Importance of Local History and Why It Matters: The Legacy of Thii-y’sh

Yakima Elyoske, Yoma Odom. Casey Laurie Laver-Thomas.

Aboya Padahake. Chanel Shokowake. Kausha Chidobateke.

Mashumak Lateke. Little Lake Hucknum Balokike. Akos Miwok Tamalusbakeke.

Ahabetapolke, Upper Lake. Akeshaya Danikake. Alima Paruke.

Abedke. Hello, what I told you was I greeted you in a prayer that my great-great-grandfather who was from Yorkville and Hopland but raised in Yorkville taught my brother Sean Joaquin Paddy and he taught me that. And what it is is a blessing and a prayer and I asked him to teach it to me and I memorized it within ten minutes.

But I didn't know what I was saying. And it took probably six months for me to figure it out. And what I did was I dissected each part of it and what it is is it was our great-great-grandfather, it was the way that he greeted people at dances, at events.

And what I said to you was, hello all of you various people who've come here from various directions. All of you various people from the east, various people from the south, various people from the west, various people from the north. Our father loves us very much.

It is he who is guiding us with his hands. His love for us is so much that that's why we're still here. Yahwee, thank you.

And then I told you was, my name is Lori Laiwa Thomas and I am an enrolled member of the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians where my mother is from. But if you ask me where I'm from, I'll always tell you I'm from Point Arena because that's where I was raised. I know the land, I know the landscape, I know the people.

I know how every single person in that tribe is related to everyone else. My knowledge about my other tribes is a little bit weaker, but I spent most of my childhood in Stewart's Point, California where my father was born. My father did not learn English until he was seven years old.

He spoke Kashia dialect, Kashia Pomo dialect. And that's where all of my grandmother's people are from. And that's the spiritual, religious lifestyle that I grew up living, was the dances from the Kashia people.

So my spiritual belief is what we call Ama Ili Bataka, a Kashia Induwaya. That means I'm a true believer of Kashia Indian spiritual ways. That's how I was raised.

But I'm enrolled, because of a federal policy, at my mother's people in Hopland. But I don't know very much, I know a whole lot about my family, but I don't know the history as deep as I know Point Arena. I'm also from Potter Valley, the place where wild barley grows.

I'm a Little Lake and a Huknum Indian, which is, Huknum is an offshoot of the Yuki from Polo. And there was Tosh Yuki, they had Yuknum, that's what Yuki comes from, and then Huknum. They ended up down in Potter Valley, that's where my grandfather's from.

So Huknum is a southern Athabascan tribe. But Little Lake is a Pomo name, that's a group that was out there at the place where wild barley grows. I told you that I was an expert gambler from the mountain by the sea, Stewart's Point, California.

I also told you that I have a grandmother from, I forgot, Pinoleville. I have a grandmother from Upper Lake. I have one great-great-grandmother who is Coast Miwok from Tomales, Tomales Bay.

And I don't even, I'm just learning Coast Miwok, a little bit here and there. And then Yorkville. I'm a Mashumak from Yorkville, Lotte.

But there's no translation for Lotte. And let's see, where else am I from? I'm from about 14 separate villages. I'm also from Elk, Big Flower, Chinobate.

One of my grandparents was from Elk. In fact, the people of Point Arena are four separate tribes merged into one. Out there in the Guala River, Brush Creek, Lighthouse, the Padawa, and mouth of the river, and right there in Elk.

So I come from all four of the people from, we call ourselves Poyas. The name Pomo is a made-up name from an ethnographer who went and studied under Kroger down at UC Berkeley. And that comes from the village that was up in Potter Valley.

It was called Pomo Pomo. It was so big. That's where my great-great-grandfather's from.

They're bear people out there. There's Pomo people, and then there's Athabascan people. But it was reported back in 1890 that there was a roundhouse out there that held 1,000 people.

It was that big. It was a really big city. And so Pomo means magnesite, or the Indian gold, those rocks that they make those salmon-colored beads out of.

And then ma means hole or place. And so that's where that name comes from. But that name is generic, and a lot of tribes today are changing the names of their people to what they call them.

And I'm going to give you a couple examples of what I do in my classes about name changes that are really on fire right now, with this cultural renaissance going on and people reclaiming their languages and reclaiming history and learning about the indigenous history, especially here in California. We had a very brutal experience. And so I came here to share with you some information that I have.

And I just recently did this presentation and I want to share with you why name changing is important to me based on a personal family history that's tied into a major historical event right here in California. And then also I want to just tell you that I graduated from UC Davis in Native American Studies, and our program at UC Davis is a hemispheric program. So we learned all about North America, South America, Central America, and Mexico.

We had to learn all of that. We had to learn the colonization story of all of that. My qualifying exams, I got slapped with, okay, colonization in California beginning with the Russian, Spanish, Mexican Americans, go.

Six sources, cite them now. Oh, that was my one question on my exam that I had to take for my PhD program at UC Davis. I'm currently in what they call ABD status.

I'm still writing my dissertation, and I have a couple chapters going. I hope to file. I thought I was going to be able to do it this year.

It's hard when you work full time, and I recently lost my husband in February. And so I took care of my husband because he was disabled. And so sometimes life gets in the way.

And so I don't care how long it takes me. I'm going to do it my way. And as long as I keep going.

So I will file and eventually become Dr. Thomas. But until then, I currently teach at Mendocino College. And I love it.

I've wanted to be a teacher since I was four years old. I used to play Tribal Office and BIA and all sorts of great made up games on the res growing up and marching around making homework for making everybody on the res was my student. And they're like, oh my God, leave me alone.

So I've been teaching at Mendo now almost five years. And I've taught at Santa Rosa Junior College. I had a tenure track teaching gig there.

I got to Santa Rosa, and I realized that it wasn't for me. I know now why that took them 103 years to hire a Native American. And they asked me that in my interview.

How do you feel being the first Native? And I go, well, it took a long time for you guys to do this. But hey, at least we're going in the right direction, right? You know, what else am I going to say? I also teach at Sac State online. I teach introduction to Native American studies, storytelling.

I teach federal Indian law and policy. I teach Native American history. And as of now, I'm hoping that we can create and groom more folks to graduate from our community colleges, transfer to four years, go get that master's degree.

Someone's got to come home and teach this. And I did teach over here in Fort Frank. It was one of the greatest experiences I had.

Two summers ago, I taught Upward Bound students. And I just want to recognize one of my students. Her name was Allison Sanchez.

And she passed away. And that's the first time I ever lost a student. But I'm thinking about her.

And I ran into another student at Harvest Market. I go, hey, do you remember me? And she's like, yeah. Anyways, I was thinking about her today.

Coming here. And so I taught over. I told the students at Fort Bragg High School, I said, you guys know more about federal policy than most cops in this country.

You're going to walk out of here knowing what tribal sovereignty means. You're going to know what public law 280 means. You're going to know all the major martial trilogy.

You're going to understand why Indians have a distinct political status in this country. And so that was my goal. And I had a wonderful time.

I had two classes of students over here. So that was two years ago. They're all graduating seniors now, by the way.

And so I'm really proud of them. And congratulations on your scholarship. That's excellent.

And I hope you come take my class. I teach in person and online. And so what I wanted to talk to you about today was, when I was asked to come speak, I was like, sure.

I saw who it was recommending me. And she's a good friend of mine. And I didn't come here to tell you guys what to do or how to think.

I came here to share with you why I believe that name changes are a good thing, especially indigenous names. It's changed it all, right? I am really happy. I have invested 15 years of my life into native languages, especially the Pomo language.

I'm a central Pomo speaker. But I'm going to be teaching northern Pomo starting in the fall of 2025 at Mendo Online. It's getting certified right now by the state.

I plan to teach a native language class. But it's going to be indigenous and minority languages, where anybody can get any materials that they need or use to learn a language. And they can come take that.

And it'll be like an independent study practice class. It's pretty popular. It's modeled after the class that we have at UC Davis, where I fell in love with languages thanks to my beautiful mentor, Dr. Martha Macri, who was a linguist.

And she sort of ignited this fire within me. And I started getting involved in local history. And I decided that's what my dissertation was going to be in.

My connection to Fort Bragg, I'm from Point Arena. So I'm a guest here. My connection to Fort Bragg is my mom's brother was from here.

His name was Pat Renick. And he went to school here and grew up here. Other than that, my people's boundary ends at Navarro.

So we didn't come up here past that. We only fished up to Navarro with my father. And I was out there holding his little fishing bucket while he surfished.

So what I want to share with you is that this movement going on with name changes is really, really exciting. Starting with the George Floyd protests going on, a lot of statues are coming down, Confederate leaders taking down Huna Pariserra, Father Huna Pariserra, especially here in California. That has a feeling that, especially for people who are in Southern California, who are mission Indians along the Southern California coast, they have a horrible experience.

We didn't really get the mission system up here. A few of my family from Point Arena actually were taken down to San Rafael. And also my daughter's grandmother, great-grandmother's from here, from Fort Bragg.

But other than that, I see a lot of that going on and a lot of statues going up, going down. And I was glad to see that because I wanted to tell you that I used to be one of those people who thought that Indian native mascots was a silly thing. Why are people up in arms about it? I actually thought that.

I was one of them. I was like, we have so many other things to worry about, you guys. That's not even important.

Come on. I remember saying that. And I was like, who cares? I remember I was one of those people, right? Until when I went back to UC Davis.

And Wes Studi's niece, Jelena Studi, came and did a presentation on campus. And they showed a film called In Whose Honor with Charlene Teeters. Charlene Teeters is an amazing artist.

And she was a grad student single mom at the University of Chicago-Champaign-Urbana. And she described her experience of being a grad student and taking her kids to a game where the chief, Alinowic, put paint on his face and dressed up like an Indian and was jumping around out in the middle of the basketball court. And she said her kids looked like they wanted to shrink.

They were mortified. They were humiliated. They were embarrassed.

They were ashamed. And she got involved with the mascot issue. And I watched as she fought the Redskins.

And she was at Redskin games. And there's men who are dragging her by her hair. And she's holding onto the rails of football stadiums.

And she's protesting with her little sign. And they're spitting on her. And they're pouring beer on her.

And that's when I said, oh, hell no. That is wrong. That is so wrong.

And then I thought, OK, so I say that there's more important issues out there. But if you know what, mascots are usually named after animals and occupations. How is federal policy, my life is governed, all of our lives in here are governed by federal policy and laws.

How in the world are people going to view native issues and take them seriously if they don't even consider them humans? And that's when I changed my mind. And I realized that. And I learned it's OK to change your mind about things.

It's OK to believe in whatever you want to. For me, I changed my mind. And I realized that it was OK.

And I was, OK, we need to change those. And then I have the horrible guilt because I'm a 49er fan. They can change the name.

I wouldn't care. So I was at San Fran. I was born in San Francisco, by the way.

So I understand now. And so it took that film, though, in whose honor, to wake me up. And to then start learning about it and start reading everything I could about it and watching tons of movies about it.

And now I show those in my classrooms and students watch them in my classes. But I always tell my students, I don't come in here and tell you anything. I just fill them with information, how they choose to live their life and vote and go about things.

That's all on other people. I don't take control of that. I'm not responsible for that.

So what I wanted to share with you is a story. When I started doing my dissertation research, it was about the connection between people and place through language and story. And I chose the central Pomo linguistic area.

So my four chapters are Manchester, Point Arena, Ukiah. Oh, I'm also from Ukiah. I forgot to mention that.

Manchester, Point Arena, Ukiah, Hopland, and Yorkville. I'm from all four villages. They all speak the central Pomo language.

We're in a northern Pomo area. So I decided to, I just read everything that I could on all the historical documents. So I was sharing some of those with the folks here today who are part of the change in name.

And I'm going to show you guys where you can also find some good information if you'd like to read. And things like that. So I want to share with you why I'm into changing a name.

And it has to do with the Bloody Island Massacre and the Russian River Massacre, which took place on May 15, 1850, was the Bloody Island Massacre. Four days later was the Russian River Massacre. And I'm going to show you a story about that.

So let's get started. So I named this lecture, The Legacy of Thii-y’sh. So I acknowledge that I'm here.

In the spirit of community, we acknowledge that we are on the ancestral homeland of the northern Pomo speaking peoples of Chewi Beda. I pronounce it Beda. It's Beda in northern Pomo.

So I'm speaking in central, just so you guys know. We recognize, honor, and respect these indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of the lands of water. And this is a blown up screenshot of the Samuel Barrett map of 1906.

It's one of the best that there is. And what Samuel Barrett did, he was the very first PhD student for Alfred Kroeber at Cal. And he's also, Samuel Barrett, why I like him so much is he's a local boy.

He's from Ukiah. And he was a really good researcher. His family owned a store.

If it wasn't for his family allowing my family to come in and trade baskets for food, we would have had a hard time. They didn't have EBT cards. They didn't have food banks.

Indians were in a really tough situation here in California. There was nowhere to go, especially after the 18 treaties were never ratified, slung in a drawer and locked away for 55 years. When gold was discovered, people wanted it.

They wanted it all. And what are you going to do when you're right here next to the ocean? You can't go any further west. You've got to go jump in the water, right? So this is a blown up version of Fort Wright area.

And then I know that you can't see this very well, but there's a map online that you can find that you can actually enlarge and read and really clear without seeing the blurred one. But this is Samuel Barrett's work of the Pomo linguistic stock. This is and beyond Pomo, too.

He was really just wild. These are all the places that already had place names. So this place was already named for thousands of years.

Thousands. I think there's a meme I've seen on Facebook. It's like, my family's been here for 150 years.

OK, and then it shows an Indian with a mastodon. I could teach with memes, too. But just to remind people that all of these places had a name, there's also a video that I show in my class.

It's called California History. It's made by Cal Poly Humboldt and the American Studies Department. The department chair, Katja Riesling-Baldy, where she talks about California history.

And it's beautiful. It's like a 13-minute film. You can find it on YouTube.

And it's really good. And she says, you know that every place in California had a name. There wasn't a creek. There wasn't a river. There wasn't a valley. There wasn't anything that wasn't named.

All these places had names. And then when colonization took place, and we went through four waves here in California, my people had the Russians at Stewart's Point. My people were at Fort Ross at Mattini.

And that's when the Russians and the Aleutian sailors came in. Oh, I'm partial part Aleut. One of my grandfathers is the offspring of a Kashia woman and an Aleutian sailor.

They were not allowed to intermarry. And they had to stay outside of the fort. But they always get together.

Anyway, so that's where I'm from there, too. So in 1850, there were two men over there. There's also a name change.

I'm sure you're aware of the Kelseyville name change that's been going on. It's really inflamed. It's a really hostile situation.

Some of my students are working with the Scott. They're from the Scott's Valley tribe. And it got so bad that the high school graduating class voted to not even have a land acknowledgment read at their graduation ceremony.

But this massacre that took place over there, this was the result of two men, Kelsey and Stone, who were very brutal. And what they were doing to women and native women had been subject to violence since day one when we have to deal with colonial efforts of overthrowing. Pocahontas is the first MMIW.

When I kept seeing that reference of Indians being called Pocahontas or squaw, that has got to be the absolute worst thing. I've never had anyone call me that to my face. And I hope I never experience that ever.

But the issue with Pocahontas, too, that was a real person. That was a Disney character. She has real descendants and everything.

But anyway, so those two men, they were very brutal. And they were doing things. They would basically just go right into your house and just grab your wife and just have sex with her right in front of you.

Your kids, 7 year-old girls, didn't matter. Threw them on the floor right there. All of these things were happening over and over.

It was really gross. What happened to Indian women and little girls, it was so brutal that they actually, that's when they decided to kill those two men. As a result of killing those two men, the US Army attacked every single Indian from Benicia all the way in.

They marched in from Benicia , came in through Calistoga, Sonoma, Napa, come up through Middletown, went over St. Helena Mountain, went on into Middletown, killed everyone that they saw. Went over to where my husband's people were from, Elam, Clear Lake Oaks. My husband is from Elam and Lakeport.

He's also from Mission. That's where he was from. So they wiped them off.

Then they headed over to by Robinson Rancheria and it was right there where they killed all those people who were out there at the lake. And it was pretty brutal. After they did that, this is where it took place.

So there's Clear Lake and this is where it actually took place. It says that the massacre was up at the top of the lake, but that's not true. This map is incorrect.

That's more like Upper Lake. The massacre actually took place over by where the R is in Clear Lake in the middle of that white map of the lake right in there. So those soldiers actually came in.

But what they did, though, this happened on May 15, 1850. There was about 800 killed altogether, including all of the Indians that were all through Napa, Santa Rosa, Calistoga, all through Waco area, and then coming in all through Middletown, and then coming up through Lower Lake, Koi Nation, Elam, and then hit Robinson. After they killed all those people at Clear Lake, they kept going.

They went to Potter Valley. My great-great-grandfather was from Potter Valley. He was.

I should have put his picture in there. He's a really cool guy. I have a picture of him wearing mountain lion skins with bones in his ears.

It was hardcore. They were bear people. They were not Pomo.

They were bear dancers. Not like Pomo dancers with flickers and things like that. But anyways, what they did was they headed up to Pottery Alley, and they had these Indian runners going all over the hills telling people, they're coming.

They're coming. Hide. Potter Valley’s got the Eel River there.

The terrain, the landscape is very different. So they were able to hide. And they kept coming.

Then they hit the Russian River, and they kept going all the way up to the river, and they came to a village south of Ukiah called Shoka Chow, east of the house. Chow means house. Shoka East.

So my people over there, they had lots of roundhouses. They had multiple roundhouses. There was like five.

They had a subterranean one, semi-subterranean one, and then they had one on top of the ground too. So there were 800 Indians killed altogether, and then they killed 75 right there at Shoka Chow. One of those that was a survivor, there's always these wonderful little survival stories.

That's what I love. There's a six-year-old little girl. Lucy hid in the bloody water behind the tules with her mother at Badona Poti, an old island called Bloody Island, after the dragoons and a militia under the command of Captain Nathaniel Lyon massacred 150 to 200.

They don't know how much of Indian women, elders, and children they had. The dragoons were on the horseback. They had those long rifles with the knives on the end.

That's what dragoons are, and they did brutal things. It was very, very bloody. Her name was Lucy Moore Nika, and she survived.

These are all her descendants. One thing I learned is that a lot of these survivors of these massacres, these little girls, they grew up to be old women, and they have very large families.

So, these are her family members, and this is out at the actual rock. There's a historical marker. The one out on the highway calls it a battle.

Battles are fought by soldiers, not little kids. And, you know, I mean, most of the attacks, they take place like, you know, warfare. Warfare rules.

Three in the morning, like, at least expecting lots of blood. That's what they call it for the island. Another lady is Sally Bell, and she states, my grandfather and all of my family, my mother, my father, and we were around the house and not hurting anyone.

Soon, about 10 o'clock in the morning, some white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. I saw them do it.

I was a big girl at the time. Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the bush where I ran and hid. My little sister was a baby, just crawling around.

I didn't know what to do. I was so scared that I guess I just hid there a long time with my little sister's heart in my hands, and I felt so bad, and I was so scared that I just couldn't do anything else. Then I ran into the woods and hid there for a long time.

I lived a long time with a few people that had gone away. We lived on berries and roots, and we didn't dare build a fire because the white man might come back after us. So we ate anything we could get.

We didn't have clothes for a while, and we had to sleep under logs and hollow trees because we didn't have anything else to cover ourselves with. It was cold then in the spring. Tisa Oros wrote this in a book called Tam Tam that I used in my California class.

It's really a good book. It actually answers a lot of books in the future written by young people, young people essays, essay winners like yourself. But she was a very extreme case of what she experienced in her lifetime.

She, too, grew up and had lots of children and lots of grandchildren and just a big, massive family. So these are stories of survival, resiliency, despite the odds. My brother handed me, gave me this photo.

He found it in my aunt's collection, and he said, this is Joe Beattie. Joe Beattie was Mary Knight's mascot. Joe survived the massacre by the soldiers that came over the Russian River Valley after the Bloody Island Massacre in 1850.

He was at a yoga job between Yokeo and Hopland at the time. He was hidden in a small backwater swamp by his grandmother, who was killed in the raid by the soldiers. The soldiers continued on down the river through the villages of Chiego, Sillala, Tatum, Largo, Gachayo, killing any and all Indians that came across until stopping in Hopland at Chanel.

Hopland scouts had heads up, and Fernando Feilas helped hide all of our members by having them go behind Duncan's Peak and stay there for almost two weeks. They built no fires, just like the other lady said. That's a common thing you'll hear.

They built no fire, they find us. Feilas told the soldiers that the Shilkawa tribe had left the area permanently due to continued bear attacks, because they knew that Pomo people, oh, you know those Pomos, they're superstitious, they don't like bears, they're out of here, they're not here. So the soldiers hung around Hopland skeptical of the story for a few days, but eventually they headed back to Benicia.

And that's Joe Beattie. He was a little boy. Guess what they did? The soldiers took him back to Benicia with them, and then they brought him back.

We don't know how or why, but that's a miracle in itself, that he even survived that. They took him, they took him with them. He rode to Benicia with the soldiers, then they brought him back.

So Joe Beattie lived. He's a Hopland Indian. And this is where the story of survival is.

This is called Sea Knoll. If you ever drive through Hopland, and you see that big chocolate chip or like sugar loaf type of mountain, there's sugar loaf down here by Elk, but that mountain there, it's a place of survival. And every time I drive past it, I don't get sad.

I feel good. I'm like, wow, I'm here today because somebody lived. So every time I drive past it, and now my daughter drives past it when she comes up from Santa Rosa, she's a student at Santa Rosa Junior College, and she comes up to see me in Yukon.

So that's called Sea Knoll. And we can't figure out the translation for it. So this is Sarah.

Her name is Sarah Joaquin, also known as Theish. Now I found these papers in my mom's storage when my mom died 20 years ago, and I sort of have been piecing together this history. And this is going to be in my dissertation.

I'm still working on it. But she was from Yokeo. Now she was originally rumored to be from Upper Lake, is what my sister told me.

We don't know. We don't even know what her mom's name was, the one, the lady who was killed. But this is, she married a white man.

His name was John McKnight. He was actually born between Ireland and England. And when he came to Ellis Island, he dropped the Mick and just kept Knight.

And so she married a white man and had four kids, and they were officially referred to as half-breeds, you know, the very first of their time, right? She's also buried at Yokeo Ranch. I found her grave. I was out there snooping around in the cemetery.

I won't do that anymore. Ran into, came up, faced the face of the mountain, went over to Point Arena, and it looked at me like I was nothing and ran off. She was the mother of the famous basket weaver, Mary Knight Benson.

And that's her holding her basket at her house out in Yokeo. Yokeo is an independent Indian community. It's not a fairly recognized tribe.

It's an independent Indian community that exists between Hopland and between Talmadge and Hopland. So that's where she's buried. I'm always contacting Berkeley and asking them for cool recordings, like, hey, do you have any more recordings for me? And they said, but we do.

We have a new one. We just transcribed this, and it's now online. This was a recording, and this was documented in 1955 by Stephen Knight.

And it says, pretty soon they started shooting in there, shoot everything they saw, and started to close in. Water wasn't that deep, I guess. They went in there.

Why, if they'd seen an Indian jump up, why they would shoot them? They shot everything they saw, shot my Indian grandmother, shot her dad hiding in there. My mother was a girl, maybe five, six years old, maybe not that old, and there was a ditch running from that place down into the river. And there was some Indians that lived across the river too, part of the tribe.

So my grandfather said that after they shot his wife, he took the oldest girl on his back, just clung to his back, and he crawled in this little ditch, and he crawled down to the river, cut across, went over there. And he left the girl with an aunt of his that lived on the other side. Soldiers didn't bother those people over there.

And then he went back to get the baby in the basket. He laid the baby on a log like that in the water. He came back and crawled back there.

The baby was dead. When he got back, they killed everything, carried my mother out. That was his exact words.

I listened to this whole recording, and I transcribed it word for word. And that's him. That's Steve Knight.

That's his brother Jim Knight. And that's his other brother John Knight. And that's their sister Mary.

And that's me at UC Berkeley holding her basket. I was crying like a baby. I was like, whoa, I'm holding Mary Knight Benson's baskets.

So I got those when, this was at UC Berkeley, but I also got to hold her other baskets in Washington, D.C. I got to go on a fully paid two-week research trip into the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, and everything, Library of Congress, everything. I was just like, I'm an archive fanatic. So my dream is like to go to archives and museums and hang out and sit at Disneyland.

So that's Sarah. That's her son, John. That's John's daughter, Genevieve, whose daughter is Shirley, who is my mom.

That's me. That's my daughter. That's my son.

I don't have grandkids, so I have a grandcat. My kids don't have kids. I just didn't get lucky there.

But yeah, so certainly gets in the family photo too, because she gets presents every Christmas. But I am Sarah's great-great-granddaughter. And I'm so thankful that she survived, that six-year-old little girl.

And I always ask my students, you know, would I be standing here today if she didn't? Probably not. So I'm thankful for that story of survival, that she made it. And I celebrate that almost every day.

And that's where they hit that beautiful mountain. There's nothing sacred about this mountain as far as religious or spiritual reasons. What it is, is it was a place that allowed people to hide in it.

There was lots of caves in there. They didn't have fires. They ate rodents.

They did what they had to do. And this is why I think names should be changed. Because the man who led this killing, who killed my grandma, is Nathaniel Wyatt.

He was born in 1818. He co-led the massacre with Davidson. They came in from Benicia.

He went rogue. He didn't have any orders to do this. There was no official orders for him to do this.

He did it on his own. He just went rogue and he said, let's go kill Indians. And they did.

He's the first union general to be killed in the American Civil War. He also fought in the Seminole War that you were talking about. He also fought with them too.

And I just learned about this by doing my dissertation research, by going to the Native American Heritage Commission website. And that's where I discovered that that woman that was killed, that was my grandma. I didn't realize that was my great-great-great-grandmother.

This is him. There was a statue actually removed. The Confederate supporters actually removed a statue like this of him because they didn't like him because he was for the Union.

But that's what he looks like in his attire. And he actually had, where is it? He has a state park named after him. Lyon Street in San Francisco was named after him.

There's a Lyon Street in Nevada and yeah, named after him. There was a special group within the military that was named like a special operations group named after him. And so, because this is symbolic of what life was like for my family when we had to hide breathing through tubers or breathing through Thule.

But this was what life was like after gold was discovered in California. And it's a miracle. And that film that Katja Balding uses in her class about Cal Poly Humboldt, she spells it right out and says, you know, I'm here today.

She says, my grandfather told my mom, granddaughter, you're here today because some minor was a bad shot. That's how close it really came and how close it came for my grandma almost not making it to be able to have all those children. They're 15 children.

My grandmother had 15 siblings all together. But this is an artist's rendition of that. And that's a dragoon which very well could be how my grandmother died.

So when I see statues that are put up to celebrate folks, especially like people like Huna Parasara, who actually stated right out that they are assaulting and sexually violating little girls in public and anybody who tries to stop them gets shot. Those are his journals and his words, which is why almost every California Indian rose up when it came time to canonizing him. And they started to take the statue down.

They took a statue down actually over at the state capitol and they put up a California Indian dancer, which is really nice. They're going to put the other one in storage sort of like in a museum where people can still use it. I don't get involved in those terms.

I don't believe in them. I don't agree with things like woke and cancel culture to me. It's a little bit too simple and shallow for my thinking.

I wanted something more robust than that. And I don't agree with that, with those types of terms, those political steering terms. But I am a revisionist as far as a Native historian and scholar and that's because our stories and our perspectives were left out.

We have to realize that this country was actually built for land-owning white men and women were their property. And did you guys know that the United States borrowed the idea for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights from the Haudenosaunee people, the great law of peace? Yeah, except for they didn't copy and borrow the part about women being the boss. Okay, you probably heard of Iroquois, right? Iroquois, the great Iroquois nation.

It's a confederacy of the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Onondaga. Thick, huge. Guess what? That whole confederacy is run by the clan mothers.

The women decide the chiefs and each clan, so there's about 14 to 16 chiefs for each of those six tribes. And the women, the clan mothers, have assistance sort of like congressional aides, sort of like our congressmen and senators have congressional aides. They advise them, they do the similar thing, except for in the Haudenosaunee people, property is passed down through the women's line also, so they don't borrow that part.

But the women can overrule that confederacy. Any decision that they make, even today, they're like the Supreme Court. They uphold the law within that nation.

So that was interesting, I thought. And then I just wanted to share this with you. I don't know if any of you have ever seen this, but I found this photo and it's of Indians fishing right here in Fort Bragg in 1860.

They've got the burden baskets. They're surf fishing, right? They got their burden baskets and they're using the stage where they hold it right down and they're just catching the fish as they come back in. I thought that was pretty cool.

I have to find the source though. It's somewhere. I have so much stuff.

I probably have 80,000 images that I've been like digging around at museums because I'm such a crazy person. But I tell stories too. I do storytelling sessions.

I tell really scary stories. Sometimes they're not PG either. They'll scare you.

But my students love them. I have one hour office hours online and my students won't leave me. Sometimes they stand there for three hours.

They're like, tell us one more. Okay, Westport. Okay, I'll tell you about Westport.

I'll tell you about the little blue people. Little blue people living in Kings Mountain Ridge. I'll tell you about the little people that live down here.

I'll tell you about the little people with the big bottom teeth on Branswell Road. All sorts. And Point Arena, Hawkland, Stewart's Point.

And then my husband's got all his stories too. But anyways, I have stories. I won't be able to do that today, but maybe another time or if you ever take my class.

You can always take my class too. I teach online. I hope to come back here next summer because it was really a lot of fun.

I really like the Coast Center. Okay, my cousin told me this story. This is Point Arena.

And my cousin, her name's Fort Silva. She lived to be 95. She was our spiritual leader, John Boston's granddaughter.

And she told me that a long time ago on a minus 2.2 tide that her grandfather said that the parent of all abalone was visible. The very first abalone in the ocean. And he said it was north of the lighthouse over there in those rocks over by where the gazebo is sort of behind the lighthouse.

I don't know where, but she just said, this is what my grandfather's prophecy was. He predicted the San Francisco quake, by the way. But he said, I mean, he could go down there with a stick and he could make those abalone spawn.

He was a very, he lived to be 127. He was very powerful. Yeah, they were very healthy back then.

Little tiny doorways. I was like, oh my God, no diabetes there. Parallel abalone.

He says that if that first abalone ever dies, that's when we know the world that we know it as it is today will come to an end. But it won't end for everyone. He said the lucky people will be the ones that go.

Those survivors are going to kill each other over that apple sitting on the table. And I go, oh my God, he's talking about the walking dead. Because I watched the walking dead too.

I said, you guys, so I teach them how to make acorn mush, how to survive, learn how to grow food, plant fruit trees, learn how to dry food, canned food, and do all you can for in case you need it someday. And my dad says always, if the world runs out of good food and the ocean's not polluted, there's always pashak, which is, they call it mule ass. I don't even know what the real, I think it's sea panty.

It looks sort of like an abalone. It's got that jelly, like donut roll in the middle. You actually cut that out and then you could take that, that, it looks like, I don't know, it's a little circle.

You could, you could fry that up. My dad said it's like hamburger. I've never eaten that.

But that was, he said that someday that that's going to happen. And that's Lord who told me the story. That's my grandpa who it happened to.

And I just want to thank all of you. I want to thank you for inviting me. I want to thank all of you for coming.

I appreciate it.