Copyright 1997, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
Coming over the pass where Tejon Ranch now sprawls, one would have seen wild flowers as far to the north as one could see. John Muir wrote, in one of his diaries, that you couldn't walk on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley without planting your feet in the middle of them. And when you got down on your knees, as anyone must do, you'd see that it's not just one flower --- not just California Poppies --- but that every square yard is a virtual garden. There are the big, showy plants --- like the poppies --- that occupy the micro-canopy of this "forest;" but then there are the medium-range plants that live inbetween and below. And, when you finally get down to basics, you discover the tiniest of plants that you'll find sprawling along the earth, no more than an inch high, with the tiniest of blossoms, sometimes smaller than the tip of your pen.
As you drive north from the area called Grapevine and pass Buttonwillow and head out onto the alleuvial plain that makes up the San Joaquin Valley, you see enormous cotton fields and regimented almond orchards so far as you can see, today; but you would have seen a very different picture, a century and a half ago. You would have looked out to the northeast across dusty sagebrush and bunch grass in a long sloping plain that ascended to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And as you continued north, you would have brought into view dark specks of vegetation that would continue to expand before your eyes. What were these? They were, in fact, the first inklings of an amazing waterway, now virtually disappeared, because domesticated. It was the watercourse of the Kern River and the Kings, as well as smaller rivers thrown in. Emerging from the mountains, they catapulted into delta-like channels and fanned down into the Valley plain. Everywhere that the ground was fed by these channels became green with willows and tules. In the basin lakes --- Kern, Buena Vista, and Tulare (the biggest) --- the tules grew more than twelve feet high. Fish and waterfowl were not just plentiful; their presence was staggering.
This Valley --- the Great Central Valley of California --- goes on for 350 miles or more. It is one of the greatest natural features of the nation. It is lush with water, the winter-spring runoff of rain- and snow-storms dropping their almost weekly toll of Pacific moisture onto the western slopes of the Sierra. And all of this water once flowed out through the Delta lands and the Golden Gate into the grand Pacific Ocean. The ocean was in continuity with the tiniest of water fingers throughout the great mountains, and this complex whole was the habitat of salmon and stealhead who, in an amazing perennial (we thought) saga of natural reproduction, found their way back to their own homeland spawning grounds to lay their own eggs in gravelly creek bottoms and perpetuate the species. But they, too, are almost gone, like the twelve-foot tules, victims of extreme environmental degradation. The natural connections of waterways have been cut. Water is halted in dams and held for later use. When water is released, it flows into irrigation canals and major aquaducts. Feather River water, today, flows through California's enormous aquaduct project out of the Central Valley itself into Southern California and no longer passes through the Delta. The impact of reduced outflow is heavy. Meanwhile, since 1900, water flowing down the eastern side of the Sierras has ceased flowing into Great-Basin lakes which annually lose huge amounts to evaporation. So Owens Lake has become a salty, dusty dry-lake bed and Mono Lake has been lowered by many feet, leaving it much more salty and less habitable to numerous species that have traditionally depended upon it.
One would be surprised, today, to learn that even inland Native Californians ate more fish than any other protein source. The fish that we catch today in California lakes and rivers, during our periodic recreational outtings, are domesticated species, grown in breeder tanks and placed short-term in lakes and streams for licensed consumption. Nor have other species been much more fortunate. The grizzly bear was hunted to extinction early in the 20th Century. The mountain lion was almost extinguished, as was the bald eagle. California's condor was virtually extinguished and hangs on, today, only because of protected breeding colonies and repatriation.
Throughout this study of California, what we have to keep in mind are these incalculable and almost unimaginable differences that stand between us, across merely 150 years. Indeed, 150 years ago, Native Californians were in the majority and so was the rest of the natural world. Today, the human population of California has gone far beyond its natural carrying capacity and the conversion of lands and resources to agriculture, forestry, and mining has produced a human-built world that has violated most natural balances. This is not the place, perhaps, to criticize these processes of change. The point is simply that we must recognize what has happened and, especially, understand that Native Californians were victims of these changes right along with all the rest of the natural balance of species. The contrast that we will observe throughout is the contrast between a people who lived in harmony with a diverse natural world and another people who insist upon shaping and transforming a world of their own and who leave little or no room for spontaneous natural restoration or development.
Indians in California
The unfortunate stereotype of American Indians is the war-bonneted, horse-riding, buffalo-hunting Indian of the Great Plains. It is this stereotype that Americans continue to illustrate in cowboy-and-indian films, in art works, and in children's books. Indigenous people of California were nothing like these images; but, then, neither were the pre-Columbian people of the Great Plains. While a smaller species of horse had occupied North America during the Pleistocene, it had been extinct for millenia before the Spanish brought their large domesticated horses onto the continent in the 16th Century. It was, in fact, the discovery of escaped Spanish horses, breading in the wild, that led Plains Indians to abandon their traditional localized lifeways and invent a nomadic buffalo-hunting culture, a culture that survived only a relatively short period of time.
In contrast to the Great Plains, California was a region of great physical diversity. California was dominated by the ocean, to its west, and the Sierra Nevada, to its east. Stretching hundreds of miles further east was the Great Basin Plateau, interrupted in a rythmic pattern by mountain ranges, wet valleys, and dry, sandy deserts. And, finally, in the very middle of California, was to be found the Great Central Valley, a relatively flat, low-elevation floor of alluvial deposits, hundreds of miles in length, irrigated year-round by rivers flowing out of the Sierras, through the relatively narrow Delta region, and out into the Pacific Ocean through the San Francisco Bay. To this broad picture, already varied in elevations and micro-climates, one must add numerous smaller variations, such as the complex of ocean-connected river valleys of the Northwest or the larger, rich valleys like the Salinas or the broad coastal plains such as those at Monterey Bay or present-day Los Angeles and Orange Counties. To this must also be added the extensive deserts of the southeast, extending to the Colorado River. Such physical diversity guaranteed the diversity of flora and fauna; and since cultural lifeways were closely associated with the particular flora and fauna that a given group utilized, this physical diversity also guaranteed the coexistence of many small, self-contained and self-sufficient societies.
By the 16th Century, the indigenous people of California had developed small communities that were largely sedentary and cooperative societies, woven intimately into micro ecological niches. The terrain available in California was so varied that even larger tribal territories tended to split up into tribelet domains in which small collections of communities developed cultural traditions that suited their own particular environments. In all there were more than one hundred different tribes and tribelets in California with thoroughly developed, distinctive languages and cultural traditions.
Unfortunately, the diversity and richness of these California cultures was never appreciated by Europeans and Americans who streamed into the state, from the 1840s onward. Feeling closer in nature to the agricultural Indians of the East and the horse-riding Indians of the Plains, Euro-Americans were quick to judge and condemn the hunter-gatherer people of California as the "meanest savages" and "mere diggers." Even as late as 1949, Rose Palmer began the chapter on "West Coast Tribes" in volume 4 of the Smithsonian Series, The North American Indians, saying, "cut off from the rest of the mainland by towering mountain ranges and vast tracts of desert, the tribes of the West Coast . . . developed in their isolation a culture distinct from and for the most part inferior to that of the red-skinned statesmen of the East, the pueblo-builders of the Southwest, and the huntsmen of the central Plains region." (My emphasis)
The study of California's indigenous people discovers, in fact, very ancient and rich lifeways and world views. It also inevitably moves into and through the tragedy of an enormous cultural collision that was brought about by the European "discovery" of what they eventually recognized as a "New World." And, finally, it confronts the enduring struggle of a people, many generations later, who are still living within or between two cultural worlds.
This is a story of survival, five hundred years of survival, rooted in millenia of cultural adaptation to a native land. It is, in that sense, an optimistic and forward looking study because many California Indians have survived both physically and culturally. While they struggle to re-configure their cultural heritage within the contemporary world, they have much to offer in the way of leadership to the offspring of a conquering, but perhaps now decadent and directionless, European-based civilization.
The Problem
The voyage of Christopher Columbus, in 1492, was neither the first European exploration of the oceans of the world nor was it by any means the last. Europeans of the 15th Century had become bold navigators, held back only by the durability of their ships, the accuracy of their navigational equipment, and their ability to provision themselves with adequate foods and medicines. All of these factors changed throughout the following two centuries; and as these changed, so did cartography. Sailing across oceans, Europeans investigated coastlines, sailed up river systems, and, gradually, mapped the world. But they did not stop at merely mapping the world; they also laid claim to it in the names of their monarchs. European monarchs, indeed, were anxious to extend their power, wealth, and influence. Colonization followed.
These were by no means empty lands that European explorers claimed for their ambitious kings and queens; they were well populated with indigenous people, equally surprised to find themselves "discovered." These were, however, people of a very different sort, possessing neither sailing ships, navigational instruments, nor maps, usually not even a written language. It was easy for Europeans to dispense with them under the name of "primitives" or "savages," and to give no heed to their basic rights to the land they occupied. At best, indigenous people fitted into the European's concept of feudal society at the absolute bottom, an entirely neglected people, culturally impoverished and sadly uninformed regarding the uplifting forces of civilization and Christianity.
This collision of European civilization with indigenous people of the world began in the 15th Century and it has not ended yet. It has been a true collision because neither really saw the other; each defined the world so differently that understanding the other was next to impossible. One may well ask how this came to happen.
Whatever it was that caused the movement to agriculture and animal husbandry in the Middle East, more than 8,000 years ago, set into motion a remarkable divergence of human cultures. This was especially promoted by the development of written languages, 6,000 years ago, as well as by the development of metal working at about the same time. Europeans of the 15th Century were the ultimate heirs of this divergence through that sequence of Mediterranean and Northern European cultures outlined as the rise of Western Civilization. Yet, in the next three centuries, they stretched well beyond themselves, through the Scientific Revolution into the Age of Enlightenment and on toward the era of the Modern Industrial State. It was during the Enlightenment, in 1769, when Europeans came to California to stay. They brought science and industry, Christianity, and a somewhat moderated version of Spanish feudalism, supported by military power on horseback. The missionaries and colonists of 1769 had developed well beyond their European explorer-ancestors of almost three centuries earlier.
What we tend to forget, in our enthusiasm for the history of Western Civilization, is that it is merely a fraction of human history as a whole and that the West developed in very different ways from humans in the remainder of the world. Other major cultures emerged in North Africa and the Middle East as well as in India and Eastern Asia. Furthermore, and of greatest importance here, large populations of humans around the world remained outside of what we are calling the development of civilization and continued in very ancient lifeways, called hunter-gatherer societies. As the Europeans explored and moved to dominate new areas of the world, it was these people who came to be recognized as the indigenous people of each newly discovered and invaded area. But other cultures of the Old World showed much less interest in world domination, appropriation, and exploitation. It was Europe that most frequently found itself intruding on the world of indigenous people everywhere; the last five centuries, indeed, has been a dramatic and often tragic story of the "Westernization of the world."
By the 18th Century, when Anglo-European settlement of North America was well underway, the cultural difference between Westerners and indigenous people was extreme. We can still witness this clash of values and objectives in the rain forests of Brazil and Peru, today. Indigenous people have rarely been able to survive in the face of European intrusion. In Peru, the only satisfactory solution is to secure indigenous people within huge national parks where hunter-gatherer life can continue, protected. Ironically, it is this lifeway that is the truly classic culture of the human species. What we are witnessing in the clash of Westerners and indigenous people is the divergence of human cultures "bending back upon itself" --- modern humans confronting archaic humans --- each in possession of entirely different world views. It has been a tremendously destructive clash. [Note: Words like "modern" and "archaic," "civilized" and "primitive," should not be used without some comment. They tend to be value-laden in our society; that is, we tend to think of everything modern as good and everything old or archaic as bad and discardable. It is this same blindness that allowed Euro-Americans to stream across the Western territories and to uproot indigenous people under the presumption of "Manifest Destiny" --- the idea that their "superior culture" would inevitably replace all "inferior ones." Ironically, it is now thoroughly doubtful whether Western civilization is a sustainable culture. Its value remains an open question; while answers may lie deeply within indigenous values.]
Talking About Indians
We cannot begin this study without a word about language. The entire study of American Indians is dominated by language problems for which no really adequate solutions exist. Nowhere are the problems more obviously manifest, in fact, than in the expression "American Indian" itself. Neither term pre-dates the arrival of Columbus, nor is either really appropriate to the native people of whom we speak.
What is wrong with the expression "American Indian?" First of all, the name "America" was given to the territory by Europeans and it was applied to the continental territories discovered in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries by European navigators. The name first appeared in a book, in 1507, and honored an Italian explorer and scientist, Amerigo Vespucci, who had sailed to coastal regions of South America and who first recognized that this was a "New World," that is, a pair of continents that were as yet uncharted and unknown by Europeans. Second, the name "Indian" was given to the indigenous people of the territory by Columbus himself who was still laboring under the mistaken opinion that he had made the transit to the East Indies, inhabited, of course, by Indians. The name has remained in spite of the error. As a consequence, when we talk about pre-Columbian territories and people, it is inappropriate to speak of America or of Indians. Furthermore, in the post-Columbian period, reference to American Indians, carries the burden of all the problematic historical relations between Europeans and the indigenous people of these continents.
Further problems are introduced by the fact that people of the United States have appropriated the name "American" as their own proper name, ignoring the fact that all people of the north, central, and southern continents are actually Americans. As a consequence, we usually use the expression "American Indian" to make reference to the indigenous people of the territories now occupied by the United States. People of Canada and Mexico, while equally North Americans, call themselves "Canadians" and "Mexicans." The indigenous people of Canada prefer the title "Amerindian." Indigenous people of Mexico are simply "Indians." Of greater importance is the simple fact that traditional homelands of indigenous people did not stop-and-start with the boundaries eventually fixed by wars between Americans and Mexicans, Americans and English. The indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, of the Northeastern Great Lakes and St. Lawrence waterway, and of the Great Plains unite Canada and the United States. Equally, the indigenous cultures of the Southwest must include substantial portions of the north-central Mexican highlands, and cultures of present-day Southern California extended well into traditional Baja California. Indigenous people conceived of their land and dwelt within it in accord with its natural topographical and ecological features. They knew nothing of the surveyor's measures.
The tendency in most contemporary writing in the US has been to reconstruct and use an original specific name for a tribal people. This project is often thwarted, however, by the fact that indigenous people rarely used proper names with which to designate themselves. Their world was limited to their own familiar territory balanced by whatever lay beyond and their own people in contrast to the others. Naming their homeland and themselves had little rationale since they themselves would be the only ones to use the terms. To accommodate this situation, anthropologists and historians of have often taken the word for "people" or "human," in the native language, and applied that as the name of the tribe.
In California, a mixture of names has developed in a variety of ways. The name "Chumash" was chosen by John Wesley Powell, in 1891, as an Anglesized version of this coastal people's name for their relatives who lived on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands. Their words were Mi-tcú-mac and Tcú-mac. The appropriateness of this selection is clarified somewhat by the fact that Chumash myths relate their origins directly to these islanders. The tribal name "Yurok," on the other hand, is actually a word in the Karok language, yúruk, meaning "downriver;" and the Yurok did indeed live down the Klammath River from the Karok. Of course, all of this is amply complicated by the fact that virtually all California tribes actually lived in cohesive tribelets or bands; and while they tended to share cultural characteristics widely within tribes, tribelets frequently exhibited extensive dialectical differences in language, self-identification being strongest with the tribelet. What has come to be called the Yokuts tribe, for instance, consisted of forty different tribelets, occupying the entire San Joaquin Valley and portions of the surrounding foothills. With such diversity, the only reasonable approach is to refer to individual tribelet names --- the Tachi, the Wowol, and the Chunut, for instance, who lived around the shoreline of Tulare Lake. In Southern California's Coachilla Valley, the Cahuilla people self-identify more strongly with their tribelet names, based on local place names, the "Agua Caliente Band" or the "Morongo Band."
While the strategy of using local tribal or tribelet names is definitely the best strategy, it is not always adequate. There are many times that we want to generalize beyond tribal boundaries and speak about situations or qualities that transcended tribal particulars. The indigenous people themselves had no language that we can adopt for doing this. We are left to various European and American terms and all of them have the kinds of weaknesses already discussed.
I have been using the expression "indigenous people" which comes from the word indigene and, ultimately, finds its roots in the word gene. The expression has value in pointing unambiguously to those people who have long-term (genetic) roots in the natural habitat and it makes that reference clearly even when we are talking about today's extremely diverse populations. The term "aboriginal" is commonly used; however, while it clearly makes reference to people who preceded European immigration, it does this obnoxiously by making European immigration the "origin of time (history)" or the arrival of civilization, since literally "aboriginal" means "before-origin." Finally, the term "native," derived from the word 'nativity,' is used; but it involves problems of reference. Within the timeframe of early immigration it is unambiguous; but after colonists had reproduced several generations of Americans, the meaning of "native" becomes ambiguous. There are now many kinds of "native Californians." In sum, when it is not possible to simply use a specific tribal or tribelet name, we are forced to use one of these expressions, as appropriate to the context; but we have to remember that each of these involves a variety of problems and insensitivities.
What Is California?
There is one final issue that needs some preliminary discussion; it centers around the seemingly obvious question What is California? There is, in fact, some difference of opinion here. For the Smithsonian Institution's ambitious undertaking, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 8, the California study area is defined by the selection of tribes whose territorial boundaries bear only an approximate relationship to the political boundaries of the State of California. In contrast, the present work will simply accept the political boundaries as they are; for our purposes, California's indigenous people will include several tribes that, from the perspective of the Smithsonian, belong to other study areas.
What is at issue in choosing one of these paths? Obviously, the principal issue is that contemporary political boundaries do not closely follow natural features of landscape, while indigenous territories did. Portions of the Smithsonian's California study area overlap into Mexico and Oregon, following the cultural distributions of the Tipai into Baja California and of the Tolowa, Karok, and Shasta along the northwestern coast. At the same time, the Smithsonian's study area excludes major portions of the eastern parts of the state, cutting its eastern boundary along the crest of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mountains, on the grounds that the excluded people belong to the cultures of the Great Basin and of the Southwest. (See Kroeber, A. L. "California Culture Provinces" in University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 17, no. 2, 151-169 (1920), for an extensive and influential discussion of these issues.)
Unfortunately, the Smithsonian's plan ignores much of the state's actual diversity by attempting to focus on a distinctively California coastal-valley-foothill culture. In fact, such a close definition of California culture makes the inclusion of the southern deserts and of the northwestern coastal river valleys arbitrary, perhaps motivated only because of the extensive early involvement of California's most famous anthropologists in these areas. In contrast, the inclusion of the entire contemporary state allows a much wider discussion of diverse cultures in relation to environment.
The three chapters that follow all take up beginnings of some kind. In the first chapter, we explore the origin stories that various California Natives have traditionally told. In the second, we explore the scientific stories that archaeologists tell us. And finally, we explore the more basic issue of world views and how these underly the different worlds that we inhabit. The very purpose of this book is to offer "the view from Native California" --- that is, a picture of the world as it has been seen from an indigenous perspective.