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

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Title: California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 18 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 14:34:42 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:52 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:52

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

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Mission San Gabriel (founded in 1771), as depicted in Alfred Robinson’s Life in California (1839). Although their principal focus was usually on main religious buildings, illustrations made by visitors to the Franciscan missions between the 1780s and the 1830s also made visual records of Indian life. Like many others, this illustration demonstrates that mission Indians did not assimilate colonial Spanish culture immediately and totally, but rather blended traditional native ways with the new conquering culture. Decades after the founding of missions, many neophytes continued to rely on native buildings (in the illustration foreground), as well as on traditional clothing, foods, tools, arts, family and clan systems, and religious rites. Evidence that the Indians were only partially assimilated can also be found in written records and the artifacts uncovered by recent archaeological excavations at mission sites. CHS/Ticor Collection, University of Southern California. that some are in archives not easily accessible to Californians cuts them off from the casual student, but perhaps makes them all the more attractive to the serious scholar. Some have been translated and published; some are still waiting for the interested scholar. It must be said, however, that the verdicts on the mission system will be ‘‘settled” not only by the facts in the archives, but also by the traditions, oral and written, handed down in the families of California Indians whose ancestors were brought up in the missions. It is from this kind of source that some of the most severe criticisms of the missions have come, although some such traditions contain appreciation as well as criticism. Life at the missions after Mexican independence during most of the 1820s went on much as it had in the Spanish period, but there was a drastic change in the 1830s, when the Mexican government “secularized” the missions, with control of the mission lands given over to secular administrators who were supposed to be guardians for the Indians. Within a few years, however, the Indians were largely dispossessed, and their lands had fallen into the hands of the so-called guardians and their allies. Francisco Patencio, a Cahuilla leader who in the early 1900s dictated an account of Cahuilla history, tells of considerable turmoil among the Indians during this period.* Other sources describe the distress of people closely associated with the missions, as secular non-Indians illegally took possession of mission properties. For people more distant from the missions, the severe impact of Euro-American contact during and after the Gold Rush of the late 1840s was yet to come. Despite the turmoil in some areas, the period from the 1820s through most of the 1840s was one toward which, in the latter part of the century, most California Indian people looked back with appreciation. For FALL 1992 327