The Sanel Valley lies south of Ukiah in the inland warmth of Mendocino County, sheltered from the coastal fog by ridges of oak and Douglas fir. The Pomo who lived here were not a single static community but a network of villages and seasonal camps connected by kinship, trade, and shared language. They spoke Northern Pomo and moved through the landscape according to the calendar of acorns, fish, and game. Winter meant the main village sites along the valley floor. Spring and summer sent families to outlying camps for gathering and hunting. Trips to Clear Lake brought obsidian and magnesite; trips to the coast brought clams and abalone. The "Big Time" gatherings -- trade fairs that combined ceremony, sport, and commerce -- drew people from across the Pomo world. It was a life organized not around fixed boundaries but around relationships, and those relationships sustained the community for thousands of years before anyone thought to draw a map.

The Hopland Rancheria was established in 1907 on forty acres about three miles east of the town of Hopland. A rancheria, in California's particular vocabulary of displacement, was a small parcel of land set aside for Indigenous people who had been pushed off everything else -- not a reservation in the treaty sense, but a grudging concession that these communities existed and needed somewhere to live. Forty acres for a people who had once ranged freely across the Sanel Valley and beyond. Then came the California Rancheria Termination Act of 1958, which attempted to dissolve dozens of these communities entirely, distributing communal land to individuals and stripping tribes of federal recognition. The Hopland Band fought back. On March 29, 1978, the rancheria's federal recognition was restored -- one of the earliest successful reversals of the termination policy in California. Three years later, the tribe ratified a constitution establishing a seven-person governing council, building the institutional foundation for self-governance on land the government had tried to take from them twice.

Among the Hopland Band's most visible cultural contributions is the Pomo tradition of basket weaving, an art form of extraordinary complexity and beauty. Susan Santiago Billy, born in 1884, was a master weaver whose work carried forward techniques refined over centuries -- baskets woven so tightly they could hold water, decorated with patterns drawn from a vocabulary of nearly three hundred traditional designs. Her great-niece Susan Billy, born in 1951, studied under the legendary Elsie Allen for fifteen years and became one of the few remaining practitioners of traditional Pomo basketry. Billy is a founding member of the California Indian Basketweaver's Association and has spent decades teaching and demonstrating a craft that requires intimate knowledge of native plants -- the willow, sedge root, and bulrush that must be harvested at precise times and prepared with skills passed from hand to hand across generations. The baskets are not artifacts. They are living practice, and the Hopland Band's weavers have ensured that the knowledge survives.

Today approximately 700 tribal members live in the Hopland area, with about 50 residing on the rancheria itself. The tribe operates its own education program, health department, utility department, police force, and court system -- a complete infrastructure of self-governance built on forty acres that the federal government once tried to erase from the map. The Sho-Ka-Wah Casino, which opened in 1998 and operated for two decades before closing in 2019, provided economic development during a critical period of tribal institution-building. The Hopland Band also conducts prescribed burns to foster regrowth of the willow, elderberry, and dogwood that basket weavers depend on -- a land management practice that connects modern environmental science to the seasonal burning the Pomo practiced long before European contact. The roundhouse that gave Shanel its name may be gone, but the impulse it represented -- a community gathering to govern itself, celebrate its traditions, and plan for its future -- continues on the rancheria that carries the Hopland name.