California Indian Research Articles

“Men who lived like women” in 18th century Alta California:<i> Coyas</i> / <i>Joyas</i>, <i>Cuút </i>or <i>Uluqi</i>, sodomites, hermaphrodites or amaricados?

Objective/context: This article analyzes testimonies of religious and military men, produced between 1770 and 1812, which give an account of Chumash, Juaneño and Yuma indigenous men of Alta California who were in the habit of dressing as women and joining them in the tasks corresponding to the feminine roles in these societies. The documents analyzed include two military diaries on the exploration expeditions and three chronicles of Franciscans who, starting in 1769, were in charge of founding missions in this area. Methodology: Through a gender perspective analysis, we examine the terms and categories used in the sources to describe and give meaning to the sexual roles and practices of the Coyas/Joyas, Cuút or Uluqi. Originality: The few works dedicated to the analysis of California Indians “in the habit of women” have focused on the missionary discourse or on the denunciation of the supposed “extermination” of dissident sexual practices. This paper argues that while the testimonies unanimously condemned these practices, they differed in the categories used to name and classify them and, thus, in the meaning attributed to them, which resulted in different legal and theological implications. Conclusions: The existence of men who dressed as women persisted, according to the sources analyzed, until the beginning of the 19th century in the region from the Gila and Colorado rivers to the Santa Barbara canal in northwestern New Spain. The categories of sodomy, amaricados or hermaphrodites, and male-female were understood under the single-sex model. And, although by the end of the eighteenth century, the principles of modern legal medicine were beginning to change, the meaning given to the Coyas/Joyas was linked to the justification of the advances or difficulties of colonization rather than to the scientific debates of the time.

Dividing the Indian Race

Despite being the first Native American to author a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), John Rollin Ridge and his writings have long troubled scholars. Ridge’s focus on Mexican Americans, racist portrayal of California Indians, and embrace of US belonging refuse easy analysis within the single identity category-focused frameworks of Native studies and Chicanx studies, and his presence in gold rush California as a Cherokee settler complicates scholarly approaches to the racial history of California. This essay uses a historicized engagement with racial formation theory to reevaluate Ridge’s work, including his novel, newspaper article in The True Daily Delta, and Hesperian magazine articles. Diverging from prior scholarship that reads Ridge’s work through the lens of present-day racial categories, this study approaches racial categories as shifting, connected to structures of power, and imbricated with gender to understand how Ridge thought of himself in relation to both California Indians and Mexican Americans and how he tried to intervene into the American racial discourse. Ridge desired recognition and inclusion from the US settler state, and he used hegemonic notions of masculinity to make his case. This prompted him to distance himself from those unable to conform to standards of appropriate manhood. I contend that Ridge’s desire for recognition led him to suggest that his own Cherokee people were more closely related to Mexican Americans than to California Indians. The complexity of Ridge’s stance and racial positioning in California demonstrate the possibilities of a reading practice informed by a relational approach to racial formation.

Bloody Island Investigation

This article explores an educational unit, developed for the secondary classroom, that critically examines state-led military campaigns against California Indians. The unit, titled “Bloody Island Investigation,” scrutinizes the May 1850 massacre of Pomo Indians by U.S. Army soldiers at Clear Lake, California. Today known as the Bloody Island Massacre, this event exemplifies a pattern of indiscriminate civilian- and military-led violence against Indigenous peoples in the American conquest of California. Although this history is well known among scholars, the scholarship is absent from the California Department of Education’s content standards. The Bloody Island Investigation unit provides educators with models for including this history in middle- and high-school classrooms. The unit consists of a range of primary source materials, including U.S. Army orders and internal reports, newspaper articles, survivor recollections, and disconcertingly varied death-count estimates. By applying to primary sources the rigorous evaluative skills central to historical work, students can decide for themselves what happened at Bloody Island: massacre of innocents, military encounter between armed combatants, or something in between.

California Unbound

An enduring focus on African American chattel slavery, the U.S. Civil War, and sharecropping in the South has failed to collectively address the varieties of unfree labor and their abolitions in the trans-Mississippi western United States. By exploring systems of servitude and their termination in California and the wider Pacific World, this essay reframes the Age of Abolition. It describes the rise and fall of labor regimes that bound California Indians, African Americans, Chileans, and Chinese women. Citing Chinese-, English-, and Spanish-language sources from a variety of archives and libraries, this article expands the chronology, geography, and actors of the Age of Abolition. Finally, it suggests trajectories for rethinking this momentous transition from Pacific World and western U.S. vantage points to suggest the need for a global history of abolition.

Strong Hearts and Healing Hands: Southern California Indians and Field Nurses, 1920–1950

Strong Hearts and Healing Hands: Southern California Indians and Field Nurses, 1920–1950

The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth

In the often contentious and acrimonious debates over whether the Golden State’s Indigenous peoples were targeted for genocide by white Euro-Americans between 1846 and 1873, inflammatory scalp bounty accusations against the state of California have become a staple of public discourse. California is frequently accused by public leaders, political activists, academic scholars, and others of once having paid cash rewards ranging anywhere from twenty-five cents to twenty-five dollars for Indian scalps, heads, and other body parts in order to wage a deliberate “war of extermination” against its Native peoples. So routinely are these allegations made that they now go largely uncontested and appear to have won nearly universal acceptance as established historical facts. These “facts,” however, are false. The state of California never offered, let alone actually paid, cash bounties for Native American scalps, heads, or other body parts. And, despite numerous similar claims to the contrary, neither did any county—nor, with one possible exception, did any incorporated town or city. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to repeated and unchallenged assertions based on very faulty scholarship, scalp bounty allegations have been allowed to evolve over the past thirty years to become a popular but polarizing myth that serves mainly to inflame public passions and to frustrate rational discourse in what are frequently bruising public quarrels over vital contemporary issues such as tribal sovereignty, reparations for past injustices, casino gaming regulation, and, of course, disputed points of historical interpretation central to the genocide debate. This essay traces the evolution of the pervasive California Indian scalp bounty myth from its origins in the 1990s and examines the numerous different versions that its propagators have put forth over time, despite a near-total lack of concrete supporting evidence. Although scalping itself was widely practiced by state militiamen and volunteer “Indian fighters” like the infamous Jackson Farley and Hi Good, the taking of corporal trophies in California’s genocidal frontier wars did not result from the pursuit of financial reward. Indeed, the remarkably small number of documented cases reveals that Indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in gold rush California and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful of isolated and unincorporated rural communities.

Letter from the Editor

Editorial| May 01 2023 Letter from the Editor Mary Ann Irwin Mary Ann Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Irwin; Letter from the Editor. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This issue addresses the fundamental role of controversy in history. We expect Michael F. Magliari’s “The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth: Evidence of Genocide or Just Faulty Scholarship?” to provoke controversy. In it, Magliari debunks an assertion that has become commonplace in histories of the newly formed state of California: that white Americans were so determined to exterminate California’s Indigenous population that state, county, and other officials appropriated funds and paid cash bounties to so-called “Indian hunters” for scalps, heads, and other Native American body parts. Magliari traces this evolving narrative through multiple secondary sources, searching for the primary source evidence upon which these claims were originally based. His article records the results of that careful search. We invite scholars of California history to debate Magliari’s conclusions. This is our job as historians: we argue with one another. It is our duty, as scholars, to seek the truth and to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Representations of Baja California Indians as ethnographic art

ABSTRACT The few existing pictures of Indigenous peoples of Baja California before the age of photography offer a precious window into the peninsula’s past inhabitants. The synoptic analysis of the material culture depicted in this imagery, from both religious and secular sources, reveals that the credibility of the pictures is based on highly contingent notions of truth that emerge from contextual relationships between images and texts. The essay maintains that representational differences mirror distinct ways of thinking about the depiction of ethnographic subjects. Although variability in style may depend on artistic ability and skill, diversity in subject and mode of representation are as much the product of multiple intermedial entanglements as they are the result of implicit aims and purposes. This unprecedented comparative exercise, while eliciting questions about what counts as accuracy in distinctive artistic and literary genres, encourages a reflection on the nature and role of images whose lives straddle between art and anthropology.

The Sacred Use of Datura Wrightii: Four Case Reports

Datura wrightii was traditionally used for sacred dreams and was used in many California Indian religions. The purpose of this writing is to present 4 case reports of people who sought the sacred use of the plant. This is contrasted with the recreational use of the plant.

Baptism Between Empires: A Coast Miwok Family in the Pacific World

Scholarship has documented in detail how Spanish colonists forced California Indians to convert to Catholicism, but some Indigenous converts managed to avoid confinement in the mission system, particularly those who resided in the borderlands between Spanish and Russian settlements. This contribution to the roundtable considers the travels of one Coast Miwok family who avoided confinement and preserved local control over tribal homelands by assiduously cultivating links with Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches while holding colonial newcomers at arm's length.

Getting back to that point of balance: Indigenous environmental justice and the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association

Emerging theories of Indigenous environmental justice reframe environmental problems and solutions using Indigenous onto-epistemologies, emphasizing the agency of non-human relations and influence of colonialism. The California Indian Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA) embodies this paradigm in its work to expand access to gathering areas, revitalize cultural burning, and stop pesticide use. Through our different positionalities as CIBA members, California Indian basketweavers, and researchers, we construct a case study of Indigenous environmental justice that articulates environmental stewardship as intrinsically linked with cultural and spiritual practice. Through education, information sharing, relationship building, lobbying, and collective action among its membership and land management agencies, CIBA has expanded basketweavers’ access to safe and successful gathering. By sustaining millennia of tradition, CIBA builds Indigenous sovereignty and shifts California’s land management paradigm toward environmental justice and global survival.

Enslaved in a Free Country: Legalized Exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans in Early California and the Post-Emancipation South

In 1850, California joined the United States as a free state. However, one of its first laws, the 1850 Law for the Government and Protection of Indians, legalized the enslavement of California Indians. Drawing comparisons between early Californian and Southern statutes that maintained racialized political economies, we argue that the institutionalized oppression perpetrated against Native Americans in California bears important legal similarities to that perpetrated against African Americans in the South, both before and after Reconstruction. This similarity is not a coincidence; the presence of both African and Native American populations in Southern legislation, the movement of Southerners to the West to participate in California’s development, the regional history of Mexican and Spanish systems of Indigenous enslavement, and a political economy reliant on racialized underpaid or unpaid labor, all created the conditions for California to legally retain de facto systems of slavery in a context of de jure freedom.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Ira Stuart Jacknis (1952–2021)

Ira Stuart Jacknis (1952–2021)

Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda (review)

Reviewed by: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda Kevin Whalen (bio) Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS of Indigenous experiences in the early twentieth century remain somewhat few and far between. After a spate of as-told-to biographies written in the mid-twentieth century that often blurred the line between non-Native writers and their subjects, biography fell out of favor among historians and anthropologists. With Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian, anthropologist Terri A. Castaneda joins a growing group of scholars working to refresh the medium as she brings to vivid life the rich and varied life of a Mountain Maidu activist. While Potts became a prominent journalist, political activist, and cultural leader among California Native people in the decades after World War II, Castaneda begins her account by drawing a painstaking portrait of Potts's Big Meadow community of Mountain Maidu people in the mid-nineteenth century, effectively using settler colonial theory to underscore the changes brought by the arrival of non-Native gold miners, land speculators, and (later) settlers. Castaneda then explores Potts's experiences at the Greenville Boarding School, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and after returning home to northern California. The second section of the book details how Potts rose to political prominence through editing Smoke Signals, a news publication for California Native people, and by participating in the Federated Indians of California, a group that pushed for just compensation of California Indians under the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. Castaneda then analyzes Potts's rising importance as a cultural leader and collaborator with anthropologists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Finally, the book closes with respective explorations of Potts's roles within the National Congress of American Indians and the urban Indian community of Sacramento. Through it all, Potts left a voluminous paper trail, and Castaneda demonstrates thoughtfulness in incorporating these written sources, as well as interviews with descendants and Native community members in Sacramento. Driven by the careful pen of Castaneda, Marie Mason Potts adds depth and texture to what we know within many critical areas of California Indian history and Native American history more broadly. For example, Potts sought out the opportunity to attend Carlisle Indian School, and her experiences at [End Page 133] Carlisle and after returning home reflect agency and its limits among boarding school students, both at school and after returning home. Potts's leadership within the Native community in Sacramento adds a crucial knowledge of Indigenous urbanization in the decades before World War II. Additionally, Castaneda's analysis of Potts's participation in the Federated Indians of California and the National Congress of American Indians, and her long run as editor of the Smoke Signal, provides a crucial window into California Native communities during the upheavals of the Indian Claims Commission and termination. Moreover, Potts's political activism as limned by Castaneda demonstrates the critical ties between local experiences and national Indigenous politics during the first half of the twentieth century. The journey of Potts was long and rich with meaningful experiences; as relayed by Castaneda, these stories bring to life both the uniqueness and exceptionality of Potts's stories and their relationships to the broader challenges and opportunities faced by Native people in California and beyond. Analyzing a life as long and rich as Potts's presents some challenges. Potts's life touched many themes and subfields that are often approached in isolation from one another by academics. Boarding school experiences, wage labor, political activism, and the development of community-oriented anthropological methods—each of these topics fill separate shelves at university libraries. Relating the experiences and activism of Potts to the literatures of each of these fields requires considerable time and attention, and in lesser hands scholarly context might compete with the narrative arc of Potts's life. Castaneda handles this difficult work with aplomb. Marie Mason Potts is an exceptional book, and it offers renewed promise for the possibilities of biographical study as a lens into Indigenous experiences of the early twentieth century. [End Page 134] Kevin...

The Enduring Flame: Stress, Epigenetics, and the California Indian 1769–2000

Epigenetics, the study of how life's challenges can alter the body's physiology, illustrates the ways stress harmed California's Mission Indians and may still harm their descendants. Eyewitness accounts from the mission period and entries for causes of death in burial records suggest that stress compromised the immune system for many Indians and made others more likely to kill themselves, commit acts of domestic violence, or suffer from mental illness. These ailments do not remain confined to one moment in time. As epigenetics proposes, stress can become encoded in the body. When modern Indians face the same pressures as did their ancestors, the chances increase that age-old afflictions will persist.

We Are the Land: A History of Native California

Historians Damon Akins and William Bauer unveil a fascinating narrative about California Indians that breaks free from conventional boundaries of time and space. In this work, they argue that Indigenous people are central to the history and future of California as they continue to fight against the idea once held by colonial entities that abundant natural resources were meant to be exploited and “could not be Indigenous land” (p. 4). Akins and Bauer achieve their goal of correcting misconceptions about the history of Native California and of demonstrating that Indigenous peoples are still here despite the violence, slavery, genocide, and state policies perpetrated against them.The authors rely largely on secondary sources interspersed with oral histories of Indigenous people. The book is evenly divided in its coverage of topics, from pre-Hispanic Native practices, stories, and uses of the environment through Native peoples' struggles during the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods; the last four chapters are devoted to the twentieth century. The topics—from the interaction with explorers and settlers to governments, laws, and activists—range broadly enough to pique interest in many quarters. While some scholars may question the omission of notes and a bibliography, each chapter ends with a section on sources discussing interdisciplinary evidence and various debates. A pleasantly surprising aspect of the authors' methodology is the placement between chapters of so-called “Native Spaces” sections, which offer vignettes about Indigenous peoples in big cities and other important places in order to supplement the history of missions, ranches, and reservations. These sections weave the past and present together in the authors' attempt to “resist the erasure of California Indians” (p. 9).Many stories of violence, adaptation, and resistance emerge from the chapters and these “Native Spaces” sections. For example, the region around Yuma witnessed the Quechan fight over control of the Colorado and Gila River crossings against the Spanish and American conquests in 1781 and 1851, respectively; more recently established in the region were the Cocopah Casino, a hospital, and the Ten Tribes Partnership, which, by retaining possession of significant water rights to the Colorado River, makes Indigenous people “vital and powerful stakeholders” amid the dominance of agricultural, military, and transportation industries (p. 35). Other spaces have captured national headlines, such as Ishi Wilderness, established by the federal government in 1984. The wilderness area is near the town of Paradise, California, infamously destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire—just the type of destructive wildfire that Native practices of burning, pruning, and harvesting, ignored under the 1964 Wilderness Act, would have helped to prevent. The authors point out that settlers who in the 1840s entered this area, which became known as the Lassen foothills, imagined it as a space that required conquering Indigenous peoples; by the twentieth century, convinced of their success, these settlers “grew nostalgic for an imagined past that could act as a prophylactic against the ills of the modern, urban world” (p. 195). Yet for the Native peoples this was not a wilderness; it was their land. These and many other accounts demonstrate how the public, politicians, and scholars would be better informed and have a greater understanding and appreciation of the natural environment if they were familiar with stories by Indigenous peoples.Indeed, this book's audience is not just other historians but the general public, though it would work well among college students. The authors intermittently refer to the history of Native California as one of genocide but also of resistance, perseverance, and survival in the present. Moreover, as they insightfully show, Indigenous peoples saw uplift in their own way, desiring “to take greater control over their lives, to live as both Indian and American” (p. 228). The authors' organization of the book and writing style are refreshing and make for a clear narrative that flows from start to finish. Anyone interested in the history of Indigenous peoples will wish to read and enjoy it.

Letter from the Editor

Editorial| August 01 2022 Letter from the Editor Mary Ann Irwin Mary Ann Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 1. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Irwin; Letter from the Editor. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This issue continues a California History tradition: exploring California Indian Country.1 Charles A. Sepulveda (Tongva and Acjachemen) begins our journey with “Hallucinations of the Spanish Imaginary and the Idealized Hotel California,” an article as moody and dystopic as its namesake song. Larisa K. Miller takes an indirect route, detailing the rise and fall of a white-led “save the Indian” group, the Northern California Indian Association, as it attempted to influence Bureau of Indian Affairs policies and actions in the state. William J. Bauer Jr. (Wailacki and Concow of the Round Valley Indian Tribes), Katrina M. Phillips (Red Cliff Ojibwe), and Margaret Heuttl (descended from Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibweg, Assyrian refugees, and European settlers) cross the plains virtually. In “Retracing The Oregon Trail,” they describe the challenges of reimagining a game that celebrated settler colonialism, in a way that honors and acknowledges Native American homelands and peoples. Each of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider Tsim D. Schneider. The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. 216 pp. Paperback $30.00. Terri A. Castaneda Terri A. Castaneda TERRI A. CASTANEDA is a professor of anthropology at California State University, Sacramento, and the author of Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist (2020). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 66–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.66 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Terri A. Castaneda; Review: The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, by Tsim D. Schneider. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 66–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.66 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search At long last, a narrative of colonial California populated with intelligent and culturally resourceful Indigenous people has arrived. Replete with earthquakes, shipwrecks, and Coast Miwok salvaging copper hulls and timber frames from hulking maritime vessels washed up on their foggy shores, it is certainly a page-turner. The book opens dramatically in 1783 as a young couple, Julúio and Olomojoia, with their six-year-old daughter in tow, strike out in a tule balsa to investigate the Spanish colonial settlement across the bay from their homeland in present-day Sausalito. They would repeat this crossing many times in the coming year as they ascertained how best to secure their family’s future in a rapidly changing world. Two centuries later, Tsim D. Schneider, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, embarked on a journey not unlike that of his Coast Miwok forebears. For two decades, he has traversed his ancestral homelands... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Decline of the Northern California Indian Association

Thousands of Indians in Northern California were landless, impoverished, and all but forgotten at the turn of the twentieth century. The Northern California Indian Association (NCIA), formed by Christian women in the Santa Clara Valley, sought to improve conditions for these people and spurred the federal government to provide them with land. After fifteen years of success and growth, in the 1910s the NCIA pivoted from supporting direct fieldwork among the Indians to establishing an Indian industrial school near Sacramento. A fire at the school in 1917 caused a devastating setback for the association. Despite having the financial health to survive this loss, the NCIA struggled to carry on. Decreasing membership numbers and an aging leadership indicated critical weaknesses in the organization. World War I and secularization exacerbated these structural problems. The NCIA viewed the emergence of a new organization, the Indian Board of Co-operation, founded by Frederick Collett and Beryl Bishop-Collett, as a significant threat. Frederick Collett accused NCIA members of subverting the fledgling board by maligning the Colletts among government Indian agents, attempting to prevent the board’s participation at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, and urging the courts to remove a foster child from the Colletts’ care. With few voices advocating for the Indians of Northern California during this period, the NCIA succeeded in influencing government policy and shaping federal Indian policies and programs. The NCIA’s decline allowed a new organization to press for a new round of federal assistance while pushing state and local officials to take greater responsibility for California’s Indigenous peoples.