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</head><body><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br></p><blockquote type="cite"> <br> <br><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">A HISTORY LESSON AT THANKSGIVING</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Sometime during the few years I worked for the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office -- what now seems like a million years ago when I was still a young man -- it was made clear to me by several local Pomo Indians that Thanksgiving to Native American Indians does not mean the same thing that it does to White People.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">To Native Indians, Thanksgiving means a totally different thing.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock was the beginning of the end for Natives, in general -- a time when Natives gave up their land in return for worthless gifts, like beads and other trinkets, or gifts that were full of disease, like wool blankets laden with smallpox, or gifts of alcohol and guns that hastened the Native demise.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">The textbook version is that the White settlers at the first Thanksgiving saw their celebration with the Natives as a friendship being started, knowing that without the help of the Native American Indians, they would never have survived the rough winter. It was a time of celebrating with family and friends and being thankful they were still around to do it.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Today, of course, we celebrate it with our own family with turkey, yams and ham -- and American consumerism and materialism.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Thanksgiving has become a celebration of almost-manic American consumerism and materialism -- Black Friday deals, Cyber Monday, Home Shopping Network, QVC, and Amazon ecommerce.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Thanksgiving may be remembered as a time when the Native American Indians and Pilgrims sat at a long table and ate together, sharing everything they had with one another. But the peace and good vibes would not last long. Over the next two hundred years since the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock, not one single treaty of any of the original treaties between any tribe of Natives and Whites was honored -- not a single treaty! There was only broken treaties -- and genocide, the theft of lands, and forced migration.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">And now?</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">And now, life on the reservation is characterized by widespread poverty, high unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, diabetes, asthma, depression, and suicide. Because law enforcement is weak on the reservation, crime rates against women and children are high -- domestic violence, rape, and child abuse.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Here in Mendocino County, CA, the Round Valley Reservation in Covelo is the final chapter in a long, sad, murderous history.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Over in neighboring Lake County, the history of what the Whites did to the local Pomo Indians is no less appalling.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Pomo men were massacred at Bloody Island in Lake County in what is now regarded by modern historians to be a slave rebellion. Pomo men were forced into slavery. Pomo girls were rounded up and forced into sex trafficking to serve the market for sex after gold was discovered in the Sierra foothills.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Andrew Kelsey committed many of these crimes with his business partner, Charles Stone.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Here's just one example.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">In the fall of 1849, Kelsey forced 50 Pomo men to work as laborers on a gold-seeking expedition to the Placer gold fields. Kelsey became ill with malaria and sold the rations to other miners. The Pomo starved, and only one or two men returned alive to Clear Lake.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Here's another example.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Stone and Kelsey regularly forced the Pomo parents to bring their daughters to be sexually abused by them. If they refused they were whipped mercilessly. A number of the girls died from that abuse.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">And as I previously mentioned, Kelsey and Stone indentured and prostituted the Pomo women. They sold them into sex slavery.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Kelsey and Stone also tried to starve the Pomo to death. The Clear Lake Pomo were not allowed to hunt or fish. The Pomo were worked to death as slaves. Otherwise, Kelsey and Stone saw the Pomo as an unnecessary drain on scarce resources.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">The starving Pomo became so desperate that Pomo leaders, 'Suk' and 'Xasis', took Stone's horse to kill a cow but the weather was bad and the horse ran off. Knowing they would be punished, (Chief) Augustine's wife poured water onto the two men's gunpowder, rendering it useless. Kelsey and Stone were furious and swore revenge. They sent a courier to summon the U.S. Calvary to slaughter the Pomo.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Pomo warriors attacked first. They attacked the house at dawn, immediately killing Kelsey with an arrow.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Stone jumped out a window and tried to hide in a stand of willow trees, but Augustine found him and killed him with a rock.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">The Pomo men took food back to their families and everyone left to join other relatives around Clear Lake. Some went to Badon-napoti where the spring fish spawn was underway. The Bloody Island Massacre was soon to follow.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">On May 15, 1850, a 1st Dragoons Regiment of the United States Cavalry contingent under Nathaniel Lyon, then still a lieutenant, and Lieutenant J. W. Daviso tried to locate Augustine's band to punish them. When they instead came upon a group of Pomo on Badon-napoti (later called Bloody Island), they killed old men, women and children.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">The National Park Service has estimated the army killed 60 of 400 Pomo; other accounts say 200 were killed. Most of the younger men were off in the mountains to the north. Some of the dead were relatives of Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake and Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California. The army killed 75 more Indians along the Russian River.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">One of the Pomo survivors of the massacre was a 6-year-old girl named Ni'ka, or Lucy Moore. She hid underwater and breathed through a tule reed. Her descendants formed the Lucy Moore Foundation to work for better relations between the Pomo and other residents of California.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Later, the Pomo were forced to live in small rancherias set aside by the federal government. For most of the 20th century, the Pomo, reduced in number, survived on such tiny reservations in poverty. Few textbooks on California history mentioned the Bloody Island incident or abuse of the native Californians.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Two separate historical markers record the site.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">The first, placed by the Native Sons of the Golden West on 20 May 1942 on Reclamation Road 0.3 miles off Highway 20, simply noted the location as the scene of a "battle" between US soldiers under "Captain" Lyons and Indians under Chief Augustine.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">California Historical Landmark No. 427, which describes the location as the scene of a "massacre" mostly of women and children, was placed on Highway 20 at the Reclamation Road intersection on 15 May 2005 by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Lucy Moore Foundation, a non-profit organization founded to educate the California public about the Bloody Island massacre.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">One more thing.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">As a final insult, the present-day town of Kelseyville, CA, is named after the criminal, Andrew Kelsey.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Kelseyville has a population of about 3,000.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Why haven't the residents of Kelseyville demanded that the name of their town be changed? It's been long enough.</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">Why isn't our new governor, Gavin Newsom, demanding that the name of Kelseyville be changed?</p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br></p><p class="ox-abe2605970-default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;">**********</p></blockquote><p class="default-style" style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif; color: #333333;"><br> </p></body></html>