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In the spring of 1850, the Pomo people living along Clear Lake in northern California were trying to survive a world that had turned hostile.Settlers and ranchers enslaved Indigenous families, demanding labor, food, and tribute. Many Pomo were forced to work under brutal conditions.Two Pomo men, driven by desperation and abuse, killed their enslavers.The U.S. Army responded with overwhelming, merciless force.On May 15, 1850, soldiers from the 1st Dragoons and local militia units marched toward Bo-no-po-ti, a small island on Clear Lake where dozens of Pomo families, mostly women, children, and elders, had gathered to fish, gather reeds, and rest.They had nothing to do with the earlier killing.They posed no threat.They did not know death was coming.Among them was a young girl later known in oral history as Xaayu, “Shining Water.”She spent her days weaving tule mats with her mother and learning how to breathe through hollow reeds while swimming, a traditional skill taught to children for gathering water plants.Her grandmother once told her:“The lake is a mother.If danger comes, it will hold you beneath its breath.”At dawn, Xaayu heard shouting across the water.She saw soldiers on the shore, rifles raised, boats pushing toward the island.Then the firing began.Bullets tore through tule huts.Women grabbed their children and ran toward the reeds.Elders tried to shield the little ones as the soldiers landed and opened fire in all directions.Some Pomo ran into the lake, believing swimming away would save them,but the soldiers turned their rifles toward the water.Xaayu’s mother pushed her down, whispering:“Under the water.Use the reed.Do not come up unless the world becomes quiet.”Xaayu submerged.The lake closed over her head.Cold water pressed against her skin.She held a hollow tule reed just above the surface, hidden between thick stalks. Through that reed she breathed, slowly, silently.Above her, bodies drifted.Gunshots echoed across the water.She heard screams, the thud of rifle butts, the splash of people sinking beneath the lake.She saw soldiers wading deep, stabbing reeds with bayonets to find anyone hiding.One bayonet pierced the water inches from her cheek.She did not move.She stayed underwater until her lungs ached and her legs trembled.By midday, the massacre was over.Between 150 and 200 Pomo people were killed.Almost all were women and children.Some estimates by Native historians place the toll even higher.When the soldiers finally left, Xaayu rose slowly from the reeds.Bodies floated all around her.Smoke drifted above the lake.She was one of the few still alive.She swam to the far shore and collapsed among willow branches.Later, she found other survivors, children who had hidden underwater, elders who had fled into the hills.Xaayu lived to old age.She returned often to the reeds with her grandchildren, touching the hollow stems and whispering:“These held my breath when the world wanted it gone.”Today, the Pomo people remember the Bloody Island Massacre as one of the greatest tragedies in their history, a truth long ignored by official accounts.