Table Bluff Reservation, United States – “You’d get beaten. It would only cause you pain.” Those were the lessons that Cheryl Seidner grew up hearing from her grandfather, a man who had learned the hard way what it meant to be Wiyot in the United States.
The Wiyot tribe has lived in the Humboldt Bay region of northern California for thousands of years, since time immemorial. But Seidner’s grandfather had discovered that, if — for example — he spoke the Wiyot language Soulatluk in school, it would earn him a bang on the head or a slap with a ruler.
