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

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

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established Malki Press, with an editorial board consisting of Native Americans and anthropologists. In the 1970s, Penn became a charter member of the California Native American Heritage Commission, where she was instrumental in insisting that professional ethnographers be retained to consult with Native Americans about sacred sites and other places significant to Indians in areas where proposed projects required a study of cultural resources for environmental impact reports. Penn’s neighbor and fellow Cahuilla, Katherine Saubel, now a well known author and lecturer on Cahuilla culture, went off in the early 1960s to take courses at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles.?’ She has been the president of Malki Museum and Malki Press for many years and is now on the Native American Heritage Commission, as Penn was before her. The particular accomplishments of Jane Penn and Katherine Saubel are unique, but all over California during this period, Indian women came to the fore, taking on responsibilities that had been men’s in traditional times. These women included, among many others, Marie Potts, Essie Parrish, and Vivian Hailstone. ized in putting into print the findings of scholars. Malki Press publishes books on the Indians of southern California, and with the University of California, Riverside, the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology (originally the Journal of California Anthropology). Shortly after the founding of Malki Press, Ballena Press launched the Ballena Press Anthropological Series, focusing on the Indians of California and the western United States; Coyote Press began to make available reprints of classic, but hitherto out-of-print, works in California anthropology, as well as to publish many current works in California archaeology and ethnography; and Heyday Books, beginning with Malcolm Margolin’s The Ohlone Way (1978), began to publish original works on California Indians and to reprint a number of classics. These presses continue in the 1990s to render a public service, since the various university presses have not chosen to keep up with the volume of new studies produced. Ballena Press’s second publication was ?Antap: California Indian Political and Economic Organization (1974), one of the first volumes putting forth the idea that political and economic systems of precontact California were more complex than had E recent decades, new publishers have specialpreviously been understood, and that religious systems were inextricably linked with the political and economic systems.”® Two years later, Lowell Bean's and Thomas Blackburn’s Native Californians: A Theoretical Retrospective brought together a number of papers by anthropologists like Anna Gayton, Walter Goldschmidt, and B. W. Aginsky, who had been doing research as early as the 1930s, with those relatively new to the scene, such as Bean and Blackburn themselves, Chester King, Raymond White, and R. A. Gould. New federal policies after 1960 also indirectly added to the fund of knowledge about California’s Indians. During the 1960s the federal government abandoned the push for termination. In the 1970s a procedure was established whereby the many Indian groups who had never had rancherias or reservations set aside for them, and were thus ineligible for benefits of federal programs, might apply for federal recognition as tribes. This process, which has stimulated a great deal of research in ethnohistory, has been impeded by the federal government’s heavy-handed interpretation of the regulations. The accumulated results of study spanning threequarters of a century can be perceived in the volume that dominated the California ethnography of the late 1970s and 1980s: the California volume of the Handbook of North American Indians (1978).29 Edited by Robert F. Heizer, it drew on the talents of anew generation of scholars, including many of those who had contributed to ?Antap, edited by Bean and King (1974), and Native Californians, edited by Bean and Blackburn (1976). It is of note that a number of these scholars earned their Ph.D.s in the 1950s and 1960s at the University of California, Los Angeles.*° Most of these scholars showed an appreciation of Indian social and political complexity and what it entailed, for example, organization beyond the “tribelet,” considerable social stratification, and an appreciation of Indian science, ec logical wisdom, and skills in management of the environment. These scholars and their peers have also been responsible for a growing inventory of ethnographies on specific California groups, as well as volumes on material culture, archaeology and prehistory, religion, and the arts. In the 1970s, legally mandated requirements for cultur, anagement (CRM) studies in connection with environmental impact reviews for large construction projects publicly funded or built on public land not only funded important studies 338 CALIFORNIA HISTORY