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

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Title: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America (January 2013) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Lee Panich Published: January 2013 # of Pages: 19 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Panich] America. Separated into a plethora of midsized polities, they spoke between 80 and 100 distinct languages, actively managed the landscape through purposeful burning and other means, and participated in highly developed ceremonial practices and far-flung economic relationships (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009). The complex hunter-gatherer-fisher peoples of late precontact California defied anthropological models of social organization and subsistence, and today their descendants continue to defy conventional anthropological wisdom embedded in acculturation models and proclamations of cultural extinction. There are currently 108 federally recognized tribes in the state of California, with many more unacknowledged groups actively petitioning for recognition at the state or federal level. Still, the history of colonialism looms large over the scholarly and popular interpretation of indigenous histories in California, particularly in those regions of the state that were colonized as part of the Spanish mission system that was established along the coast as far north as San Francisco Bay. By the late nineteenth century, observers of native California proclaimed that formerly missionized Indians were so acculturated as to be virtually extinct. In his reports from 1871 and 1872 journalist Stephen Powers ignored the descendants of mission neophytes, writing, “Their aboriginal customs have so faded out, their tribal organizations and languages have become so hopelessly intermingled and confused, that they can no longer be classified” (1976:16-17). This assumption was also shared by later anthropologists, including Alfred Kroeber and others at the University of California, Berkeley. Like Powers, Kroeber felt that the former mission Indians of central California had been wholly enculturated by the Franciscan missionaries and accordingly left these peoples out of his otherwise extensive fieldwork designed to document the precontact lifeways of California’s indigenous groups. “The tribes that were completely devoted to mission life are gone,” wrote Kroeber (1925:888). In this way, we can see the intersection of terminal narratives and anthropological essentialism during the early twentieth century. The methodological framework employed by Kroeber and his Berkeley colleagues relied on the ability of tribal elders to recall cultural pracARCHAEOLOGIES OF PERSISTENCE 111 tices that predated the arrival of nonnatives to the region. Key to this method was the isolation of the “essences” of a particular culture, including language, material culture, and religious practices (Field 1999:194; Lightfoot 2005:227). This method not only presupposed the static nature of native cultures and the lack of meaningful history in precontact times; it also conflated Indian identity with the retention of precontact cultural traits. Those groups that, in Kroeber’s estimation, had lost such characteristics or the ability to provide information about them were not studied in detail and were thus not considered authentic Indian peoples. Other anthropologists, including John P. Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution, did work with many of the groups ignored by Kroeber and his colleagues, including those who encountered the Franciscan missionaries, indicating their continued presence as distinct social groups. Besides the gaps in the fieldwork of early Berkeley ethnographers, the legacies of colonialism are today most easily observed cartographically, in the close spatial correlation among the extent of Spanish missionization, the limits of Indian survival defined by Kroeber, and the geographical distribution of federally recognized tribes in California (Figure 1). The process of land allotment to native Californians by the U.S. government that began in the midto late 1800s followed a pattern similar to that of early anthropological investigation, leaving many former mission Indians without a permanent land base (Castillo 1978). When, in the early twentieth century, the federal government again began to allocate land to California Indians, none of the groups associated with the northern missions were given land. As detailed by Field (1999), Kroeberian anthropology provided the rationale for the distribution of lands to particular native groups during this later phase of allotment. Those groups whose identities or very survival were questioned by anthropologists were left landless, while those groups that had been studied by Berkeley ethnographers were more likely to receive land allocations from the federal government. In time, the cumulative effects of anthropological and governmental assumptions about culture change in the colonial period became manifested in a pattern of federal recognition that favors indige-