APPENDIX B: RESEARCH IN CALIFORNIA

Copyright 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711

Journalists, historians, anthropologists, museum curators, artists, and just-plain tourists reflected on what they viewed as the disappearing American Indian. Even as the last stages of the Plains Indian War were being fought, Americans sought out the remnants of indigenous people and began to record the facts. What was their history? What were the stories they told? How had they survived on this land? In what did they believe?

The cultural anthropologist, as a scientist, faces a fundamental problem; objectivity is difficult, perhaps even impossible. First and foremost, the anthropologist is the product of a particular culture, and observations about other people are inherently interpeted from within that culture. One can try to solve this problem by becoming completely assimilated within the subject culture. But, if this goal is achieved successfully, where has so-called objective "science" gone? Indeed, where has the need to write and report gone? The anthropologist is always somewhere in the middle space --- far enough within the subject culture to receive trust and cooperation and far enough also not to misjudge the exotic or obscure from the foundation of one's own cultural values; yet the anthropologist still remains close enough to our own culture to retain an interest in portraying the subject culture as informatively and to compose whatever has been learned within a theoretical framework that begins to illuminate a wider picture of how humans live on this earth.

Beginnings

The very earliest studies on human life in California must be classified as amateur ethnography. They are the product of Europeans who came into contact with native people during brief excursions into the territory and who made notes, observing various characteristics of these people and their lifeways. The earliest of these records were diaries and ships' logs that were made during very brief encounters by Spanish explorers from 1542 onward; of these, the very first was Juan Rodríquez Cabrillo's voyage along the coast from New Spain north to the Channel Islands, which was Chumash territory. Cabrillo was followed by others who sought ports-of-call that might provide a shipping link between Manila and Mexico. These included a disastrous adventure by Sebastian Rodriquez Cermeño, in 1595, and a more successful one by Sebastián Vizcaíno, in 1602. After that, there was no Spanish activity in Alta California until the entrance of the Franciscan missionaries, in 1769. (Castillo, 1978)

Another visitor to California, in the Sixteenth Century, was the Englishman Francis Drake who arrived along the coast in 1579, made landfall, and remained for approximately five weeks. Drake's visit to California is chronicled in a book by Francis Fletcher, who accompanied the mission as a preacher. It is the earliest significant account of life in California. Unfortunately, there is some argument over where Drake made his landfall; hence, the people described could have been Coastal Miwoks, at Bodega Bay or Drake's Bay, or Yuroks, at Trinidad Bay. (Heizer, 1947)

After these early explorations, no attention was given to Alta California for more than one and a half centuries. This situation changed rapidly, however, in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century. The Spanish Franciscans entered from the south, in 1769, under an ambitious program of developing a network of missions and military fortresses from the border with New Spain northward along the coast. However, Russians, English, and Americans were also beginning to take an interest in this territory, looking for furs, examining the land's resources, and testing the resolve of Spain. In less than one century, the Spanish and Mexicans, in succession, lost control. California became a United States territory and then became a state (1850).

The Franciscan fathers, generally speaking, took little interest in the aboriginal lives of California's native people. Mission documents clearly disclose the fathers' compelling interests in new baptisms and in ordering Indian lives into Christian discipline and moral sentiments. These documents are primarily useful to us in suggesting tribal distributions and population sizes, in the areas immediately affected by the missions, though there are some materials that offer information on native languages. The one great exception to this rule was Father Geronimo Boscana who, while residing at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, in the period from 1814 to 1825, wrote an extensive account of the lives and religious beliefs, Chinigchinich, followed by several of the surrounding tribes. Boscana clearly took an interest in the relation between native beliefs and their overall culture rather than simply treating them as "exotics." This, indeed, is what marks the division between ethnography and its amateur form.

The mission fathers were not the only Europeans who intruded upon California's indigenous people in the last quarter of the Eighteenth century; there was increasing activity along the coast of California and various observations of ethnographic significance were made. An interesting case in point was the landing of the schooner Sonora at Trinidad Bay, in Humboldt County, on June 9, 1775. The Sonora was part of a Spanish naval expedition commanded by Don Bruno de Hezeta from the frigate Santiago and whose purpose was to chart the northern coastline and observe foreign activities there. There was a Yurok village located at the base of Trinidad Head and the Spanish visited with the Yurok for more than ten days. We have extensive accounts of these visits, including observations of the material lives of the Yurok people. These were authored by Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, captain of the Sonora, Hezeta, commander of the expedition, Fray Miguel de la Campa, chaplain of the Santiago, and others. (Heizer, 1991)

Estimated at more than 300,000 in 1769, the indigenous population had fallen to 100,000 by the time of statehood and to less than 30,000 by 1870. The last quarter of the Nineteenth Century was marked by a new awareness, the realization that America's indigenous people were disappearing, and by a rush to salvage what could be discovered of these vanishing cultures. It was the age of museum formation and people scrambled into California, as well as other parts of the West, to collect native artifacts. Many of the earliest artifact hunters, unfortunately, were foreigners who exported native materials to places all over the world, leaving California and US collections of truly historic materials relatively shallow. Meanwhile, "Indian advocates" and more serious students of Native Americans scrambled to help the natives themselves survive and to record as much as remained of their aboriginal cultures. This was the beginning of a race against time in which ethnographers would eagerly observe what they could, before it was gone forever, and in which they would gleen the rest from the first-hand accounts of the elders who had survived. Fortunately, a few industrious and concerned people became dedicated to the study of native peoples early enough that they were able to record their observations of native Californians who were born and culturally educated prior to extensive European contact.

Hugo Reid, who married a Tongva woman and lived in Los Angeles, was a case in point; he wrote letters on the native cultures of Southern California that were published by the Los Angeles newspaper Star, around 1852. Alexander Taylor wrote diverse accounts of California and Mexican history as well as accounts of native cultures in a magazine, The California Farmer and Journal of Useful Arts, in San Francisco, from 1860-63.

Stephen Powers was an Eastern journalist, born in Ohio,in 1840, who walked across country, from Raleigh, North Carolina, to San Francisco, in 1869. In 1871-72 Powers returned to California to pursue a new project, an extensive study of the California tribes, and he published articles serially in the Overland Monthly and elsewhere. In 1875-76, Powers returned to continue collecting, observing, and writing notes on tribes of California north of the Tehachapi Mountains; and in 1878, he published his book Tribes of California which attempted a map of tribal territories with boundaries and an original categorization and analysis of the diverse languages that he had found. Still in print, Powers' book is the beginning place for any thorough study of Native Californians.

In the same decade as Powers' work, the famous historian Hubert H. Bancroft mounted a huge research project, involving an extensive staff, to deal with California history and produced five volumes on Native Americans in the West as a part of this. The remainder of the 19th Century saw the beginnings of California archaeology and massive private and institutionalized efforts at artefact collection. Two of the private collectors that are notable were C. Hart Merriam, whose extensive collection of baskets and other artifacts resides at the University of California, Davis, and Grace Nicholson, whose extensive notes and photographs reside at the Huntington Library.

David Prescott Barrows, a graduate of Pomona College, was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Barrows' dissertation was on the Cahuilla of Southern California, and he published his ethnobotany of the Cahuilla in 1900.

Professional Anthropology

In the next year, the University of California, Berkeley, founded its joint Department and Museum of Anthropology with Frederick Ward Putnam its first chairman, Alfred L. Kroeber an instructor, and Pliny Earle Goddard the assistant. The Berkeley department became a center of activity in the study of California tribes, languages, and cultures, and published many monographs. The most important of these was the University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology, starting in 1903 and ending in 1964 with volume 50. After 1964, this was replaced by the University of California Anthropological Records.

Alfred L. Kroeber eventually became chairman of the department, and Kroeber's students fanned out through the state. Kroeber himself continued active on-site research for a long period of time, and he worked with a number of Indian informants on his extensive projects in classification of languages and collection of oral narratives. Kroeber dominated California ethnography and ethnology until his death in 1960; of particular note, in ethnology, were "California Kinship Systems" (1917), "California Culture Provinces" (1920), and "Elements of Culture in Native California" (1922), all published in Berkeley's monograph series. Kroeber's Handbook of the Indians of California, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1925, was such a sophisticated and thorough compendium that it remains the standard text today, though many details have been replaced by more exacting local and contemporary studies. Among other things, Kroeber is credited with the important observation that California social organization must be conceived differently from that of the classic tribal empires of the East and the Plains; instead, virtually all "tribal" territories must be seen as breaking down into "tribelets." Indigenous people of California self-identified with the tribelet much more strongly than with the tribe. (Heizer, 1978)

In exactly the same time period and quite independently, an extraodinary ethnographer and linguist, John Peabody Harrington, who was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology, of the Smithsonian Institution, traveled throughout California, collecting original materials, identifying informants, and recording vast amounts of material on languages, narratives, and customs. One should read Carobeth Laird's Encounter with an Angry God to understand Harrington's personality; at any rate, Harrington held a dim view of professional academic anthropologists and spent his life amassing field notes, with only brief stabs at monographic summaries. Furthermore, he suffered from a certain amount of paranoia and hid away most of his research notes in obscure storage places. Fortunately, Harrington's notes are now available for scholarly study, in something like 42 reels of microfilm, and furnish one of the richest resources in existence. They have already taken scholars thirty years to organize and putting them into readable form will continue to take many more years. Thanks to Harrington's work, certain tribes (the Chumash, Tongva, and Ohlone, especially) who were thought to be extinct and lost from any possible study are actually well known to us.

Yet another important figure of the century's first quarter was Roland B. Dixon who worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Dixon did field work in Northern California and wrote ethnographic studies of both the Northern Maidu and the Shasta. He also did linguistic research and collected narratives. Kroeber's best known student was Robert F. Heizer who remained at Berkeley and ultimately replaced Kroeber as chairman of the anthropology department. Heizer was an archaeologist and did little ethnographic field work; but his writing and editing is enormously important and covers archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory.

By the end of the 20th Century's first quarter, both the Berkeley and the Los Angeles campuses of the University of California had extremely active anthropology departments with major commitments to the indigenous people of the State. Both departments were serially publishing the results of their research work. In Los Angeles, the Southwest Museum was established and, by the mid-1930s, it began publishing the journal, Masterkey. By the mid-century, Malki Museum was established on the Morongo Reservation, in Banning, and Malki Press began re-publishing classics as well as new works on Southern California cultures. In cooperation with the University of California, Riverside, Malki began publishing the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. Ballena Press began, in Northern California, followed by two other presses with special emphasis on California's Native Americans, Coyote Press and Heyday Press.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of anthropologists emerged, many of them from the University of California, Los Angeles; and they carried forward a strong appreciation of the complexities of social organization as well as new theories about the plausible links between physical features of ecological niches and socio-political traditions. Lowell Bean and Thomas Blackburn are two of these anthropologists. Bean established a long-term relationship with the Cahuilla of Southern California. Blackburn, often with the collaboration of Travis Hudson, established a long-term relationship with the Chumash, for which the Harrington materials have been invaluable.

The ethnographic literature of the second half of the 20th Century has been stimulated in several additional ways and through a surprising turn of events. As Federal and State governments attempted to establish intelligible and stable grounds for their relations with Indian communities and as litigation over claims made by Indian groups traveled into and through the courts, there was a considerable need for detailed research of archaeological sites and traditional areas of habitation or land use. Among other things, the Cultural Resource Management Studies grew out of this context. As Natives themselves were drawn into these issues, more and more Native groups began to take an active interest in their own cultural heritage. All of these efforts have produced significant resources for the study of Native Californians. Thanks to the work of Sylvia Brakke Vane and Lowell Bean we have an extensive compendium of documents, California Indians: Primary Sources, A Guide to Manuscripts, Artifacts, Documents, Serials, Music and Illustrations. Research continues.

California has been a state for 150 years and, throughout that period, the study of Native Californians has been a race-against-time to salvage as much material and information as possible before it was gone forever. Often, linguistic observations, narratives, and accounts of social traditions simply went into notebooks and no further. Thousands of artifacts left the country bound for foreign museums; and thousands more left the state bound for the great national museums. In California, as elsewhere, museums possess far more than they can possibly exhibit; the majority of artifacts will be seen in archives and storage rooms only by scholars with special interests and credentials. Nevertheless, the legal groundwork for "repatriation" of Native American materials, especially human remains, is now well established. With repatriation of Native American artifacts underway, from both Federal and State facilities, and many native groups involved in the creation of local museums and cultural centers, there will be many more opportunities for these materials to be seen. In turn, the repatriation movement is creating a new surge in research and understanding. For many Native people of the present generation, the return of their own artifacts means the first exposure to their own cultural heritage and a genuine "ownership" of their own cultures.

When we discuss the historical period, later, we will view in detail what we have only hinted at here, the tragic impact of European settlement on California's indigenous people. That trauma was of such magnitude that it can easily be appraised as "extermination" or "genocide." Those who were not destroyed and who have survived to this day have surely not been allowed anything like full membership in either California or US society. It would be safe to say that the State of California was hostile to its indigenous people from the very beginning and has done little, in modern days, to correct that situation.

American citizenship, as such, was extended to America's native peoples only after the First World War and largely only in recognition of their military service. Nevertheless, California's native cultures have survived through more than two centuries of traumatic battering, and the present renaissance of research in Native American studies is one of the indicators of their survival. In no small measure is this survival indebted to the work of anthropologists, linguists, and ethnographers of the past who placed this material "in trust" and made it available for Native people themselves. Research work in California has been well more than a "dry documentation of dead materials;" it has been a crucial part of this life-giving survival of Native cultures.

Beroza, Barbara. Sources of California Ethnohistory, 1542-1850 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Archaeological Research Facility, 1974)

Castillo, Edward D. "The Impact of Euro-American Exploration and Settlement." in HNAI, 8 (1978)

Heizer, Robert F. "Francis Drake and the California Indians, 1579." University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology, 42, no. 3, 251-302 (1947)

. . . . "History of Research." in HNAI, 8 (1978)

. . . . and John E. Mills. The Four Ages of Tsurai. (Trinidad, CA: Trinidad Museum Society, 1991)

Kroeber, Alfred L. Handbook of the Indians of California (New York: Dover Publications, 1976)

Powers, Stephen. Tribes of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)

Vane, Sylvia Brakke. "California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers." in California History, Vol. 71 (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1992)

. . . . and Lowell John Bean. California Indians: Primary Sources, A Guide to Manuscripts, Artifacts, Documents, Serials, Music and Illustrations (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1990)