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

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Title: On the Ethnolinguistic Identity of the Napa Tribe [Chief Constancio Occaye's Narratives] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 21 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 23:20:24 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:45:53 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:45:53

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

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On the Ethnolinguistic Identity of the Napa Tribe: The Implications of Chief Constancio Occaye’s Narratives As Recorded by Lorenzo G. Yates John R. Johnson Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History 2559 Puesta del Sol, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 About 1876, Lorenzo G. Yates interviewed Constancio Occaye, described as the last “Chief of the Napas,” and recorded several items of folklore from his tribe. Yates included Constancio’s recollections about the use of charmstones in his classic article on that subject, but he does not appear to have ever published Constancio’s account of Napa oral traditions regarding the Land of the Dead, creation, and the acquisition of fire. Anthropologists, although not without some uncertainty, have long considered the Napa tribe to have been of Southern Patwin affiliation. The narratives themselves, and the native words recorded parenthetically by Yates, appear to be mostly of Coast Miwok derivation, which suggests that a reconsideration of Napa ethnolinguistic identity is in order. Every now and then, documents come to light that provide new information about California’s native peoples and yet have somehow escaped the attention of interested scholars, even though they may have resided for many decades in public archives. Included among the papers of Lorenzo G. Yates at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives and at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley are manuscripts that include versions of several San Francisco Bay Area myths that appear not to have been published previously (Yates n.d., 1888). Yates used only the last section—pertaining to charmstones—in a published article that he wrote on that topic, in which he summarized original information that he had sent to the Bureau of American Ethnology. These bits of folklore, preserved by Yates, represent some of the only known traditions of the Napa tribe, and are thus highly significant for anthropologists interested in comparative oral literature in Native California. Furthermore, the native words in these myths suggest that a reappraisal of the ethnolinguistic identity of the Napa people may be in order. BACKGROUND Lorenzo Gordin Yates (1837-1909) was an English immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager. He became a dentist by profession, but had a lifelong passion for natural history. Yates moved his family from Wisconsin to California in 1864 and settled in Centreville in Alameda County, which later became a district of Fremont. Following a research trip to Santa Rosa Island with Stephen Bowers in 1876, Yates moved to Santa Barbara to pursue his natural history interests in the area (Benson 1997:15, 41-43). Before his death in 1909, Yates published a number of articles pertaining to California marine mollusks, paleontology, and archaeology (Camp 1963a, 1963b; Coan and Scott 1990).