The View from Native California:

In the title of this book, I have wanted to suggest that Native Californians have a unique view of the world and that the book is written from that perspective. This is a very fragile suggestion since I am personally a descendant of Irish and Swedish immigrants of the 19th Century and I am definitely not one of America's indigenous people. Some may think my project audacious.

Since this book is not a report from inside Native California, then, what is it? Looking back over eight years of teaching about indigenous people of the Western United States, especially the people of California, I would like to suggest that it represents a long period of personal discovery and adventure. This adventure began, in many respects, in the early '70s when I camped and fished along the Pacific Coast in an area northwest of Santa Barbara called Refugio Beach. As I sat in our small boat, tied onto long fronds of kelp, looking back into the beach and back onto the tree-filled plain that backed the beach, I was very much aware of living out a part of the traditional life of the Chumash, who had lived there long before me. But I was filled with questions, unanswered by the presentday swarm of campers. How had they lived here? What did this Chumash village look like? Where had they come from? When did they leave? What was their lifeway? I began to buy and read books; and I began to visit museums. Only later did I begin to visit and meet living Chumash people. Today, one can visit Satwiwa and actually see Chumash houses and talk to Chumash craftspeople.

Living in the Pomona Valley, east of Los Angeles and on the rim of Southern California's desert lands, I also found myself questioning who had lived here before me and how they had traditionally lived. The same kind of awakening happened through books and museums. Eventually, I began meeting Tongva and Cahuilla people and enjoying their songs, dances, and stories in person.

When both my library and my experiences had grown substantially, I began teaching a freshman humanities course on California's Native people and eventually expanded that to include many of the indigenous people of the Western United States. But the project of writing about California's people, in particular, has always been close at hand.

Throughout, I tried to assimilate myself to Native life; but, as Gregg Sarris (Pomo/Coastal Miwok) told a group of Claremont students, the other day, it is not a question of assimilation but rather of integration. I cannot assimilate myself into a Native lifeway any more than Natives have been able to assimilate themselves to Anglo-European life. Integration of both worlds is the only real project; and integration requires understanding of both. Thus, I have tried very conscientiously to integrate the Native view into my own experience of California; and I have tried to do this by understanding, so far as I could, as much of that view as I possibly was able without actually being a Native Californian.

January 1998

Tad Beckman

Claremont, CA