City returns land to tribe
Nearly 160 years after a massacre, tribe gets island back
Eureka transfers deed to Indian Island, site of a notorious 1860 massacre, back to the Wiyot people.
California is in a moment of long-overdue reckoning with the state’s original sin: the bloodsoaked treatment of the people who inhabited this land long before any white settlers ever dreamed of Manifest Destiny.
In recent months, we’ve seen Gov. Gavin Newsom issue a formal apology that refused to mince words (“It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was,” the governor said), along with a rethinking of the symbolism of mission bells.
Last Monday, history was made in a packed rec center on the waterfront in Eureka, when the city signed a deed effectively returning Indian Island to the Wiyot people.
On the rugged North Coast of California, there is a cluster of islands in the deep waters of Humboldt Bay. Indian Island, which is composed mainly of tidelands and stretches about a mile long, is the largest of those islands. And it had belonged to the Wiyot people since long before California was a state or the United States a country.
“Indian Island was the center of our world,” said Cheryl A. Seidner, a former tribal chairwoman and current Wiyot cultural liaison.
“That’s where we would go to pray. That’s where we would have ceremonies.”
The Wiyot’s ancestral territory encompassed the area around Humboldt Bay, extending from Little River near Trinidad to Bear River Ridge near Scotia, and east to Berry Summit and Chalk Mountain.
If you could somehow pull a trip wire and watch the last millennium of history play at warp speed, you would see empires rise and fall around the globe, all while Indian Island remained in the hands of the Wiyot.
They were probably here, hunting and fishing and dancing, when Genghis Khan breached the Great Wall of China and King John signed the Magna Carta and the Aztecs established Tenochtitlán.
Historically, “the island was home [to the Wiyot tribe] for at least 1,000 years, according to an archaeologist, and since time immemorial, according to the tribe,” as the Humboldt County alternative weekly the North Coast Journal put it.
But you already know where this story is going. These stories never end well.
In 1860, Indian Island was sold off without the consent of the Wiyot people, just days before an unthinkable massacre nearly decimated the tribe.
The massacre was so horrific that it garnered national attention even in those Wild West days of early California statehood. It continues to stain the annals of the state record as “one of the most notorious massacres in California history,” according to the
San Francisco Chronicle.
As the Wiyot completed their weeklong world renewal ceremony, with many of the men away gathering supplies, a small group of white settlers made their coordinated, vicious attack on multiple Wiyot communities.
Somewhere between 60 and 250 people — primarily women, children and the elderly — were slaughtered. The perpetrators were known locally but never faced formal charges.
Bret Harte, a writer who would later become one of early California’s first literary stars when he edited the Overland Monthly, is a large part of the reason we still know what happened on Feb. 26, 1860.
Harte, an Albany, N.Y., native trying his hand at frontier life, had been hired as an assistant editor at a fledgling local weekly.
He was just 23 at the time, but his boss happened to be temporarily out of town — putting Harte at the helm of the paper and in charge of the first draft of history.
He produced a searing, unequivocal condemnation of the events that described the carnage in graphic detail. His words would be picked up in the San Francisco papers, and later even make their way east by steamship to be reprinted in the New York Times. There are now libraries and streets and schools named for Harte around the state, but at the time he faced death threats and nearly lost his career for his writing about the massacre.
Monday’s rectification of past sins had been a long time coming.
Eureka has owned the majority of the island since the 1950s. An effort to regain the sacred land has been underfoot since the 1970s, Seidner said.
Tribal land is rarely restored, and there are virtually no examples of a municipality voluntarily doing so.
Robert Anderson, the Oneida Indian Nation visiting professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington, said that he didn’t know of any other municipalities that had returned land to a tribe.
But it’s difficult to know for sure.
“The only way we have this information is just by hearing it through the grapevine, more or less,” Anderson said, mentioning a church he knew of in Alaska that had returned a patch of ill-begotten land to tribal ownership some years back, as well of instances in which the federal government and private entities had returned tribal land.
“But it’s not something that happens very often,” he said.
In 2000, the tribe bought 1.5 acres on the eastern edge of the island for $106,000 — a sum raised over the course of several years by selling fry bread, T-shirts and $10 posters, among other things. The city deeded 40 more acres to the tribe in 2004, but still controlled the majority of the land on the island.
The Eureka City Council voted to return its remaining 202 acres to the Wiyot in December 2018, and it was made official during Monday’s ceremony. There are a handful of remaining private homes, but the vast majority of the island is now in tribal hands.
There was extensive environmental contamination on the site when the tribe reacquired that first parcel in 2000. From the 1870s to the 1990s, a ship repair facility had operated on the island, leaving a toxic legacy of paints, solvents, metals and petroleum products on the sacred earth.
“The tribe spent years and years doing restoration work,” tribal administrator Michelle Vassel said.
In recent years, candlelight vigils have been held every February to coincide with the anniversary of the massacre.
“Those vigils brought out a lot of people, both Indian people and nonIndian people, and I think that they were really a part of the healing process,” Vassel said, explaining that the environmental restoration had also been a part of that healing process.
On Monday evening, Steve Watson, Eureka’s chief of police, took to Facebook to reflect on what he had witnessed earlier in the day at the transfer ceremony.
“It may have been 160 years too late, but returning the island to the tribe was the right thing to do,” Watson wrote. “While no one living today is personally responsible for those terrible events (the massacre and the theft of the island etc.), we as a community had the moral obligation and present ability to right an incalculable wrong in a meaningful way that exceeds mere symbolism.”
And what has long been locally known as Indian Island will now be Tuluwat. “The village side was called Tuluwat, so now the island itself is going to be dedicated as Tuluwat Island,” Seidner said.
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