Lake County group working to change the name of Kelseyville to redress violence against tribes

“What about street names with Kelsey in them? When does it end?”

Citizens for Healing is quick to note that any proposed redesignation would apply only to the town of Kelseyville and its post office. Businesses with the Kelseyville in their name need not make any change.

Considering the “larger issues in the world right now,” said Pivniska, she finds this push to change the town’s name “ridiculous.”

“I think it’s a pointless effort,” agreed Rob Brown, a former five-term Lake County supervisor whose district included Kelseyville, where his bail bonds business is located.

These attempts to change the town’s name “come up every once in a while, when people don’t have anything else to do in their lives,” said Brown, who retired from public service in 2021, after 20 years as a supervisor. Such efforts are “politically correct” exercises that “give people the chance to feel relevant,” he said. The campaigns inevitably “die away” when “something really important comes along.”

There is optimism, on the side of those favoring a name change, that this time will be different.

Conditions are ripe

One such effort was spearheaded by Nils Palsson, a community organizer and former teacher at Kelseyville High School who in 2016 and ’18 unsuccessfully challenged Democratic Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents California’s 5th District.

Before losing his home in the 2015 Valley fire, Palsson lived in Kelseyville. This was in his mid-20s, he recalled, “when I was kind of finding my way as a conscious human being and peaceful revolutionary.”

He met Clayton Duncan, a Pomo elder from the Robinson Rancheria in Upper Lake, who shared accounts how Andrew Kelsey enslaved and brutalized native peoples, “and a bunch of other horrible things that made me get the sense that Kelsey was not a good dude.”

They started an online group called We Are Konocti, hoping to create momentum for a name change. But Palsson at the time was “not super clued-in to the political processes,” he allows, and the campaign fizzled. “It never had real will behind it,” said Palsson, who believes the conditions for a name change are far more ripe today than they were a decade ago.

We Are Konocti was formed “before George Floyd” was killed, “before Black Lives Matter really got traction.”

Now, Palsson points out, “you’ve got monuments coming down left and right. There’s “a national conversation” about place names and history.

“Obviously, we want to remember everything. But the names we select – that’s who we choose to celebrate.”

‘It will never be the same’

Today’s Kelseyville residents had no say in naming the town, points out Mark Borghesani, president and general manager of Kelseyville Lumber & Supply Co., which was founded by his grandfather, Lou, in 1956.

“My generation was given the name of the town, and we made it our own,” he said.

The community, Borghesani believes, is inextricably tied to its name. “Kelseyville is our brand, and many of us have spent a lifetime building that brand” – which has nothing to do, he added, “with how this town was originally named, or why, or whom after.”

He describes Kelseyville, once dubbed the Pear Capital of the World by USA Today, as “a friendly, country town. That’s what we have built, worked for, marketed and promote every year. If the name changes, so will our town. In my opinion, it will never be the same.”

Bloody Island Massacre

Just off Main Street, a few hundred yards south of Kelseyville Lumber, a monument has been erected to mark the site of “the first Adobe home (in) Lake County.”

That house, the plaque proclaims, was “Built by Charles Stone and Andy Kelsey on land purchased from Salvador Vallejo.”

In fact that house was constructed by indigenous Pomo and Wappo natives whom Stone and Kelsey enslaved and subjected to starvation, torture, rape and murder. In the winter of 1849, their condition increasingly desperate, the Indians executed the two white men. Stone was dispatched with an arrow to the stomach. Kelsey, too, absorbed an arrow, but was also shot, stabbed and speared. Their bones repose beneath that monument.

To avenge those executions, U.S. Cavalry soldiers and vigilantes – including Kelsey’s brothers, Ben and Sam – embarked over the next five months on an indiscriminate spree of mayhem, killing “as many as 1,000 Indians, or more, across four Northern California counties,” wrote Benjamin Madley, UCLA associate professor and Native American historian in his 2016 book, “An American Genocide.”

The most infamous of those mass killings occurred on May 15, 1850, at the north end of Clear Lake. Soldiers under the command of U.S. Army Captain Nathaniel Lyon opened fire on natives – mostly women, children and elderly – who’d sought refuge on the mile-long island called Bonopoti. It’s unclear how many natives were slaughtered in what is now known as the Bloody Island Massacre. Estimates range from 60 to 400 people.

Bloody Island is now a hill, surrounded by land that has been drained and reclaimed. At the eastern base of that hill, visible from Reclamation Road, is a plaque installed in 1942, commemorating “a battle between U.S. soldiers” and “Indians under Chief Augustine.”

“It was no battle,” corrected Clayton Duncan. “It was murder. Women, children, old people – they got killed for nothing. They did nothing to nobody.”

Lesson in forgiveness

On a blustery afternoon in early March, Duncan stood on a flat patch of ground just south of that plaque. He recounted how a group of Pomo men, who had been away hunting when the soldiers came, spent five days gathering the dead, many of whom were in the water, shot down or bayoneted as they tried to escape.

The bodies were cremated on the island’s east peak, which was later leveled by the Army Corps of Engineers, a desecration that still angers him, Duncan said.

He is the great-grandson of Lucy Moore, a survivor of the Bloody Island Massacre. Six years old at the time, she hid underwater, breathing for hours through a tule reed. Lucy Moore lived to be 110 and helped babysit Duncan when he was a small boy, he said.

He was instrumental in the creation and installation of a second, more historically accurate plaque that commemorates the massacre at Bloody Island. In 2006, Duncan led the campaign to get rid of Kelseyville High School’s “Indian” nickname.

“We are your brothers and sisters, not your mascots,” he reminded the school board, which was unanimous in its decision to drop the nickname.

The former angry young man has mellowed since his adolescence, part of which was spent in Oakland, where he ended up, he recalled, in more than his share of fistfights.

“My mom said, ‘How come you’re always fighting these white guys?’”

“I said, ‘Mom, look what they’ve done!’”

She shared with him that as an adult that his great-grandmother – one of the survivors of that 1850 slaughter – “got up every morning, put her palms to the air and asked the creator for his energy of forgiveness.”

That lesson eventually inspired Duncan to organize an annual Sunrise Ceremony of Forgiveness. Every May for the past 23 years, he and his brother, Douglas Duncan, have marked the anniversary of that massacre with prayer, speeches and traditional dancing.

Kevin Engle, a local historian who works with Citizens For Healing, has attended the ceremony numerous times. Two years ago, he distributed copies of an article he had written on Andrew Kelsey. After Clayton Duncan thanked him for that research, Engle stood and spoke of the importance of changing the name of Kelseyville.

“Clayton tried to do it, and it was basically a one-man show,” Engle recalled saying. “It’s not right. It’s time the community got together and helped this man.”

That torch has been picked up by Citizens For Healing, who will eventually need to gather 2,000-plus signatures to get their initiative on the ballot.

Several members have floated the possibility of a less onerous alternative.

Should there be a groundswell of sentiment in favor of changing the name, noted Dallas Cook, “the five County Supervisors could say: ‘The time is now – let’s do it.’”

That seems unlikely, considering the charged, divisive nature of the issue. None of the five supervisors contacted by The Press Democrat agreed to be interviewed. Jessica Pyska, a Democrat who replaced Republican Rob Brown and whose district includes Kelseyville, responded to a reporter’s request with a statement acknowledging the sins of the Kelseys, then mentioning Citizens For Healing’s intention to bring forward a ballot initiative.

“If or when that occurs, a decision will be made by the people,” Pyska said in an email. “As a county supervisor, my responsibility will be to support the community and the process.”

‘Step back and listen’

Back at Pioneer Plaza in downtown Kelseyville, Caitlin Andrus said she can “see both sides” of the issue. Would she be upset if the town’s name was changed?

“Personally, no,” she replied.

“There comes a time where we, as the people who weren’t here first, need to step back and listen to other peoples’ experience. And hear them.”

Her sister, Sabrina, a self-described “recovering lawyer” who owns several businesses in town, picked up on that.

“There are a lot folks” in Lake County, she said, “myself included, who want to take our cue from those who have been hurt by the decision to exalt this family by naming our town after them.”

That requires humility, she said. “It requires checking our egos and taking a hard look at what we really think we’re losing.

“I have zero problem with it. I’m looking forward to the day we change the name.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.