Police mounted a manhunt for Acorn Peters' friend, Eugene "Bear" Lincoln, who was allegedly accompanying Peters at the time of the incident. As part of that search officers ran wild in the valley community, pushing into the houses of friends and relatives of Lincoln with guns drawn, roughing people up, pointing their weapons at adults and children alike. Attorney Dennis Cuningham has filed a class action suit against several law enforcement agencies for civil rights violations. The manhunt was unsuccessful in spite of a $100,000 reward offer from Governor Pete Wilson and a (disputed) re-enactment of the shooting on the national television show, "America's Most Wanted."
Lincoln surrendered to authorities four months later. His trial, on charges of killing Davis and being responsible for Peters' death - police claim that the firing which resulted in Peters' death started with shots from Lincoln - begins in August. He faces the death penalty.
Newspaper accounts focused on Davis' death, attributing the events leading up to the fatal shootout to a feud between the Britton family on one hand and the Peters and Lincoln families on the other. However, a more careful look at the situation, involving a review of statements of individuals connected with both "sides," reveals that the family feud notion is a convenient oversimplification of a much more complex reality, the roots of which extend, possibly, as far back as the program of genocide inflicted - with official blessing - by white invaders upon the indigenous Yuki people in the 1850's and '60's. That campaign reduced the Yuki population from about 3500 in 1848 to about 400 by 1880. (A number of other tribes have since joined the Yukis in the valley, driven there - like cattle - after establishment of the Round Valley Reservation in 1856).
The history of relations between indigenous people and the U.S. government is replete with government betrayals, massacres, broken treaties and changing emphases, all aimed at subordinating Native people to control by the now-dominant culture.
From conquest, leading to treaty-making with independent tribal entities, the American system shifted, in the 1870's, to an attempt to assimilate individuals into white civilization, bypassing tribal structures and undermining traditional tribal leadership. With these methods the federal government was able to control just about every aspect of Indian life between about 1850 and 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act partly restored tribal integrity with limited home rule in the form of tribal councils elected by majority vote, a system at odds with traditional consensus types of self-government and one limited by the absolute veto power held by the government - in the form of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) - over any tribal council decision.
An attempt - instituted in the 1950's - once again to eliminate tribal structures, by providing housing for individual tribal members and "terminating" the legal status of the tribes, proved disastrous to the individuals and tribes thus "terminated."
In 1975, PL93-638 restored a certain amount of tribal self-determination, but the BIA has been able, by shifting to a bureaucratic overlordship, to retain significant control. According to one writer (E. Cahn, 1969), "...the exercise of power and administration of programs by the BIA have come to ensure that every effort by the Indian to achieve self-realization is frustrated and penalized; that the Indian is kept in a state of permanent dependency as his price of survival; and that alienation from his people and past is rewarded and encouraged for the Indian (emphasis added)."
In Round Valley, the consequences of native subordination to white governmental power show up most notably in the workings of the tribal council there and in associated tensions between those, including members of the Frank and Britton families, who would shed any native identity and those who seek to retain traditional perspectives and activities; primarily members of the Lincoln and Peters families.
In an interview with New Settler publisher Beth Bosk, Edwina Lincoln described the tribal council problem this way: "...the Frank women married into the Britton family; that's how they became politically strong. And now they have so much power over people through the various services they control. So it's like people...are being threatened by these families...when they go to vote.
"...the Health Center, the Tribal Council, the Head Start, the Adult Education Program, Indian Ed, the Drug and Alcohol Program, the Housing Program, all the Johnson/O'Malley board, Title 5 board - all these boards that make the decisions are peopled by the same people...
"This is not a feud we are involved in. It's corruption of tribal government - a tribal government that is against our culture, against our language, against our economic development, against our sovereignty, one whose family members are committing violent acts while they are working hand in hand with the police."
Another woman, a Britton who prefers anonymity, reveals the day-to-day effect of tribal council maladministration in the public service job where she works: "I see these guys punch in at work and then take off downtown to run their personal errands and hang around awhile before coming back and starting work. The ones in charge know it's happening but they don't do anything because it's their relatives."
Cyndi Pickett is the widow of Acorn Peters. A white woman, she has lived in Round Valley for 9 years, much of that time in the Indian community. Her perspective on the split in the Native community includes a psychological dimension:
"Living with white racism has caused many Indians to internalize the whites' view of them as inferior," Pickett says. "As a result, they want to shed any Indian identity for themselves. And as part of that, they take on an attitude that is scornful of anybody that wants to retain the Indian ways. Their perspective is: 'There are no Indians left anymore; there's no more Indian stuff happening since the1800's; the white man took it away; but that's okay because we're Christian now.'"
Norma Knight, a community elder, recounts a bit of history, reaching back to the 1950's attempt by the Federal governemnt to move Indian people off of their reservations and into the American mainstream. At that time a number of Round Valley residents left and took up residence in other northern California areas, but by the late '60's and early '70's they were beginning to return. According to Knight, "after spending some time in the wider, white-dominated society, those people came to realize that the problem wasn't their being Indians. Other minorities were equally despised and mistreated by members of the dominant culture. That inspired them to take another look at their own traditions and practices, to find what was good there and begin to bring it back."
Pickett elaborates: "Those who stayed did everything they could to become assimilated. They wanted to belong; they wanted acceptance. They gave up their religion and became Christian. They almost had the Indian issue dead and then these folks came back and started reviving the dances and stuff right in front of them. It didn't set so well."
Pat Lincoln, a Wailaki traditionalist puts it this way: "The church plays a major role; they don't want this 'Indian stuff.' They look at it like 'which side are you on, the good Christian people's side or the Indian devil-workshippers' side.'"
The church that Lincoln refers to is the Pentecostal church. There are other Christian denominations in the valley which include Indians in their congregations, but their members don't appear to be participants in the violence and their names don't come up in discussions of the community's problems.
The Pentecostals are more fundamentalist than any of the other Christian groups and more hostile to people and practices they see as "heathen." This group includes many of the Brittons, specifically those who are allegedly responsible for numerous acts of violence against the traditionalists. One woman, a Pentecostal who is related to the Brittons commented, "It hurts me to have to say it about my own family, but some of the Britton boys (Neil and Justin) are bullies." Pat Lincoln reports that Neil Britton has threatened to "shoot all you Lincolns." He describes also situations in which individuals connected with the church have publicly taunted him and others in his family about their traditional practices.
In fact, the tragedy of April 14th traces directly back to an incident in which Neil Britton and two other men allegedly assaulted Arylis Peters' sixteen year-old son Byron, beating him badly. Concerned that the youth might do something rash, Acorn Peters and Cyndi Pickett attempted to lodge a complaint against the three men, but were put off time and again by the Sheriff's Department. Pickett set one appointment after another with deputies who failed to show up. She and her husband spoke to resident deputy Shannon Barney - a cousin of Acorn's - and pleaded with him to do something. Barney referred her to the Sheriff's office in Ukiah, an hour and a half away, but when Pickett went to the Complaint and Incident Reporting window at the Sheriff's facility she got nowhere.
"I picked up the phone," she says, "and told the woman that answered that I wanted to file a complaint. She asked me my name and as soon as I told her it was like hearing doors begin to shut. She said she didn't know how to take a complaint. 'Wait a minute,' I said, 'The sign here says this is where to file complaints and you're telling me you don't know how to do that?' 'I'm sorry ma'am,' she told me, 'you'll have to file that complaint in Covelo.'"
As they feared, Byron Peters got impatient, decided to take the law into his own hands and fired a few shots at Neil Britton's car. It wasn't until his trial for that incident, says a Sheriff's Department spokesperson, that they heard about the earlier beating and filed charges against Britton. District Attorney Susan Massini says that action on those charges, filed April 10, 1995, is pending; Britton has not been arrested.
Pickett, Pat Lincoln, his wife Edwina and others are convinced that if the Sheriff's Department had accepted and acted on Byron Peters' complaint, the April 14 shootings would never have taken place.
According to Ron Lincoln, a cousin of Pat's, law enforcement has not played a good role in Round Valley, either in the past or during the present troubles. "We have a history of law enforcement brutality and misuse of law and order," he says. "Sheriff's deputies have beaten Indian youths on a number of occasions. Some of the worst incidents took place during the tenure of former Sheriff Tim Shea, but there has been little if any improvement under current Sheriff Jim Tuso."
Pickett and the Lincolns tell of situations in which deputies worked over with batons persons whom they had arrested and handcuffed. One such incident led to the disarming and beating of several deputies by a crowd of residents. Nobody was convicted because those charged were able to convincingly demonstrate that the deputies had been using excessive force.
On another occasion a young man was acquitted on charges of stabbing a deputy with a penknife; he only used the knife after unsuccessfully trying to persuade the officer to stop beating his handcuffed older brother. The deputy was found to have been drinking on duty but the only consequence he suffered was transfer to another area. The young man, considered a model student at his school, suffered such a severe beating at the hands of deputies that his survival was in doubt.
Bob Davis, the slain deputy, wasn't universally respected in the valley. Pickett has this to say about him: "He beat up my daughter, he and Shannon Barney. He was the kind of guy that snaps and then regrets it later. He got real accommodating afterward, trying to explain how it was legal for him to do that. He used to tell my daughter, 'You're going to get killed hanging around with Indians.' He'd say to her, 'You're good looking' and stuff like that. He was sick."
Another resident, Bobbie Anderson, characterizes Davis this way: "Tuso calls him a hero; I don't feel like he was a hero. He was a killer. He was trained to kill and he killed Leonard Peters. He would be alive today, he and Peters both, if he didn't have to be such a big shot and show all the other deputies what he could do. He had no business up on that hill."
A major issue is the apparent one-sidedness of law enforcement in the valley. Non-traditionalists seem to be immune to arrest. Anderson talks about how "the Britton boys would go out to Hull's Valley and shoot at the Peters' houses and the Peters would go to the cops and the cops wouldn't do anything." Pickett recounts an incident in which one of the Brittons hit a child on a bike with her car. The deputy wouldn't take a complaint.
In October, 1995, Elvin "Pink" Peters received gunshot wounds in both legs when a car pulled up beside where he and three friends were parked and leveled down on them. Six eyewitnesses say that the person who shot and wounded Peters was Neil Britton; the Sheriff's Department did write up a report and, in November they passed it on the the District Attorney. Asked in mid-February why charges hadn't been filed, Massini said the matter was still under investigation and she would announce the results "soon." By press time nothing had come out.
Police racism is undoubtedly a factor in much of what has transpired, but some residents suspect there may be even more to it. "They have a stake in keeping this community divided," says Pickett. "They haven't given up the idea of damming the Eel and flooding this valley. There was a plan to do that before, back in the late '60's. The only thing that stopped that was Ronald Reagan, when he was governor. He came here and looked it over and said they shouldn't flood it. But people here feel that he said that because Lousiana Pacific wanted to wait until they could take out all the timber." And, of course, it is the traditionalists that have been fighting the depredations of the big timber companies.
Pickett notes that LP has put in roads throughout much of the land they own; roads that are more solid than ordinary logging roads. "They're all lignited with culverts installed, just waiting to become lakeside subdivisions. It's true that the Eel is supposedly a 'wild and scenic' river, but that's a law that can be reversed and we know how much clout LP money has with legislators."
"The whites in this community would like nothing more than to see it become a lake," says Pickett, "and you can be sure that the white wannabes are quite willing to take some of the cash that will be in play and leave. But the traditionals aren't about to let that happen. So the money folks are quite content to see this community remain divided so that they can point to the traditionals as 'standing in the way of progress,' and use that as grounds for moving everybody out and opening up the floodgates."
But all that is down the road a piece. For now the challenge is to live together in this small community and stop the violence and bloodshed. Bobbie Anderson puts it this way: "The Britton and Lincoln kids get along fine. Why can't the adults be this way? It's sad that we have to live like this and go through this.
"I think some of the Indian people just want to stay away from it and just not get involved. We need people to get involved. What we need now is healing. Both sides have to forgive. We need to learn to do that, get rid of our hatred and show our love to each other. It's got to be a forgiving someplace."
Maybe the best place to start would be the tribal council.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited