Pomo

Pomo homelands in northern California reach from the Pacific shore inland to Clear Lake, across today's Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties. They were never a single political unit: the name covers many independent communities linked by kinship, marriage and seven related but mutually unintelligible Pomoan languages. Today some twenty federally recognised Pomo tribes and rancherias are based in the region.

The word Pomo comes from a village name in southern Potter Valley, meaning roughly "those who live at red earth hole", perhaps a reference to the local red magnesite or hematite-rich clay. By 1877 English writers were using it for the whole language family and the people who spoke it.

Linguists have proposed that Pomoan speakers descend from Hokan-speaking peoples who settled near Clear Lake thousands of years ago, though the details are debated. Archaeology in the Lake Sonoma valley traces a long sequence: sparse camps of the Skaggs Phase (about 3000–500 BCE); more permanent villages, acorn mortars and wide trade in obsidian and soapstone during the Dry Creek Phase (500 BCE–1300 CE), when a Pomo group is thought to have taken over the area; and the Smith Phase from 1300 CE onward, marked by archery and the mass production of clamshell beads, a currency across central California.

Acorns were the staple food, gathered and processed mainly by women, alongside salmon, greens, berries, mushrooms and small game hunted by men. Pomo basketry is famous worldwide for its fine weaving and range of forms. Women twined, coiled and plaited baskets for cooking, storage, cradles and ceremony, sometimes covering gift baskets entirely in woodpecker feathers and hanging them with abalone pendants; men made fish weirs and bird traps. Religious life included the Kuksu ceremonies of central California, with masked dances, mourning rites and an all-male society meeting in underground dance houses. From 1872 the Ghost Dance and Bole Maru movements spread to the Pomo, and Bole Maru is still practised.

At contact there were perhaps 8,000 to 21,000 Pomo. Coastal Kashaya Pomo traded with the Russian Empire's outpost at Fort Ross (1812–1841), while Spanish missionaries took many southern Pomo to Mission San Rafael in the 1820s, where conditions have been compared to slavery. A smallpox epidemic in 1837 killed many in the Sonoma and Napa areas. After the California Gold Rush, settlers took over Pomo valleys. At Clear Lake, two ranchers, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, held Pomo labourers in brutal conditions until the workers rose and killed them; in reprisal, US cavalry attacked an island in the lake in 1850, killing an estimated 60 to 100 Clear Lake Pomo and neighbours, most of them women and children, in what is known as the Bloody Island Massacre. Forced removals followed, including marches to the Round Valley reservation.

From the 1870s a strong market for Pomo baskets gave families an income, and in 1878 a group of Northern Pomo bought land in Coyote Valley, followed by other purchases at Pinoleville and Yokaya. Population fell to about 1,200 by 1910 but had recovered to 10,308 by the 2010 census. Many rancherias lost their status under the California Rancheria Termination Acts; a 1983 federal court ruling restored 17 of them. All the Pomoan languages are now severely endangered, with revival work under way.

Our maps for 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 show the Pomo near the northern Californian coast; the outline is approximate. On the 1500 map the Pomo label stretches over a much larger swathe of the Pacific coast than their historical homeland. The Yokuts appear further south-east, in the San Joaquin Valley.