Wappo Erotic

The Wappo held the country that is now Napa Valley and the middle Russian River, a stretch of oak foothills, chaparral ridges and creek bottoms running from Mount Saint Helena down into Alexander Valley. The name is Spanish. Mexican soldiers who spent the 1830s and 1840s failing to subdue them used the word guapo, brave or good looking, and it stuck. Their Pomo neighbors called them Ashochimi, and they mostly called themselves after their own villages, because that was the unit that mattered. What actually set them apart was language. Wappo is an isolate, or close to one: linguists long paired it with Yuki, spoken far to the north, in a Yuki-Wappo family, but the evidence for that link has thinned, and Wappo sits alone in a neighborhood of Pomo and Miwok speakers who share nothing with it. Syntacticians still argue over its case marking and its shifted word order, working mostly from recordings made in the last decades before the language went quiet.

Wealth here was obsidian. The volcanic glass around Glass Mountain and Mount Saint Helena traveled hundreds of miles through central California as blades and blanks, and the Wappo sat on the source. They lived in small autonomous village clusters, sorted by anthropologists into western, northern, central and southern divisions plus the Lile'ek, an offshoot that settled near Clear Lake. Ceremonial life ran through the Kuksu tradition they shared with neighboring peoples: an initiated society, feathered dancers, semi-subterranean dance houses. The collapse was fast. Mission San Francisco Solano opened at Sonoma in 1823, smallpox tore through the region in 1837, Mexican land grants carved up the valleys, and the treaties California tribes signed in 1851 were never ratified by the Senate. A small rancheria in Alexander Valley survived into the twentieth century and was then terminated in 1959. The Mishewal Wappo suit to undo that termination was dismissed on filing deadlines rather than on the merits, and they remain federally unrecognized; other descendants are enrolled at Middletown and among Pomo neighbors. Laura Fish Somersal, weaver and the last fluent speaker, died in 1990 after years of work with linguists and students. The coiled and twined baskets she taught are the thing that passed hand to hand without a break. The homeland underneath all of this is now some of the most expensive farmland in the United States.