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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es SSS SSS SHS SS ESS EEE BE “ot a C1aar/s) California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers by Sylvia Brakke Vane That a rich fund of information there is to draw on when one begins to write about the Native Americans of what is now the state of California—an embarrassment of riches fully worthy of the “Golden State.” Dry-as-dust ' ship’s logs or explorer’s journals, correspondence . that reveals old antagonisms between Spanish mis. sionary priest and civil administrator, the notes left behind by some long-deceased anthropologist, newspaper stories, gold-rush accounts, articles and books on ethnography, archaeglogy, linguistics, prehistory, history, botany, zoology, and geology — all of these are grist to the mill of the ethnographer/ ethnohistorian who studies California Indians.! It is inevitable that it be so, for the culture and history of humankind reflect at least in part the environment in which they are set, and the California environment is as varied as its history. It stretches from foggy coast to dusty desert, from valleys below sea level to the highest mountain in the continental United States. The place California first burst on human consciousness an untold number of millennia ago. What we. know for sure is that there were humans here when the glaciers melted in the post-Pleistocene era, some ten thousand years ago. By the time Europeans first saw the lands of California in the sixteenth century, they were inhabited by more than one hundred “ethnic nationalities,” or cultures, each as different from each other as were the European cultures from which the intruders came. The arrival of the Europeans brought the written word, and that made what is often called “history” possible. But the history was intertwined always in the early days with descriptions and observations of the Indians of California that would later be valued by ethnographers, that is, those anthropologists who have attempted to describe the cultural patterns of California’s native groups. Explorers Alarcén sailing up the Colorado River in 1540, Cabrillo sailing up the coast two years later, Drake landing somewhere in present-day Marin County in 1579— the accounts they wrote provide some of the purest ethnography we have.” By and large, the accounts of sixteenth-century encounters are purely descriptive. Europe was expanding its horizons, seeing the “other,’”” and wanting to know about it. Those who explored described the physical appearance, the clothing and adornments, the food, and the actions of the peoples they encountered. Most wrote of Indian men and women who were variously frightened, warlike, curious, or joyful, as the case might be. Although most early visitors marvelled at the Indians’ physical strength and vigor and their ingenuity at hunting, a certain condescension can be detected in the writers’ descriptions of, for example, Indian surprise at the arrival of a ship where no ship is known to have arrived before, or fright at the firing of a gun. But by no means did the Europeans consistently have the upper hand in these early encounters. They needed wood to repair their ships, supplies, fresh water, and food —especially the greens and fruits that would cure the scurvy afflicting so many of them. They were _ CALIFORNIA HISTORY