The error should have been obvious if only Americans had stopped to consider it. European nation states are rarely ethnic wholes; tribes are. Nation states are composite commonwealths uniting diverse ethnic groups into a single political unit. Very few (There is one great exception here.) indigenous ethnic groups ever came together to synthesize anything beyond. In fact, the tendency among indigenous people was quite the opposite! The tendency was to live in relation to much smaller groups and to share only broader interests, usually gathered in deep cultural history, with the larger ethnic group.
To say that one was Shoshone said a great deal and very little at the same time. It said a great deal about overall ethnohistory, cultural beliefs, institutions, and customs. It said very little about one's specific political commitments, willingness to follow, or day-to-day activities. Even language was by no means entirely common to all Shoshone. Local subdivisions of a tribe were far more important for the day-to-day identity and practical influence over an individual. Some of these subdivisions might be no larger than a few closely related villages. In the Great Basin, this pattern was exemplified in the extreme since population density was already very small, Great Basin ecology requiring a very low population density and, hence, a great deal of independence.
The Washoe are one of the smallest Great Basin tribal groups and the relative richness of their traditional homeland (Truckee Meadow and Tahoe Basin) is superior to most of the Great Basin. Nevertheless, even the Washoe failed to identify directly as Washoe, especially when political unity was expected. Even Washoe villages were notoriously "disorganized", being mostly made up of extended family units but also including the equivalent of "resident aliens," that is, people who were passing by and stuck, for one reason or another. The "rabbit boss" or the "antelope boss" probably had more leadership authority than the matriarch or patriarch of the root family.
Having said all of these discouraging things about disunity among indigenous people, one can still observe the phenomenon of ethnicity and tribalism which clearly developed over long periods of time, as people settled into an area. When we try to unravell the historical development of these groups, however, we find little to go on. The creation stories and historical narratives that they tell rarely paint an "accurate" picture of where the people came from; usually, indeed, creation stories rationalize the traditional locality as the place of origin. The biggest clue to migrations and mixing of people is language. We find a number of language families; then there are distinct language members of these families; and, finally, there are regional dialects. It is possible to guess, at least, on how long a group was isolated from its linguistic source in order to develop separately as far as it has when we find it. The Washoe present an illustration again. The Washoe language is in the family called Hokan; and most Hokan speakers are widely separated in historic time. Studying the difference between Washoe and other Hokan languages, suggests that the Washoe were separated from their linguistic "siblings" around 4500 years ago. (D'Azevedo, "Washoe", p. 466; also, Jacobsen) Incidentally, this tends to favor the theoretical idea that the Washoe were not Great Basin people originally but, rather, came over the Sierras from the west to first settle as the Martis Complex north of Tahoe. There are a number of Hokan speaking tribes in isolated niches in California, but there are no other Hokan speakers in the Great Basin.
All Great Basin peoples other than the Washoe speak languages in the Numic group of the large Uto-Aztecan family of languages. This is a family of languages spoken in various parts of the Southwest and throughout much of Mexico all the way into Central America. Uto-Aztecan languages are also spoken throughout Southern California; but this is the so-called Takic group. If one assumes the general principle that the diversity of dialects is proportional to the time of occupancy, then it can be argued that the oldest Uto-Aztecan speakers of the American Southwest resided in Southern California and migrated somewhat later into the southwestern corner of the Great Basin. According to this theory, Uto-Aztecan speakers began to move northeast into the Great Basin about 2000 years ago, creating the Numic group of languages. Interestingly, this region contains extraordinarily high concentrations of petroglyphs, especially in the Coso Range, south of Owens Valley. Once established, these Numic speakers were further differentiated into groups that moved essentially northward, those who moved into the central area, and those who moved more easterly. On this line of speculation, the three most ancient languages, clustered near to Southern California, are Mono, Panamint, and Kawaiisu. Each of these then moved further outward in a fan shaped expansion, covering the Great Basin, forming the Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute speaking peoples. (Miller, HNAI, 11) It is difficult to understand why the tripartite separation remained so strong over both time and geography; but perhaps it was determined by the ecological differences in the earliest regions of separation
In the accompanying map, we can see the ultimate distribution in tribal groups; note how the three main regions tend to spread out to the northeast from the proposed origin in Southern California. What is different about the tribal affiliations in the Great Basin is the fact that they betray less of a cultural differentiation and more of an accidental linguistic differentiation. Thus, Shoshone are differentiated from Paiute; but how different are they. Paiute and Shoshone speak different Numic languages because of long separation from their linguistic roots. But how different, really, are they in their cultural roots. In the Great Basin, tribal affiliations do not reflect strong differences in culture, that is, in social, political, or material modes of life.
