A portion of the Fort Building just north of City Hall in Fort Bragg is on its way to becoming a tribal learning center, in collaboration with the city and a coalition of local tribes. And the city is trying to attach some educational and policy commitments to its land acknowledgment. These are some of the recommendations that came out of a citizen’s commission tasked with researching public opinion about changing the name of the town and “the deeper issues of racism.”
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic and a national reckoning with racial violence, the city council held an hours’-long in-person partially outdoor public meeting considering a ballot measure asking residents if they wanted to change the name of the city, which is named for Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who never set foot on the premises.
Instead of a ballot measure, the council convened the citizens’ commission, which met for more than sixty hours over a year and a half and presented its recommendations to the council late in 2022. One of those recommendations, which then-City Manager Peggy Ducey predicted would form the “backbone” of the city’s approach to the rest, was crafting an MOU with the city, the school district, and local tribes, to “present a more complete and inclusive history of the local area.”
Tuesday night, at a city council culture and education ad hoc committee meeting, Fort Bragg Vice Mayor Jason Godeke reported that he had just met with a school district committee about plans for an ethnic studies curriculum at the high school. And he shared a progress report about associating specific actions with the land acknowledgment.
“Just having the land acknowledgment in and of itself is a starting point, but it needs to have some resolution behind it,” he declared. He said that the city is working on formalizing government-to-government consultations with the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians on “initiatives, issues and items of concern,” like how to deal with artifacts found within the city of Fort Bragg. Another commitment is to “raise visibility and public awareness of the history and contemporary presence of the native population in our area.”
Godeke said the city is collaborating with a non-profit called Kai Poma, to figure out how to use two of the rooms in the Fort Building to exhibit art, artifacts and other educational materials. He said Kai Poma’s board includes members of Round Valley, Coyote Valley and Sherwood Valley to receive property from the state, like the 172-acre Blues Beach property by Westport, which was transferred from Caltrans to the tribes in 2021. “A lot of their charter and articles align very much with what we were hoping for from that learning center,” he said. “And they’re also very interested in having an office presence here on the coast.”
Eddie Knight, a Kai Poma board member, shared some ideas from the cultural center at Lake Mendocino. He said that for almost 30 years, visitors to the limited space could watch videos of basket making legend Elsie Allen creating her masterpieces as she spoke about the process. “Instead of having all the baskets on display,” he added, which exposes the fragile materials to light and causes them to age faster. There were also videos about the native plant and animal life. He said Kai Pomo is also interested in displaying art by local native and non-native artists.
It’s not settled yet how the rooms would be set up to accommodate what combination of exhibits and office space. Chelsea Boehm, a curator from Ukiah’s Grace Hudson Museum, recommended low lighting and special coating on the windows to preserve artwork and artifacts, cautioning that this arrangement is “not always conducive to a working environment.”
The committee is also seeking funding from the Community Foundation for educational signage about local Pomo history and people, including an acknowledgment of Buffy Schmidt of the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, who created signs with sayings on them in the Northern Pomo language and images inspired by local basketry.
The Mendocino Indian Reservation Army post: “Fort Bragg.” is registered by the California Office of Historic Preservation as California Historical Landmark No. 615.
A plaque commemorating the place states the following: “Established in this vicinity June 11, 1857 by 1st Lieut. Horatio Gates Gibson, 3d Artillery, later Brig. Gen. U.S. Army. Named by Gibson in honor of his former company commander, Braxton Bragg, later Gen. C.S.A. Abandoned in October 1864.”
There is no mention of the atrocities committed against innocent native people which was the primary purpose of this army post which was pretended to be a fort (without any fortification.) The plaque also attempts to obfuscate the legacy of its namesake Braxton Bragg “later Gen. C.S.A.” rather than clearly identifying his role as a turncoat General in the Confederate Army during the seditious war against the United States of America in their effort to preserve slavery.
Time to Correct History
When Fort Bragg Main Street was headquartered in what is now CA 2nd District Congressional Office- the adjacent door rooms had a cannon. We held an art exhibit there when First Friday Art Walk was just starting.
Glad to see this transition of this building’s use- is there a non-profit that locals can donate to? It would be the greatest thing to turn that building– from the old horrible shameful days of the bloody roundup of native Americans on the North Coast– to a center of truth telling and help preserve forever this missing part of local California history. It is time to correct history. Fort Bragg had a key part in this west coast Trail Of Tears. Mendocino County Tourism Commission I am sure can assist.
Another idea! Maybe the Order of the Native Daughters of the Golden West, can turn away from the veneration of some of these pioneers, and help with reparations for how some of those pioneers did dirty.
Some History gathered from various sources:
In the late 1800’s, a mill worker named Duncan MacKerricher (1836-1926) was hired to by Indian Agent E.J. Whipple on the Mendocino Indian Reservation. Two years later, in 1864, the Native Americans who lived there were forcibly removed to the Round Valley Reservation, which was at that time called Nome Cult Farm.
A posse led by Mexican Salvador Vallejo massacred 150 Pomo and Wappo Indians on Clear Lake, California.
Nathaniel Lyon and his U.S. Army detachment of cavalry killed 60–100 Pomo people on Bo-no-po-ti island near Clear Lake, (Lake Co., California); they believed the Pomo had killed two Clear Lake settlers who had been abusing and murdering Pomo people. (The Island Pomo had no connections to the enslaved Pomo). This incident led to a general outbreak of settler attacks against and mass killing of native people all over Northern California. The Site is a California Registered Historical Landmark #427
White settlers killed over a thousand Yuki Indians in Round Valley over the course of three years in an uncountable number of separate massacres. In the early 19th century, despite the establishment of the Mendocino Indian Reservation and Nome Cult Farm in 1856, Mendocino County witnessed many of the most serious atrocities in the extermination of the Californian Native American tribes who originally lived in the area, including the Yuki, the Pomo, the Cahto, and the Wintun.
The systematic occupation of native people lands, the forcing of many of their members into slavery and the raids against their settlements led to the Mendocino War in 1859, where hundreds of Indigenous people were killed.
Sources:
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/california-coastal-trail/when-native-americans-were-forcibly-removed-from-a-mendocino-indian-reservation
https://books.google.com/books?id=gVVGAQAAIAAJ&dq=%22Mendocino+Indian+Reservation%22&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q=%22Mendocino%20Indian%20Reservation%22&f=false
Timeline of Genocide Incidents in the Greater Mendocino Region https://nahc.ca.gov/cp/timelines/mendocino/