Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California

Abstract

This edited collection comprises exciting recent work on colonial California in the fields of ethnohistory and historical archaeology. The nine chapters in this volume explore the many facets of community building among Indigenous Californians, paying specific attention to how Indigenous people formed copresent and imagined communities around shared religious beliefs, political and economic ties, and the practices of locality. The authors propose that communities are not natural, distinct, or static, but constructed, “dynamic, overlapping, and perhaps above all else, conditional” (21). The authors, individually and collectively, pursue five goals in their exploration of colonial California community building: considering how Indigenous Californians formed new communities and redefined existing communities, exploring how traditional and innovative community-building practices worked, assessing the impact of shared physical proximity on community building, and pinpointing when, where, and how communities intersected. The book as a whole and the individual chapters succeed beautifully. The result is a diverse range of scholarship that coheres methodologically and thematically in ways that help the reader better understand the significance of each individual chapter.The chapters in part 1 detail how the Gabrieleño, Chumash, and Pomo people re-created Indigenous spiritual communities within colonial contexts. Native converts and workers continued traditional mourning and courtship customs, which linked widely dispersed villages to each other and to the mission system. Both archaeological and documentary evidence suggest how traditional practices intersected with missionization and migratory labor patterns to produce new kinds of Indigenous communities. The chapters in part 2 illustrate how Indigenous people built communities outside colonial institutions, but directly in response to colonialism. The Chumash and Tejon people of Southern California organized multiethnic communities around resistance to the mission system, while Ohlone and Yokuts converts at Mission Santa Clara used the mission itself to maintain political and economic ties between Native villages. Intermarriage between the latter two linguistic groups created complex new tribal identities. Part 3, the final section, reveals how Indigenous Californians created unique colonial communities to meet distinctly Indigenous needs. Ohlone and Yokuts at Santa Clara developed a communal identity that knit together a diverse population. The Pomo near Fort Ross in Marin County and the Kumayyay of San Diego created settlement patterns to connect themselves more securely to the broader colonial economy.Hull and Douglas’s collection makes a welcome addition to existing scholarship and suggests a new paradigm for studies of Indigenous California. A deep dive into specific aspects of Indigenous Californian communities gives historians new ways to understand what made Indigenous communities cohere, beyond the abstractions of tribelet or language group. The theoretical and methodological rigor of this volume also invites comparison between the colonial experiences of Indigenous Californians and those of Native societies in other regions and eras. This volume is a must-read for scholars of Indigenous California. It represents some of the most energizing research in this field: the synergy of historical archaeology and ethnohistory is illuminating and inspiring. All scholars of Indigenous histories will benefit from its careful considerations of what community means, how it is created, and the many purposes it can serve.