Qualla: The People of the Roundhouse

The People of the Roundhouse: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name of the village says everything you need to know. Shanel -- "of the roundhouse" -- was the Central Pomo word for the settlement that anchored life in what European Americans would later call the Sanel Valley, a warm fold in the hills of southern Mendocino County. The roundhouse was not merely a building. It was the place where ceremonies were held, where the Sho-Ka-Lome grass game drew traders from neighboring tribes, where councils met and decisions carried the weight of community. Before Europeans arrived, the village supported a population of roughly 1,500 people and contained five assembly houses. The Hopland Band of Pomo Indians descend from the people who built those roundhouses, and their story since contact has been one of dispossession, legal erasure, and a persistence that the federal government eventually had to acknowledge.

The People of the Roundhouse: A Valley of Seasons

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Sanel Valley lies south of Ukiah in the inland warmth of Mendocino County, sheltered from the coastal fog by ridges of oak and Douglas fir. The Pomo who lived here were not a single static community but a network of villages and seasonal camps connected by kinship, trade, and...

The People of the Roundhouse: Forty Acres and a Constitution

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Hopland Rancheria was established in 1907 on forty acres about three miles east of the town of Hopland. A rancheria, in California's particular vocabulary of displacement, was a small parcel of land set aside for Indigenous people who had been pushed off everything else -- no...

The People of the Roundhouse: Weaving Memory into Willow

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the Hopland Band's most visible cultural contributions is the Pomo tradition of basket weaving, an art form of extraordinary complexity and beauty. Susan Santiago Billy, born in 1884, was a master weaver whose work carried forward techniques refined over centuries -- basket...

The People of the Roundhouse: Sovereignty in Practice

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today approximately 700 tribal members live in the Hopland area, with about 50 residing on the rancheria itself. The tribe operates its own education program, health department, utility department, police force, and court system -- a complete infrastructure of self-governance bui...