Baykeeper and the Wiyot - setting the stage

Tyson Ritter/The Eureka Reporter
Table Bluff Reservation-Wiyot Tribe’s Indian Island parcel is a National Historic Landmark, for which the tribe is currently preparing an Environmental Impact Report.

Historic land contaminated
by Wendy Butler, 9/2/2006

It’s littered with contaminants; however, Table Bluff Reservation-Wiyot Tribe’s Indian Island parcel is a National Historic Landmark.

That’s why its soil remediation plan is more complex than that of other Humboldt Bay properties, said Andrea Davis, Wiyot Tribe environmental director, during a telephone interview on Friday, before she was due to head out to the island.

The Tuluwat Village site on Indian Island, which is on Eureka’s Waterfront, was the center of the Wiyot world, and a place where the tribe performed its “world renewal ceremony.”

On Feb. 26, 1860, the day after the ceremony, a group of local Eureka men traveled to the island and massacred close to 100 Wiyot men, women and children.

In 2004, the Eureka City Council approved the transfer of the eastern portion of Indian Island to the Table Bluff Reservation-Wiyot Tribe.

Davis said that soil capping is an option for a small part of the parcel, on which the tribe hopes to reinstate its ceremony, as well as host members of the public “for cultural and environmental education tours.”

She said that the tribe is currently working on an Environmental Impact Report that it hopes will be available to the public in late September. The plan is currently being discussed with the North Coast Regional Quality Control Board.

When interviewed Friday, Water Board Executive Officer Catherine Kuhlman said that Indian Island “has quite a few chemicals at hazardous levels.”

“It is sort of the same thing you see at a lot of other cleanup sites,” she said.

She acknowledged that the site is “sacred tribal land.”

What is conceivable, Kuhlman said, is “some interim level of cleanup, where they could still do some of their cultural and sacred rites.”

The Wiyot Tribe has consulted with Humboldt Baykeeper and Californians for Alternatives to Toxics on the matter, as well.

“Feedback that I have gotten from them is they both support the tribe and our pursuit to clean up the tribal site,” Davis said.

Pete Nichols, program director for Humboldt Baykeeper, said that his organization has not done an analysis of the entire island site.

“What I do know, it’s a small isolated (portion),” he said. “They’ve done due diligence in trying to analyze it and maintain the cultural resources on the site.”

Nichols and CAT Executive Director Patricia Clary have expressed strong opinions about the dangers of capping contaminated parcels, specifically in regard to Union Pacific Railroad Co.’s Eureka Rail Yard or “Balloon Track.”

The Balloon Track is located at Washington Street and Waterfront Drive. Security National is near finalizing its purchase, and once that’s completed it will be responsible for how the former rail yard is cleaned for its planned mixed-use Marina Center, SN Vice President Brian Morrissey said.

Security National is considering some capping, as well as removal of contaminated soils, he said.

Clary said that she didn’t think that the site has been “characterized sufficiently environmentally.”

In May, Humboldt Baykeeper filed a lawsuit in federal court against Union Pacific for what the group claims are violations of the federal Clean Water Act on the railroad’s parcel.

“We plan on fully characterizing the site,” Morrissey said. “Once we own it, we will submit a plan that will go before all of the various (agencies.) … Then we’ll have a plan that we can use to clean the Balloon Track.”

“The difference between the Balloon Track and Indian Island is that the perpetrator is very alive and very well at the Balloon Track,” Clary said. “The perpetrator on Indian Island is not the Indians.”

“It’s apples and oranges,” Nichols said.

He said, and Clary seconded, that the Wiyot Tribe has had to purchase back contaminated land that had been initially taken from them, and then conduct an expensive cleanup.

“As far as capping goes, each site presents a different set of variables that need to be assessed before you look at what the best solutions are,” Nichols said.

“We’ll be analyzing the EIR, as well,” he added. “But, we’ll just see where it goes from there. (It) seems they’re trying to do the best they can (and) the scope, the scale is entirely different.”

(Security National owns The Eureka Reporter.)
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