History on the Lost Coast

Abstract This essay is a response to an AHR call for works on resilience: “how to revive,” as it’s framed, “after things fall apart.” It would be hard to find a case in which “things fall apart” more completely than they historically have done for Native people in California. While this history is deeper than the American occupation of Native land, the latter half of the nineteenth century evinces a particularly brutal history of violent displacement by white settlers and the political machinery supporting their land claims. The “we are still here” rhetoric that marks so much Native American political discourse is therefore particularly necessary and pressing in California. Such claims cannot help but also mark the ways we narrate that history. The massacre on Tuluwat in Eureka, California was a point so low one cannot imagine a return, and yet the Wiyot did. They are still here, and their story has much to tell us about resilience and cultural survival. This article seeks to amplify untold stories from American Indian history and move California Indians from the margin to the center by foregrounding Native voices and ways of knowing. This work, thus, moves beyond the history of American genocide by exploring the role of Native people as complicated agents struggling for their own future.