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To the native Wintu people it was Bohem Puyuik, the "Big Rise," and no marvel. Mt. Shasta towered above everything else, her loins delivering the natural springs and snowmelt that birthed an amazing river.

The Sacramento River offered such an abundance of meals that the Wintu and many neighboring tribes - the Pit River, Yana, Nomlaki and others - had little to fight over. They thrived in pre-colonial times, on waters that ran silver with salmon, forests thick with sport and oaks heavy with acorns.

But centuries of illness, digital enslavement and homicide wrought by European and American invaders scrambled the harmony that when reigned alongside the Upper Sacramento River.

Today, three tribes listed below are locked in a bloodless warfare. At difficulty is a proposal by one Indigenous group to broaden and relocate its on line casino and whether or not the flashy new playing corridor, resort and leisure heart would honor - or desecrate - the past.

The casino envisioned by the Redding Rancheria and its 422 members would rise 9 stories on 232 acres alongside Interstate 5. The rancheria - home to descendants from three historic tribes - started planning the event nearly two a long time ago, envisioning a regional magnet for tourists and gamblers.

However the proposal has been buffeted by influential opponents, including town of Redding, neighborhood teams and the billionaire subsequent door - who occurs to be the most important private landowner in America. The naysayers checklist a cavalcade of complaints against the brand new Win-River on line casino complicated, saying it would despoil prime farmland, exacerbate traffic, enhance police and fire protection prices and threaten native fish in the Sacramento River.

Those complaints have helped stall, however not kill, the venture, whose fate rests virtually solely within the fingers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. And now the BIA’s obscure bureaucrats have been confronted with an explosive new charge from two neighboring tribes: that construction of the casino would desecrate what the tribes say needs to be hallowed floor - the location of an 1846 rampage by the U.S. Cavalry that historians say most likely killed a whole bunch of native individuals.

The Sacramento River massacre has not acquired the eye of different atrocities of America’s westward growth, just like the one in 1890 at Wounded Knee, S.D., the place U.S. troops killed as many as 300 Lakota individuals. Estimates of the carnage, recorded over the many years from witness accounts and oral tradition, vary from one hundred fifty to 1,000 men, women and children slaughtered alongside the banks of the Sacramento River.

If the higher estimates of the death toll are appropriate, it will rank as one in every of the biggest single mass killings of Indigenous folks in American historical past.

"In my coronary heart, I discover it hard to imagine that there are Wintu individuals which might be willing to construct a casino on ... the blood-soaked dirt of the massacre site," Gary Rickard, chair of the Wintu Tribe of Northern California, advised a state Assembly committee in August. "There are dozens of other locations alongside the I-5 corridor and the Sacramento River."

Redding Rancheria Chair Jack Potter Jr., himself part Wintu, called the claim that his tribe would build its on line casino on the massacre grounds "a slander that will not be easily forgotten." He advised state lawmakers that the true massacre site is miles away. Rancheria leaders mentioned their opponents have manufactured the controversy for a less honorable reason: to dam what can be a sparkling new competitor.

"Gaming in Indian country could be a tide that raises all of our canoes," insisted Potter, who appeared at occasions to combat again tears as he spoke at the Sacramento listening to. "We should not battle against one another, in that spirit."

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

Friendships that return a long time and tribal ties of a century or more have been imperiled by the casino furor. Native people normally aligned in opposition to a hostile or indifferent U.S. authorities - "We’re all the youngsters of genocide," as one elder put it - have watched sadly as their conflicts flip inward.

It’s a dynamic that has played out earlier than. Robbed of their ancestral lands, tribes now sometimes battle when one tries to assert new territory, typically as a base for a lucrative trendy endeavor: playing.

The friction is exacerbated by the peculiar historical past of the Redding Rancheria - and by opponents’ eleventh-hour invocation of the Sacramento River massacre, 19 years after the rancheria began to assemble parcels for the project.

The Redding Rancheria refers to a almost 31-acre stretch of land near the south end of Redding that the federal government bought in 1922 for "homeless Indians" who came to the world as seasonal employees for ranches and orchards. The rancheria sits in a comparatively obscure location compared with the interstate-adjoining site of the proposed casino, greater than three miles by automobile to the northeast.

In 1939, the Wintu, Pit River, Yana and different Indigenous peoples formed a rancheria authorities. It was recognized by the U.S. But in 1958, an act of Congress "terminated" recognition of a number of California groups, together with the Redding Rancheria, in an attempt to power Indians to disperse into the general inhabitants. It took a landmark 1983 court settlement to formally restore recognition of 17 rancherias, together with the one in Redding.

The result's that there are Redding Rancheria members with Wintu blood, like Potter, 52, who firmly assist the casino, whereas different Wintu descendants who are not descended from the original rancheria households, like Rickard, 78, adamantly oppose it. Rickard grew up with Jack Potter Sr. and has identified his son since he was a boy.

Cordiality prevails, a minimum of outwardly, when Rickard and Potter meet at the moment. However the unhealthy blood between their groups has develop into fierce, exacerbated by the yawning wealth disparity between the rancheria and the Northern Wintu.

Rancheria members have thrived largely because of the success of their present Win-River Resort & Casino, which operates 550 slot machines, a dozen table video games, an 84-room lodge and an RV park.

The complex is the largest income producer for the rancheria, which also owns a Hilton Garden Inn and a marijuana dispensary in Shasta County. Sources acquainted with the tribe mentioned each enrolled member receives a month-to-month "per capita" payment of at the least $4,000 and maybe as excessive as $6,000.

The rancheria’s chief govt, Pitt River descendant Tracy Edwards, 54, declined to debate the quantity of the payments.

That earnings, along with health clinics and other advantages, makes the Redding Rancheria members the envy of Indigenous groups with comparatively paltry property. Rickard’s Northern Wintu declare roughly 560 certified members, however like many groups throughout America, the tribe has been laboring for years and still has not received formal recognition from the U.S. government. Meaning the tribe can’t put land into trust, a prerequisite to casino improvement and also a shield towards federal, state and native taxes.

"We don’t have the sources so as to acquire the issues we need," mentioned Shawna Garcia, the Northern Wintu’s cultural resources administrator. "We don’t have the income to help our members with things like college, housing and other help."

Historians and ethnographers say the Wintu were the predominant tribe round the positioning proposed for the casino advanced, an expanse of meadow and scrubland that locals dub the Strawberry Fields because of its agricultural historical past. And Rickard questioned why the "pure-blood Wintu people" he represents have been left to wrestle, while the rancheria - representing an amalgamation of tribal groups - stands poised to create an even greater cash cow with its new casino.

Rancheria leaders like Edwards, a UC Davis-educated lawyer, have emphasised how the tribal group has supported native and non-native folks, each as one in every of the biggest employers in Shasta County and via its charitable basis.

In just one yr, 2018, the rancheria said it gave more than $1.2 million to group organizations, serving to serve the homeless and victims of the Carr Fire. During the early section of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rancheria donated $5,000 each to 60 companies struggling to remain afloat.

At a value of $150 million, the rancheria’s new on line casino would characteristic 1,200 slot machines - greater than double the number at its present on line casino; and with 250 rooms, the brand new on line casino resort could be more than triple the size of the present hotel. The tribal group has pledged to close its present Win-River casino when the brand new one opens.

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The rancheria’s outsized group presence has created substantial goodwill around Redding, however a portion of residents have stepped ahead - by way of petitions and ballot measures - to precise disdain for big developments they feel may hurt the rural character of their community.

Among the many extra highly effective opponents is Archie Aldis "Red" Emmerson, president of logging large Sierra Pacific Industries, whose sprawling estate looms alongside the Sacramento River, simply south of the casino site.

In 2020, an Emmerson-allied company purchased property from the town of Redding that included a portion of a street that could be the north entry to the on line casino site and created an easement that would have barred entry to the rancheria land for all but agricultural functions. The easement successfully would have thwarted the casino by blocking automobile access to the event.

But in 2022, a Shasta County Superior Court choose voided the deal, saying that in promoting the land (for just $3,000 to the billionaire) the city had violated its "own processes, procedures and the relevant legislation." The ruling nullified the easement, preserving the rancheria’s unrestricted access to the property.

The Redding City Council and neighboring homeowners have maintained their opposition to the project for years, while a brand new conservative majority on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors just lately reversed the county’s earlier objections. The supervisors supported the casino, despite admonitions from the sheriff, fireplace chief and county counsel that the agreement with the rancheria didn't present adequate compensation to cowl the elevated prices of serving the massive improvement.

The rancheria agreed to make one-time funds totaling $3.6 million to assist Shasta County, the Sheriff’s Department and fire and emergency providers. That initial infusion could be supplemented by recurring payments: $1,000 for every police service call and $10,000 for each fireplace/emergency service name.

No concern has unsettled intra-tribal relations, although, like the debate flowing out of the horrible events alongside the Sacramento River, 177 years ago.

Oral histories of the Wintu and neighboring tribes recall how native families and elders had gathered along the river generally known as the big Water every year in early April for the spring salmon run. Traditionally, the season signaled rebirth.

But Capt. John C. Fremont had different concepts.

Fremont diverted his men from their ordered assignment: completing land surveys within the Rocky Mountains. The Americans instead went adventuring to California, the place, within the spring of 1846, they responded to sketchy claims from settlers that they had been endangered.

About 70 buckskin-clad white men set upon the native individuals, the locals far outgunned by the invaders, every toting a Hawken rifle, two pistols and a butcher knife, according to UCLA historian Benjamin Madley‘s detailed account of the massacre.

The horsemen accomplished their grisly work with such evident satisfaction that legendary frontiersman Kit Carson later bragged that the coordinated assault had been "a excellent butchery."

The massacre marked the start of "a transitional period between the Hispanic tradition of assimilating and exploiting indigenous peoples and the Anglo-American sample of killing or eradicating them," in accordance with Madley’s "An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe."

Fremont (later a U.S. senator from California and a Republican presidential candidate) would say that his celebration attacked the natives because of studies of an "imminent attack" upon settlers. However the "battle" was one-sided, with the federal troops suffering no recognized casualties. Afterward, in keeping with Madley’s account, Fremont’s males feasted on the native people’s larder of recent salmon.

Within the practically two centuries since, the tragedy can be more forgotten than remembered. There isn't a historical marker around Redding noting the event.

The Wintu folks believed to have been the principal victims have preserved reminiscences of the mass killing of their oral historical past. But no ceremony marks the atrocity. And at the Wintu cultural resource middle in Shasta Lake City, a wall-size timeline of the group’s history makes no mention of the 1846 bloodshed.

There’s also the now-urgent question - pushed to the fore by the on line casino feud - about exactly the place the massacre occurred. The Northern Wintu and one other outspoken opponent, the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, insist that the Strawberry Fields property was a key location in the atrocity.

The Paskenta commissioned a examine by a retired anthropologist from Cal State Sacramento that drew on research from the late 1800s by a linguist from the Smithsonian Institution who, in flip, received much of his information from a Wintu elder who survived the massacre. The report, by Dorothea Theodoratus and a colleague, mentioned that the "center" of the massacre was "opposite the mouth of Clear Creek" in the Sacramento River, a degree roughly two miles south of the proposed casino location.

But other accounts from members and witnesses stated Fremont’s soldiers chased down victims after the preliminary assault, leaving the precise range of the bloodshed unknown. The Theodoratus report says that six villages, together with two on the proposed on line casino property, were so totally intermingled that every one "would have had some direct involvement with that massacre."

Andrew Alejandre, chair of the Paskenta Band, told the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee in August that his tribe is searching for to have the state and federal governments designate the Strawberry Fields a sacred site, off limits to development. Alejandre, 35, said his tribe vehemently opposes building a casino "on prime of men, ladies, children and elders. The spirit of those ancestors ... Let them rest!"

In rebuttal, Potter and rancheria CEO Edwards notice that in the course of the many years that they and others have pursued developments within the area, the rival tribes never mentioned the massacre. Divisive fights over a proposed auto mall and a sports complex (both scrapped) got here and went with none dialogue about desecration of a mass grave site.

"I would never disrespect the stays of my ancestors," Potter mentioned.

Fifty miles south of Redding in rural Corning, the 288-member Paskenta Band opened the Rolling Hills Casino and Resort two a long time in the past. The luxe gaming corridor is only one a part of an financial surge by the tribe, which has also opened an equestrian complex, an 18-gap golf course, a 1,400-acre gun and looking heart and a 3,000-individual amphitheater, where Snoop Dogg performed in May.

Potter charged that the battle over the historic massacre can be a ploy by the flourishing Paskenta to squelch the Redding Rancheria’s hopes for a shimmering destination on line casino "because of the mistaken belief that it ... will cut into the profits of their gaming facilities."

Paskenta’s Alejandre, a designer who once ran a clothes firm, denied that's the case.

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While representatives for the Paskenta and Northern Wintu tribes bashed the casino proposal at the August hearing, representatives of at least eight different California tribes argued in assist of the Redding Rancheria. One stated the Redding group had proved itself a great steward of cultural sources.

Another speaker at the hearing was Miranda Edwards, the 28-12 months-outdated daughter of the rancheria CEO. The Stanford-educated Edwards and her mother spoke in regards to the significance of shifting the tribal group ahead for the "Seventh Generation," future descendants whose livelihoods have to be deliberate for at present.

"We work laborious daily to provide for this rural community and make it the best that we are able to for everyone that lives there," Miranda Edwards told legislators. "It’s disheartening to hear from people who select to not see that. But it won't stop our work."

Potter, the rancheria’s chairman, had a sardonic take on the dispute.

"We always discuss crabs in a pot," Potter stated. "We are like all these crabs, caught in a pot. When one tries to get out of the pot, all the others reach up and pull him again in."

Will arguments in regards to the Sacramento River massacre sway the ultimate outcome of the Redding Rancheria’s on line casino quest? A BIA spokesman mentioned only that "these issues are underneath evaluation." Nearly two centuries after representatives of the U.S.

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