"The Native Americans" Series (1994), Turner Home Entertainment (notes/commentary on video)
Pre-Columbian California was more densely populated than any other part of the country. Had more than 200 distinct languages, dialects. People were often multi-multilingual (to 15 languages!?).
Our identity was our landscape, and our landscape was sacred.” Another Indian, from SW, said that American Indian history is more about place than time. Identification with place is the American shibboleth.
Columbus 1492. First contact of Spanish with Chumash in Santa Barbara Channel was in 1542, just 50 years later. But not until 7,200 years later, in 1769, was the first mission in Alta California.
“They are so savage, wild, dirty, disheveled, ugly, small, and timid that only because they have the human form is it possible to believe that they belong to mankind” (Spanish priest).
Soon enough came smallpox, measles, etc. Indians noticed that the priests etc. at the missions weren’t suffering as much, so they thought maybe those Christians have some mysterious protective power after all, and were lured to missions in hopes of (physical if not spiritual) salvation. But nooooo—they kept dying just as fast as before, but now they were trapped—forced to stay, enslaved. The army went after runaways.
“Whether the Indians be really dragged from their homes and forced to exchange their life of freedom for one of confinement and restraint, the change would seem advantageous to them. They lead a far better life [=more like the European kind of life?] in the missions than in the forest” (some English visitor).
When the mission period ended (in 18--), the native population had been reduced by two-thirds. Most of the worst effect of the first wave of European invasion was felt along the coast and adjacent hinterlands (parts of San Joaquin Valley, Southern California, and especially the delta region), even though more-or-less all parts of California were influenced to some extent (e.g. Maidu word for “work”=tawal and for “gold”=’odo—or did that date from the Sonorans who got to the goldfields first, in 1848 or 49?
The northern and Sierran tribes were still fairly intact until . . . 48-9. But even by the 1840s (which in any case is still VERY recent compared with eastern part of U.S.), American westward expansion wave brought settlers to California (as well as Oregon).
Why would we want gold? We have everything: food, clothing, fire, the winter . . .
Killing frenzy, bounties, Indian-hunting clubs.
“It must be expected that the war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races, until the Indian race becomes extinct; the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”—Peter H. Burnett, Governor of California in 18-- [Genocide is beyond our power to avert? Some sort of force of nature??]
Within six years of the gold discovery the population of California reached 250,000. Indians reduced to plowing fields for white farmers, and in the north, cutting trees for him.
“A man who works in the soil cannot dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams.” (Paiute shaman)
