LOREN: We used to have one page -
third grade history -
one page. That's all we got.
Missions, some acorns maybe or something,
primitive tools, and then you turn the next page,
Spanish.
So that's all we were taught in school.
That's all I was taught in school
when I was growing up.
Nothing about we have a 10,000-year-plus culture
rooted in this community, in this part of the world,
in this environment. Nothing about that.
And of course nothing about how we were
dispossessed of that life.
Nothing about that, of course.
VALENTIN: The true history of California
has never been told.
The history of California is really disgraceful
and shameful.
California Indian history does not begin
with the Spanish expedition coming into California in 1769.
California Indian history actually begins with
Pope Alexander issuing the Papal Bull in 1453
that said all Indigenous people,
all Indigenous people around the world
are heathens, pagans, and savages;
that Indigenous people have no soul;
that Indigenous people are the enemies of Christ;
that Indigenous people were to be put
into perpetual slavery;
that Indigenous people, their property and possessions
were to be taken from them.
That's what started it all.
There was a number of other papal bulls.
I believe there was 4 in total
over the next 50 years
issued by other subsequent popes as well.
The final Papal Bull gave Portugal,
the Southern hemisphere, to go out and conquer,
to claim those lands for Portugal,
and to turn and make them Christian nations.
The Northern hemisphere was given to Spain
so they could claim those lands for Spain.
And claim them as Christian nations
for the Catholic Church.
That's where the Mission period started from.
Then it went into Africa,
India, Indonesia,
the Pacific Islands, and then the Americas.
And that's what brought the missions to California.
In 1769 the Portola expedition came up,
and that's what opened the way through.
When they came in, when the missions came in,
a lot of people think that Junipero Serra was here
to evangelize, to proselytize,
to turn those Indians.
Nothing could be further from from the truth.
Junipero Serra came to California
to fulfill the dictate of those papal bulls,
to take the land, to take the possessions.
Junipero Serra was the founder of the California
mission system, first of all.
Prior to coming to California
he was in Mexico.
And he was working down there.
Part of the community he worked with was
a Jewish community that came from Europe.
And they brought them to the New World
trying to take the Jewish out of them
and they promised to become Catholic.
They were looking for a place to survive.
And so whenever he was working with the Jewish
in Mexico, he never could believe that
they truly converted.
And so whenever he came to California,
he was convinced that he had to break the culture
before they would truly convert.
And that's why he was so brutal.
So when they came here they looked to destroy
our humanity, our spirituality,
our culture, and our environments.
The way they would capture the Indians,
a lot of people talked about how
the Indians came to the missions voluntarily.
We have in our oral history,
and it's documented as well,
the soldiers would go out and do an early morning raid.
They would identify the village site that they were--
where they would have the raid,
and then the soldiers on horseback
would attack that village site.
And they would target the women.
They would capture the women.
And they would tie them together
thumb to thumb to form a human chain.
Once all the women were captured
they'd start marching them back to the mission.
And when they marched back to the mission
they knew the children would naturally follow
their mothers.
And they knew that it just a matter of
a short period of time before the husbands
and the men would come in to be with their families.
That's how many, many Indians were taken to
the missions at the beginning of the mission period.
Once they got to the mission they couldn't speak their language.
They couldn't wear their clothing.
They couldn't sing their songs.
The men, from the women, from the children
were separated.
That was to break the culture.
The children--they did not want the parents
passing that knowledge onto the children
until the parents were converted
or the children were converted to Catholicism.
There were whippings, brutality.
I said they separated the women.
The soldiers did not bring their wives or families,
and there wasn't a lot of other women here for them.
And so they would go into that woman's barracks
and just rape the women continuously.
There was slavery.
There was absolute slavery.
The Indians were not allowed to leave.
They were totally controlled by the Church.
That went on to the Mexican period.
There was no labor force here.
They were giving these huge land grants
to the Mexicans who were well connected.
And what they would do is they wanted to get
these huge ranches with cattle, pigs, horses,
sheep, and they were totally ruining the environment
of the Indigenous Peoples,
destroying the environments.
There was no labor force here.
So once again, the Indians were enslaved.
There's a story in San Juan Bautista in 1839.
One of the Indians tried to run away from one
of those ranchos.
They ran out and lassoed him by the neck
and dragged him all the way back,
and left his body there
to terrorize and put fear into the Indians,
that if you run away, this is what's going
to happen to you. That was slavery.
Then came the American period,
the California period.
The year that California became a state in 1848,
that was the year they discovered gold.
Now you have thousands of people from across
the United States and around the world
coming to California to go stake their claim
to their riches.
And they're going up into the mountains
and the Indians were trying to protect their lands
and prevent people from going to their lands.
So all of a sudden we have an Indian problem.
The federal government had a solution
and the California government had a solution.
The federal government was they negotiated treaties,
18 treaties for all California tribes,
covering 8.5 million acres north to south.
Our tribe signed that treaty.
The commissioners that were sent to negotiate
those treaties signed.
They were sent to Washington to be ratified.
The State of California did not want those treaties to be signed.
They passed a resolution to oppose the ratification
of those treaties.
And then they sent a delegation of
California state Senators
to lobby against the
treaties being ratified.
After a period of time, the governor ordered
that those treaties be sealed for 50 years,
and they were never signed.
Our treaties that we signed were
sabotaged by the State of California.
The State of California had their own plan.
They wanted extermination.
The governor in the very first State of the Union
said that there will be a war against the
California Indians.
That is to be expected.
That was their plan.
A couple of years later, one of the very first
treasury bonds that was paid by the State of California
was to pay for the extermination
of California Indians.
Today, they issue bonds for railroad improvement,
for waterways,
for housing,
for schools, for parks.
Can you imagine issuing a bond to pay for the
extermination of California Indians?
They were paid bounty money.
They were paid 25 cents to $5 bounty.
It was pretty average for every dead Indian.
They paid military, militias, rather,
to go up into the mountains to find the Indians
and to kill them.
They were paying people to hunt down human beings
to kill them.
After that period of time, they passed laws to where
they could kidnap the children,
because once again they're trying to
get the Indian out of the children.
It wasn't uncommon for them to kill the parents
and take the children and to sell them.
The prices that I hear are boys typically
would sell for $150 and they were used
for very hard labor.
Girls, there wasn't a lot of females,
there wasn't a lot of women here in California
for the men that were here,
and so girls, they sold for a higher price.
They were sold for $300.
And they were sold for very bad purposes,
to be used by those people
in most cases.
There was indentured servitude.
Indentured servitude is slavery.
There's records of Indians being enslaved
in California into the 1930s.
That's less than 100 years ago.
People were born, people are alive today
when there was legalized Indian slavery
here in California.
This history's never told.
CORRINA: It's really difficult to understand
because many folks aren't taught history,
and what the relationship is to American Indians
in this country.
So there's federally recognized tribes.
That means that they have a relationship
with the United States government,
as sovereign nations. Right?
So that means it's a relationship like
you could say France has with America.
Right? Those are two sovereign nations
that are able to sit down at the table
and work things out.
There is no federally recognized tribes
along the coast of California that was
touched by the missions.
So the missions happened because
Spain actually wanted the land,
because Russia was coming down to the Bay.
And so they really wanted to have a land base.
And so they used this fool, Junipero Serra,
to create these missions to hold the land. Right?
He created the first 9 of the 21 missions.
My ancestors were enslaved in two,
both Mission Delores in San Francisco
and Mission San Jose in Fremont.
So our nations got destroyed in a bunch
of different kinds of ways.
VALENTIN: When the missions were closing,
the very last padre presidente of the mission system -
Payeras was his name -
he wrote to his superiors in Mexico City
and said, We need to find a way to explain
what we've done here.
All we've done is baptize and made
sacraments and bury the Indians.
He says there's no Indians along the
coast of California.
We need to come up with an alibi in
excuse of what happened.
And so they started saying that the Indians
came to the missions voluntarily.
They came for a better life.
They came to learn agriculture.
They came to find God.
That's why the Indians came to the missions.
Weren't they lucky?
LOREN: The State wanted to commit genocide
and one of the ways to do that was to pay
for it to be done.
So Peter Burnett, the lieutenant governor,
and John McDougal, the second governor,
the first full governor of California,
and they were appropriating about $1.6 million of 1850 money,
so I don't know what that would be worth today,
to exterminate the California Indian.
Dragoon squads were formed immediately.
Anybody who had a rifle was supported to go out
and hunt Indians down.
So the way that this was tallied was by the scalp.
So a buck, means an Indian man is a buck,
and a squaw and a child
were worth different amounts.
And then the counties were given money by
the State of California.
So I'm from Del Norte County,
the last county in California on the coast,
going into Oregon,
and so Del Norte County received funds from Sacramento,
then the men would bring in their scalps from the train,
and then be paid off for those.
We do have--
The courthouse was burned to hide all the records
in the county back in the '40s,
but it was interesting how these scalp
receipts have survived. There's 11 of them.
And it says right on the register,
Del Norte County, and it's kind of that
waxy, real nice paper from the past,
and on the front it's black ink if they got
to pay full price,
and they flipped it over and wrote it in red ink
if they owed them money for interest
for scalps that they had turned in
they didn't get paid for that day.
The last Indian that we have documented -
of course, any Indian that was still living traditionally
is called a renegade.
So the last one of our tribe
was run off in the brush in 1902
and shot in the back of the head
and buried in a shallow grave
there at Hiouchi California.
And then we hid out in the brush
around our area.
My great grandmother's generation hid up
in the mountains, and built real temporary
housing, lived up there amongst--
we call them [NATIVE WORD]
You guys might think they're mythology,
but we call them Bigfoot or Sasquatch
in the English language.
We call them [NATIVE WORD]
-and lived amongst them for a while
until they got done butchering off the coast area.
And so they finally got to go back into the flat lands
at the end of that.
But that's why I'm here.
That's where-- I descend out of that.
It happened on both sides of my family.
My father is from the Trinity River.
And of course, unfortunately,
there was literally gold nuggets in the bottom
of the Trinity River,
so every Indian got wiped out in that canyon.
They decided to make Hoopa Valley a reservation,
and so they started dumping all of the residual populations
of Indians onto this one concentration camp
named Hoopa Valley.
That was established later in 1864.
So our people were taken there as well,
and so on and so on.
So it was just a really rugged time.
So scalping was just a way to do that.
So it was a win-win for the guy with the rifle.
So that's where the turning point was.
Things like nits breed lice,
so therefore you must kill the children.
Better dead than red, that was another one.
So those two quotes were coined right there
in southern Oregon in reflection to the
California Indian situation.
So our first massacres under these orders
of the Governor McDougal and Burnett, both,
is that we started getting our first genocidal acts.
Our first one was to setup the town of Crescent City.
So they destroyed the town of Taa-'at-dvn at the peninsula.
And then they setup Crescent City.
And then they decided the next year to get all
the rest of the capitals.
Because our land used to be broken up into regions
called [NATIVE WORD],
and each [NATIVE WORD] has a capital,
and all of its suburbs were loyal to that capital.
So they destroyed [NATIVE NAME]
and then they decided in December
to destroy Yan'-daa-k'vt.
So we have an old religion.
So for thousands of years, hundreds of years,
people would pilgrimage to our center of our world
or axis mundi,
because we believe in Genesis.
We believe the Earth was made and we were
put here with laws to live by.
So our people would come there
on this pilgrimage down the coast
from Yurok territory, our territory,
from way up the coast, and then come in this
huge celebration.
Hundreds of people would arrive.
So the settling population of Crescent City
looked north, just about whatever that is - 9 miles -
and thought, Oh my.
They're thinking they're being attacked by the Indians.
Well the Indians were just coming to worship Genesis.
So they decided to destroy Yan'-daa-k'vt.
So it was in December of 1853,
it's the second single mass killing
of Indians in American history.
450 people died that night there.
And so of course we lived in wooden plank houses,
so they set them on fire.
They burned well.
And as the people escaped into the darkness
and dived into the pond near there,
they were shot dead, shot down and killed.
MARSHALL: 60 years ago, my father told me
Don't tell them you're Indian.
Don't tell them anything.
If somebody asks you your origin,
you tell them you're Italian
or you're Mexican,
or you're Spanish.
And I was too young to understand why.
That's only 60 years ago.
And he told me that because his father
experienced the massacres up there in Weaverville,
up there in the Trinity Alps.
His people were killed in front of his face,
and he didn't want that for his grandchildren.
CORRINA: Just recently, probably in the last
couple of months, I went and talked to
the matriarch of our families - my auntie.
She just made 80 years old.
And I went and talked to her about
doing some stuff with the family.
And she began to tell this story.
And I remember I was sitting in her living room,
and her oldest daughter was there,
my cousin, she's about 4 years older than me,
and another one of her daughters was sitting next to us.
And I said, Auntie, I said,
I was like, How was it in boarding school?
Because she went to Chemawa. All her--
My mom and my uncle.
My mom and my uncle are dead.
So the three of them went to Chemawa Boarding School together.
And she said she had a good time there,
she said because she could be Indian there.
And she said around the age of 12 years old
they took me out of there
and they put me-- they sent me to
San Leandro.
And if you guys know the Bay Area,
there's Oakland and then there's a little town,
San Leandro, right next to it.
She said, They sent me to San Leandro
and I got to stay with this really nice white family.
And this really nice white family, they wanted to
send me to school, not just watch their kids,
but to send me to school.
And San Leandro School District said no
because I was too dark.
She's still alive in Oakland right now.
Her daughters had never heard that story
until we sat down and had that conversation.
Because it hurts. It's so painful.
This is not that long ago. Right?
She was born in the '30s.
This was not that long ago that this happened.
LOREN: So in 1923,
the government had passed a policy
to extinguish our religion.
And it was illegal for us to practice our religion.
They had the authority to come onto your reservation
and take your leaders and throw them in jail,
confiscate your regalia and sell it off
to whomever they wanted to,
and then you were told, You will never dance like this again.
So I was growing up in this schizophrenia.
And my head man that taught me to sing,
he taught me the prayers for Genesis,
he was a Christian too.
But I caught him one time confessing.
He was saying, Well, you know, sisters and brothers,
I think we turned our back on this a little
too quickly, he said.
We should have took longer time to think it through
before we threw it all away.
And from that point on he never, ever looked back.
He taught us to sing. He taught us to dance.
He taught us to pray. He gave us the teachings.
He taught us all the mythos that goes with our cosmological
view of the world.
And except for [INAUDIBLE] stories.
I'm not going to tell you "Coyote Stories" stories
because they're just nonsense.
But he loved to sing gambling songs and so on.
But the point is that we started reemerging
out of the ashes,
and I still believe we're in the ashes phase.
We are trying to shake loose out of this
repressive historical traumatic experience
and embrace our spirituality
and the beauty of our spirituality.
MARSHALL: Our religions,
our ways of life,
our ways of celebrating life and celebrating
imminent times in our lives,
they were obliterated.
We weren't allowed to practice our religion.
We weren't allowed to sing our songs.
We were taught to speak English.
We were taught to speak Spanish in the missions.
We were taught to shut up.
We didn't say anything.
So in our hearts the religion stayed alive.
In our--In the ancestors that survived this Holocaust
those stories still live.
Those stories are now being told to our babies.
And those babies will reincarnate that religion,
and they will reincarnate the practices of their ancestors
in the future. And it's already being--
It's already being brought back through
some of the language revitalization programs
in the state, along with the first thing that comes
after the language is the singing.
After that then becomes the teaching and the doctrines
of what they're singing and dancing about.
CORRINA: Right now I'm trying to breathe.
And I hope all of you will take a deep breath with me.
And let it go.
Because what we just heard
and what I'm just re-experiencing
is historical trauma, and it's very difficult
to sit here and to know that I wake up every day with that,
and that Indigenous people all over this continent do,
all over this world.
And I think that I love to imagine
what this would have been like
prior to contact.
How beautiful our people lived.
And how we could have survived for thousands of years.
And how these other people came here
and really wrote down that we were wandering around.
They found us wandering around.
And I always say, Goddang,
for thousands of years we wandered around
bumping into trees? What the hell?
[LAUGHTER] Right?
But in a short amount of time, all of that is gone.
We're talking about less than 200 years.
We were colonized by 3 different groups of people
in a very short amount of time.
What does that look like and feel like,
and how do you unpack that?
And that when we look at this entire destruction
of the world, we have to look at patriarchy.
When we look at that we have to say
what happened, because there's relations that we have
with this land, and when other people came to this land,
they thought about it in ways in which it was property.
And in their territories, women were also property,
so thereby they were rapable.
It was a way for them to destroy us.
But prior to that, what did it look like?
So if you ever lived in the Bay Area
I was absolutely blessed to always be here in my land,
but I wake up every day wondering if they're going
to destroy any more of our burial sites,
if they're going to pull up any more of our ancestors.
So every single day that they're doing those things
inside of our territory, we have to wonder.
And it continues to pull the scab off
of the historical trauma that's still there.
My ancestors had village sites
all around the Bay.
And along with those fishing village sites
we had things called shellmounds.
And in those shellmounds we buried our ancestors.
It was like anybody else in the world.
We didn't have cemeteries that were far off,
but we had our ancestors right next to us.
And we buried in a way that these mounds became
bigger and bigger and bigger.
And on the top of those mounds
we would have ceremonies,
and we could light fires,
and we could send signals all across the Bay.
My job as an Ohlone woman,
as a woman in my village sites,
as a grandmother and a mother,
is to ensure that we protect those places.
Those original teachings come from those places.
Those are our spaces of--our points of reference.
Our original stories come from there,
the way we're supposed to be in balance with the land,
how we are supposed to--
how there's a reciprocity between
the people and the land.
It's not an ownership, but it's a responsibility
of how we take care of one another.
And when you look at the Bay Area now,
you could say, Where would these sacred sites be?
Because these mounds were older than the pyramids in Egypt.
And these places still exist,
even if there's parking lots on top of them,
or buildings.
So it's my responsibility then to protect what's left,
because if we don't, then the genocide is permanent.
MARSHALL: The truth has to come out.
It has to be told. It has to be recognized.
We need to be able to talk about
what the next steps are.
So I'll fight in court.
I'll fight on the street corner.
I'll carry a sign.
I'll protest.
It's the time to get active again.
It's the time to start to talk in front
of these kinds of forums.
It's time to change the mainstream school system historical records.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be fun.
It's not going to be cheap.
We're going to need all your help.
We're going to need everybody to align
and look at these things.
And this true history has to be told.
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