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

About This Item:

Title: On Arborglyphs and Arborgraphs Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 3 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 15:40:40 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:45:52 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:45:52

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

Page: of 3  

This would also suggest that the figures in the arborgraph were probably drawn sometime well after the 1820s, since until then there had been relatively little contact between the mission communities and the adjacent ranchos, and native groups living in the Kern River area. However, there is another possible interpretation of the arborgraph, and one that I believe is much more likely to be correct. In my opinion, too little consideration has been given in the past to the initial cultural responses of native peoples to their first encounter, not only with the Spanish, but with Spanish animals such as horses and other livestock. After all, Native Californians lived in a universe very different from our own, one in which many of the categories—and the boundaries between those categories—that we accept as natural and inevitable were far more fluid and permeable (Blackburn 1975). The world was a dangerous, unpredictable place where things were not necessarily what they superficially seemed to be, and the categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ were frequently interchangeable. Were-animals, shapechangers, and shamans with strange powers could easily be encountered anywhere one went. Consider, for example, the suggestive implications of the following account. In 1919, Maria Solares told John Harrington (1986: Vol.3, RI. 9, Fr. 432-40) that before Mission Santa Ynez was established in 1804, but after the founding of Mission Santa Barbara in 1786, some hunters from the village of KalawaSaq encountered an ox that had strayed away from somewhere over the mountains. They took it as a sign of ill omen and were very afraid. They had never seen anything like it, and they watched it day and night. Finally, the people decided to drive it to the village. They spread tule mats for the ox to stand on, and then showered it with offerings of feather down, beads of various kinds, and such foods as acorns, coffee berry, chia, tarweed seeds, pinyon nuts, and islay. Then they left it alone and just watched it some more. Eventually the ox wandered away without harming anyone. As this story (and many others) illustrates, it would have been customary for anyone approaching or interacting with a place or an entity thought to be imbued with power, such as a shrine or suspected supernatural beings, to make an offering of food items and shell beads as a kind of warding prayer. How would native Californians have reacted to their first sight of vaqueros riding horses and roping REPORT . On Arborglyphs and Arborgraphs . Blackburn 303 elk, grizzlies, and other large animals, and what kind of assumptions might they have made regarding the activities they were observing? Here were strange people interacting with and controlling not one but two different kinds of large, powerful, and (in the case of the horses) completely unknown creatures by what must have seemed supernatural means. Although it is pure speculation, could the vaqueros’ lariats have perhaps been viewed as being somehow analogous to the takulfoxsinas or feathered cords described in Chumash narratives (Blackburn 1975) as being used by both mythic beings and by shamans? In summary, I suggest that the Kern River arborgraph could be viewed as an initial attempt by native peoples to understand and deal with the incursion of new, powerful, and potentially dangerous entities into their world; they might well have believed that the act of depicting those unknown forces in the same way that others were traditionally portrayed might afford them a certain measure of control over them, or at least allow them to minimize or ameliorate their impact. REFERENCES Blackburn, Thomas 1975 December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harrington, John P. 1986 John P. Harrington Papers, Vol.3: Southern California/Basin. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives. [Microfilm edition. Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publication]. Saint-Onge, Rex, John Johnson, and Joseph Talaugon 2009 Archaeoastronomical Implications of a Northern Chumash Arborglyph. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 29(1):29-57. Banning. Schoolcraft, Henry 1854 Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States..Part /V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. Spence, Mary L., and Donald Jackson (eds.) 1973 The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Vol. 2. Urbans: University of Mlinois Press___—Stine, Scott 1980 Hunting and the Faunal Landscape: Subsistence and Commercial Venery in Early California. M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley. Weber, David 1985 Richard H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in the Far Southwest, 1848-1853. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.