Annual Indian Island Candlelight Vigil

The Wiyot Tribe invites members of the community to the 18th Annual Indian Island Candlelight Vigil. This event will
be held rain or shine. On Saturday February 23 from 6-8 p.m. on the West end of Woodley Island. Please bring a
candle.

The Wiyot peoples are the aboriginal inhabitants of Humboldt County, California. Their territory spans from Little
River to Capetown to Scotia and as far as Blue Lake and Kneeland. Indian Island, the center of the Wiyot World, was
a place for a dance known as a “World renewal ceremony, which lasted for seven to ten days in a village called
Tuluwat. The significance of this ceremony was to ask the Creator to bless all people and the land in preparation
for the New Year. Traditionally, the men would leave the island and return the next day with the day’s supplies. The
elders, women and children were left to rest on the island along with a few men.

During the early morning of February 26th, 1860, the day after the world renewal ceremony a group of Eureka men
armed with hatchets, clubs and knives, paddled their boats over to the island. Guns were left behind so the noise
would not be so great. Exhausted from the ceremonial dance, sleeping men, women and children were brutally slain.
History would tell that this was not the only massacre that took place that morning. Two other Wiyot village sites
were also attacked. A total of eighty to one hundred people or more were brutally murdered that cold February  morning.