A Northern California town’s name recalls the massacre of Indigenous people. Will changing it bring healing?

Tyrone Beason | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

The town of Kelseyville bills itself as one of Northern California’s best-kept secrets — an idyllic wine country community that overlooks the state’s largest freshwater lake, as well as a 4,305-foot volcano that is blanketed in greenery.

But a dispute has erupted over a proposal to change the town’s name because of the history it evokes of violence against Indigenous people.

It is said that the town takes its name from Andrew Kelsey, a notorious white settler who, with his business partner Charles Stone, brutalized Pomo villagers in the late 1840s — murdering men on a whim, raping women and youths, trafficking children and enslaving and starving tribal members.

“These guys were evil, evil men,” says Duncan Clayton, an elder from the Robinson Rancheria Band of Eastern Pomo Indians. “They exerted complete control by inflicting terror on the people.”

The Lake County Board of Supervisors has responded to calls from both tribal and non-Indigenous residents to change the town’s name — and by extension confront this dark history — by placing a nonbinding advisory measure on the Nov. 5 ballot. It asks residents across the county to vote on whether Kelseyville should be renamed for the mountain that towers over the town, Konocti — a Pomo word meaning “Mountain Woman” that celebrates both the volcano and the area’s 14,000 years of Indigenous history.

Even if voters reject the measure, the board has indicated that it still might move forward with recommending the change to the U.S. Bureau of Geographic Names, which has authority over the naming process because Kelseyville is in an unincorporated part of Lake County and lacks its own government.

Few of Kelseyville’s 3,800 residents dispute that Andrew Kelsey was a cruel man who seemed to take pleasure in mistreating Indigenous people. He and one of his brothers, Ben Kelsey, were infamous in their own time too, according to a research paper by historian and archaeologist John Parker. The paper was presented to the Lake County Historical Society in 2021, and can be watched on YouTube.

Fed up with the abuse, tribal members banded together and executed both Andrew Kelsey and Stone. Accounts of how the men were killed and what happened next vary, Parker found. What is clear, however, is that the killings set off a wave of retaliatory attacks orchestrated by Kelsey’s brothers, armed vigilantes and the U.S. Army. The attacks culminated in the “Bloody Island Massacre” on May 15, 1850, when cavalry soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Indigenous villagers at Clear Lake.

Attackers stormed a ceremonial gathering place on an island on the lake’s north end called Bo-No-Po-Ti, hunting down women, children and elderly people with bayonets as they fled for cover in the marshes.

Duncan’s great-grandmother, Lucy Moore, was just 6 when U.S. soldiers and self-appointed avengers besieged her and other villagers.

For 25 years, Duncan has led a springtime sunrise ceremony at the lake to commemorate the massacre, inviting those in attendance to offer forgiveness for what Kelsey, and cohorts such as 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 that rang through in the proclamations of elected officials of the time, including California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, who publicly mused about the need to pursue a“war of extermination” against the state’s tribes.

“It was murder and theft — that simple,” Duncan said recently by phone. “We were in the way of their greed and in the way of all this land.”

It’s a sentiment echoed in the 2016 book “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe.” Author and UCLA historian Benjamin Madley wrote that those who committed atrocities such as the Bloody Island Massacre were part of a “killing machine” made up of state and federal authorities, volunteers and hired mercenaries. Like the Spanish and Mexican colonizers before them, American settlers believed that God had decreed their right to California’s natural wealth, and that Indigenous people stood between them and boundless prosperity.

The marshy site where the massacre took place is now dry land — barely noticeable to visitors save for a roadside historical marker that describes the tragedy. But tribal leaders say that doing away with “Kelseyville” will give Indigenous residents a new way to seek healing from a historical trauma that lives on in their hearts and minds.

The effort to change the town’s name started in 2020 as an outgrowth of meetings among concerned county residents who went on to form the group Citizens for Healing. Last year, 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 recently accosted by a pair of residents on the street who accused her of hurting the close-knit town.

Sides, who is white and not affiliated with any tribe, says she only has one regret.

“I’m just sorry it’s become such a battle,” she said.

While some opponents say the change would be too costly to implement for the small community, and too burdensome for those whose livelihoods depend on the name recognition that comes with “Kelseyville,” there are others who don’t believe that changing the town’s name is the proper salve for acts of dispossession that played out on a massive scale.

Local residents and businesspeople formed the group Save Kelseyville to push back against Sides and others who say the change is needed to help atone for past wrongs.

“Changing the name of Kelseyville will not change the past,” the group wrote on its website. “This initiative has divided our community rather than offered any healing. The platform to discuss the past may disappear with the name. It is best to educate about history instead of trying to erase it.”

Kelseyville isn’t the only town in the region that’s grappling with its name. Farther west on the Pacific Coast, a group called Change Our Name Fort Bragg has waged a similar effort, arguing that the town’s name honors a slave-holding Confederate general named Braxton Bragg and commemorates a military installation “that facilitated genocide, ethnic cleansing, and involuntary servitude of the indigenous people,” according to the group’s Facebook page.

Given how the Kelseys tried to rob native people of their ancestral connection to their homeland farther inland, it’s dismaying to see people in 2024 argue to keep the name Kelseyville, says Duncan’s nephew, Lake County Supervisor Chair Eddie Crandell. He’s also vice chair of the Robinson Rancheria Citizens Business Council.

While the board has been criticized by some for ordering a countywide vote rather than confining the election to Kelseyville, and by others for not taking direct action to change the name, Crandell says it’s only fair to allow voters throughout the county to participate — given that descendants of those harmed by the Kelseys don’t just live in Kelseyville.

Crandell says he feels an obligation to his four children and his ancestors to support the change, which he hopes will foster a greater appreciation for some of the first peoples to inhabit Northern California. He says he was only in his 30s when he began to learn about his Pomo culture, because much of that history had been whitewashed in school lessons.

“[Opponents] say you can’t change history and when does it stop? I have that same question,” says Crandell, 47. “When does it stop that we’re being ignored and not taught our true history?”

Not all Indigenous residents of Lake County are of the same mind about the name change.

Flaman McCloud Jr., chairman of the Big Valley Rancheria of Pomo Indians, said some are indifferent, or don’t see the value of dwelling on the past.

Others, McCloud says, are worried about antagonizing the town’s majority-white population when Native Americans make up less than 2%. He, too, has felt apprehensive at times about speaking publicly on an issue that stirs up age-old racial tensions.

“This county is rural — cowboys and Indians,” says McCloud, 45. “It’s still that way. I’m concerned about what my kids are going to go through if it happens.”

“But if we don’t do it,” McCloud says, “we’re still going to be looked at as second-class citizens.”

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