(guitar strumming) - For California Indian
history, specifically, I think it's important
for people to know that California has always
been a populous place. It's home, right now,
to 109 to 111 tribes. But back then, you're talking
about tribes everywhere. (light music) There is no empty space
of wilderness that exists in this place that we
currently call California. The way you know that there were Californian Indians everywhere is that every place had a name. There was not a mountain
or a field or a region that there wasn't a tribe
who had already named it. For the sciences, I think
that the land bridge theory has always been sort of a
first point of knowledge about native people. But there have been new
studies that have shown that there was humans in
this side of the Americas over 100,000 years ago, which would mean that that is
around the same amount of time in which they say people were
sort of first leaving Africa. And so we are asking people to complicate how they understand who are
as indigenous peoples here. What we say is we're from this place - That's a real and true
belief that we have. We are a part of the
land and the land is us and we didn't migrate
from some other place. We've always been there. - We've always been a part of our land and not above it, not
below it, but equal to. And we have our role. Our roles come from that engagement and come from seeing what needs to be done to make things the best
way that they can be. - So all this is very important
for people to understand because I think sometimes they think California Indian people are here, but they're not really doing
much with the space. There's so much evidence
of, like, agriculture. There's evidence of large areas
in which they're tending to. There's evidence of ways
in which they're shaping what we now think of as
the natural landscape. And then colonization happens. (somber music) Most California Indian
scholars, they call it invasion. So we're being invaded. - When Cabrillo was first on
one of his ships in 1500s, burning of the land is
what actually gave away people on that land. That was, like, the first
thing that, you know, colonizers saw, was our
traditional burnings of the lands. - You're talking about
three waves of destruction. From the start of these waves, there's not really a time period in which Californian Indians can recover from what's happening to them. So the first wave of destruction is the Spanish mission system. They built the first mission in San Diego. There's 21 missions that
they built in total. This is Father Junípero Serra. And they're bringing
people into the missions in the hopes that they can
create this labor force to be able to establish
this extension of Spain. The mission system is effectively an enslavement system of
California Indian people. The missionaries bring along
with them Spanish soldiers. The soldiers are written
about in these records as being perpetrators of sexual violence, not only against women, but also children. Junípero Serra actually talks
about that in his journals. He's like, they're sexually
assaulting women and children in front of people. And when people try to
stop them, they get shot. I mean, it's a very
violent type of situation. The mission system sort of
stops around San Francisco and so up here in Northern California, what they say about us is we
were contacted relatively late in the sort of colonization cycle. We'd had contact with some explorers who had come through, people that were looking mostly for gold. And at a point, they find gold. And this is where you
get the sort of, like, massive influx of the gold rush. (somber music) - And it just came, like, overnight and it came in hard. And life just changed
drastically just immediately in a lot of ways for California people. (somber music) - They're not here so that
they can set up a colony or so that they can
establish a labor force. They want gold. They will kill whoever's in the way. They will take apart whatever
needs to be taken apart. They'll do whatever it takes. The thing about the gold rush
that people don't think about is that it was actually an environmental destruction as well. And then on top of that,
they are setting up a political system and a state
system of laws and governance that will legalize the genocide
that they want to commit against California Indian people. - Our first lieutenant
governor, Peter Burnett, saw this huge population
of Indians in the state. And so he's the one that, you know, charged the war of extermination
on the California Indians. And we lost, you know, probably around 80% of our total population in
just a short period of years. - The early settlers wanted the resources, they wanted what would
make them rich faster. But instead of asking the tribe
to help them or assist them, they say, well, since the tribe probably won't just give it to us,
we're just gonna wipe them out. We're gonna massacre them. We're gonna take everything for ourselves. (somber music) - Each region of California
is allowed to set their own sort of, 'What are we gonna pay for a scalp or a head?' But when you look at advertisements, what you see is that
they're advertising them at things like $5 a head
and 25 cents per scalp. The first year that they do this, they pay one million dollars. The state of California
says that it has paid one million dollars for
killing Indian people. The second year they do it,
it's one million dollars. In this region, every
single tribe in this region would have some kind of stories about the violence that
came out of the gold rush. My great-grandfather, you know, his family is from Karuk country. His great-uncle, his mom had
lived through the gold rush. And he was born sort of,
like, at the tail-end of this period of time and he would always say to my mother, you know, remember, granddaughter, you're here because some
miner was a bad shot. Like, that's how close
it is to who we are. (light music) - When modern contact, we had to forgot about
all our relationships. We had to forget about all of the sciences and we had to forget about
all of the philosophies. We had to forgot about everything that was ingrained in us
for thousands of years. To a shattered existence. (somber music) - They would take your
kids from your family and take them to boarding schools. And then assimilate you, you were not to practice your cultures. You're not to practice your traditions. You're supposed to practice, you know, I hate to say it this way,
the white man's religion. We're gonna Christianize you. You're gonna follow our god. - I know that I'm a product
of forced assimilation. I know I was stripped of some
of the smartest information a human being can have and I know I don't have that now. But I know it's attainable over time. And we're on the right path. - There's all these great
moments of native people making sure that they were
trying to hold on to things. Like, fighting back and
making plans for the future. It's palpable in Humboldt County. (chainsaw whirring) (light music) - The Native American community and especially Wiyots and
the surrounding tribes were put through a lot. It wasn't just the Wiyots, it
was Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk. We were all put through a
lot during the early years. Here we are, we're growing. We're becoming a stronger nations. We're working together with each other to create a positive thing. And not only us working with
each other's sister tribes, we're working with the cities, the governments that surround
us, the schools, HSU, to make this more positive. - Humboldt State University is within the aboriginal territory
of the Wiyot people. And then we have several other
large tribes around here, the three largest in California, the Karuk, the Yurok, and the Hupa. So being that we are in the backyard of three of the largest tribes, we can draw off and partner
with some of our local tribes to bring that extra educational component to our STEM and natural resource students. Here at the Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering program, and Diversity in STEM, we go by INERSP+. Our services generally provide
navigational suggestions to students, assisting
them navigate the college in Natural Resources and Sciences. We often are enriching that experience with extra curricular activities coming from an indigenous perspective. So bringing up our ancestors
practices, and techniques of managing landscapes, melding
them or braiding them in with the scientific method
and innovative technologies. - In Native Studies, we're
doing a sort of broad spectrum of what it's like to learn
from indigenous peoples and cultures and knowledges so that we can build a better world, build a better way of knowing. It's about how we learn
with and from native people instead of disciplines
historically that have focused on the study of Native American people. - My paternal grandmother
was one of the founders of the Indian Tribal Education
Personnel program, the ITEPP, back in the late '60s and early '70s. Her and a bunch of other
mothers and grandmothers, they were the ones that kind of started a lot of other community
programs, our healthcare programs, our education programs. I always think it's a pretty amazing story 'cause a lot of those women, her included, had attended boarding schools, and for those women to come back from that and still understand that we needed health and we needed education and
we needed a strong community. - When you talk about the Indian Tribal
Educational Personnel Program and United Indian Health Services, having these women with moxie, they come from a generation of
women who have been having to just hold that strength
for such a long time. And part of the work as tribal people is how do we go back and tap into that 'cause that's always there. We come from a long line of those folks who are moving forward and
have had to keep their dignity, keep their pride. And although it hurts,
we're still doing that work. That's what I try to tap
in for the young people, tribal people, in particular, but also for non-Indian
students to hear that too. It's not all historical
trauma and then we're gone. No, it's historical trauma
and we're still here and we're not going anywhere. We're still learning,
we're still enduring. (light music)
