living Indigenous epistemologies, Tuluwat Reclaimed offers bite-sized multimedia reflections that readers of this article can discover alongside the AHR special edition.
Notably, Nancy and Matilda were just two survivors of the massacre on Tuluwat. There were others, like Wiyot leader Jerry James, Jeanie Sands, Jane Searson, Annie Sam, and Mad River Billy. Together, their stories demonstrate specific practices of how Wiyot peoples responded to and attempted to shape the genocidal policies aimed at them, specifically by rejecting narratives of cultural loss or change-as-loss. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, Jerry James led the fight to reclaim the village of Tuluwat. His son Albert, and great-grandchildren like Cheryl Seidner, continued to advocate for the return of land through grassroots activism that spanned decades.
This intergenerational work bore fruit. In the 1970s, the city of Eureka made a small step in this direction, voting to officially rename the island “Indian Island” rather than maintain the name Gunther Island. Then, in the 1990s, Cheryl Seidner as Wiyot tribal chairwoman raised over $106,000 by selling t-shirts and Indian tacos for the Wiyot Sacred Sites fund, which was used to purchase a 1.5-acre parcel of land on Tuluwat being sold by the city of Eureka in 2000. She petitioned university events and meetings of organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians to help buy the land and raise awareness. Wiyot efforts to reclaim land were aided by innovative allies and advocates inspired by Wiyot stories of survival.
As a result, almost all the land of Tuluwat is now held in trust by the Wiyot Tribe. Currently, the village of Tuluwat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (added in 1966) and as a threatened National Historic Landmark. The Wiyot Tribe has worked diligently to clean up extensive environmental contamination and decay, and to control erosion in collaboration with local, state, and federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2017, the EPA gave the tribe the “excellence in site reuse award,” the first time a tribe anywhere in the United States received such recognition.74
When we place Native voices at the center of the story, we recognize that the coast was never actually lost at all. The town now known as “Eureka,” meaning “I have found it,” yields to the Wiyot placename, Jaroujiji, meaning “where you sit and rest.” The Native call “We are still here” resonates strongly throughout this community of cultural revitalizers and political activists. On August 24, 2024, for example, Marnie Atkins (Wiyot Tribe) and Diane Warren (Wiyot descent) organized a reunion for the descendants of Matilda and Nancy, honoring Rrawuraghu’muk (“all my relations”). This reunion coincided with Wiyot Goutsuwe’n (Wiyot Day) on the Wiyot Tablebluff Reservation to celebrate Wiyot history, culture, identity, and heritage. In this way, Wiyot people stayed in community through specific social interactions that made that community visible to itself even when it may have appeared fractured from the outside. This is how they revived “after things fell apart.”75
Author Biography
Kathleen C. Whiteley (Wiyot descent) is an assistant professor at University of California, Davis in the Department of Native American Studies. She is from Eureka, California.
Wiyot Tribe, “History,” Cultural department. https://www.wiyot.us/148/Cultural.
Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 98–139.
Michael F. Magliari, “Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers: Indian Servitude and Slave Trafficking in Humboldt County, California, 1860–1863,” California History 97, no. 2 (2020): 18.
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
It is important to note that the state of California did not pay for Indian scalps. Michael F. Magliari, “The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth: Evidence of Genocide or Just Faulty Scholarship?,” California History 100, no. 2 (2023): 4–30.
Benjamin Madley, “California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836,” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2019): 14–47; Michael F. Magliari, “Free State Slavery: Bound Indian Labor and Slave Trafficking in California’s Sacramento Valley, 1850–1864,” Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 2 (2012): 155–92; Jean Pfaelzer, California, a Slave State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).
Madley, An American Genocide, 280–84; Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 192–218; Robert Fleming Heizer, The Destruction of California Indians: A Collection of Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in Which Are Described Some of the Things That Happened to Some of the Indians of California (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Anthony Jennings Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest: A California Sketch (San Francisco, CA: Bacon & Company, 1885); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
William Bauer Jr., “Ghost Dances, Bears and the Legacies of Genocide in California,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 137–42; Margaret D. Jacobs, “Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing? Are These Our Only Choices?,” The Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2016): 444–48; Jeffrey Ostler, “Denial of Genocide in the California Gold Rush Era: The Case of Gary Clayton Anderson,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 45, no. 2 (2021): 81–102; Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, We Are the Land: A History of Native California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021); William J. Bauer Jr, California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2016); Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Amy Lonetree, “A Heritage of Resilience: Ho-Chunk Family Photographs in the Visual Archive,” The Public Historian 41, no. 1 (2019): 34–50; Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023); Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
Cutcha Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); Peter Nelson, “Where Have All the Anthros Gone? The Shift in California Indian Studies from Research ‘on’ to Research ‘with, for, and by’ Indigenous Peoples,” American Anthropologist 123, no. 3 (September 2021): 469–73, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13633; Olivia Chilcote, “‘Time Out of Mind’ The San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians and the Historical Origins of a Struggle for Federal Recognition,” California History 96, no. 4 (2019): 38–53; Mark Minch-de Leon, “Atlas for a Destroyed World: Frank Day’s Painting as Work of Nonvital Revitalization,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 56–88; Brittani Orona and Vanessa Esquivido, “Continued Disembodiment,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, no. 42 (2020): 50–68; Kaitlin P. Reed, Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2023); Blythe Katelyn George, “Tribal Lands, Tribal Men, and Tribal Responsibilities: World Renewal Fathers with Criminal Records and Their Perceptions of Work and Fatherhood on and Off-Reservation” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2020); Stephanie Anne Lumsden, “Policing, Incarceration, and Dispossession: California Indians and Carceral Statecraft” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2023); Caitlin Keliiaa, “Unsettling Domesticity: Native Women Challenging US Indian Policy in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1911–1931” (working papers, UC Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, 2017); Rose Soza War Soldier, Kishan Lara-Cooper, and Walter J. Lara Sr., “Tilted History Is Too Often Taught: Activism, Advocacy, and Restoring Humanity,” in Ka’m-t’em: A Journey Toward Healing (Pechanga, CA: Great Oak Press, 2019), 99–110; Khal Schneider, “A Square Deal in Lake County: Anderson v. Mathews (1917), California Indian Communities, and Indian Citizenship,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 18, no. 3 (2019): 263–81.
Jerry Rohde, “Genocide and Extortion: 150 Years Later, the Hidden Motive Behind the Indian Island Massacre,” North Coast Journal, February 25, 2010, https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/genocide-and-extortion/Content?oid=2130748.
In this essay, “plunder” is used less in the sense of the detailed economic histories found in the works of Michael Witgen, Emilie Connolly, Claudio Saunt, and others. See Michael John Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Emilie Connolly, “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in the Early United States,” The American Historical Review 127, no. 1 (2022): 223–53; Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020).
Norton, Jack. When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern California (San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press, 1974).
As demonstrated by Witgen, there are important regional variations of the plunder economy. The plunder economy is the theft of Native wealth broadly speaking. In the upper Midwest, this included resources (land, mineral rights, and timber) but also the theft of annuity payments or even the profiting from selling provisions to the government that were then handed out as part of the annuity payment to Native peoples. In California, the lost treaty process allowed settlers to act without restraint in violently stealing Native lands and resources. The eighteen treaties were not ratified and therefore could not shape public awareness about what belonged to Native peoples and what was available to the taking.
Sarah Deer argues that many Native American women’s narratives of death, violence, and exploitation during this time were most likely retained as oral histories. Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 69.
Wiyot History Papers, Humboldt County Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA Wiyot History Papers, Humboldt County Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA. https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/wiyot_history_papers/1 (hereafter Wiyot History Papers).
Olive Dean Davis, “A History and Genealogy of the A. C. Spear Family of Freshwater, California,” Spear Family Papers, Humboldt County Historical Society, Eureka, CA (hereafter Spear Family Papers).
Maurice Crandall, “Captive Cousins: Hoomothya, Wassaja, and a Lifetime of Unwellness,” The Western Historical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 117–36.
According to the Wiyot Tribe Language department, Soulatluk means “our jaw” and is also used as the name of the Wiyot People by some speakers.
Philip J. Deloria, “Cold Business and the Hot Take,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 1, 2020): 537–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa196; Jean M. O’Brien, “What Does Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Do?,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 1, 2020): 542–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa198; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” The William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2018): 207–36, https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.75.2.0207.
Magliari, “Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers,” 18.
Jerry Rohde, Humboldt Bay Shoreline, North Eureka to South Arcata: A History of Cultural Influences, (Arcata, CA: Humboldt State University Press, 2021).
Rohde, “Genocide and Extortion.”
Dr. Lynikka Butler (Wiyot Tribe linguist), email message to author, February 14, 2024.
In 1898, at the age of twenty-five, Brainard graduated from the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, which may have influenced his decision to record these accounts.
Wiyot History Papers, Humboldt County Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA. https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/wiyot_history_papers/1.
The Wiyot History papers were uncovered by a local historian, Jerry Rohde, in 2009. According to Rhode, there is nothing else within the literature of Humboldt County Indian History that contains as much direct reporting from so many creditable sources about such a range of key events. The documents came into his possession when he was working on an article about the Indian Island Massacre for the North Coast Journal. The donor chose to remain anonymous and provided the documents, except for one page. The anonymous conservator indicated to Rohde that it contained names of massacre perpetrators, some of whom still had descendants in the area. After Warren Brainard died in 1924, these accounts were given to his sister Carrie Seidner. In the late 1930s, Carrie Seidner was contacted by her friend Lucy Dungan Allard, a white woman, who wanted to learn more about the massacre on Tuluwat. Historian Victoria Haskins utilizes the Wiyot papers to consider the gendered nature of these affective and traumatic accounts. She focuses on the transmission of these accounts to and through white women. Victoria Haskins, “Testimonies of Affect: Native American Women’s Histories of Violence on California’s Pacific North Coast,” Women’s History Review 31, no. 6 (2022): 953–74.
Afterward, Polly Steve was forcibly removed to the Klamath River reservation but persevered by supporting herself and family as an expert basket maker. Her daughter Elizabeth Conrad Hickox became one of the best-known basket weavers in the state of California. See Cathleen D. Cahill, “Making and Marketing Baskets in California,” in The Women’s National Indian Association: A History (Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 126–49.
Llewellyn Lemont Loud, Ethnogeography and Archaeology of the Wiyot Territory, vol. 14 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1918), 260.
Doc. 2 Mrs. Jane Sam, Wiyot History Papers.
Doc. 1 and 2 Mrs. [Jane Duncan] Searson, Wiyot History Papers.
As Cutcha Risling Baldy, Alfred Hurado, and others have shown, attacks on fertility and procreation were central to California genocide. See Baldy, We Are Dancing for You; Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
Doc. 5 Mrs. Jane Sam, Wiyot History Papers.
In 2019, a nineteenth-century Wiyot Girl's Brush Dance Skirt, a ceremonial garment last worn during the World Renewal Ceremony, was returned to the Wiyot Tribe from a collection at the Brooklyn Museum. This return was thanks to a National Park Service grant to assist in the consultation, documentation, and repatriation of remains and items as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Doc. 5 Mrs. Jane Sam, Wiyot History Papers. In 1946, some of these remains were uncovered during the expansion of the jetty in Humboldt Bay. In 2022, under the NAGPRA, the Army Corps of Engineers and University of California, Berkeley repatriated the remains to Wiyot Tribe. In a private ceremony, they were subsequently buried on Tuluwat. Iridian Casarez, “U.S. Army Corps, UC Berkeley Repatriate Human Remains to Wiyot Tribe,” North Coast Journal, January 24, 2022, https://www.northcoastjournal.com/NewsBlog/archives/2022/01/24/us-army-corps-uc-berkeley-repatriate-human-remains-to-wiyot-tribe.
In 2022, Fort Humboldt dedicated a new sign acknowledging the Wiyot name, Jouwuchguri’m. “Fort Humboldt Sits on Wiyot Land, New Sign Acknowledges,” Lost Coast Outpost, January 31, 2022, https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2022/jan/31/fort-humboldts-new-sign-acknowledges-it-sits-wiyot/.
Nancy’s second husband, Albert Hitchock, was engaged in stock raising and general farming with a known Wiyot murderer, James Henry Brown.
Magliari, “Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers,” 18.
Magliari, “Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers,” 18.
Bret Hart, “Indiscriminate Massacre of Indians, Women and Children Butchered,” Northern Californian Magazine, February 29, 1860; Anonymous, “Horrible Massacre of Indians at Humboldt Bay,” The Placer Herald, March 3, 1860; “Indian Massacre,” Humboldt Times, March 3, 1860; “Indian Matter,” Humboldt Times, April 14, 1860; “From California: The Humboldt Butchery of Indian Infants and Women,” New York Times, March 16, 1860.
Local historian Jerry Rohde has positively identified five perpetrators of the massacre: Henry P. Larrabee, James D. H. Brown, Wallace M. Hagans, Augustus Dinsmore, and Charles Hills. In 1869, Hills committed suicide.
Austin Wiley, the editor of the Humboldt Times, preached for the “removal or extermination” of Wiyot peoples and later became Superintendent for Indian Affairs in California. In 1861, he indentured an eight-year-old Wiyot boy named Smoky. Robert Fleming Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser, Archaeology of Hum-67, the Gunther Island Site in Humboldt Bay, California, Reports of the University of California Archeological Survey, no. 62 (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Department of Anthropology, 1964).
Nearly all Chinese residents of Humboldt County were expelled from Gunther Island in 1885. In 2021, thanks to the efforts of the organization called the Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity, there is a mural dedicated to Eureka’s Chinatown. The mural is located on “Charlie Moon Way.” Moon was the only Chinese immigrant who was able to remain in Humboldt County through his marriage to a Chilula Redwood Creek Tribe woman named Minnie Tom. Stephanie McGeary, “Eureka Chinatown Project to Name Alley ‘Charlie Moon Way’ in Honor of Humboldt’s Legendary Chinese Immigrant,” Lost Coast Outpost, October 30, 2021, https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2021/oct/30/eureka-alley-be-named-charlie-moon-way-after-legen/.
In 1913, the club was destroyed in a fire. In the 1950s, Gunther’s former home, a Victorian house, also burned down. Thadeus Greenson, “‘We’re Coming Home,’” North Coast Journal, January 24, 2019, https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/were-coming-home/Content?oid=12849841; Heizer and Elsasser, Archaeology of Hum-67, the Gunther Island Site in Humboldt Bay, California.
After Gunther purchased the land, he renamed it Gunther Island—a name that would not change until the 1970s due to Wiyot activism. This is effectively what historian Jean O’Brien calls a replacement narrative of which “the effect of their ideological labor is to appropriate the category 'indigenous' away from Indians and for themselves.” Jean M. Obrien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxii.
All of Matilda and Nancy’s children are listed as part of Arnold Spear’s household in the 1870 census. However, Nancy was not listed, and Matilda passed away in 1867. “United States Census, 1870,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MN6N-KBQ : Tue Mar 05 10:19:26 UTC 2024), Entry for A C Spear and Martha Spear, 1870.
Nancy appears on the 1870 census as part of settler John Mosely’s household in Tablebluff, together with a male Native laborer named John. However, all of her children are found in the 1870 census as part of Arnold Spear’s household, suggesting she had residence in both places. “United States Census, 1870,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MN6N-W8D : Tue Mar 05 10:27:56 UTC 2024), Entry for John Mosely and Marzella Mosely, 1870.
Petition found by Paul Thompson. Ancestry.com, California, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 185–1953 [database on-line], Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: California County, District and Probate Courts, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/8639/images/007602388_00296?pId=78005.
Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 2.
In 2000, Patrick Earhart, grandson of Iyve Hitchock Ortiner, produced an updated version. In 2017, Paul David Thompson, the nephew of Thema Margaret Thompson Snyder, posted the history to Ancestry.com and vastly extended the genealogy and sourcing, creating the opportunity for another group to discover this family.
Davis, “A History and Genealogy of the A. C. Spear Family of Freshwater, California,” Spear Family Papers, 29.
Spear Family Papers, 32.
Between the 1860s and the 1910s, Freshwater was a bustling community supported by the logging industry and the redwood forest. In its heyday, there was a bowling alley, a tailor shop, cabinet shop, barbershop, drug store, post office, grocery store, three saloons, a restaurant, a hotel, and a dance hall. Interestingly, it did not have a church. Community Organization of Wrangletown, Freshwater Chronicle & Cookery, 3rd ed. (1980), page 16. Humboldt County Collection, Special Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA.
Spear Family Papers, 47.
For more information about the policy of local day schooling in Native California, see Nicole Blalock-Moore, “Piper v. Big Pine School District of Inyo County: Indigenous Schooling and Resistance in the Early Twentieth Century,” Southern California Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2012): 346–77; Irving G. Hendrick, “Federal Policy Affecting the Education of Indians in California, 1849–1934,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1976): 163–85.
Community Organization of Wrangletown, Freshwater Chronicle & Cookery, 3rd ed. (1980), page 74. Humboldt County Collection, Special Collection, California Polytechnical University, Humboldt, Arcata, CA.
Spear Family Papers, 54.
In 1924, his activities at school are mentioned in Haskell’s newspaper called The Indian Leader. For example, his photograph is featured on June 13, 1924, page 24.
Spear Family Papers, 55.
Spear Family Papers, 73.
David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Revised and Expanded (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020); Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902–1929 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Meredith L. McCoy and Matthew Villeneuve, “Reconceiving Schooling: Centering Indigenous Experimentation in Indian Education History,” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2020): 487–519.
Though he eventually did set up his own blacksmith shop in Eureka from 1910–1912, he later moved it to Freshwater, where he and his wife Alice operated a popular dance hall next to their home on Alliance Road. The hall was built in similar fashion to the Spear barn of his youth. Spear Family Papers, 52.
For an overview of the celebrated music program at Chemawa, see Melissa Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2014).
In 1977, a cello was gifted to the Clarke Memorial Museum in Eureka, California, where it is still is today and it was recently featured on their Facebook page. The gift was from Gene Kinsman, a nephew of Henry.
Larissa K. Miller, “The Secret Treaties with California’s Indians,” National Archives, 2013, https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2013/fall-winter/treaties.pdf. Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land; Robert Fleming Heizer, The Eighteen Unratified Treaties of 1851–1852 between the California Indians and the United States Government (Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1972), accessed September 2, 2024, https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/arfs003-001.pdf
Ray Raphael, Little White Father: Redick McKee on the California Frontier (Eureka, CA: Humboldt County Historical Society, 1993).
Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 7.
Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 7.
“Deposition of Ivye Hitchcock Ortiner [Wiyot],” Susanville, California, July 8, 1937. Records Relating to Frederick G. Collett v. John Collier Concerning the Federal Recognition of California Indians, 1932–1939. Record Group 21. Entry A1 60A, "Law Case Files, 1934–1938." Case 85496, Frederick G. Collett v. John Collier. FRC Boxes 21–23. National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
Larisa K. Miller, “Primary Sources on CE Kelsey and the Northern California Indian Association,” Journal of Western Archives 4, no. 1 (2013): 1–21, here 8; Valerie Sherer Mathes, “C. E. Kelsey and California’s Landless Indians,” in Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement: Revisiting the History of the WNIA, ed. Valerie Sherer Mathes (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 163.
See William Wood, “The Trajectory of Indian Country in California: Rancherias, Villages, Pueblos, Missions, Ranchos, Reservations, Colonies, and Rancherias,” in “Symposium: 60 Years After the Enactment of the Indian Country Statute—What Was, What Is, and What Should Be,” special issue, Tulsa Law Review 44, no. 2 (2008): 317–64.
In 1969, my 2x-great-grandmother Flora McLean Anderson was buried in the Spear family cemetary. She was the youngest child of Nancy.
Tuluwat Reclaimed is sponsored by a three-year University of California multicampus research grant called Centering Tribal Stories.
Heidi Walters, “Sympathy for the Brownfield: Indian Island is a Model among Cleanup Projects on Humboldt Bay, in More Ways than One,” North Coast Journal, August 26, 2010, https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/sympathy-for-the-brownfield/Content?oid=2131314.
“Call for Proposals: AHR Special Issue on Histories of Resilience.”
