Untold History: the Survival of California s Indians

A young Cahuilla woman in the early 20th Century | Photo: Edward S. Curtis

If you grew up in California, you probably learned most of what you know about the history of California Indians while you were in fourth grade. All that several generations of Californians learned of the state's Native peoples can be summed up thusly:

California was originally populated by people who did not farm but made very nice baskets. The Spanish padr s arrived, and California Indians moved to the Missions to learn farm labor. Some of them died there, mainly because their immune systems weren't sophisticated enough to handle modern diseases. By the time Americans arrived Native Californians had mainly vanished somehow. The Gold Rush happened and California became a modern society with factories and lending institutions. Finally, in 1911, Ishi, the last wild California Indian, wandered out of the mountains so he could live a comfortable life in a museum basement.

That fourth grade curriculum has improved somewhat in recent years, and kids these days will learn more about the involuntary nature of California Indians' association with the missions. In schools that follow the Common Core curriculum, kids will learn that California Indians used fire to manage the landscape for food, fiber, and game.

Yet California Indians still vanish from mention in the newer fourth-grade curricula by the time of the Gold Rush. They're relegated to the past tense, as witness one test question in the Common Core curriculum: Choose one legend told by California Indians a long time ago and tell what parts of the natural region are in the story. All California Indian cultures made: a) deerskin b) pine nuts c) baskets d) kutsavi.

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California Indian history didn't end with the Gold Rush. It's still in progress. California Indians make baskets and manage landscapes with fire -- and drive pickup trucks and earn doctorates -- in the present tense, planning for a future seven generations distant. In that sense, the thread of California Native history extends farther into the future than that of mainstream society, focused on the next fiscal year at most.

It's probably no accident that the fourth grade curriculum stops mentioning the Native peoples of California at around the time of the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush was a period in which white settlers treatment of California Indians might well be too horrible for us to share with children. Even for adult Californians, looking closely at historic harms visited on Native Californians is an unsettling experience.

That sorry history makes it all the more remarkable and fortunate that California Indians are still here, still working to shape the state and its landscape, still working to heal the rift between their non-native neighbors and the landscape we all depend on.

Before Contact

A healer from the Hupa tribe | Photo: Edward S. Curtis

It's a matter of rough consensus these days that California's Native people numbered from 100,000 to 300,000 before Spanish and Russian explorers first visited the state. The precise population is a matter that spurs some disagreement among scholars. For some time, historians assumed that California's indigenous people were spared the worst of the first few waves of epidemics the Europeans brought with them to the Americas. Before Spanish settlement in 1769, the thinking went, the state's relative isolation on the far side of tall mountains and impassable deserts likely protected California Indians from the plagues that had ravaged the rest of the continent since the early 1500s. If California was indeed isolated from those epidemics, then its pre-contact population would have been not too far different from the numbers the Spanish found.

Recently, researchers have pointed out what Native Californians themselves knew all along: the mountains and deserts weren't obstacles to Native travel. Far from it: people lived throughout the hottest deserts and the coldest mountain ranges, traveling regularly for trade and other reasons. Once European diseases got a foothold in the Southwest and Mexico, they likely crossed into California. Besides which, it's likely that Manila galleons traveling from the Philippines to Acapulco stopped off along the California coast on regular, if unrecorded, occasions. And if diseases had ravaged the diverse societies of California well before the Spanish came, then Native populations before the epidemics would obviously have been considerably higher.

Some scholars contend that California may have been home to a third of North America's population before 1492. Regardless of the total count, uncolonized California was well-populated. Along the shores of Tulare Lake in the San Joaquin Valley, as many as 70,000 people, mainly Yokuts, may have gathered at least seasonally. The Chumash and Tongva regions of coastal Southern California were dotted with thriving villages, many just a short walk from their neighbors. The Bay Area, with its immensely productive wetland ecosystem, was populated by tens of thousands of Ohlone, Coast Miwok and Sierra Miwok, Patwin, and Wappo people. Around 300 dialects of 100 distinct languages were spoken in California, one of the highest concentrations of cultural diversity in the world.

The diverse cultures in California were intimately interwoven with the landscapes they called home. From the Tolowa of the northernmost California coast to the Quechan still living in and around Yuma, California Indians shaped the landscapes they lived in significant ways, using fire, hand tools, and millennia of familiarity with local ecosystems. They did this so successfully that across much of what would become the state of California, the tended landscape provided all the food, fiber and medicine the people needed without any need for agricultur

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