Qualla: People From the Top of the Land

People From the Top of the Land: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Missvain Original upload by User:Frank_Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 3.0. In July 2016, about three hundred people gathered on a windy bluff above the Sonoma coast to watch Kashaya Pomo dancers move through tall grass for the first time in more than a century. The sound of clappers and bone whistles carried over the Pacific. A tribal leader called it the most powerful moment the Kashaya had experienced in a hundred years - to hear the wind through the feathers of their dancers on land that had been taken from them and, after five years of negotiation, returned. The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria is a small federally recognized tribe in northern Sonoma County. Their formal name is bureaucratic, but their name for themselves is not. Kashaya means "expert gamblers," and wina-ma bakhe ya translates as "People From the Top of the Land" - a reference to the coastal ridges where they have lived for thousands of years, watching the Pacific from above.

Image: Missvain Original upload by User:Frank_Schulenburg | CC BY-SA 3.0

People From the Top of the Land: A Territory Measured in Seasons

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before European contact, an estimated 1,500 Kashaya Pomo inhabited a territory stretching from the Gualala River in the north to Duncan's Point south of the Russian River, and from the Pacific coast over coastal mountain ranges to the confluence of Dry Creek, roughly thirty miles...