https://news.yahoo.com/unleashed-california-massacre-school-named-121105380.html
The New York Times
He Unleashed a California Massacre. Should This School Be Named for Him?
Thomas Fuller
Thu, October 28, 2021, 5:11 AM·
More than 150 years ago, Serranus Hastings, founder of the University of
California, Hastings College of the Law, masterminded the massacre of
Native Americans in Round Valley, Calif. (Alexandra Hootnick/The New
York Times)
ROUND VALLEY RESERVATION, Calif. — They said they were chasing down
horse and cattle thieves, an armed pursuit through fertile valleys and
evergreen forests north of San Francisco. But under questioning in 1860,
a cattle rancher let slip a more gruesome picture, one of indiscriminate
killings of Yuki Indians.
A 10-year-old girl killed for “stubbornness.”
Infants “put out of their misery.”
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Documented in letters and depositions held in California’s state
archives, the Gold Rush-era massacres are today at the heart of a
dispute at one of the country’s most prominent law schools whose
graduates include generations of California politicians and lawyers like
Vice President Kamala Harris.
For the past four years, the University of California, Hastings College
of the Law has been investigating the role of its founder, Serranus
Hastings, in one of the darkest, yet least discussed, chapters of the
state’s history. Hastings, one of the wealthiest men in California in
that era and the state’s first chief justice, masterminded one set of
massacres.
For those involved, including a descendant of Hastings who sits on the
school’s board, the journey into the past has revealed a very different
version of the early years of the state than the one taught in
classrooms and etched into the popular imagination of intrepid pioneers
trekking into the hills to strike it rich.
Across Northern California — north of Napa’s vineyards, along the banks
of the Russian River and in numerous other places from deserts to
redwood groves — as many as 5,617 Native people, and perhaps more whose
deaths were not recorded, were massacred by officially sanctioned
militias and U.S. troops from the 1840s to the 1870s, campaigns often
initiated by white settlers like Hastings who wanted to use the land for
their own purposes.
Thousands more Indians were killed by vigilantes during the same period.
But what sets apart the organized campaigns is that the killers’ travel
and ammunition expenses were reimbursed by the state of California and
the federal government.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that California state legislators
established a state-sponsored killing machine,” said Benjamin Madley, a
history professor at UCLA.
By Madley’s calculation, expeditions carried out at Hastings’ behest
killed at least 283 men, women and children, the most deadly of 24 known
California state militia campaigns.
In 1878, Hastings donated $100,000 in gold coins to found the school
that carries his name, California’s first law school. It was “to be
forever known and designated as ‘Hastings’ College of the Law,”
according to the school’s enactment.
Now both the law school and its critics agree that Hastings “bears
significant responsibility” for the massacres, in the words of the
Hastings inquiry, but they disagree on what to do about it, including
the question of whether the school should retain its name.
At a time when institutions across the country are reexamining their
history, Native leaders in California say a broad reckoning over the
treatment of American Indians is overdue. The long-standing notion that
they died as an accidental consequence of Western settlement, of disease
and displacement, they argue, needs to be revised with acknowledgment of
the purposeful killing campaigns.
The debate over what to do at Hastings comes during renewed attention on
the period of Spanish missions — when tens of thousands of Indians were
forced to give up local customs and died of disease — and the legacy of
Native enslavement; historians estimate that 20,000 Native Americans
were enslaved in the first decades after California became a state in
1850, even though it officially barred slavery.
Two years ago Gov. Gavin Newsom described the state’s treatment of
Native populations as genocide, issued an official apology and created a
Truth and Healing Council tasked with producing a report on relations
between the state and Native American groups by 2024.
“We have to speak truth,” said Abby Abinanti, chief judge of the Yurok
Tribal Court and, in 1974, the first Native woman admitted to the
California Bar. “We have not figured out as a country at this point, how
do we reconcile our behavior? How do we make this right?”
The investigation into the Hastings massacres began in 2017 after a Bay
Area lawyer, John Briscoe, published an opinion essay in The San
Francisco Chronicle under the headline, “The Moral Case for Renaming
Hastings College of the Law.”
Last year the law school announced a number of measures that it
described as restorative justice: It agreed to allocate space for a
memorial in the main lobby of its administrative building in San
Francisco; provide members of all tribes in Round Valley pro bono legal
help; maintain a program focused on Indigenous law; and assist in the
establishment of a charitable foundation, an initiative currently on
hold because of disagreement among tribal members on how to carry it out.
But David Faigman, chancellor and dean of Hastings Law, has led a
campaign to keep the school’s name.
“What would removing the Hastings name accomplish?” Faigman wrote when
the results of the school’s investigation into the Hastings legacy were
made public in September 2020.
A committee formed to investigate the massacres said changing the
college’s name might lead to a “decline in applications and perhaps a
loss of philanthropic and alumni support.”
A number of prominent Hastings alumni, including senior retired judges,
disagree and have called for a renaming. They say that like the fortune
of the Sackler family, derived from the opioids that ultimately killed
multitudes of Americans, the gold Hastings donated to found the school
is tainted.
Ultimately, Faigman said in an interview, the question of whether
Hastings keeps its name rests with the Legislature and the governor. His
critics say Hastings should proactively demand the change. A
spokesperson for Newsom, Erin Mellon, said the governor hoped
Californians would “think critically about the harmful legacies of our
forebears.” The governor will review any legislative proposals that land
on his desk, Mellon said.
The site of the massacres, Round Valley, is a four-hour drive from
Silicon Valley. But the halo of wealth of the Bay Area has never reached
the tumbledown homes, trailer park and ranches of Round Valley. The main
sustaining business in Covelo, the valley’s unincorporated town, is
backyard marijuana plots.
James Russ, president of the Round Valley Indian Tribal Council, which
governs the Round Valley Reservation, emphasizes that the leadership is
happy to accept the college’s offer of legal assistance for the tribe’s
activities.
“We have a window of opportunity, and we don’t want to screw it up,”
Russ said.
The controversy over the name is further complicated by the question of
which tribal members should receive reparations.
The Yuki people were decimated and, after decades of intermarriage among
members and white settlers, were subsumed into the Round Valley Indian
Tribes, which was created after a coerced 19th-century relocation by the
U.S. government of seven distinct tribes.
Mona Oandasan, one of the leaders of a group of Yuki tribespeople in
Round Valley, said the law school was negotiating with the wrong people.
The Yuki were the ones targeted in the Hastings massacres, not the other
tribes on the reservation, she said.
“We are the direct descendants, and they should be talking to us,”
Oandasan said.
Native leaders say they hope the Hastings controversy could be a
possible catalyst to bring awareness to a terrible legacy that few
Californians know about. Greg Sarris, chair of the Federated Indians of
Graton Rancheria, a Northern California confederation of tribes, is
donating proceeds from his tribe’s casino to fund efforts at the
Smithsonian to produce curricula about Native history, including an
Indian perspective on the Gold Rush era.
That period was a particularly treacherous and murderous time in
California — “a catalog of slit throats, gunshot wounds and crushed
skulls,” wrote Kevin Starr, a California historian.
But even back then, the massacres of Indians carried out by Hastings’
militias shocked contemporaries and prompted an investigation in the
Legislature.
Brendan Lindsay, author of the 2012 book “Murder State: California’s
Native American Genocide, 1846-1873,” said ranchers hunted Indians in
the way they might track down a fox that ventured into a henhouse.
According to the chronology by Lindsay, one set of killings was carried
out by H.L. Hall, who was hired to look after Hastings’ cattle and horse
ranches in 1858. When four or six — accounts differ — of the nearly 400
horses on the ranch were killed, Hall and three other men raided a Yuki
village and killed nine or 11 tribespeople. During subsequent massacres,
he rode into Yuki villages and killed women and children, including the
girl he said he killed for “stubbornness.”
A second killing spree was led by a group that called themselves the Eel
River Rangers.
Hastings, who died in 1893, is buried in a cemetery in Napa Valley,
where he had extensive landholdings. His grave is marked not so much by
a headstone as a small monument, a granite obelisk that stands out amid
the evergreens of the St. Helena Public Cemetery.
Not taught in California schools, the history of the Round Valley
massacres came as a surprise to many of those at the law school.
Faigman, the dean and a history major, said he had never heard of
Hastings’ role before Briscoe’s article was published. Col. Claes
Lewenhaupt, the great-great-grandson of Hastings who sits on the law
school’s board of directors, a seat that has been held by descendants
since the school’s founding, said he first learned about Hastings’ role
a decade ago when he read some of the scholarship that emerged.
“It’s awful,” said Lewenhaupt, a lawyer who grew up in the Bay Area and
spent a career prosecuting and defending U.S. Army soldiers. But he said
he agreed with Faigman that the Hastings name should be maintained. “I
do not think the renaming will benefit the institution,” he said.
In Round Valley, Deb Hutt, a Yuki tribeswoman and the sister of
Oandasan, said she wonders why descendants of the Hastings family have
never apologized. While sitting at a picnic table across from a tribal
gas station, Hutt said she sometimes tried to imagine what Round Valley
would be like had Hastings and other white settlers not taken over the
valley.
Buffered by mountains, the Yuki were relatively undisturbed by Spanish
or Mexican conquerors. It took the huge and sudden migration of the Gold
Rush for the tribe to be confronted by unmerciful invaders.
“We were their hunt,” Hutt said of the men who led the Hastings
massacres. “And what we lost was more than lives.”