The city of Kelseyville payments itself as one in every of Northern California’s best-kept secrets and techniques — an idyllic wine nation group that overlooks the state’s largest freshwater lake, in addition to a 4,305-foot volcano that’s blanketed in greenery.
However a dispute has erupted over a proposal to vary the city’s title due to the historical past it evokes of violence in opposition to Indigenous individuals.
Mountains rise over Konocti Vista Marina, simply north of Kelseyville.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Instances)
It’s stated that the city takes its title from Andrew Kelsey, a infamous white settler who, together with his enterprise accomplice Charles Stone, brutalized Pomo villagers within the late 1840s — murdering males on a whim, raping girls and youths, trafficking youngsters and enslaving and ravenous tribal members.
“These guys had been evil, evil males,” says Duncan Clayton, an elder from the Robinson Rancheria Band of Jap Pomo Indians. “They exerted full management by inflicting terror on the individuals.”
The Lake County Board of Supervisors has responded to calls from each tribal and non-Indigenous residents to vary the city’s title — and by extension confront this darkish historical past — by inserting a nonbinding advisory measure on the Nov. 5 poll. It asks residents throughout the county to vote on whether or not Kelseyville must be renamed for the mountain that towers over the city, Konocti — a Pomo phrase that means “Mountain Girl” that celebrates each the volcano and the realm’s 14,000 years of Indigenous historical past.
A winery sprawls alongside the banks of Clear Lake as Mt. Konocti rises within the background. Lake County residents will vote on altering the title of Kelseyville to Konocti.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Instances)
Even when voters reject the measure, the board has indicated that it nonetheless would possibly transfer ahead with recommending the change to the U.S. Bureau of Geographic Names, which has authority over the naming course of as a result of Kelseyville is in an unincorporated a part of Lake County and lacks its personal authorities.
Few of Kelseyville’s 3,800 residents dispute that Andrew Kelsey was a merciless man who appeared to get pleasure from mistreating Indigenous individuals. He and one in every of his brothers, Ben Kelsey, had been notorious in their very own time too, in line with a analysis paper by historian and archaeologist John Parker. The paper was introduced to the Lake County Historic Society in 2021, and could be watched on YouTube.
Fed up with the abuse, tribal members banded collectively and executed each Andrew Kelsey and Stone. Accounts of how the lads had been killed and what occurred subsequent fluctuate, Parker discovered. What is obvious, nevertheless, is that the killings set off a wave of retaliatory assaults orchestrated by Kelsey’s brothers, armed vigilantes and the U.S. Military. The assaults culminated within the “Bloody Island Bloodbath” on Might 15, 1850, when cavalry troopers slaughtered tons of of Indigenous villagers at Clear Lake.
Attackers stormed a ceremonial gathering place on an island on the lake’s north finish referred to as Bo-No-Po-Ti, looking down girls, youngsters and aged individuals with bayonets as they fled for canopy within the marshes.
Duncan’s great-grandmother, Lucy Moore, was simply 6 when U.S. troopers and self-appointed avengers besieged her and different villagers.
For 25 years, Duncan has led a springtime dawn ceremony on the lake to commemorate the bloodbath, inviting these in attendance to supply forgiveness for what Kelsey, and cohorts akin to his brother, and the U.S. did to his ancestors.
He sees the violence as rooted in avarice, white supremacy and a profound hatred of Indigenous people who rang by way of within the proclamations of elected officers of the time, together with California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, who publicly mused about the necessity to pursue a “warfare of extermination” in opposition to the state’s tribes.
“It was homicide and theft — that straightforward,” Duncan stated not too long ago by telephone. “We had been in the way in which of their greed and in the way in which of all this land.”
Bo-No-Po-Ti, the scene of the Bloody Island Bloodbath, rises from a subject. When the mass killing of Indigenous individuals occurred there on Might 15, 1850, the location was surrounded by water and marshes. The world has since been drained.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
It’s a sentiment echoed within the 2016 e-book “An American Genocide: America and the California Indian Disaster.” Writer and UCLA historian Benjamin Madley wrote that those that dedicated atrocities such because the Bloody Island Bloodbath had been a part of a “killing machine” made up of state and federal authorities, volunteers and employed mercenaries. Just like the Spanish and Mexican colonizers earlier than them, American settlers believed that God had decreed their proper to California’s pure wealth, and that Indigenous individuals stood between them and boundless prosperity.
The marshy web site the place the bloodbath happened is now dry land — barely noticeable to guests save for a roadside historic marker that describes the tragedy. However tribal leaders say that taking away “Kelseyville” will give Indigenous residents a brand new option to search therapeutic from a historic trauma that lives on of their hearts and minds.
The hassle to vary the city’s title began in 2020 as an outgrowth of conferences amongst involved county residents who went on to kind the group Residents for Therapeutic. Final 12 months, committee co-founder Lorna Sides formally submitted the change request to the BGN, and touched off a fierce public debate.
Sides, 72, says she was not too long ago accosted by a pair of residents on the road who accused her of injuring the close-knit city.
Sides, who’s white and never affiliated with any tribe, says she solely has one remorse.
“I’m simply sorry it’s turn into such a battle,” she stated.
Whereas some opponents say the change could be too pricey to implement for the small group, and too burdensome for these whose livelihoods rely upon the title recognition that comes with “Kelseyville,” there are others who don’t imagine that altering the city’s title is the correct salve for acts of dispossession that performed out on a large scale.
A view of Clear Lake in July.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
Native residents and businesspeople shaped the group Save Kelseyville to push again in opposition to Sides and others who say the change is required to assist atone for previous wrongs.
“Altering the title of Kelseyville won’t change the previous,” the group wrote on its web site. “This initiative has divided our group reasonably than supplied any therapeutic. The platform to debate the previous might disappear with the title. It’s best to teach about historical past as a substitute of making an attempt to erase it.”
Kelseyville isn’t the one city within the area that’s grappling with its title. Farther west on the Pacific Coast, a gaggle referred to as Change Our Identify Fort Bragg has waged an analogous effort, arguing that the city’s title honors a slave-holding Accomplice common named Braxton Bragg and commemorates a army set up “that facilitated genocide, ethnic cleaning, and involuntary servitude of the indigenous individuals,” in line with the group’s Fb web page.
Given how the Kelseys tried to rob native individuals of their ancestral connection to their homeland farther inland, it’s dismaying to see individuals in 2024 argue to maintain the title Kelseyville, says Duncan’s nephew, Lake County Supervisor Chair Eddie Crandell. He’s additionally vice chair of the Robinson Rancheria Residents Enterprise Council.
Whereas the board has been criticized by some for ordering a countywide vote reasonably than confining the election to Kelseyville, and by others for not taking direct motion to vary the title, Crandell says it’s solely truthful to permit voters all through the county to take part — provided that descendants of these harmed by the Kelseys don’t simply stay in Kelseyville.
Crandell says he feels an obligation to his 4 youngsters and his ancestors to assist the change, which he hopes will foster a higher appreciation for a number of the first peoples to inhabit Northern California. He says he was solely in his 30s when he started to study his Pomo tradition, as a result of a lot of that historical past had been whitewashed at school classes.
“[Opponents] say you’ll be able to’t change historical past and when does it cease? I’ve that very same query,” says Crandell, 47. “When does it cease that we’re being ignored and never taught our true historical past?”
A girl walks within the dry Adobe Creek in Kelseyville in December 2022.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Instances)
Not all Indigenous residents of Lake County are of the identical thoughts in regards to the title change.
Flaman McCloud Jr., chairman of the Massive Valley Rancheria of Pomo Indians, stated some are detached, or don’t see the worth of dwelling on the previous.
Others, McCloud says, are apprehensive about antagonizing the city’s majority-white inhabitants when Native Individuals make up lower than 2%. He, too, has felt apprehensive at occasions about talking publicly on a difficulty that stirs up age-old racial tensions.
“This county is rural — cowboys and Indians,” says McCloud, 45. “It’s nonetheless that approach. I’m involved about what my youngsters are going to undergo if it occurs.”
“But when we don’t do it,” McCloud says, “we’re nonetheless going to be checked out as second-class residents.”
