By John M. Glionna
CAZADERO, CALIF. — Kneeling in a remote stretch of Sonoma County forest, Reno Franklin used his fingers and an archeologist's trowel to sift through the rich, brown soil where he believes an ancient Indian village once stood.
He was looking for clues to the laborious life his ancestors had once carved out of this land, and he dusted off a tiny obsidian arrowhead, gently and reverently holding the well-chiseled stone up to the sunlight.
The owner of the forestland wants to harvest its redwoods. Franklin said he worried such fragile artifacts would be trampled in the process.
"It's so beautiful, it doesn't even look real," he said of the stretch of woods known as Bohan Dillon Ridge that slopes away to the ocean a few miles away. "How could you not want to protect this?"
Franklin is historic preservation officer for the Kashia band of Pomo Indians, whose history stretches back for thousands of years in this region 100 miles north of San Francisco. Today his fight to protect the tribe's past from developers, looters and vandals received a critical moment in the spotlight.
The nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation released its annual list of America's most endangered historic places, and two Kashia sites — the Regalia House and the sacred Old Round House on the reservation at Stewarts Point Rancheria — were on the list of 11 locations.
Click here to read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-trust14jun14,1,2468903.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=2&cset=true
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