Aboriginal California encompassed hundreds of thousands of peoples in thousands of villages speaking over one hundred separate languages with many more derivative dialects. The tribal groups spanned a multitude of environmental conditions, from deserts in the south to mountains along the coastlines to the great valley in the central part of the region. First-contact experiences also varied widely, from brief contacts with European ships in the early sixteenth century to the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This land cut off on all sides by mountains, deserts, and oceans, has always been dramatically different from any other part of native North America and is known to the present day for its distinct regional identity.
———Before contact with Europeans, California communities were located in small, relatively isolated areas with populations ranging from less than 100 to over 1,000 people, averaging 250 per group. Groups often lived in close proximity to other people who spoke a different language, so it was beneficial to understand and speak at least one foreign language. Largely patrilocal in residence, village society was organized on the basis of kinship, with each village consisting of extended relatives in one or two families, lineages, or clans. In times of need, the regional political system allowed for the formation of temporary alliances, which changed in composition according to changing circumstances.
———Aboriginal California's subsistence economies did not fit the usual hunter-gatherer or agricultural typologies, instead representing a hunter-gatherer-harvester system in which the social group mobilized to harvest seasonal crops such as acorns. Natural harvests were processed and stored, with surpluses being utilized in regional trade networks that gave geographically distant groups access to a variety of foods and a multitude of exotic materials.
———Societies were religious by nature and in structure. Social control was achieved through a code of moral laws, and conflicts were handled more often through moral sanctions than through confrontation and warfare. Infractions were mediated by leaders of families, villages, and tribes. If the offense was severe or covert, medicine people had the moral training to resolve it. Group warfare existed but was rare, usually reserved for relation against an offense to the religious order, which often took the form of a disruption in the food supply.
———Early historic contact occurred in different parts of California in different decades and even centuries, with non-Indian people who had differing approaches to dealing with Indians. The Spanish and Mexican invasion occurred in the southern and coastal areas. In the Spanish-Mexican systems, Indians valued as an essential economic work force that sustained the missions, presidios, and pueblos. Under the Spanish and, later, Mexican systems, Indian people were permitted to live in tribal communities on or near the missions and ranchos. As a result, survivors and original communities stayed together for decades after the American period.
———In the coastal region of Spanish occupancy from 1769 to 1848, the local Native American population was reduced by 90 percent. Epidemic diseases such as measles, cholera, and smallpox ravaged the vulnerable Indian people. The crowded missions were an ideal incubating ground for disease, resulting in an extremely high death rate for the biologically vulnerable, the old, the young, pregnant women, and so on.
———The Russians occupied a limited land base on the north coast on the northern offshore (Farallon) islands for several decades in the early nineteenth century. They also used the Indian people as an economic asset — as a work force around the fort and trading post at Fort Ross and as hunters on offshore-ships. Agents of the British Hudson's Bay Company entered the northern river valleys from Oregon in the early 1800s, but found little of economic value. They had little social or economic impact themselves, but left in their wake a malaria epidemic that decimated thousands of Indian people in the contacted areas of the Sacramento Valley. American trappers and explorers arrived in the mid-1800s and hunted mainly in the northern part of the state, outside Mexican-controlled areas. They moved through Indian country quickly.
———Government Indian policies in California rarely resembled those in other parts of North America. In 1850, the new California legislature passed the Government and Protection of the Indians Act, which provided for the indenture of loitering, intoxicated, or orphaned Indians and regulated Indian employment. The law was amended ten years later to expand the scope of slavery to include adults. The state policy resembled the "black codes" adopted by slave states as a means to control both free blacks and bondsmen. The state government also subsidized military campaigns against Indians, allowing for the indiscriminate killing of Indian women and children, as well as men, and justifying the slaughter as protecting settlers from Indian threat. A program of genocide, called "extermination" in the California Press, was carried out by a group calling itself the California Volunteer Militia and by temporary bands of miners and ranchers — all organized for the purpose of killing Indians. Between 1845 and 1870, the Indian population in California declined by 80 percent, from 150,000 to 30,000 people. As many as 40 percent of these deaths were the result of extermination killings. Only a few native Californians survived the removal and extermination campaigns in 1853, when Congress appropriated $250,000 to establish the first five reservations; all the reservations were closed in 1864. Later, Congress passed the Four Reservation Act, which authorized the creation of the Hoopa Valley, Tule River, and Round Valley reserves in California (no fourth reservation was ever completed).
———In the late nineteenth century California contained many tribes and few reservations. As a result, people from various tribal communities were taken to reservations where they were unfamiliar with the resident Indian population and were not able to exploit local natural food resources. This disruption of the social and political fabric of aboriginal life led to tension, depression, and fending. At the same time, Indian labor, especially prized during the early gold-rush years, was becoming irrelevant to the state's agricultural economy. There was a constant demand, and by the 1880s, as fruit growers and specialty farmers expanded their operations, a new demand for cheap labor had arisen.
———As the native population declined in the late nineteenth century, Indian groups reactivated traditional alliances and partnerships. A group under threat would move to the territory of an alliance partner, where it would be taken in, fed, and protected. The alliances of this period were structured along old patterns of political organizations such as marriage, extended family, shared religious systems, and language group. When native communities were forced to fragment or dispense, they divided along family lines through kinship and intermarriage. Therefore, through whole committees may not have been allowed to survive, their structural segments lived on. For example, the Redwood Creek people moved to Hopi Valley to live with their kinfolk.
———As Indian communities developed new kinds of Euro-American-style poitical organizations, the role that leaders played as spokespeople to outsiders became important. These leaders — mostly men at first — aroused suspicion in the outsider population and became targeted for isolation (jail) and destruction (murder). In many cases, the position of tribal spokesperson became so dangerous for men that women, less likely to be objects of violent attacks, began coming forward to assume such positions.
———Thus the men, who had traditionally been hunters, fishermen, religious participants, and political leaders, were now denied access to subsistence resources and to positions of political and economic power. They were forced to find work on the farms, ranches, and mines of white owners. Religious leaders were not allowed to go into the hills, and therefore could not feed the spiritual beings in the mountains The world that they had nourished for centuries through ritual activities, songs, stories, dances, and prayers began to starve and deteriorate.
———At the same time a new generation of half-Indian children were born to Indian woman who had been raped or taken as wives by the Spanish, Mexican and American invaders. These women and children, occupying a new place in a social structure, became marginalized as not fully Indian and not fully white.
———California Indian survivors used multiple strategies to maintain their culture in this shifting and hostile environment. Some hid in the foothills, while others lived quietly so as to minimize the chances of retaliation. Leaders, both male and female, took on the internal role of coordinators in the community, maintaining heritage and traditions. Some Indian people married non-Indians who could offer protection. Others moved to population centers and entered the non-Indian society and economy, cutting traditional family ties. Indian boarding schools socialized children in an environment absent of traditional cultural influences or parental interaction. Young people at the boarding schools often married members of other tribes, with the women moving away from their homes forever. The men would return with wives who knew nothing of local culture, and the next generation of children would be raised without knowing their culture.
———In the early twentieth century, a number of civic organizations, including the Sequoyah League, the Mission Indian Federation, and the Indian Board of Cooperation were formed to improve the social and economic conditions of California Indians. Indians themselves played an important role in the structure and activities of these organizations. The Indian Board of Cooperation, for example, encouraged Indians to undertake self-determination on their own terms by securing educational and financial opportunities and benefits All the Indians of California were eligible to join these organizations.
———California Indians and their allies went to court to win compensation for lands taken in the nineteenth century. One case concerned compensation for reservations promised in early, unratified treaties but never granted, and a second concerned compensation for the rest of California's land that had not been promised as treaty reservations. The settlement of these cases extinguished the aboriginal title claims that California Indians could make to aboriginal territories, but established a clear relationship between the state's native communities and federal officials. By 1950, 117 Indian communities had been established in California by the federal government either on lands set aside from the public domain or on lands protected with federal funds.
———In the 1950s, California witnessed a number of changes. Under the federal government's termination policy, thirty-six small reservations (called rancherias) exchanged official community existence for individual title to land and a distribution of money. During these same years, a federal program of relocation moved unemployed Indians and Indian veterans from their home communities to urban areas. The program moved California people to the state's cities and drew thousands of non-California Indians to cities such as Oakland and Los Angeles.
———During the second half of the twentieth century two Indian worlds have emerged in California: that of traditional reservation life, and that of urban immigrant like (largely involving non-California Indians.) These two worlds often compete for non-Indian support as the urban Indians seek funds as "ethnic groups" while California tribes maintain their government-to-government relationship with the United States, which brings them money and services. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal "war on poverty" increased the amount of money going to reservations, and urban-development programs often supported the rise of native leaders in cities. These two arenas supported one another as city-trained activists returned home to become tribal leaders and both urban and rural activists combined their efforts in organizations such as the American Indian Movement (AIM).
———In the 1970s and 1980s, California tribes became increasingly involved in the struggle to control Indian education. The California Indian Education Association was formed in 1972, and soon afterward DQU University (an Indian-run institution) was established on federal land near Sacramento. In the mid-1970s, departments of Native American studies were instituted at several California state universities and colleges. Publishing also became a focus of activity. The Indian Historian Press and the Malki Museum Press (on the Morongo Reservation) were founded in the 1970s, and cultural centers and tribal museums appeared. In 1976 American bicentennial moneys went to the construction of the Hoopa Tribal Museum and the rebuilding of three Hupa villages abandoned sixty years before.
———The 1980s, an era of burgeoning tribal self-government and economic development, brought progress for many California Indian communities A court decision in 1983 reserved the termination of seventeen California rancherias, and many Indian leaders became involved in the formulation of state and federal programs. At the end of the twentieth century, there are more Indian tribes in California seeking recognition by the federal government than there are in the rest of the United States — some thirty California tribes. Their tenacity, together with the persistence and inventiveness of their reservation and urban-based counterparts, bears powerful witness to the survival of native culture in the nation's most populous state.

LEE DAVIS
National Museum of the American Indians
Smithsonian Institution