Killing Pomos part 1

There is no statute of limitations for the crime of genocide. It is the same as for murder. When it happens, amends should be made for that crime just as it is for murder.

For two hundred years, since the coming of the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Americans, Native Americans have been under systematic murderous attack… either directly or by sins of omission. Their numbers have been decimated by genocide, chemical poisoning, culture murder, and disease. Family and tribal ties were broken by murder, enslavement, rape, and the organized government removal of people from their homes.

Just before gold was discovered in California, in 1848, there were, approximately, two hundred and fifty thousand Indians in California. By 1870, twenty-two years later, an estimated thirty thousand remained in the entire state. In 1910 the National Census recorded a bare seventeen thousand Native Americans in California. Their culture had been eliminated and their lands taken from them by illegal confiscation. The Native American tragedy is a calamity of such monumental proportions that it must rank with the Holocaust.

Massacres

The Temescal Massacre of 1842 and the Bloody Island Massacre of 1849 are two of the instances of assaults on the Native Americans during the period of 1800 and nearly to present time. The Bloody Island Massacre, revenge for the killing of Stone and Kelsey, was noticed in The Humbodlt Times in Eureka, California. The newspaper carried this message:

‘Let the Indians understand that they, as tribes, will be held responsible for crimes. No special pains will be taken to find the individual perpetrators.

Any ten (men) will be taken and hung if the guilty are not brought forward and hung.’

The newspapers carried on the pronouncement.

January 17, 1863: ‘Good Haul of Diggers (Indians). Band Exterminated.’

April 11, 1863: ‘ Good Haul of Diggers. One white man killed. Thirty-eight Bucks Killed, Forty Squaws and Children Taken.’

May 23, 1863, Editorial: ‘ The

Indian must be exterminated or removed…This may not be the most Christian-like attitude. It is the most practical.’

March 31, 1853, The Daily Alta California headline was, EXCITING NEWS FROM TEHAMA

‘The Indians have committed so many depredations in the north of late the people are enraged against them. They are ready to knife them, shoot them, or inoculate them with smallpox…all of which have been done’

The Spanish and Mexican overlords kept the Natives as worker-slaves as a matter of policy. Punishment for failing to follow the rules could and often did result in death without trial to the transgressing Native Americans. During the eighteen hundreds, posses of armed men hunted Indians who fled captivity with the purpose of killing or keeping them as slave-workers.

Chemical poisoning

The deliberate and systematic destruction of a race sometimes backfired. If such acts against the Natives were not deliberate, they occurred out of ignorance.

Government workers were careful when they used chemicals to rid the settlers of pests around Clear lake. In 1949, Clear Lake was surveyed and the testers determined Clear Lake’s total volume. Insecticides were applied in oh-sosafe dosages of one part chemical to seventy million parts of water to eliminate the Gnats.

A year later, when the water of Clear Lake was tested, there was no trace of the poison. The gnats were gone. The DDD had disappeared. Wonderful. The gnats no longer bothered the fishermen or the people living around the Lake.

The pesky chemicals were still there. It had gone to ground and continued to do what DDD does to living creatures. The Grebes began to die. A handsome bird, the Grebe is white-necked with a black head. It rides low over Clear Lake as it searches the water for food. On its back rides the baby grebe all soft gray down and nestled under Mama’s feathers. No more. Eleven years later the thousand nesting pairs had dropped to thirty pairs.