14.2: Indigenous Californians
The Indigenous peoples of California are a diverse group of nations and peoples who have inhabited the geographic area within the current boundaries of California for thousands of years. They are the second-largest Native American population in the United States, with over 100 federally recognized tribes and many more that have applied for federal recognition.
They have a rich and diverse culture, which is reflected in their language, art, music, and traditional practices. They have a deep connection to the land and its resources, and they have developed sustainable ways of living in harmony with the environment. In the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the Indigenous peoples of California were subjected to a series of violent and oppressive policies, including the Spanish missions, the California genocide, and the Indian boarding schools. These policies led to the decimation of the Native population, and they continue to have a legacy of trauma and discrimination.
In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in Native American culture and history. This has led to several positive developments, including language revitalization, the Land Back movement, and the recognition of Native peoples' environmental knowledge.
The Indigenous peoples of California are a resilient and resourceful people. They have survived centuries of oppression, and they continue to fight for their rights and their homelands. They are an important part of the fabric of California, and their culture is an asset to the state.
The Early Boundaries
The traditional homelands of many tribal nations may not conform exactly to the state of California's boundaries. Many tribes on the eastern border with Nevada have been classified as Great Basin tribes, while some tribes on the Oregon border are classified as Plateau tribes. Tribes in Baja California who do not cross into California are classified as indigenous peoples of Mexico. The Kumeyaay nation is split by the Mexico-United States border.
Earliest People of California
Evidence of human occupation of California dates from at least 19,000 years ago. Prior to European contact, indigenous Californians had 500 distinct sub-tribes or groups, each consisting of 50 to 500 individual members. The size of California tribes today is small compared to tribes in other regions of the United States. Prior to contact with Europeans, the California region contained the highest Native American population density north of what is now Mexico. Because of the temperate climate and easy access to food sources, approximately one-third of all Native Americans in the United States were living in California.
Early Native Californians were hunter-gatherers, with seed collection becoming widespread around 9,000 BCE. Due to the local abundance of food, tribes never developed agriculture or tilled the soil. Two early southern California cultural traditions include the La Jolla complex and the Pauma Complex, both dating from c. 6050–1000 BCE. From 3000 to 2000 BCE, regional diversity developed, with the peoples making fine-tuned adaptations to local environments. Traits recognizable to historic tribes were developed by approximately 500 BCE.
The indigenous people practiced various forms of sophisticated forest gardening in the forests, grasslands, mixed woodlands, and wetlands to ensure availability of food and medicine plants. They controlled fire on a regional scale to create a low-intensity fire ecology; this prevented larger, catastrophic fires and sustained a low-density "wild" agriculture in loose rotation. By burning underbrush and grass, the natives revitalized patches of land and provided fresh shoots to attract food animals. A form of fire-stick farming was used to clear areas of old growth to encourage new in a repeated cycle, a permaculture.
Contact with Europeans
Different tribes encountered non-Native European explorers and settlers at widely different times. The southern and central coastal tribes encountered European explorers in the mid-16th century. Tribes such as the Quechan or Yuman Indians in present-day southeast California and southwest Arizona first encountered Spanish explorers in the 1760s and 1770s. Tribes on the coast of northwest California, like the Miwok, Yurok, and Yokut, had contact with Russian explorers and seafarers in the late 18th century. In remote interior regions, some tribes did not meet non-natives until the mid-19th century.
Late 18 th Century - Mission & Decline
At the time of the establishment of the first Spanish Mission in 1769, the most widely accepted estimates say that California's indigenous population was around 340,000 people and possibly more. The indigenous peoples of California were extremely diverse and made up of ten different linguistic families with at least 78 distinct languages. These are further broken down into many dialects, while the people were organized into sedentary and semi-sedentary villages of 400-500 micro-tribes.
The Spanish began their long-term occupation in California in 1769 with the founding of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego. The Spanish built 20 additional missions in California, most of which were constructed in the late 18th century. From 1769 to 1832, an estimated total of 87,787 baptisms and 24,529 marriages had been conducted at the missions. In that same period, 63,789 deaths at the missions were recorded, indicating the immense death rate. This massive drop in population has been attributed to the introduction of diseases, which rapidly spread while native people were forced into close quarters at the missions, as well as torture, overworking, and malnourishment at the missions.
The missions also introduced European invasive plant species as well as cattle grazing practices that significantly transformed the California landscape, altering native people's relationship to the land as well as key plant and animal species that had been integral to their ways of life and worldviews for thousands of years. The missions further perpetuated cultural genocide against native people through enforced conversion to Christianity and the prohibition of numerous cultural practices under threat of violence and torture, which were commonplace at the missions.
19 th Century - Genocide
The population of Native California was reduced by 90% during the 19th century—from more than 200,000 in the early 19 th century to approximately 15,000 at the end of the century. Most of this population decline occurred in the latter half of the century, under American occupation. While in 1848, the population of native people was about 150,000, by 1870 it fell to 30,000, and fell further to 16,000 by the end of the century.
The mass decline in population has been attributed to disease and epidemics that swept through Spanish missions in the early part of the century, such as an 1833 malaria epidemic. Other factors include state-sanctioned massacres that accelerated under Anglo-American rule.
Russian Contacts - 1812-1841
In the early 19 th century, the Fur Rush (otter pelt) was usually associated with the activity of the Russian-American Company. A Russian explorer, Baron Ferdinand von Wrangell, visited California in 1818, 1833, and 1835. Looking for a potential site for a new outpost of the company in California in place of Fort Ross, Wrangell's expedition encountered the native people north of San Francisco Bay. He noted that local women, who were used to physical labor, seemed to be of stronger constitution than men, whose main activity was hunting. He summarized his impressions of the California Indians as a people with a natural propensity for independence, inventive spirit, and a unique sense of the beautiful.
Another notable Russian expedition to California was the 13 months long visit of the scientist Ilya Voznesensky in 1840–1841. Voznesensky's goal was to gather some ethnographic, biological, and geological materials for the collection of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He described the locals that he met on his trip to Cape Mendocino as "the untamed Indian tribes of New Albion, who roam like animals and protected by impenetrable vegetation, keep from being enslaved by the Spanish".
Mexican Secularization - 1833-1848
After about a decade of conservative rule in the First Mexican Republic, which formed in 1824 after Mexico gained independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, a liberal sect of the First Mexican Republic passed an act to secularize the missions, which effectively ended religious authority over native people in Alta California. The legislation was primarily passed from liberal sects in the Mexican government, including José María Luis Mora, who believed that the missions prevented native people from accessing "the value of individual property."
The Mexican government did not return the lands to tribes but made land grants to settlers of at least partial European ancestry, transforming the remaining parts of mission land into large land grants or ranchos. Secularization provided native people with the opportunity to leave the mission system, yet left many people landless, who were thus pressured into wage labor at the ranchos. The few Indigenous people who acquired land grants were those who have proven their Hispanicization and Christianization.
American Settler Colonialism - 1848-1850’s
The first governor of California as a U.S. state was Peter Hardenman Burnett, who came to power in 1848 following the United States victory in the Mexican–American War. As American settlers came in control of California with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, its administrators honored some Mexican land grant titles, but did not honor aboriginal land title.
The state formed various militia groups that were tasked with a "war of extermination" that authorized the murder of native people in exchange for payment for their scalps and heads. For example, the city of Shasta authorized "five dollars for every Indian head." In this period, 303 volunteer militia groups of 35,000 men were formed by the settlers.
In the fiscal year of 1851-1852, California paid approximately $1 million dollars toward the formation of militia groups who would eliminate native people. Volunteer militia groups were also subsidized by the U.S. federal government, who reimbursed money to the state toward this eliminatory objective. With this shift in power, the U.S. government instituted a policy of elimination toward indigenous people in California.
American Gold Rush & Forced Labor - 1848-1855
Most of inland California including California deserts and the Central Valley was in possession of native people until the acquisition of Alta California by the United States. The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 inspired a mass migration of Anglo-American settlers into areas where native people had avoided sustained encounters with invaders. The California Gold Rush involved a series of massacres and conflicts between settlers and the indigenous peoples of California lasting from about 1846 to 1873 that is generally referred to as the California genocide.
The negative impact of the California Gold Rush on both the local indigenous inhabitants and the environment were substantial, decimating the people remaining. 100,000 native people died during the first two years of the gold rush alone.
Settlers took land for their camps and to farm and supply food for their camps. The surging mining population resulted in the disappearance of many food sources. Toxic waste from their operations killed fish and destroyed habitats. Settlers viewed indigenous people as obstacles for gold, so they actively went into villages where they raped the women and killed the men.
Sexual violence against native women and young girls was a normal part of white settler life, who were often forced into prostitution or sex slavery. Kidnappings and rape of native women and girls was reported as occurring "daily and nightly." This violence against women often provoked attacks on white settlers by native men.
Forced labor was also common during the Gold Rush, permitted by the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. Raids on native villages were common, where adults and children were threatened with fatal consequence for refusing what was essentially slavery. Although this was in legal terms illegal, the law was established not to help protect indigenous people, so there were rarely interventions to stop kidnappings and the circulation of stolen children into the market by law enforcement. What were effectively slave auctions occurred where laborers could be "purchased" for as low as 35 dollars.
A central location for auctions was Los Angeles, where an 1850 city ordinance passed by the Los Angeles City Council allowed prisoners to be "auctioned off to the highest bidder for private service." These auctions continued as a weekly practice for nearly twenty years, until there were no California native people left to sell.
California Genocide - 1846-1873
The California genocide continued after the California Gold Rush period. By the late 1850s, Anglo-American militias were invading the homelands of native people in the northern and mountainous areas of the state, which had avoided some earlier waves of violence due to their more remote locations. Near the end of the period associated with the California genocide, the final stage of the Modoc Campaign was triggered when Modoc men led by Kintpuash (also known as Captain Jack) murdered General Canby at the peace tent in 1873. However, it's not widely known that between 1851 and 1872 the Modoc population decreased by 75 to 88% because of seven anti-Modoc campaigns started by the whites.
There is evidence that the first massacre of the Modocs by non-natives took place as early as 1840. According to the story told by a chief of the Achumawi tribe (neighboring to Modocs), a group of trappers from the north stopped by the Tule lake around the year 1840 and invited the Modocs to a feast. As they sat down to eat, the cannon was fired, and many Indians were killed. The father of Captain Jack was among the survivors of that attack. Additionally, when in 1846 the Applegate Trail cut through the Modoc territory, the migrants and their livestock damaged and depleted the ecosystem that the Modoc depended on to survive.
20 th Century: Forced Assimilation
By 1900, the population of native people who survived the eliminatory policies and acts carried out in the 19th century was estimated at about 16,000 people. Remaining native people continued to be the recipients of the U.S. policies of cultural forced assimilation throughout the 20th century. Many other native people would experience false claims that they were "extinct" as a people throughout the century.
Indian Removal in California (1903)
Although the American policy of Indian removal to force indigenous peoples off their homelands had begun much earlier in the United States in 1813, it was still being implemented as late as 1903 in Southern California. The last native removal in U.S. history occurred in what has been referred to as the Cupeño trail of tears, when the people were forced off their homeland by white settlers, who sought ownership of what is now Warner Springs. The people were forced to move 75 miles from their home village of Cupa to Pala, California. The forced removal under threat of violence also included Luiseño and Kumeyaay villages in the area.
Indian Boarding Schools in California (1892–1935)
During the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the 20 th century, the federal government attempted to force indigenous peoples to further break the ties with their native culture and assimilate into white society. In California, such forms of education as the reservation day schools and American Indian boarding schools were established.
New students were customarily bathed in kerosene and their hair was cut upon arrival. Poor ventilation and nutrition and diseases were typical problems at these schools. In addition to that, most parents disagreed with the idea of their children being raised as Euro-Americans, with students being forced to wear European style clothes and haircuts, given European names, and strictly forbidden to speak indigenous languages. Sexual and physical abuse at the schools was common.
By 1926, 83% of all Native American children attended the boarding schools. Native people recognized the American Indian boarding schools as institutionalized forces of elimination toward their native culture. They demanded the right for their children to access public schools. In 1935, restrictions that forbid native people from attending public schools were removed.
It was not until 1978 that native people won the legal right to prevent familial separation that was integral to native children being brought to the boarding schools. This separation often occurred without knowledge by parents, or under white claims that native children were "unsupervised" and were thus obligated to the school, and sometimes under threatening circumstances to families.
21 st Century: Recovery
California has the largest population of Native Americans out of any state, with 723,000 identifying an "American Indian or Alaska Native" tribe as a component of their race (14% of the nation-wide total). The Bureau of Indian Affairs, BIA, generally recognizes someone’s as Native American if they have at least on-fourth Native American blood, otherwise known as blood quantum. This population grew by 15% between 2000 and 2010, much less than the nation-wide growth rate of 27%, but higher than the population growth rate for all races, which was about 10% in California over that decade. Over 50,000 indigenous people live in Los Angeles alone.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are currently over one hundred federally recognized native groups or tribes in California including those that spread to several states.