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

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Title: Various California Indian or Nisenan Newspaper Clippings Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 7 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 22:03:43 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:54:08 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:54:08

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

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Continued From Second Page rather than his shotgun, because the latter weapon “tore them up so bad.” Considering the additional effects of social disruption and disease, it is not surprising that some recent historians have spoken of “genocide” in California. What is novel about Hurtado’s book is that, while not minimizing the outrages, he emphasizes another side of the story: the fact that, as his title indicates, a certain number of California Indians survived—although in declining numbers, with weakened tribal identity, and with increasing loss of the aboriginal languages and cultures. Repeatedly, Hurtado refers to the Indians’ “ability to persist in a hostile world” and their “integration with white society,” and how “Indians participated ... in the fumdamental reordering” of American economy. The conclusion of the book tells how a 100-year-old Indian of the Muquelumne (Miwok) tribe visited John Sutter’s grave in 1885: “The Sutters were all gone, but there ‘Indian Surv were still Muquelumnes, .., Hurtado continues: “That any Indians survived is testimony that abhorrent conditions can produce -courage and strength in people, a tribute to the persistence of humankind.” The passage quoted is perhaps a fine encomium of the human spirit, but it misleads the reader when it compares the Sutters as a family to the Miwok as an ethnic group. Furthermore, this book is essentially limited to the 19th Century. Hurtado is basically interested in historical records written long ago by white men; he has little interest in interview data such as have been gathered by anthropologists in field work with California Indians from 1900 to the present. He gives no suggestion that he has visited 20th Century Indian reservations or talked to living Native Californians, many of whom remember their grandparents’ stories of how they were “integrated” by whites. There is no indication here of the fact that reservations still exist in California, but with horrendous problems of poverty, unemployment and illness, or that Indians still suffer from prejudice on the part of local whites and government officers, or that individual Indians survive only at a terrible cost—the now near-final extinetion of the native languages of their people, and of the cultures which were transmitted by means of those languages. The loss which the California Indians suffered at the hands of the whites can be interestingly compared, as regards both percentage decrease in population and destruction of cultural heritage, to the loss which European Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Anyone interested in California Indians should read this book, and then do a “reality check,” perhaps at the Morongo Reservation—between Banning and Palm Springs, on Interstate 10. a Original Teachings of