More than 150 years after brutal slaughter, a small tribe returns home | Al Jazeera America

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“After losing much of their ancestry, the Wiyots are learning their traditions in preparation for a renewal ceremony

 

A posse of white settlers sneaked through the darkness one night in 1860 and murdered more than 50 Native American women and children, mostly with axes and hatchets.

 

“Amidst the wailing of mutilated infants,” The San Francisco Bulletin wrote at the time, “the savage blows are given, cutting through bone and brain.”

 

Nearby settlers carried out two more massacres that night, killing an additional 90 Indians, most of them Wiyot, and for more than a century it seemed the Wiyot were a destroyed people.

 

The tribe was at first shunted into a local Army fort known to the Wiyot as “jouwuchguri,” which translates as “lying down with your knees drawn up.” The Wiyot were forbidden to use their own language. The last fluent speakers eventually died off, and in 1958 the U.S. government, intent on mainstreaming Native Americans, stripped the Wiyot of their tribal status. Despair set in, along with alcoholism and drug abuse.

 

But slowly, the Wiyot began to recover. The Wiyot Nation, which finally regained tribal status in 1990, began the slow process of returning to Indian Island.

 

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