People Who Belong To The Land – July, 2011, Anderson Valley Advertiser

People Who Belong
To The Land

Violet Parrish Chappell and Vivian Parrish Wilder

[excerpt:]
. . .

According to Violet Parrish Chappell, 82, traditionalist and historian of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, her people’s name – their real name, not the arbitrary handle imposed by the white man’s society in the 1870s – has always been Wina·má·bake ya: “People Who Belong To The Land.” To be exact, the land to which the Wina·má·bake ya belong spans the coast and hills at the mouth of what is today known as the Gualala River, located just outside the town of Gualala, reaching as far south as the area below the mouth of the Russian River, also extending roughly eight miles inland. . . .

[O]ne of the greatest instances of harm ever wrought on the Kashia’s ancestral land is on the verge of occurring. A pair of extremely large wine corporations have proposed what would be the two largest forest-to-vineyard conversions in the history of the State of California, which would take place right in the heart of the people’s ancestral homeland, just outside the small northwestern Sonoma County town of Annapolis. . . .