Indigenous peoples of California
of California, commonly known as Indigenous Californians or Native Californians, are a diverse group of nations and peoples that are indigenous to the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after European colonization. There are currently 109 federally recognized tribes in the state and over forty self-identified tribes or tribal bands that have applied for federal recognition. California has the second-largest Native American population in the United States.
Most tribes practiced forest gardening or permaculture and controlled burning to ensure the availability of food and medicinal plants as well as ecosystem balance. Archeological sites indicate human occupation of California for thousands of years. European settlers began exploring their homelands in the late 18th century. This began with the arrival of Spanish soldiers and missionaries who established Franciscan missions that instituted an immense rate of death and cultural genocide.
Following California statehood, a state-enabled policy of elimination was carried out against its aboriginal people known as the California genocide in the establishment of Anglo-American settler colonialism. The Native population reached its lowest in the early 20th century while cultural assimilation into white society became imposed through Indian boarding schools. Native Californian peoples continue to advocate for their cultures, homelands, sacred sites, and their right to live.
In the 21st century, language revitalization began among some California tribes. The Land Back movement has taken shape in the state with more support to return land to tribes. There is a growing recognition by California of Native peoples' environmental knowledge to improve ecosystems and mitigate wildfires.
Classification
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.History
Indigenous
Evidence of human occupation of California dates from at least 19,000 years ago. Archeological sites with dates that support human settlement in period 12,000–7,000 ybp are: Borax Lake, the Cross Creek Site, Santa Barbara Channel Islands, Santa Barbara Coast's Sudden Flats, and the Scotts Valley site, CA-SCR-177. The Arlington Springs Man is an excavation of 10,000-year-old human remains in the Channel Islands. Marine shellfish remains associated with Kelp Forests were recovered in the Channel Island sites and at other sites such as Daisy Cave and Cardwell Bluffs dated between 12,000 and 9000 cal BP.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 are 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 the area of California.
Early Native Californians were hunter-gatherers, with seed collection becoming widespread around 9,000 BCE. 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.
File:Yurok plankhouse03.jpg|thumb|A reconstruction of a traditional Yurok plank house.
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 18th century: Missions and 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.
19th century: genocide
The population of Native California was reduced by 90% during the 19th century—from more than 200,000 in the early 19th century to approximately 15,000 at the end of the century. The majority of this population decline occurred in the latter half of the century, under United States 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, among other factors including state-enabled massacres that accelerated under Anglo-American rule.
Russian contacts (1812–1841)
In the early 19th century, Russian exploration of California and contacts with indigenous people were usually associated with the activity of the Russian-American Company. The 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-month-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. This was noted in the land acquisition of Victoria Reid, an Indigenous woman born at the village of Comicranga.