Tribal leader scorns Russian lawmaker’s tale of Fort Ross history

When a Russian lawmaker suggested his country should demand the return of Fort Ross along the Sonoma County shoreline — as well as all of Alaska — he was as ignorant about history as he was bombastic, according to the chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians.

The Kashia never sold Russia the land on which the government-backed Russian American Company built its outpost, Chairman Reno Franklin said.

Instead, the tribe only leased the land, making the Russians’ eventual sale to John Sutter, the Sacramento Gold Rush-era tycoon, in 1841 of questionable legality.

“That land was never given to anybody, the mere concept of it is foolish,” Franklin told The Press Democrat in an interview last week.

The area’s history as told by its original inhabitants paints the already outrageous comments made on a Russian state-backed talk show by Oleg Matveychev, a lawmaker who analysts consider to have a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an even harsher light.

On March 14, Matveychev, a member of the Russian parliament, suggested on state television that Russia should demand the return of formerly claimed territories in North America as a payback for economic sanctions the United States and other countries leveled against Russia in response to its brutal and unprovoked attack on neighboring Ukraine.

“We should be thinking about reparations from the damage that was caused by the sanctions and the war itself,” Matveychev said on a state talk show program, according to an account in The Daily Beast.

Among those reparations, he suggested, “the return of all Russian properties, those of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and current Russia, which has been seized in the United States, and so on.”

The show’s host asked if he meant to include Alaska and Fort Ross.

Yes, Matveychev said.

“We discovered it, so it belongs to us,” he said.

“I just kinda laughed,” Franklin said, describing his reactions when he read of Matveychev’s remarks.

“It’s some politician trying to make a name for himself half the world away that clearly was ignorant of his own country’s history,” Franklin said.

But if outlandish, the comment is also racist, he said. “It’s a racist comment and it’s a comment steeped in genocide and genocidal acts to suggest that Russia came and discovered our village,” Franklin said, referring to the Kashia ancestral village of Metini, which was near the site of the Russian fort.

There are various reasons that historians, tribal elders and leaders say Russian “ownership” of the land beneath Fort Ross likely never occurred. The Kashia did not conceive of owning land, and were unlikely to have attempted a sale. Instead, facing incursions from Spanish missionaries from San Francisco and hostile tribes to the east, Kashia leaders may have embraced the Russian settlement with its palisades and cannons as a deterrent to other less welcome interlopers.

They may have struck a deal, Franklin said, but they didn’t make a sale. “It was leased just like good friends would do,” he said. The Russians later vaccinated many of the tribe against smallpox, he said.

Additionally, Kashia leaders and elders and an archaeologist who has studied the fort’s history say there are indications that any deals made between Russians and tribal members were endorsed by certain Kashia leaders, but not by the tribe as a whole.

“These ‘prominent’ individuals, while almost certainly the headmen of local kin groups, would not have had the moral or political authority to cede the surrounding land to the Russians,” Breck Parkman, a now-retired state archaeologist, wrote in a 1996 article on the subject.

“Instead, they could have offered to share the land with the Russians by way of a lease,” Parkman wrote.

In an interview with The Press Democrat last week, Parkman said his research indicates the outpost’s first Russian leader, Ivan Kuskov, understood the deal as a lease as well. The treaty was then sent to bureaucrats in Russia who approved the deal, he said.

“The Russians had permission to settle and make use of the land,” Parkman said. “But they didn’t own the land.”

But later colonizers, both Russian and American, may have misinterpreted those terms.

“Kuskov understood but it got lost along the way,” Parkman said. “Whether convenient or just misunderstood, it became a concession. The land was ceded.”

The site became a state park in 1909.

The Kashia’s ancestral territory ran from the Gualala river mouth as far south as what is today called Duncan’s Point, a range of around 40 miles, according to a historical account on the Fort Ross Conservancy website. The Russians built their fort next to Metini, an important spiritual and cultural center for the Kashia where they often hosted gatherings and ceremonies.

For the Kashia, common perceptions celebrating Fort Ross as a Russian site have long been a sticking point. Compared to the Kashia’s history in the area, the roughly 29 years the Russian company occupied the rocky bluffs 45 miles northwest of Santa Rosa are just a blip in history.

The name of the park “should be Metini Fort Ross State Park,” Franklin said. “We should be there first, not in a caption. We should be celebrated first and then the Russians should be celebrated right alongside us.”

But for decades, Kashia people were left out of the site’s history as portrayed by California State Parks, Franklin said. It was only in the last decade, he said, that a tribal identification card allowed Kashia to enter the grounds without paying an entrance fee, including to pray.

“The state over the years could’ve done a better job of listening to the elders,” Parkman said. “It’s been a gradual exercise in listening to the elders and learning how to respect people.”

The Fort Ross Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that supports the park through fundraising and programming, has helped to rectify that erasure, Franklin said. The Kashia people established a dance circle on the park grounds in 2013, and hosted a Bigtime, a gathering centered on dance and ceremony.

After inhabiting a small reservation inland for decades, the Kashia regained some control of their ancestral coastline in 2015, when the tribe took ownership of around 700 acres just north of Salt Point State Park, including a stretch of 52 acres of coastal prairie and more than 600 additional acres on the inland side of Highway 1.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88