Northern Humboldt Indians tells the stories of the Hoopa, the Yurok, the Wiyot, the Whilkut, the Tsungwe and the Mawenok — the latter of whom, we’d be willing to wager, you’ve never heard of until now — and their encounters with each other, and with the wave of White settlement that overran Native Americans in the mid-19th century.There’ll be an interview with Rohde posted on the Outpost a couple of hours from now. In the meantime, check out this excerpt, which Rohde gave us explicit permission to reprint.There was a place, on the Mad River, that must have seemed like a world unto itself. To the west the Iaqua Buttes stood like a dark, unscalable wall, rising abruptly from the canyon bottom and extending so high that they blocked the late afternoon sun. On the south was another mountain barrier that also enshadowed the river, while to the north rose a rolling ridgeline punctuated by Chaparral Mountain, Bug Creek Butte, and Board Camp Mountain, all more than 5,000 feet high. Here, however, the mountains descended more gradually to the river, with grassy, south-facing prairies often warmed by the unobstructed sun. On the canyon floor, near the location that became known as Big Bend, it is easy to believe that the river ran through its gorge like a long, sonorous chord, sending its sound to anyone who paused to listen to it, and telling the listeners that here they were welcome to abide, that here, like the river canyon, the spirit ran deep.It became the home of the Mawenoks.Almost no one has heard of the tribe. Between 1906 and 1913 three ethnographers interviewed Mawenoks, but they either failed to confirm their tribal identity or did not broadcast their information. In 1918 Llewellyn Loud, in his monograph on the Wiyot tribe, used statements from John Stevens, whom he indicated was born “one and a half to two miles below Maple Creek.” The location was in the heart of Mawenok country, but Loud didn’t know this and he accordingly labeled Stevens a member of the neighboring tribe, the Whilkuts.Eight years earlier, Stevens had been interviewed by another ethnographer, C. Hart Merriam, who concluded that the Mad River area previously assigned to the Whilkuts had actually been the homeland of a closely connected but separate tribe called the Mawenoks. Merriam obtained a list and descriptions of numerous Mawenok villages without realizing that his informant was himself a member of the tribe, believing, like Loud, that Stevens was a Whilkut. Merriam’s minimal account of this heretofore unknown tribe was not published until 1974 and then only as a paper from the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley. An even earlier ethnographical inquiry, conducted by Pliny Goddard in 1906 and 1908, included a brief but detailed report about the tribe that still languishes in the deepest obscurity.In his 1906 interview with Johnnie Maple, he obtained the tribe’s name, spelling it “Me-wi-yi-nuk,” but he apparently never used it in print. A 1908 Goddard interview with Minnie Pete, a Mawenok who was born at Big Bend in about 1850, never mentions her tribal identity, It was first seen by California Athabaskan language expert Victor Golla in 2015, some 107 years after it was recorded. After studying it, Golla concluded that it “is clear that it was recited in a variety of Hupa closely resembling Goddard’s ‘Whilkut.’”Over time, according to Goddard’s and Merriam’s information, the Mawenoks came to occupy a long stretch of the river, from above Bug Creek on the south all the way downstream to the North Fork Mad. In about 1849 the Mawenoks and their Whilkut neighbors probably joined together in expanding their boundaries by attacking a Wiyot village in the vicinity of later-day Blue Lake. Some Wiyot men were killed, some were driven off, and some of the younger women, whether willingly or not, became wives or partners of the attackers, so that the village subsequently became a combination of Wiyots, Whilkuts, and Mawenoks, along with their mixed off
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