“By the Aid of His Indians”: Native Negotiations of Settler Colonialism in Marin County, California, 1840–70

Abstract

As archaeology turns to the study of sustained colonialism, researchers are reassessing sites occupied by Native people from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In California, this was a particularly crucial time, with many Indigenous people creating social and economic ties with newcomers in order to maintain connections to their ancestral homelands. One such locale was Toms Point, a landform on Tomales Bay, where Coast Miwok people worked at a trading post run by an American entrepreneur. This article explores the material evidence for their engagement with a broad array of social and economic connections, including the California coastal trade, the salvage of a local shipwreck, and persistent Indigenous exchange networks.