Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Abalone Tales by Les Field Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 6 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 15:38:39 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:35 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:35

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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and bo i 3 tiiatly, seat at Euro-American explorers, administrators, and, ul , Fopologists have used to ref, : oo les. T. ; er to Native Californian eoPie he making of ethnic monikers, or ethnonyms, in Native med , a nee European obsession with race and identity. ec i ase of the San Francisco Bay Area Native Peoples is quite to the g' g ° 34 Artifact, Narrative, Genocide wv well as to the peoples similarly incarcerated at missions just to the south of the Bay Area (Santa Cruz and San Carlos Borromeo de Rio Carmelo, on the coast, and San Juan Bautista, inland) whom linguistic anthropologists identified as speaking related, although mutually unintelligible, languages in the Penutian family. In addition to speaking related languages, these peoples were loosely affiliated with each other, and with other neighboring peoples who spoke much more distantly related or completely unrelated languages, through intermarriage, trade, and annual ceremonial cycles long before their internment in the missions. Nevertheless, the application of the term “Costanoan” to disparate peoples on the basis of European perceptions of geography and language obscures how these peoples understood and named their identities before and at the time of contact. “Ohlone” refers to the same Native groups as “Costanoan,” all with similar post-contact histories shaped by the demographic collapse caused by missionization and the subsequent regrouping during the Mexican period. In the East Bay and South Bay, Native peoples have referred to themselves as “Ohlones’” for at least a century, and in the East Bay Ohlone communities, the term “Muwekma’ was also used into the 1930s (Leventhal et al. 1994). The anthropologist C. Hart Merriam was the first to use the expression “Ohlonean” languages in the early decades of the twentieth century, which Richard Levy (1978) elaborated into the widely accepted seven-branch Ohlonean language tree. The term “Ohlone” may have originated from “Oljon” or “Olchon,” a village that was located on the coast of modern San Mateo County. Many versions of this term can be found in the records of Bay Area missions, as well as in the journals and other texts of Euro-American visitors to the region starting in the 1820s, Since the early twentieth century, the Muwekma Tribe's ancestors have described themselves as “Ohlone” and “Ohlonean” in their official dealings with the B1A/BAR. Even though the derivation of the ethnonym “Ohlone” originates in the colonial history that reshaped identities and boundaries in the Bay Area, I am not alone in considering the use of the term “Ohlone” a form of resistance to the absurdity of “Costanoan” (see Margolin 1978). The argument I have been making in no way proposes either an essentialism—the idea that the ancestors of today’s Muwekma had a “real” name and identity that Europeans and Euro-Americans simply Muwekma Ohlone Cultural Patrimony 35