[News] Cultural Genocide in Lake County, CA

[Anti-Imperialist News]

December 19, 2011

“There was no civilization before private property”


Cultural Genocide in Lake County, CA

by WILL PARRISH

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/19/cultural-genocide-in-lake-county-ca/

As you read these words, one of the Northern 
California East Bay Area’s wealthiest men is 
getting away with an act of cultural 
genocide.  Construction crews employed by 
wireless technology magnate John Nady began 
trenching grading, excavating, and building atop 
Rattlesnake Island in Lake County, California 
last week, in the latest phase of Nady’s 
seven-year-long effort to build two houses on the 
sacred grounds of the Elem Pomo tribe. 
Reportedly, private security guards flank the 
construction area in case of any attempt by the 
Elem and their supporters to occupy the island, 
as occurred during a previous developer’s attempt 
to build there in the early-’70s.

Rattlesnake Island is a lush 56-acre expanse in 
Clear Lake – California’s largest freshwater lake 
– located just outside the sleepy Highway 20 town 
of Clearlake Oaks.  For more than 14,000 years, 
the Elem’s home has encompassed an area in and 
around southeastern Clear Lake.  For more than 
6,000 of those years, Rattlesnake Island has been 
the Elem’s cultural and religious center.

Elem cultural leader Jim Browneagle best summed 
up the significance of Nady’s project to his 
people in a Free Speech Radio documentary that 
aired on 140 stations across the country on 
Thanksgiving.  The documentary borrowed its title 
from a previous piece I published here at 
counterpunch.org, “The Struggle for Rattlesnake 
Island.”  The radio piece is available online. 
“If there’s a home built right there, it’s gone ­ 
the sacredness of it,” Browneagle said.  “We’re 
going to do the best we can to prevent that. We 
want to preserve it as it is, without 
homes.  It’s really the last sanctuary of our nation.”

Nobody is stopping Nady yet, least of all 
officials at the County of Lake.  The message 
rolls out from the county’s Lakeport offices that 
wealthy outsiders are permitted special 
exemptions from the law, for no other reason than 
that they are wealthy and aggressive.  The 
construction proceeds only because the Bay Area 
mogul received a special extension of Lake 
County’s normal grading season from County 
Community Development Director Rick Coel.

According to Lake County Supervisor Denise 
Rushing, Coel granted the extension after Nady 
threatened to sue if he didn’t get his way.  The 
section of the county’s grading code that Coel 
invoked, which may henceforth be known as the One 
Percent Exempt Provision, has rarely been used in 
the County and must be based on some sort of necessity.

The necessity in this case, from the perspective 
of Nady and his supporters in Lake County’s 
decision-making apparatus (cronies is a less kind 
way of putting it), seems to be that a new 
organization called Friends of Rattlesnake Island 
sued the County in November to try to force Nady 
to file an Environmental Impact Report 
(EIR).  The lawsuit is scheduled to be heard in 
Lake County Superior Court in January.  Nady 
apparently would like to complete the project 
prior that first hearing, thereby rendering the entire lawsuit moot.

Supporters of Rattlesnake Island attempted to 
secure an injunction on Monday against any 
further construction activity by Nady, but the 
judge at Lake County Superior Court struck down 
the motion on the grounds that Nady’s legal team 
did not have adequate notice to contest it.  A 
similar motion may be brought again in the coming days.

In the meantime, the pillage is ongoing.  As of 
this writing, Nady’s team has poured a concrete 
pad for an outdoor bathroom.  They also conducted 
trenching associated with a septic system, which 
Nady had previously started to build in 2005, 
even though the County had not yet granted him a 
permit.  The LakeCo Supes ordered him to halt the 
project at that time.  Nady ignored the order and 
continued developing the septic system. The 
Supervisors promptly obtained a restraining 
order, and Nady halted the construction.

In September, the LakeCo Supes had just 
overturned a unanimous Planning Commission 
decision requiring that Nady file an EIR related 
to his project.  The vote was 3-2 in favor of 
overturning the Planning Commision ruling, 
thereby granting Nady a grading permit.  All 
three Supervisors who voted in Nady’s favor cited 
his “private property rights,” which they 
maintain supersede all other considerations in this case.

Yet, Jim Browneagle had just provided a detailed 
Power Point presentation at the Supervisors’ 
meeting three weeks prior, in which he 
authoritatively demonstrated that the Elem are 
the island’s rightful owners, even under 
strictest application of the US government’s own 
property laws. I published a piece on that 
Supervisors meeting in the Anderson Valley 
Advertiser here: Moreover, Nady had prevented the 
county’s own archaeologist, Tom Gates, from 
taking any materials off the island for lab 
analysis, as is required under the California 
Environmental Quality Act. Thus, the county has 
been was unable to determine the “significance” 
of the lithic scatter Gates found at the 
site.  Elem traditionalists, who of course have 
extensive oral knowledge of the island, maintain that Nady’s building site.

CEQA also mandates that tribal monitors be 
present when their cultural artifacts are at risk 
of being disturbed by a development.  Yet, at the 
time of the examination of the island by Gates, 
the county archeologist, Nady specifically 
forbade any member of the Elem Pomo to be present 
as a tribal monitor, and the County went along, 
according to Elem traditionalist and former 
tribal vice chairman Batsulwin Brown.
“I was told by Tom Gates that [Nady] did not want 
any Indian from Elem on his land,” Brown said. “I 
requested a monitor during the 10-minute meeting 
the tribe held with Tom Gates. He said Nady would 
not allow anybody from elem to be present.”

Yet, in the case of his construction activities 
last week, Nady did have a monitor present: a 
member of the Wappo of Napa County, who are not a 
federally recognized tribe and whose people have 
no significant historical knowledge of 
Rattlesnake Island.  The move was clearly 
calculated to give a fig leaf of legal propriety 
to Nady’s project, even though it entirely violated the spirit of the law.

The Wappo member’s participation in Nady’s 
project, coupled with the County’s failure to 
consult the Elem prior to beginning grading 
activities, has deeply upset Pomo people 
throughout Lake County.  Members of each 
individual tribe were contacted by Browneagle, 
and they are all drafting letters of complaint to 
Rick Coel and to the County Supervisors.

“I actually got ahold of the [Wappo] monitor and 
pretty much gave him a piece of my mind,” Jim 
Browneagle says.  “When I told him I’m the Elem’s 
Historic Preservation Officer, and that nobody 
contacted me, he turned completely around and 
started apologizing and saying, ‘Well, what can 
we do?’ I’m going, ‘You’ve already done the worst 
damage you can ever do. You didn’t even ask us, didn’t even come to us.’”

The Elem do have allies in the Lake County 
decision-making apparatus, among them the 
aforementioned Supervisor Denise Rushing, who 
wasn’t even informed that development of the 
hotly-contested project was about to commence, 
even though Rattlesnake Island is in her 
district.  Rushing pointed toward a possible 
resolution to the ongoing dispute involving Elem, 
Nady, and the County in an e-mail to Haji Warf, a 
resident of and member of Friends of Rattlesnake Island:

“Personally, I believe that government should 
purchase (and should have purchased) this site to 
preserve it. The state or federal government 
should have stepped in by now as the amount is 
out of the county’s capabilities to buy.  At this 
moment, the tribe needs to ask that no further 
desecration be allowed and that the government at 
the state or federal level step in.

“At minimum an EIR needs to happen. But the best 
result of the EIR (saying the island itself is 
sacred and developing it cannot be mitigated) 
would still leave us with the only remedy being a 
suit from Nady or a negotiated agreement whereby 
the island gets preserved by public 
purchase.  The tribe needs to contact the state 
in my opinion–they do have a real case for 
negotiation given that the county hasn’t done the EIR.”

Historically, a thick layer of ideology coats 
each official legal decision vis-a-vis 
Rattlesnake Island, this one being no 
exception.  One of the intellectual rationales 
for Nady’s comes courtesy of Lake County 
Supervisor Rob Brown, who stated in the Free 
Speech Radio News piece that aired on 
Thanksgiving, which may well have come from 
someone living in Lake County during the more 
openly genocidal period of the 1860s:

“Without private property rights, we have no 
civilization.  There was no civilization before 
private property. There wasn’t! There were people 
that lived. And they operated under certain rules 
in everything that they did. But they did not 
have incentive to do things, because private 
property is the formation of a civilized country.”

Jim Browneagle and others have already attempted 
to do as Denise Rushing suggested, meeting 
with  Congressman Mike Thompson to try to 
convince him to sponsor legislation bringing the 
federal government in to perform eminent domain 
on Nady’s paper title, thus granting Rattlesnake 
Island back to the Elem. The “grape-obsessed” 
Thompson, as the New York Times has called him, 
wavered at the possibility given that such a 
course might lead to a new casino being 
constructed “in Wine Country” (which leaders of 
the Elem say will never happen on Rattlesnake 
Island).  Thompson then indicated he might be 
inclined to support such legislation if the Lake 
County Supervisors first approve of it.

Rushing’s e-mail marked the first time a Lake 
County Supervisor has openly suggested the same 
course.  As attorney Liam Griffin, a Lake County 
native, noted in his dissertation: “Application 
of the federal power of eminent domain is the 
most practical and equitable solution, and the 
time to do so is now, before this ancient sacred 
homeland and sacred tribal landscape is destroyed 
and lost forever. “We are requesting tribal and 
public support to prevent the outright 
destruction of Elem’s 6,000 year old homeland village on Rattlesnake Island.”

Regaining Rattlesnake Island is a matter of far 
greater urgency for the Elem in light of their 
present living conditions.  Adjacent to the 
reservation is a small lake of sulphur-infested 
waters left by a mercury mining company, which 
practiced open-pit mining for several 
decades.  Six years ago, the US Environmental 
Protection Agency rated the Elem Pomo rancheria 
as the third most toxic site in the United 
States, before it undertook an insufficient 
clean-up effort.  Many who live on the reservation are sickening and dying.

In the meantime, supporters of the Elem have 
called for an emergency demonstration at Nady’s 
opulent home in Oakland’s Piedmont district this 
Saturday, December 17th, which will originate at 
noon at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre.

More information on how to support the Elem is at www.elemmodun.org.

Supporters have also created a Call to Action, 
available at 
<file://localhost/document/d/1YWTppsLU8910pvnoBqlb78qYfF6xVgXuSf_9e0bPJQA/edit>https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YWTppsLU8910pvnoBqlb78qYfF6xVgXuSf_9e0bPJQA/edit?hl=en_US.

To read past AVA coverage of this issue, visit 
http://theava.com/archives/12178 and http://theava.com/archives/11866.

Will Parrish can be reached at <mailto:wparrish at riseup.net>wparrish at riseup.net.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20111219/5435f5fb/attachment.htm>