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

About This Item:

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

Page: of 18  

While he was doing field work in the Klamath River area during the early 1900s, the great University of California anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber was photographed by artifact collector Grace Nicholson or one of her companions. Nicholson herself was one of the leading advocates for California Indians and their arts in the early twentieth century. From the Grace Nicholson Collection, Courtesy Huntington Library. and a resultant dilution of traditional cultures. American churches, both Catholic and Protestant, continued the effort to convert the Indians to Christianity that had begun with the Spanish. In this they were fairly successful, although many, if not most, Indians continued to hold a number of their traditional beliefs alongside Christianity. the Office of Indian Affairs, which became the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the 1930s, managed reservations, interfered forcefully in tribal politics, controlled Indian schooling, and attempted to transform Indians with little understanding of Indian traditional economy, religion, or political affairs. As a matter of survival, however, most Indian men had to engage in wage labor and most Indian women worked as household help. Indians thus did become part of the larger economy. With this gradual change in traditional ways, anthropologists came formally onto the scene none too soon to record and interpret the diverse cultures of California Indians. David Prescott Barrows earned the first doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on [: the early decades of the twentieth century, the Cahuilla of desert southern California, and published a Cahuilla ethnobotany in 1900. About 1901, the University of California at Berkeley established a department of anthropology and appointed Alfred L. Kroeber as its first chairman. Kroeber and generation after generation of graduate students in the department systematically studied the native peoples of California. Kroeber dominated California ethnography until his death in the early 1960s, leaving a lasting mark on the discipline. His Handbook of the Indians of California, completed about 1918 and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1925, though now dated in part, remains the outstanding single synthesis on the subject. Here he presented the data, “culture area’ by “culture area,” and then by groups within culture area. His maps show the distribution of major language families and the traditional boundaries of California’s many groups. Kroeber asserted that only along the Colorado River did California Indians have the “tribes” known in eastern America. In most of the state, the socio-political and economic power was held in small corporate groups that he called “‘tribelets.” He also devoted considerable attention to the study of Indian religion. FALL 1992 335 ue Mi IE PE