Part III: Up-and-Down California

This person is a Cahuilla --- as a matter of fact, a Desert Cahuilla living in the Agua Caliente Band. The science of generalization, as pursued in the preceding discussions, allows us to suggest much about him and the traditions in which he grew up. But when we begin to know Juan Garcia, the individual, we discover that not very much of this applies. Generalization helps where particular knowledge is lacking. The irony of knowing is how the particular extinguishes the general. In this part, we will develop six particular descriptions of California tribelets as a way of understanding something about the diversity found here.

Tribal Territories

When the ambitious Smithsonian project, The Handbook of North American Indians, was designed, North America was divided into ten regions of study. All of those regions, with the exception of California, are geographically large and include several states or portions of countries. California is the only study region of its small size, representing less than a single political territory, today. The reason is twofold. First, even with so small a size, the California study region contains extraordinary diversity. Second, the cultures selected within this small sphere are not only diverse among themselves but are unique in comparison with the cultures of the surrounding regions. The division was, in many ways, a natural division.

When we include the entire state, as is my aim here, the diversity of cultures is expanded even more. The Handbook set out to describe sixty tribes in the California region, but the State of California included at least nine more tribes from the study regions of the Northwestern Coast, the Great Basin, and the Southwest. The complexity of this undertaking is far greater when we consider the division of all tribes into tribelets. Such diversity was clearly a reflection of the state's topography. Since indigenous cultures tend to develop by adaptation to their physical environment, the great variation in environments throughout the state tended to isolate individual tribelets within the local ecological niches to which they had adapted their lifeways. Since the forces of nature were stronger than the forces of political unification, California tribelets remained distinctively dependent upon their localities and rather independent of each other.

In contrast to other parts of North America --- The Arctic Tundra, the Great Plains, the Prairie Lands, the Eastern Woodlands, etc. --- California is a rather small region with extraordinary geographical diversity. The combination of an ocean coastline, coastal mountains of moderate elevations, interior valleys, the great Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains, and both high and low deserts, provided diverse habitats for a multitude of flora and fauna. Contrast, for instance, the habitats provides by the Salinas Valley, along the central coastline, and the Coachella Valley, in the southern interior. The Salinas River runs into the Pacific Ocean at Monterey Bay; the Valley floor is dark colored soil enriched by long-term decomposition of plant materials; hillsides are covered with grasses and oaks; the climate is moderate in temperature and higher in moisture content and retention. In the Coachella Valley, we find sandy desert terrain; surface waters percolate into underground aquifers and move toward the Salton Sea, which has no outlet; plantlife is sparce, though the trained eye will see mesquites, agaves, creosote, and various seed-bearing plants; the climate is very hot and dry to an extreme. By no surprise, the kinds of animals we will see in these two valleys are very different from each other.

The ways in which plant and animal communities co-inhabit geographically distinct environments are studied in ecology. The principal strategy in ecology is recognition that everything is interdependent. Each element of an environment has need for nourishment and appropriates other elements of the environment for its growth and survival. In exchange, every element of an environment contributes something back to the interdependent complex. For example, mice appropriate and consume a wide variety of plant materials; but mice also provide food for snakes and hawks.

Another way of recognizing California's diversity, then, is to examine its geographically distinct regions from the point of view of ecology. This is, of course, an impossibly complicated task; the whole state could be divided into innumerable micro-ecological niches. Even along the Pacific Coast, where there is general similarity from north to south, there are quite different ecosystems to be observed, offering different species of flora and fauna to be studied. In this overview of California, we offer only six ecologically distinct regions, though two of these are subdivided.

What makes these ecological regions interesting to a study of California's Native people is that early humans entered into the natural balance of flora and fauna cooperatively. Thus, as human lifeways developed, they acquired distinctive characteristics that bear important relations to the ecological niches in which they lived. The intimate relationship between culture and ecology, indeed, must have kept people focused on their traditional homelands and inhibited most tendencies toward expansion. In California, life became so environmentally focused that many more than one hundred different tibes and tribelets were well established by the 18th Century, when Europeans first began to explore the region.

In contrast, European economic and technological developments, as early as the 15th Century, had stimulated considerable interest in exploration of the world and European nations were already aggressively expansive. As the industrial nations developed out of these European origins in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the character of human ecology changed dramatically. Americans, today, demand more-and-more of their environments and contribute back less-and-less. Americans are so dominant, indeed, that their environments are "human built" rather than "natural." The ecology of any American environment, today, must contend with the human, first, as the major factor in determining the conditions of all other fauna and the flora. Because of this, most of California has changed in dramatic ways and in just a very short period of time. The changes can be seen everywhere; but nowhere are they more significant than in the state's Great Central Valley. In his diaries, John Muir wrote about walking through the San Joaquin Valley in spring, finding the valley floor so lush in wildflowers that one could not step without taking some toll of plants and flowers. Around the southern end of San Joaquin Valley, there were large lakes, marshlands, and extensive deltas; tules grew twelve feet high. But no one driving along Interstate 5, today, could possibly even imagine this.

The ecology of natural environments is diverse; it is a trait of modern human environments that they tend away from diversity toward uniformity. Modern humans try to do the same thing wherever they go! Thus, people who lived cooperatively within natural environments developed lifeways that were compatible; and this meant that human cultures were equally diverse. The influence of ecology was usually supreme. For example, the tribes of the California's northwest coast and neighboring interior valleys spoke different languages that belonged to quite different language families and that indicate different geographical origins in remote time. However, the cultural traditions of these tribes --- housing, food utilization, costuming, narratives, spiritualism --- are strongly similar if not, in fact, the same. Long exposure to the same environment seems to have been the greatest influence in shaping their cultural life.

Another interesting example, is the case of the Cahuilla, of Southern California. In their case, the ecologies of local environments seem to have caused a group of people with common origins and cultural coherence to spread out across several ecologically different environments! They inhabited the desert floor of Coachella Valley as well as the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains and the adjacent interior valleys and mountain passes to the west. They undoubtedly improved their situation, in this way, since any one of these ecological regions could be seasonally unreliable and food was usually sparce in any of them. While the Cahuilla lived far apart, their cultural traditions provided many ritual opportunities through which food and other resources could be shared all around.

In The Natural World of the California Indians, Heizer and Elsasser noted six major ecological zones in the State of California and divided two of these further, on the basis of local differences. In his book, A Natural History of California, Allan Schoenherr describes ten natural regions in the state, though he ignores the coastline itself as a natural region. Both treatments have their virtues; the description, below, is informed by both. Maps of these regions are presented in Appendix A. Also note the topographic and tribal maps of California. Careful comparison of these maps will demonstrate how the ecological zones match the state's topographical features and how the tribal territories tended to conform to these ecological zones.

Because indigenous cultures expressed such a close adaptation of life to natural environment, it is obvious that the most reliable generalizations about Indian life can be made within ecological zones. When we make comparisons that cross zones, we begin to discover serious differences. Tribal organization rarely crossed ecological boundaries, with a few exceptions; rather, tribes conformed to the boundaries of ecological niches as determined by natural barriers. Most commonly, a given ecological zone was divided up among several tribes which expressed many cultural similarities and yet stood apart as separate political entities. As Kroeber noted, early in his studies of the California tribes, not even the tribes hung together as strong political units, and people usually felt a stronger affiliation with tribelet than with tribe.

The most important environmental influence in California is, of course, the Pacific Ocean, which provides almost 1000 miles of coastline. The second most important feature is an extensive foothill (or low-mountain) environment, ranging from 1000 to 4000 feet in elevation. And the third major environmental feature is the deserts of the eastern and southern portions of the state. Yet three other distinctive environments are found in substantial areas within the state; these are the valley floors, especially the huge Central Valley, the great river systems that lead into the ocean, and a few substantial inland lakes. All six of these regions have to be further subdivided.

The Pacific Coast is affected by several factors. Foremost is the prevailing pattern of winds and weather coming off of the ocean from the northwest. The typical storm track runs across the upper half of the state, making Northern California rather like the rest of the Pacific Northwest, cool and wet. Only in the winter does the storm track dip down in the southern half of the state, making Southern California substantially more arid. Also, the strong eastward turn of the coastline, from Point Conception south, shelters those areas from the harsher effects of the ocean, especially the high surfs found north of San Francisco. In the ocean itself, there are two major currents that meet near Monterrey Bay. A harsh, cold current moves southward out of the Gulf of Alaska along the northern coastline; and a mild, warm current moves northward away from the Gallapagos along the southern coastline. As a final difference, one should assess the rocky cliffs of the north in comparison to the wide beaches of the south. All of these factors determine a complex pattern of weather and, hence, of natural flora and fauna. Furthermore, the ocean itself offers unique food and plant resources, which change, from south to north, along with the physical character of the coast itself.

The north coast remained substantially intimidating to ocean fishers and hunters, who at best used shallow canoes to visit shoreline sea stacks, hunting for seals. Their focus remained primarily tideland collecting of shellfish and surf fishing. The south coast, however, was more welcoming to sea travel and led to deep sea fishing and more extensive mammal hunting. It should also be noted that the presence of the coast was felt far inland since resources were shared through systems of re-distribution. Thus, coastal tribal territories naturally extended inland, forming a relatively wide band, from north-to-south, all the way along the western portion of the state.

The second largest ecological zone is determined by the extensive foothill regions of the state. This region consists of the Coastal Mountains which run all the way from the border with Mexico north past San Francisco Bay and up to, but not including, the Trinity Alps. On the eastern side of the state, the great mountain ranges, the Sierras and the Cascades, both provide substantial foothill regions along their western slopes. There is, of course, a certain difference between the northern and the southern foothill areas because of the substantial differences in weather patterns, north and south.The Coastal Mountains are dominated by oaks, various other hard woods, and wild grasses. They were abundant with game and produced a pattern of hunting and gathering unique to California. The Sierra and Cascade foothills are dominated by oaks, various pines and firs, junipers, and grasses. There were equally abundant with game animals and provided a similar pattern of hunting and gathering. Traveling to the east, high mountain elevations are reached, merging with a harsh seasonal ecology; crossing the summits, there is a radical transition, produced by the sharp decent of the Eastern Sierra, into the ecology of the Great Basin.

Beyond the mountains to the east lay a high desert environment, more or less continuous with the entire Great Basin and, hence, heavily influenced culturally by the Indians of the Basin. This is terrain more commonly covered by piñon pines and junipers, mesquite and creosote, with sparse populations of game animals, except for rabbits, bighorn sheep, and antelope. It is the third largest ecological zone of the state and its economic uniformity is broken only by the low, Sonoran deserts of the south. Along the Colorado River, at the far southeastern edge of California, in particular, were to be found agriculturalists, most closely connected with the cultural traditions of the Southwest.

The next ecological zone of significance in California is certainly the extensive valley floor of the Sacramento and San Joachin Valleys. This is an amazing region, four hundered miles long, north-to-south, and up to fifty miles wide. The valleys are rich in grasses of many kinds and provided abundant game animals. The weather pattern in the valleys tended toward hot, dry summers and wet, cool winters; nevertheless, the overall average climate was mild, requiring little change in lifeway from summer to winter.

The riverine zone is also very distinctive. This is formed in a relatively narrow band following the great rivers that run to the Pacific Ocean and largely determined by the abundance of migrating salmon and stealhead. Fishing was so plentiful along these rivers that it became the determinant of local economies, some tribes consuming more than fifty percent of their total diet in fish. Since major rivers cut through coastal, foothill, and valley environments, the riverine tribes enjoyed an especially rich variety of resources and, consequently, achieved cultures of significant affluence.

The lake zone is the final and smallest of California's distinctive environments. There are only four notable regions --- Clear Lake (in the northern coastal region), Tulare, Kern, and Buena Vista Lakes (in the southern San Joaquin Valley --- now virtually extinct), Lake Tahoe (in the central Sierra), and Lower Klamath Lake (in the northeastern corner of the state). These are all fresh water lakes of considerable size and offer various fish, fresh-water shellfish, and waterfowl.

What Languages Tell Us

In his essay on California's languages, William Shipley says, ethnographers and linguists discovered "no fewer than 64 --- and perhaps as many as 80 --- mutually unintelligible tongues, further differentiated into an unknowably large number of dialects." What is truly striking is that even the tribes which shared a relatively homogeneous ecological sphere frequently spoke different languages, even languages from entirely different language families. There is no more dramatic example, perhaps, than the fact that the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok, who shared an almost homogeneous riverine ecological realm, on the Trinity and Klamath Rivers, spoke three entirely different and "genetically" unrelated languages. Leanne Hinton, in Flutes of Fire, makes many further points regarding the relationship between language and culture. One of the historical catastrophes, still ongoing, has been the loss of language speakers throughout the state. With this loss, we close access to narratives and oral histories, world views, and moral and spiritual beliefs and customs. Let us look more closely at what languages may be able to tell us.

What marks the difference between different dialects, different languages, and different linguistic families? As we know from contemporary experience in the United States, there are Southern and Northeastern dialects, but we would never deny that both regions speak English as their language. A dialect is a variant of a single language in pronunciation, idiom, and local nomenclature. Italian and Spanish, on the other hand, are different languages; while they both fall into the family of Romance Languages, a sub-division of the Indo-European family of languages. Spanish and Mandarin (Chinese), on the other hand, are not only different languages, but they derive from entirely different language families. Since all languages change with time, one can easily understand how these differences arise as people from primally different language groups migrate away from each other, creating new linguistic variations in isolation and having no continuing mutual impact. Thus, as time passes, what was once a simple dialectical difference in language becomes a whole division of language families. Equally, the production of local dialects has the potential of producing different languages if removal, isolation, and continuation of variation should occur over a very long time.

The first task faced by linguists, in California, was to determine what they were observing in the case of any particular tribe. Was this a dialect of a language shared with another tribe? Was it a different language? If different languages, were these related to each other in a family? And finally, if there were different language families in California, how might that have come to pass? What does this tell us, potentially, about migrations into the region?

One of the first difficulties to be faced is the sparseness of data. None of the California languages were written; hence, there is no wealth of data in written archives. Furthermore, few speakers of the original pre-historic tongues were still alive by the time linguistic studies got underway. Given the subtleties involved in making the distinctions that we have been discussing, it should be no surprise that many of the identifications proposed are still hypothetical and even hotly debated by linguistic scholars. (One should mention, here, that there is a very ambitious attempt at restoration and preservation of indigenous languages underway across the country today.)

Nevertheless, if we assume that there will be no radical changes in identifications currently discussed, we can consider the following very general picture. It is proposed that the oldest linguistic group to inhabit the territory of California and still represented there spoke languages in the Hokan family. It is possible, in fact, that all of California was once Hokan speaking; however, the separation and scattering of modern Hokan speakers can be theoretically understood as the effect of people from other language families migrating into the state and displacing Hokan speakers into isolated pockets where they survived. This inward migration resulted in the isolation of Hokan speakers in the agricultural strip along the Colorado River; the Ipai/Tipai who are culturally connected with most of Baja California; the central coastal complex of Chumash, Salinian, and Esselen; the Pomo; the Washo; and the northeastern complex including Karok, Shasta, Achumawi, Atsugewi, and Yana. No common boundaries remain between these groups of Hokan speakers; and detailed studies of dialectical differences suggest that their common development was interrupted up to 4000 years ago.

The people who migrated into California were speakers of Penutian and Uto-Aztecan language families. Along with the Hokan residues, these account for almost all California languages. There are, nevertheless, three other very interesting language variations along the northern coast. A small group of people surrounding the traditional homeland of the Pomo spoke Yuki, a language unknown outside of California. Then, a complex of small tribes, including the Hupa and the Tolowa, spoke languages from the Athapascan family. And, directly in the midst of this complex, the Yurok and the Wiyot spoke Algonquian languages. It is very difficult to understand how or when these people entered California. Other Athapascan and Algonquian speakers are far removed from the state.

Entrance of the Penutian speakers seems easier to understand, although presentday Penutian speakers are limited to California, Oregon, a small region in British Columbia, and Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula. There is no way to tell how extensively they occupied California originally because they, too, were displaced by speakers from the Uto-Aztecan family. It seems appropriate to assume that they were the original cause for the division of the Hokan speakers, about 4000 years ago, and that they occupied most of Southern California and the Central Valley. Tribes speaking Penutian languages still shared common borders, in historical times, though individual languages had differentiated along with other cultural characteristics in the gradual adaptation to environment.

The more recently intruding Uto-Aztecan speakers were found in Southern California. Since Uto-Aztecan dominates the Great Basin, it would seem that these languages betray a relatively late arrival of Great Basin people into the desert areas of Southern California; Kroeber called it the "Uto-Aztecan Wedge" since it takes the shape of a wedge leading from the southwestern corner of the Great Basin all the way to the ocean shores. This seems to have occured around 2500 years ago. Since two of the three sub-families occur only in California, it seems that the migration was distant enough in time to allow diversification away from the Numic family of the Basin as adaptation to the special environments of Southern California occured.

Throughout the foregoing chapters, I have tried to develop a picture of both the material life and the social life of California's indigenous people. There are, indeed, many generalizations that apply reasonably well across the state or that apply so widely that it is easiest to simply note the exceptions. Nevertheless, the great danger in creating a picture of this kind is the possibility of losing track of the state's enormous diversity. In this section, I would like to look directly at that diversity and even celebrate it.

I have chosen six California tribes for detailed description. Each of these has been thoroughly studied and their cultures have been well documented. Each comes from a different ecological region in the state; consequently, the diversity of their cultures tends to demonstrate the ways in which culture responds to environment. None of these descriptions is intended to be comprehensive for the people involved. A great deal is left unsaid because it has already been treated in general. These descriptions, rather, are aimed at bringing out differences, the ways in which local cultural traditions diverged from the norm. And it is an opportunity to suggest how cultures respond to more detailed features of the environment and of local history.

The Washo will give us some insights into the Great Basin, which borders California, on the east. The Yurok will introduce the influence of the ocean and rivers of the northwestern coastline. The Yokuts will illustrate the great Central Valley. The Sierra Miwok are representative a large numbers of people who lived in the coastal mountains and Sierra foothills. In Southern California, the Chumash present us with a rather different maritime culture and the Cahuilla illustrate a desert society. While each of these represents a unique ecological niche, there were, of course, other approaches to these diverse environments. Where possible, I will also discuss some of the other tribes that can be associated through common environment and culture.

Bibliography

Hinton, Leanne. Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1994)

Schoenherr, Allan A. A Natural History of California (University of California Press, 1992)

Shipley, William F. "Native Languages of California." in HNAI, 8