A Cahuilla woman harvests fruit from carefully tended palms in 1905. | Photo: Edward S. Curtis In My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir describes a typically verdant California scene: I came to a patch of elymus, or wild rye, growing in magnificent waving clumps six or eight feet high, bearing heads six to eight inches long. So far, a classic description of Californias fecundity, painted in Muirs usual purple prose.
But there are people in the scene, too, and Muir doesnt quite know how to treat them. The crop was ripe, and Indian women were gathering the grain A fine squirrelish employment this wild grain gathering seems, and the women were evidently enjoying it, laughing and chattering and looking almost natural, though most Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites.
What Muir misses in his description of native women gathering wild grain is the same thing nearly all of his European predecessors had missed in similar scenes: these women, probably Mono Lake Paiutes, were not passively gathering natures wild bounty. Instead, they were harvesting a carefully tended field. The extent of the patch, the magnificently waving clumps, the size and sweetness of the grain - none of these might have existed without centuries of human care and interaction, including intentional burning, sowing, and harvesting.
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Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.
Muir would become more sympathetic toward native people as he came to know them better, but on these first encounters with Californias first inhabitants he was merely putting a twist on a common - and false - stereotype.
Sierra Miwok Ceremonial Roundhouse at Indian Grinding Rock State Park, completed in 2016 using traditional techniques and used for Miwok cultural events. | Photo: 2016 Sherwood Harrington, used with permission.
According to this false stereotype, the Indians of California were a sorry lot. Unlike previous native peoples encountered by Spanish and American colonialists, they built no pyramids, no cliff dwellings, and no large earthen mounds. Unlike the Plains Indians, they never adopted the horse culture that captivated Francis Parkman. Instead of driving bison off cliffs in spectacular fashion, they hunted rabbits, squirrels, and sometimes antelope. Apart from the tribes living along the Colorado River, they appeared not to practice agriculture.
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Lacking these tokens of what the settlers considered advanced culture, California Indians lived what seemed to whites a mean existence, dwelling mostly in brush huts (sometimes partially underground) and gathering much of their food, eating insects and larvae and digging for edible roots. American immigrants labeled California Indians as Diggers, an offensive epithet originally applied to the Shoshone of the Great Basin, but which was quickly used by American trappers and settlers to encompass all the diverse peoples of California. The dehumanization embodied in this stereotype of California Indians helped fuel a century of genocide and enslavement, which reduced California's Indian population from at least 300,000 in 1769 to 17,000 by 1890.
Like so many stereotypes, this one was based on failure to truly understand the people being stereotyped.
A Lake Pomo woman cooks acorns in front of a tule shelter in 1924. | Photo: Edward S. Curtis
In reality, anthropologists believe that the diverse peoples occupying California represented some of the most advanced hunter-gatherer societies anywhere in the world, so advanced that hunter-gatherer is really an inaccurate term for their varied ways of life. They created pictographs (rock paintings) that have lasted hundreds if not thousands of years, petroglyphs (rock etchings) requiring untold labor, and, in the desert, intaglios marked on the earths surface so large that they're better viewed from the air. Their creation stories are so complex it takes singers a whole day to tell them. These stories remind California Indians how to interact with the landscape, so that their religion and their means of getting a living might merge in a way of life rooted deeply in place.
Europeans viewed California Indians as having no concept of property, but they did recognize ownership based on usufruct of some resources, while setting others aside for communal purposes. Perhaps most important, as ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and Native Californians themselves remind us, they shaped the landscapes in which they lived through their extensive environmental knowledge, equivalent to our botany, ecology, ornithology, entomology, and more.
Other native peoples in North America had their own ways of tending the landscape to support themselves, but in California this indigenous resource management was so sophisticated that the region could support one of the highest densities of native people anywhere in the world. Europeans credited this density to Californias remarkable natural fecundity, failing to recognize the ways California had been turned into something like a garden through intentionally set fires, pruning, weeding, broadcast sowing, and harvesting. Even digging for roots and bulbs, the practice so derided by Europeans, was done in specific ways that helped bulb plants reproduce and thrive.
Taken together these techniques modified habitats, changing both the distribution of plant species and their genetic adaptations. Several iconic California landscapes, including mountain meadows, oak savannas, and fan palm groves, owe their appearance and even their very existence to this indi
