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California:  Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants an

California:  Traditional Indigenous Relationships with Plants and Animals

Work in progress; please do not cite without permission.

This is intended to be one part of a book that will also include a section on the Pacific Northwest, thus covering the Pacific coast of North America from the Mexican border (or just south of it) to southern Alaska.  The book is on traditional plant and animal management and ideology.  It draws heavily on myths and texts, especially early recordings from the days when texts were important to anthropology (sadly no longer true—though some stalwart souls are still recording them).  I am interfacing biology with culture, using phenomenology and ethnobiology as the main ways into the latter. 

Unfortunately, events are making it impossible to work on the book.  The California section is substantially finished, though I am updating it as new materials appear.  These now are largely supportive of the basic points, so the time has come to post this work on my website for anyone to use. 

“…we are constantly walking on herbs, the virtues of which no one knows.”  -Pastor, Chujmas elder, as quoted by Fernando Librado Kitsepawit, Ventureño Chumash (Librado 1979:56; cf. Blackburn 1975:258)

Californian Environments

            The Pacific Coast of North America, in pre-European times, had the distinction of supporting large, populous, highly complex societies that lived by hunting and gathering and that almost totally lacked agriculture.  Many groups along the immediate coast and major rivers were not only larger and more differentiated than most hunter-gatherer cultures, but more so than many horticultural societies around the world.  (On California Native environments, see Jones and Klar 2007; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.)

            The reason has traditionally been considered “the rich environment,” but actually the environment is not incredibly rich.  The Northwest Coast has huge salmon resources, but to balance this out it has millions of acres of dense evergreen forest with almost nothing for humans to eat.  California and the interior regions have rich seed resources and appreciable game, but are dry at best, and are subject to frequent prolonged droughts that make finding food a desperate proposition.  Irrigated agriculture on a large scale has made these dry areas productive, but without that they can be quite barren.

            It is not surprising, then, to learn from archaeology that complex societies did not exist until around 3,000 years ago (give or take a millennium).  What is surprising is the rise of such societies—a phenomenon still unexplained.  Before even attempting explanation, we need to understand the complexity.

            Let us, then, look at how such societies maintained themselves. 

            For convenience, I will make the arbitrary decision to divide these two regions by the California state line.  Groups split by the line will be considered to lie in the state where their major population once dwelt (except for the Modoc, who belong properly to the Plateau region, and are poorly known because of the genocidal “Modoc War”).  The decision is slightly less arbitrary than it looks.  In spite of often being classified as “Northwest Coast,” the Karok, Yurok, and Athapaskan groups of northwest California are politically, mythologically, and socially rather typical Californians, and lived by a Californian economy depending heavily on acorns. 

            This distinction gives us a Californian region whose economy was based on management of varied seed and nut resouces.  The northwest part of the state depended largely on fish, with seed and root foods important.  The Central Valley and other regions living near rivers and lakes had a similar economy, with perhaps relatively more seeds and nuts.  The Plateau region of traditional anthropology begins from the Cascade Range crest and extends eastward to the Rockies, and is defined in terms of human ecology by the intensive focus on wild root, corm and bulb foods, which are cultivated and stored(see e.g. Hunn 1991; Turner et al 1990).  The Plateau economy grades into the Californian economy in the northeast corner of the state, where the Achomawi and Atsugewi lived on fish, acorns, seeds, and root crops (Garth 1978; Olmsted and Stewart 1978).  Most of the rest of California depended largely on acorns, and to a lesser extent other nuts, with seed and root crops important.  The thinly-occupied deserts had few acorns, and life here depended on a wide range of plant foods; pinyon nuts were locally common and important.  I will not be dealing with the Great Basin or Baja California, except that far northern Baja California is linguistically and culturally a part of Native California by all standards, and will be included. 

            I shall, however, include the southeastern groups in California, which depended to a great extent on agriculture rather than, or along with, wild seed management.  As usual, culture areas grade into each other; agriculture supplied about half or less of the food of the Mohave and Quechan along the Colorado on the state line, and only a small percentage of the food of the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla.  Montane and coastal Kumeyaay probably did not practice it at all.  By contrast, agriculture supplied most of the food of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) in south Arizona, and most other culturally Southwestern groups.

            Classic ethnographic California thus focuses on the Mediterranean and montane parts of the state.  Most of the large, complex cultures developed in the former.  In spite of being called “Mediterranean,” California is not much like the Mediterranean Sea region.  The Mediterranean is landlocked and sun-warmed—a downright hot-tub.  This keeps its bordering countries warm in winter, and hot and often rainy in summer.  California’s coast is chilled by the California Current, a vast river of ocean water flowing down from Vancouver Island at a temperature around 55 F.  This creates such extreme conditions that the diving seabirds of Baja California are arctic forms (auklets, murrelets, and subarctic cormorants), while the soaring ones are tropical (terns, frigatebirds).  Thus coastal California is always cool and pleasant, but is quite dry.  More important to Native peoples, the California current and related upwelling produces fantastic biological productivity in coastal waters, and keeps the land cool and moist, permitting great productivity there too.  (Morocco’s Atlantic coast is similar, but the Mediterranean Sea shores are not.)

            This cold ocean keeps even southern California’s mountains pleasant and forested.  At elevations equivalent to California’s giant sequoia belt, Turkey’s mountains have thin woods, and reach a timberline around 8000 feet.  This low line is set not by cold but by drought due to Saharan and Arabian winds. 

            Conversely, much of the Mediterranean is exposed to winter storms and summer rains from farther north.  I have been caught in a major winter snowstorm on the Riviera (but, then, I have seen snow down to 1000’ in southern California) and subjected to days of rain in August in Rome.  California is walled off by mountains from the full force of northern and eastern winds.  The exception is southern California, where major passes allow such winds to roar down as the dreaded “santanas,” named because they pour down the Santa Ana River and other canyonways.  A desert wind, it combines the violence of the mistral with the heat of the scirocco.

            California ranges from warm to hot in summer, cool to cold in winter.  Rains varied (before recent climate change) from 130” a year in the far northwest mountains to 2” or less in the lowest valleys of the eastern deserts.   Such “average” figures mask incredible variation.  El Centro, on the Mexican border in southeastern California, averages 2” a year.  In the middle 1970s it made its average perfectly:  there was essentially no rain for six years, and then in August of 1976 a west Mexican chubasco (hurricane) dropped 12” in one day. 

Northern California has its own variety.  In February 1964, I saw the Sacramento River running more than ten miles wide.  A bridge about 100’ above the normal level of the Eel River was washed out.  Yet in summer 2009 the Sacramento was far below its usual banks and the Eel was almost totally dry, and in 2015 the rivers were still lower.  Within my years in Riverside, yearly rainfall has fluctuated by an order of magnitude (2” to over 20”), and the deserts eastward varied even more than that.  Such conditions would stress anyone, and they certainly proved difficult for hunting-gathering peoples.

Throughout California there is an alternation of El Niño conditions with drier years.  El Niño is caused by warm water in the east Pacific, and brings heavy winter rains.  They start just after the winter solstice, and thus around Christmas—hence the name (originated in Peru), which refers to the baby Jesus.  El Niños came every 5-7 years in the late 20^th century, but before and since that time they were less frequent.  They provide about twice as much rain as normal years.  In the normal years, the warm-water pool of the Pacific is around Indonesia, bringing the rain to that country and to Australia instead of to the American coasts.  Recently, a tendency has arisen to refer to particularly cool and dry conditions in California as “La Niña” years, as if Jesus had a long-lost sister!  All, in turn, is part of the vast global El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system.

            Globally warm periods, like the Medieval Warm Period and the present, are hot and dry in California.  Globally cool periods like the Pleistocene and the Little Ice Age are generally wet, but California suffered some searing droughts at the height of the Little Ice Age, which was globally dry (Gamble 2008).

            Today, global warming, partly natural and partly due to human release of greenhouse gases, is drying and heating California.  Vegetation is dying, and animal life with it.  Drastic reduction of both natural vegetation and agriculture is now in progress, and the future is bleak.  California has taken a world lead in combatting global warming, but without national and world support, all efforts will have little effect.  Political activity funded and driven by oil and coal companies have checkmated all attempts to slow—let alone stop—the warming process.  Unless greenhouse gas release is controlled, California could easily become a lifeless desert, like the central Sahara, within a few centuries. 

The Chumash saw it all as a gambling game.  All year, Coyote (with his allies) gambles with the Sun (with his).  On the winter solstice, the Moon judges the game.  If Coyote has won, the winter will be rainy and there will be much food.  If the Sun wins, winter conditions all too familiar to southern Californians will ensue:  the sun will beat down, day after day, from a brazen sky, and no food will grow (Blackburn 1975).  In the Santa Barbara County mountains, there is a cave where the Chumash bored a hole through solid rock.  The rising sun on the winter solstice morning strikes straight through the hole and illuminates a painting of a coyote on the cave wall.  One can easily guess what magic was tried there.  Alas, modern science cannot do much better than the ancient Chumash at predicting, and no better at controlling.

Biotic California

            The Californian region of the biologists is Mediterranean California.  It includes several formations:  chaparral (dense brushlands), scrub formations of many types, montane and lowland forests, Mediterranean steppe and grassland, winter-rain deserts, and the rainy, wooded northwest part of the state (Barbour et al. 2007).   Over 8000 native species of plants occur.  In spite of claims for extreme diversity (e.g. Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), this is less than comparable Mediterranean-climate zones of the world in Turkey and South Africa, and far less than many dry-tropical areas.  Still, it is diverse enough to provide tremendous variety and opportunity for hunters and gatherers. 

            Any account of the state will describe these plant associations.  However, earlier accounts exaggerate the extent of grassland.  Contrary to earlier assessments, it is now clear that the vast flat lowland valleys of California were usually covered by sparse scrub and annual wildflowers, not bunchgrass (Minnich 2008).  One can still see this in the few areas of the Central Valley that are not cultivated.  The wildflowers were thick and tall near the coast, but inland they would wither away to very little, leaving the ground sparsely covered, or, in such desert plains as the Antelope Valley and southern Central Valley, absolutely bare.  This was especially true where salt was concentrated by deposition in closed drainage basins (as can be seen in several areas today, e.g. the salt lake in Carrizo Plain).   

Anna Gayton (1948) was perceptive enough to notice these facts in early accounts, and realize what it meant for the Yokuts who lived there:  they could not find game, or even water, in the vast burning flats, and had to live near rivers and lakes.  These, at contact (following the wet centuries of the Little Ice Age), were very extensive; there was a vast chain of marshy lakes in the San Joaquin Valley that supported enormous fish and water plant resources (Latta 1977).  I can barely imagine this, being able to recall the last bits of marsh and lake, still visible in the 1950s.  Today, it is difficult to imagine the drought-starved plowed fields having been, only recently, huge marshy lakes teeming with fish, ducks, geese, turtles, frogs, tule elk, and every sort of water plant and insect.

The deserts also were covered with scattered bushes and, in wet springs, annual wildflowers.  The current cover of grass that dominates most of lowland California is made up of introduced Mediterranean weeds, which have outcompeted native plants (Minnich 2008), even replacing chaparral and woodland after hot fires.  The state looks very different today from its aboriginal appearance.  Even in the wildest parts of the western United States, enormous deterioration in the environment was occurring by the 1870s.  One of J. W. Powell’s workmen—a semiliterate frontiersman who cannot be accused of romantic environmentalism—wrote to Powell in 1880, describing southern Utah: “The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out [sic] by stock” (Powell 1971:47). 

Animal life was equally rich.  The vast herds of deer and elk reported by explorers probably involved recovery from heavy hunting by Native Californians and heavy predation by bears, but there were evidently always many cervids.  Moutain sheep, including the desert bighorn, were evidently abundant before diseeases introduced by domestic sheep virtually exterminated them (they survive today partly because Fish and Game workers patiently catch and inocuate them).  Fish choked the rivers.  Salmon and steelhead were particularly prominent. Fall, winter, and spring runs of salmon stayed in the rivers for months until spawning time; they had to run when the streams had enough cool water, making summer runs impossible.  Steelhead (sea-running rainbow trout) still occur in many rivers, but in small numbers.  The salmon runs are disappearing fast, except in the Klamath, where Native Californians have fought desperately to keep the runs alive.  Even there, the outlook is cloudy.  Trout have done much better, thanks in large measure to stocking, and to vigilant monitoring by fishers.   Other fish, including the native warm-water fish of the Sacramento, Colorado, and elsewhere, are extinct or nearly so. 

The end is near; the usual combination of global warming, suburbanization, agribusiness, waste of water, and pollution are closing in fast on what is left of Californian nature, and all will be gone within a few decades unless desperate measures are taken.  (For a good, and depressing, summary see Allen et al. 2014).

Cultural Contours

            Humans have been in California for a long time.  The oldest date so far is 13,000 years ago (give or take a bit; see Erlandson 2015 for this and following dates) from Santa Rosa Island, but to get down the coast and out to a rather remote island would have taken some time.  Just north of California, at Paisley Cave in Oregon, there are dates as far back as 14,800 years ago.  People had reached Monteverde in southern Chile by 13,000 years ago.  So California was almost surely settled by 15,000 years ago.  Settlers probably came down the coast at first, but Paisley Cave is far inland.

            The initial population was small, and increased only slowly.  A few fluted points show that California was not entirely untouched by the Clovis style of spearpoint around 12,000 years ago, but points are few and scattered.  More local and more numerous points follow.  Then a very long period coinciding with the hot, dry Altithermal demonstrates that California was thinly populated by atlatl-wielding hunters from 8000 to 5000 years ago.  Conditions during the Altithermal were like those of the “new normal” developing after 2014, with extreme heat and dryness, though the southeast had higher rain than now, due to expansion of the summer monsoon from Arizona.  Ancient pack rat middens made of local twigs reveal that mountains now bare had juniper and other bushes.

            Climate ameliorated after 5000 years ago, and people responded by becoming more numerous and sedentary.  They began a shift to acorns, small seeds, and geophyte (root, bulb and corm foods; see Pierce and Scholtze 2016; Reddy 2016).

Increase was faster from about 3000 years ago, and in fact seems to have increased exponentially after that.  Hunting was still with the atlatl, but more attention was paid to plants and fish than to land game.  Robert Bettinger (2015:34) points out how this tracked improvements in plant use technology.  The importance of better acorn processing has long been well known, and seeds became so important that there was even local domestication (see below).  There was evidently a positive feedback: the improvements allowed more population growth, which in turn made people want more improvements. 

We must avoid recourse to explanation through “population pressure,” however, since groups evidently differed in their responses to the rising population.  They could innovate, borrow, migrate, fight, starve, or otherwise deal.  Migration, especially, is well attested by linguistic and archaeological data.   Humans love sociability above all other things, and want to live together, share, intermarry, dance, and generally have fun in groups.  They also like good food better than bad food—however their culture defines those.  Thus, wanting to procure more and better animal and plant resources is not a mindless reflex of “population pressure.”  It is a way to cope with scarcity, but also a way to support larger, livelier setttlements with a higher quality of life, however defined by the people in question.  Also, humans do not always love the neighbors, as shown inter alia by the number of skeletons with projectile points in their bones in California cemeteries, and large settlements afford protection.  Pierce and Scholtze (2016) echo Bruce Smith’s call to look at cultural niche construction.  People increasingly create their own environments (not just niches!).  In California, burning and other management techniques clearly increased along with acorn and small seed reliance.

            The bow and arrow probably caused a minor revolution (Bettinger 2015:44-48).  Bows and arrows are better for getting game, especially small game, than the previous technology based on spears, spear-throwers (atlatls), nets, and traps.  An increase in animal bones appears at the time the bow and arrow reached California, around 400-500 CE.  This allowed people to capitalize on the improved plant management, because it provided enough protein to allow more sedentization in remote back-country areas rich in plant resources.  (Less remote areas had access to fish, shellfish, and nuts, and were not limited by quality protein availability.)  It allowed more sedentary lifestyles and more dispersal into small groups (especially in summer), for the same reason.  The land was used more efficiently.  Cultivation and, in the southeast, true agriculture expanded and flourished.  In the pinyon areas, for instance, pinyon exploitation greatly increased, because it was possible to spend extended time in the dry, otherwise-resource-poor areas where pinyons grow.  Vessels for carrying water must have had a lot to do with that.  Bettinger stresses the importance of stored food (largely nuts), which were family property rather than shared by all.

            Along the coast, things were very different.  The bow and arrow had much less effect, since the staples were fish, shellfish, and sea mammals (speared at landings or from boats).  What mattered most was sea temperature, especially in southern California, where warm currents from far south often intrude on the more usual cool water.  Warm currents brought fewer fish, and those larger, faster, and harder to catch.  Thus they were lean times for local people.  This affected demographics over time.  Yet, here too, there was a sharp inflection in the population growth curve around 4000-3000 years ago.  In this case, it seems to result from better marine technology, ranging from the Chumash plank canoe (dating to perhaps 2000-2500 years ago; Gamble 2002) to superior fishhook and net designs.  Again this went in tandem with social structure. Villages got large, with notable differentiation in burials.  The bow and arrow came even later on the coast, in some places as late as 1250 in some areas (Bettinger 2015:100).  It reached the Chumash around 500 CE, following which there was a rise in violence, and presumptively war, that cooled slowly as people adjusted to the new weapon (Bettinger 2015:109). 

This has recently had fateful effects, as southern California has been one of the poster children for the frequency and violence of war among hunter-gatherers alleged by Steven  Pinker (2011) and others.  If the violence-ridden cemeteries sample only a brief and atypical time, Pinker’s ideas need adjusting (as pointed out in detail from much other evidence in Fry 2013).  

Complexity, and probably language distributions, reached something like contact-period levels around 400-600 CE.  By this time, bow hunting, mortars to grind acorns and other large seeds, sophisticated metate production for small seeds, and agriculture in the far south were established.  Corn-bean-squash agriculture spread in from the southwest at some quite early stage, and was probably still spreading when the Spanish came; it was long-established by then in the Colorado River and Imperial valleys.  Local cultivation and possibly domestication of wild seeds—barley and, in the south, maygrass (Reddy 2016:237)—is implied by the seed record. 

            The weather turned hot and dry again after 900, reaching a climax in the late 1200s, which were apparently as hot and dry as the mid-2010’s.  Californians endured, turning to more intensive use of still-available resources, especially marine ones where available.  Shifts away from the formerly vast marshes of the interior are noteworthy.  California’s eastern neighbors crashed.  The Four Corners and Utah were about 90% depopulated.  Incipient civilization crashed into small village societies in the southern southwest.  People migrated, dispersed, set up villages wherever water was still available. The effect on California’s rather extensive trade with Arizona and points east must have been substantial. “[P]rehistoric interaction between the two regions was regular and sustained and…economic or political developments in one area are likely to have hadhad important implications in the other” (Smith and Fauvelle 2015:710), as shown by the very extensive and long-lasting trade that brought shells, asphaltum, and the like from the coast, turquoise from the California desert, and pottery and stone goods (and probably cloth) from the Southwest.  The trade dropped off sharply after the 1200s, but California kept growing in population and social complexity.

            Cooler, wetter times followed, and the Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1700-1750 restored glaciers to California’s highest peaks.  Plant resources exploded, and human populations grew accordingly.

There were only 250,000-300,000 Native Californians as of 1700 (Cook 1976).  This means fewer than two persons per square mile (California’s area is 158,633 sq. mi.).  This population likely represents a reduction from peak, however, because Spanish diseases had already ravaged the state (Preston 1996), having been introduced when Spanish first touched on what is now California—1540 along the lower Colorado, 1542 on the coast. 

Languages and Society

California is famous for the diversity of its indigenous languages (Golla 2011 provides an encyclopedic survey).  At least 64, possibly 80, languages were spoken (Shipley 1978; Golla treats 78), including two whole language families—Yukian and Chumashan—that are completely confined to the state.  Many people were multilingual, and in some areas it seems that the very concept of a single “native language” did not exist (Dixon 1907—if I read him aright; cf. Golla 2011)—a worthy example for us today.  (For background on California Native peoples, the classic account by Kroeber, 1925, is dated and now sometimes sounds patronizing, but is still a superb summary; more up-to-date and sensitive are the great Handbooks of the Smithsonian Institution, but one must not only read the huge California volume [1978] but also relevant parts of the Plateau volume [Walker 1998] and the Southwest volumes, since the state was divided among these various cultural regions.  For prehistoric times, see Jones and Klar 2007, especially Victor Golla’s excellent article on languages and language prehistory, which is summarized and updated in Golla 2011.)

Relationships of California languages with languages elsewhere are usually so remote as to be unclear.  Chumashan was once tentatively linked with several other Californian and Southwestern languages in the “Hokan phylum,” but Chumashan is in fact very distant from other “Hokan” languages.  Edward Sapir, and later in more detail Joseph Greenberg (1987), provided intriguing evidence for linking Yuki with the languages of southern Louisiana, and this appears to be a good likelihood (Golla 1911; it may also be very distantly related to Siouan). 

Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh thought the Penutian family of languages of central California were related to the Mayan languages of Mesoamerica, and Greenberg (1987) accepted this.  There is much evidence, most obviously the win- root for “person,” as in Wintu wintu and Maya winik, and the tendency to count using base 20, which in Mayan is also “winik”—because the number is derived from counting on fingers and toes, so 20 is a whole “person.”  The Mayanist Cecil Brown and I investigated this idea some years ago, and found dozens of intriguiging pairs like that, but unfortunately the Penutian languages are so poorly attested in the record that we could not come to any definite conclusions and did not publish our work.  I remain convinced, however.  Penutian is generally thought to be related to most of the Plateau languages in a Penutian phylum.  Sapir and some followers considered it to be related to the Tsimshian languages of British Columbia, but that link is, at best, controversial.

One very important problem in understanding Californian, and other Native American, languages is that much was lost by the time that even the earliest ethnographers spread out to study the cultures.  In particular, all these languages had the same sorts of style registers that English or any other world language has.  There were styles appropriate to chiefly speeches, styles appropriate to medicine formulas, styles peculiar to particular animal characters in myths, and so on.  Particularly important was the division into high style, such as a chief would use in a formal speech, and ordinary daily style.  Victor Golla (2011:226-227) discusses what little is known, from the very few languages that survived long enough for such refinements to be noted. 

There was another, intermediate, register, such as a chief might use in his daily directives to the people (recall Garth’s observations cited above).  There were also special modes of speech used by shamans, and still others for myth-telling.  There were evidently some lower registers too, the equivalent of rustic dialect or slang.  We have no idea of most of these.  On the whole, all that was recorded was the ordinary register, the others having been forgotten (as noted by e.g. Laird 1976 for the Chemehuevi).  A. L. Kroeber did hear some formal speaking from Yurok and Mohave consultants, and gives tantalizingly short transcriptions of the Mohave (Kroeber 1972:81-83).

Hokan, Chumashan, and Yukian languages have been spoken in California for many thousands of years and presumably originated there.  Penutian languages are thought to have intruded from the north several millennia ago.  The Algonkian-related Yurok and Wiyot came later, and the Athapaskan and Uto-Aztekan languages later still, probably in the last 2000-3000 years.  Intrusion of the Shoshonean languages into the coastal areas happened about 1500 years ago, give or take a few centuries.  Dissimilar song and vocal styles (Keeling 1992a, 1992b) and vocabularies (O’Neill 2009) fit with other cultural differences, separating e.g. the otherwise culturally close Karuk and Yurok.  Both, for instance, indicate direction upriver/downriver/away from river, rather than by compass points, for reasons that will be obvious if you look at a map or satellite photograph, but Karuk—longer established—has a more complex and intricate system for marking it (O’Neill 2008).

Dramatic shifts in languages probably track changes in resource procurement.  The spectacular radiation of the Shoshonean groups from the southern Sierra into southern California (Takic) and across the Great Basin (Numic) coincides with the coming of the bow and arrow and probably has something to do with it—not only because of fighting and hunting power, but also because of better plant resource procurement (Bettinger 2015:48-49)

The state is traditionally divided into subcultural areas.  We may ignore these; they are rather debatable.  There are, expectably, cultural gradations at the margins into the neighboring culture areas. 

            More interesting to us here is the question of social complexity.  In general, Californian peoples lived in small village communities (“tribelets”; Kroeber 1925) of about 200-1000 people.  They centered around a single winter village or a very small group of such.  People dispersed in the spring and summer to forage and amass storable foods.  Some of these village communities were notably self-sufficient.  A. L. Kroeber interviewed one old man who had never been more than a day’s walk from his home in the remote northern California coast ranges (Kroeber 1925:145).   Bettinger (2015) takes limited mobility as usual.  Archaeology, however, shows substantial trade, and it appears more likely that this old man and others like him were limited in their travels by post-Anglo-settlement conditions.

            The smallest communities were apparently those in the Mohave Desert and Great Basin.  Even along the Colorado River and in the densely populated northwest, the operational unit was often the family; tribal consciousness existed but there was no real tribal government.  People lived in what Robert Bettinger calls “orderly anarchy” (Bettinger 2015).  He traces it to the effects of the bow and arrow on settlement (see above). 

William Kelly reported “anarchy” for the Cocopa (Kelly 1977, esp. p. 78).  For them, the word for “leader” literally meant “mad dog, crazy person” (Frank Blue, quoted Kelly 1977:80).  So much for leaders!  The Cocopa, like other groups, had orators, who performed the hard-work harangues noted above (Kelly 1977:80), but had no real designated authority. 

Even so, riverine communities on the Klamath, Sacramento, and (probably) other major rivers, and the coastal communities of the Santa Barbara Channel, were large.  Many of these in the latter two areas seem to have gone on to become chiefly villages ruling over whole polities, with small tributary villages in the hinterland.  This is believably, but not certainly, attested for the Chumash and Tongva (Gabrielino) of southern California.  It is a more than reasonable inference for the Patwin and neighboring groups of central California (cf. Kroeber 1932).  Chumash polities of up to 2500 square miles are possible.  (See Bean and Blackburn 1976 for several articles on California politics and group sizes.  Bettinger 2015 clearly underestimates the level of chieftainship and chiefdom organization.)  Unfortunately, we shall never know the truth, for these groups were shattered by conquest and disease in the early historic period.  The Patwin and several Chumash groups narrowly avoided total extinction.

            In terms of Julian Steward’s useful if imperfectly defined “levels of sociocultural integration” (Steward 1955), these were simple chiefdoms.  This means that they were organized into ranked descent groups, with chiefly lineages ruling over commoner lineages.  One village would be the chiefly seat; other, smaller settlements would be tributary.  Some Californian societies got substantially more complex, as will appear (see Arnold 2004; Bean and Blackburn 1976; Gamble 2008).  These groups thus not only had dense populations; they had complex societies with chiefs who evidently practiced redistribution economies.  Early accounts (Crespí 2001; Gamble 2008; Kitsepawit 1981) show that Chumash chiefs gathered fish and seed resources and lavished them on guests and others.  Their society was not much less complex that of the Iron Age Irish that we will consider anon, though the latter had sophisticated metallurgy, the wheel, writing, beer, wine, and other trappings of civilization. 

            On the other hand, we are not to see these societies as necessarily very similar to chiefdoms elsewhere, especially agricultural ones.  California’s societies were very different.  Kent Lightfoot and coworkers (1911) have pointed out that the vast shellmounds and earthmounds of central California, some of which contained hundreds or thousands of burials, are a unique feature that indicates a very different society, one about which we know little (most of the mounds are very old, up to 3000 years or more).  Villages of that time were large, but not of the size one would normally associate with huge earthworks.  This and other complex early manifestations indicate a society apparently rather different from any now known.

            They also warred, as chiefdoms do.  As in other chiefdoms from the Northwest to Ancient Ireland, chiefs held feasting and dancing parties that had a competitive edge.  To refuse an invitation to a chief’s fiesta could be cause for war, at least among the Chumash (Gamble 2008:194).  Wars over slights of this kind occurred also in northwestern California.  As is chiefdoms everywhere, feasts were important (Gamble 2008:224-227).  One reason was recruiting fighting men.  Another was cementing alliances with rivals would would otherwise have become enemies.  Cemeteries in the relevant parts of the state show high levels of violent death (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:85-89), as is true in chiefdoms everywhere.  The Yurok writer Lucy Thompson stresses the enormous value of the huge Klamath River dance ceremonies in reducing conflict. All local groups were invited and had to settle disputes before participating.  Apparently this worked well, since no one wanted to miss these events (Thompson 1991:145-146 and elsewhere).  Presumably, large ceremonies in other parts of the state had somewhat similar effects.

Steward’s other levels of integration were tribes, bands, and states.  (Note, incidentally, that these are not “evolutionary stages” and were never intended to be taken as such [Steward 1955].  They are all the end products of very long and intricate developmental sequences.  Some of his students confused the issue by hanging an evolutionary scheme on them.)  The smaller village communities would be “tribes” in his sense (though not as organized as his general characterization implies).  Steward’s “band level” of integration was modeled on what he thought was characteristic of the Shoshonean groups of the Great Basin, but they have turned out to be much more organized and sizable, definitely “tribes” in his sense.  Steward mischaracterized them for several reasons, but the main one was that he studied them in their late historic condition, devastated by disease, massacre, oppression, and forced acculturation (Clemmer 2009b.)  States did not exist in California, or anywhere else north of central Mexico, until European colonization.

All the above typology crosscuts what is probably a more important truth:  All the California groups were organized into village-level or village-cluster-level societies, led by a not-very-powerful chief or a patrilineal chiefly group, and showing some occupational specialization.  All else was elaboration on this basic pattern.  The central village was not only the winter residence, but was the ceremonial center, where rituals and fiestas were held (Bean and Blackburn 1976).  It was the meeting ground not only for the community but for visitors and traders.  It was often regarded as the center of the world, or at least the center of the little world of its community members.  The situation of the typical village society was dynamic, with back and forth changes in complexity over time (Bettinger 2015), but it was oscillation around the village level of organization.

These groups managed to stay together and maintain their ceremonies and organization with minimal government, apparently through simple sociability and shared culture.  Even if the sources have exaggerated the “anarchy” of California, it was a world held together by norms, which in turn had their force because people needed each other and thus needed shared rules to live by.  Neither organized religion nor organized government were necessary.  Thomas Hobbes was exactly wrong; monarchy was not only unnecessary, it was downright undesirable.  Grassroots self-organization literally beat it out of the field.  There is, obviously, a lesson here.  California was no dream of peace.  There were countless feuds and small wars.  Steven Pinker (2011) exaggerates its violence, but probablly not by much.  Yet California was no “savage state” either; the life of Californians was the antithesis of being “nasty, poore, solitary, brutish and short” (Hobbes 1950 [1657]).  And the dramatically more hierarchic and class-ridden Northwest Coast had at least as much violence.

In the larger groups, the chief had an assistant or cochief who did the orating and much organizing (see e.g. Goldschmidt 1951; Librado 1977).  This dual leadership is probably related to the “peace chief/war chief” team found eastward throughout the continent.

 In general, the larger and more dense the population, the larger the elite group, and the more different it was from the commoners.  Also, the larger and denser the population, the more specializations could exist.  The deep interior groups had chiefs and shamans and little (if anything) more.  Leaders for irrigation, rabbit hunting, and other collective activities were selected ad hoc or were chosen for long periods by the tribe; they were known to the Anglo settlers as “water bosses,” “rabbit bosses,” and so on.  At the other extreme stood the Chumash, with specialized priests, healers, canoe makers, canoe owners and operators, and other formally recognized and named occupational specialties (Gamble 2008). 

Chumash elites formed a group known (in at least one Chumash area) as the ‘antap.  Data are not clear as to whether it was a hereditary class-like formation, a hereditary council of lineage elders, or a sodality like the Plains Indians warrior societies.  Perhaps it was somewhere in between all these.  We cannot tell from the late accounts that survive.  Similar groups of elites or ceremonial leaders are known for other chiefdoms in the state.  The Chumash also had a “Brotherhood of the Canoe” (Kitsepawit 1977), made up of canoe owners and makers; it was an elite, specialized society. 

My impression is that trade was more important than population size or density in driving these distinctions of rank and specialty.  Groups central to great trade routes, and especially the groups that lived where land trade had to shift to the water, were the most chiefdom-like.  This meant especially the great villages of the Chumash and Tongva, gathered around lagoons that made good harbors; the large Patwin and Nisenan settlements on the lower Sacramento and the Sacramento delta; the towns near the junction of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers; and the towns at good harbors on San Francisco Bay and Clear Lake.  I believe that organization for trade was more important than population in driving social complexity.  On the other hand, areas central to trade but low in population density, like the obsidian quarry areas of the East Sierra and elsewhere, were not socially complex, so a fair density of population is evidently a sine qua non for complexity. 

In spite of the well-known fondness of California groups for staying at home and never straying far, trade was important, and trading went on (see below).  People’s unwillingness to travel meant that many intermediaries might be involved, but contact was real, and small “world-systems” developed.  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly Mann (1998) have described the world-system of the Wintu (see Goldschmidt 1951, one of the sources they used, for a notable account).  The Wintu was probably a subsystem of the great Sacramento drainage network focused on the Patwin.  Similar very small world-systems centered on the Yurok, the Chumash and Tongva, and the Lower Colorado River, and rather predict or map out Kroeber’s cultural subareas within the wider California system.  A world-system assumes a core group or groups; a semi-periphery; and a periphery.  For the Chumash-Tongva, the semiperiphery might be seen as including the interior Chumashan groups, the Salinan, Juaneno, Luiseno and Cahuilla; the periphery the Serrano, Vanyume and Alliklik.  The Chumash and Tongva were richer and more populous.  Unlike modern core nations, did not have a stable advantage in trade over these groups, but did have some advantage, and could defeat them in conflict.

The desert and Colorado River tribes had to travel much farther to stay alive, and thus came to love traveling, and to make long journeys fairly often.  In a striking passage, James O. Pattie (1962 [1831]), a fur trapper, tells of walking from the Colorado to the mountains of far northern Baja California in the 1820s.  He and his band of hardened mountain men barely made it—they crawled the last miles on hands and knees.  Their Indian guides not only ran on ahead to check the route, and ran back to the men, but when they all made it to water Pattie and his company collapsed while the Indians had a dance!   His group and other trappers took over a million beaver from the lower Colorado in those decades, eliminating the beaver and permanently changing and degrading the hydrology of the whole region.

California’s indigenous groups were shattered beyond all measure by European contact (Castillo 1978).  Diseases no doubt came with the first Spanish contacts in Baja California, the Lower Colorado (1540), and Cabrillo’s coastal voyage (1542).  Disease surely ran far ahead of Europeans thereafter, as it did elsewhere in the continent (Hull 2009, 2015; Preston 1996, but, as Hull points out, Preston goes far beyond the evidence).  Actual Spanish settlement in 1769—much earlier in Baja California—brought much more disease, as well as military action.  Indigenous peoples were gathered into the missions, which supplied little food, oppressed the Native peoples without providing rights or protection, and stopped much of the burning, hunting, and gathering (K. Anderson 2005; Timbrook 2007).  However, Native Californians could maintain some of their lifestyle, gathering wild seeds and hunting, since the missions could not feed them.  Virginia Popper (2016), analyzing plant remains from colonial sites, found several local adaptations, from Spanish continuing their Mexican lifestyles to Native people living quite traditionally.

Anglo contact was even more traumatic.  Diseases swept through the population.  A malaria epidemic in 1833 killed 1/3 of the population of the north-central part of the state (Cook 1955), and went on to ravage Oregon, where Robert Boyd’s study is exemplary (1999).  Smallpox epidemics were frequent, and endemic disease also occurred.  The relative role of disease in depopulation has been exaggerated (Cameron et al. 2015; Hull 2015).  Its absolute role was horrific, but genocide, virtual enslavement in the missions, poor nutrition, disruption of Indigenous lifeways, and other causes were probably as important in the declines of the Californian nations.

In the 1850s, northern California became one of the areas of the United States subjected to outright genocide:  state-backed, official or quasi-official campaigns of extermination (Madley 2012, 2016; Trafzer and Hyer 1999).  Most of this took place under the brief reign in the 1850s of the Know-Nothing party, which was pro-slavery and openly genocidal toward Native Americans.  The Yahi were eliminated except for a few survivors, notably the famous “Ishi” (R. Heizer and T. Kroeber 1979; T. Kroeber 1961).  The Yuki and their neighbors were almost wiped out (Miller 1979), as were several small groups.  The Wiyot of the Eureka area were subjected to massacre and were almost all killed (Elsasser 1978).  The Tolowa were decimated, as a spillover of the Rogue River War (Madley 2012).  This at least had the effect of showing the three connected tribes of Yurok, Karok and Hupa what was in store for them.  The Karok, and to some extent the other two with them, holed up in the fantastically rugged and inaccessible mountains of their homelands and fought back, in one of the very few genuinely successful resistance movements in the United States.  After decades of sporadic warfare, they received treaties and reservations, and are still among the most numerous and culturally intact groups in the western United States.  This is a story that, amazingly, has never been told, and it deserves a major historical study.  Heroic but ultimately futile resistance by the Cahuilla (Phillips 1975) and the Central Valley tribes (Phillips 1993) has received more and better historical attention.  So have the resistance campaigns of the relatively nearby Seri, Yaqui and Apache in Mexico and along the border, but, in general, successful resistance to genocide has not been much studied—a surprising and deplorable omission.

Elsewhere, Madley documents the murder of 1,340 Native people by California militias, 1680 by the U.S. Army, and 6,460 by settlers and vigilantes.  These are reasonable figures, but one suspects that many a murder is lost in the records.  Madley’s work has brought the California genocide from one of the least-known in history (my use of the term has been questioned in the past) to perhaps the best-documented genocide of an Indigenous population, with the possible exception of parts of Australia.  The sheer death figures do not even begin to describe the cultural effects, however.  Cultural repression in day schools and boarding schools, segregation, prejudice, deliberate breaking up of populations, scattering of groups between reservations that opened and closed with dizzying speed in the 19^th century, and other methods calculated to destroy California cultures persisted for decades.  It is testimony to incredible resistance, resilience, and sheer toughness that some cultural groups survived as identifiable “tribes.”  More than a few white settlers, also, rallied to the cause, including such early “Indian lovers” as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  They could be unenlightened by modern standards, but they saved many people.

The Modoc War is perhaps the best known of the sad stories (Dillon 1973).  The Modoc were forced onto a reservation established for their traditional enemies the Klamath.  They were there subjected to harassment by both Klamaths and whites.  A small band left the reservation, holed up in the horribly rough and inaccessible lava beds of Modoc County, and held off the United States Army for six months, only to be ultimately starved out and sent to die in a prison camp in Oklahoma. 

The struggle still needs full treatment; it has always seemed to me to be the archetypal story of the conquest of the Americas.  We have the story in many versions.  In addition to the historical and anthropological accounts, we have contemporary accounts from several different points of view.  The settlers spewed out racist hate via local newspapers.  The army’s deep concerns and tactical debates are available in full (Cozzens 2002:98-298).  The Indian agent for Oregon desperately tried to prevent the war, but was overwhelmed, and we have his heartbroken story (Meacham 1875).  Most interesting, perhaps, is the narrative of the incredibly heroic Native interpreter Winona, transmitted through her son Jeff Riddle (1974).  Winona shuttled back and forth, at constant risk of her life, interpreting and mediating for both sides.  With this Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of views, and with the story’s location in the black and starkly beautiful lava beds, the tale would make a stunning film, but a tragic one, not a Hollywood show.

Throughout California and the west, even after pacification and treaties, food supplies were stolen by corrupt officials (Jackson1885; Phillips 1997), and educational institutions did more sexual abuse and labor exploitation than teaching.  Before 1863 Native people could be enslaved, and conditions after Emancipation were not always much better.  They could still be thrown off their lands illegally, as at Cupa in San Diego County (Castillo 1978).  Many groups had their reservations “terminated” in the late 19^th and again in the mid-20^th centuries; this involved giving them individual allotments, which they usually soon lost to sharp dealers or outright illegal squatters.  A thorough history of the Wintu (Hoveman 2002) provides documentation of one of the more fortunate groups; the Wintu, in the upper Sacramento drainage, survive, but were almost exterminated and lost almost all their land.

The last termination in the area was the Klamath Reservation termination in southern Oregon in 1954 (Stern 1966), the effects of which were so horrific that terminations were virtually ended nationwide.  Local entrepreneurs even resorted to the classic 19^th-century trick of giving men bottles of whiskey in exchange for signing their names on blank sheets of paper—the paper later being filled in with a deed of sale of allotted land.

The sordid record of murder and destruction has been often told, and would not be worth raising yet again if it were not for the fact that, today, denial or partial denial of it has become commonplace.  Not only do the Euro-Americans gloss over it; the surviving Native groups often do.  This is an understandable but sadly misdirected reaction to their being called “extinct” or “culturally extinct,” for decades.  They naturally want to assert their survival. 

Indeed, they survived, and by truly heroic efforts—especially their own, but also the efforts of a few Anglos, such as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  But it was a near thing.  In 1900 there were only about 15,000 identifiable California Indians.  This fits perfectly with Henry Dobyns’ “95% rule” (Dobyns 1983)—the average Native American group was reduced 95% from settlement to lowest point.  There were actually many more individuals, mostly of mixed ancestry, hiding out or calling themselves “Mexicans,” but the total number was still tiny.  Only around 1900 did the precipitous decline from disease and cruel treatment begin to reverse itself.  In the 19^th century, there was every reason to assume the California Indians would be gone in a few years, at least as identifiable ethnic groups. 

As it was, though population has fortunately rebounded, most of the languages are now lost, and the last few are kept alive by diligent efforts of a handful of Native people and cooperating linguists (see Leanne Hinton 1994, whose work has been outstanding). 

I would thus urge modern people, including Native people, to be understanding of the “vanishing Indian” attitude of 1900.  We should pay more attention than we have done to the level of loss through disease, oppression, and outright genocide.  We should pay far more attention to the relatively few people—including those forgotten Yurok and Karok fighters—who prevented the vanishing from being total. 

Native Californian Uses of Biota

Major resources are listed in Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish’s recent book, California Indians and Their Environment (2009).  The most useful plant resources were divided into two types:  nuts and seeds.  Nuts grew on trees.  Acorns were by far the most important.  The classic account is E. W. Gifford’s “California Balanophagy” (1957), “balanophagy” being a delightful coinage for “acorn eating.”  They could produce around 70,000 kg/sq km in prime habitat (Bettinger 2015:110, citing Martin Baumhoff), enough to feed far more people than California ever had.  There were many species, cropping on different cycles, so nuts were always plentiful.

Pine nuts, walnuts, buckeyes, laurel nuts, wild cherry kernels, and many other nuts were also important, more so than the literature generally suggests.  Resources such as pine nuts from gray and Coulter pines, for instance, were surely more important than the literature suggests.  Seeds came from a vast range of annual and small-sized perennial plants.  Some major ones were sage species, notably chia (Salvia columbariae), tansy-mustard (Descurania pinnata), redmaids (Calandrinia ciliata), tarweeds (Madia and Hemizonia spp.), sunflowers of several genera, and a great profusion of grass species.  Loss of people, especially from remote and mountainous areas, came early after Spanish settlement, losing us knowledge of much resource use.

Berries, fruits, shoots, sap, roots, bulbs, corms, cambium, and every other plant part short of hard wood were eaten.  Berries were particularly rich and prone to follow fires.  An odd line in Pedro Fages’ accounts of Spanish conquest mentions wine from elderberry fruits; he may have meant “juice,” but the Paiute made real wine from cactus fruits (Powell 1971:50), presumably having learned it from the Oodham, and the Opata of Sonora did indeed make elderberry wine—a lot of it—and it was apparently strong and good (Yetman 2010:38-39).  (The Fages entry spawned an odd story about wine from willow fruit, because someone misread saucos “elderberries” as sauces “willows.”)

            California ethnobotany has been richly explored over several generations, but we have probably lost most of the old knowledge.  Even so, what remains is stunning.  Most of the southern California tribes have produced full ethnobotanical books (for the Cahuilla, Bean and Saubel 1972; Chumash, Timbrook 2007; Kawaiisu, Zigmond 1981; Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay, Hedges and Beresford 1986; Baja California Kumeyaay, Wilken-Robertson 2018; Serrano, Lerch 1981; others in manuscript) and northern California has not been neglected (e.g. Welch 2013; for Northern Paiute, just across the line in Nevada, Fowler 1991; reviews, K. Anderson 2005; Mead 1986).  Ethnozoology is less well covered (but see Timbrook and Johnson’s Chumash ethnoornithology, 2013).

Old records remain important.  J. P. Harrington’s are the richest (see Timbrook 2007).  Powers’ Tribes of California (1877) preserved much.  Records are still being discovered and made available.  A recent publication by James Welch (2013) makes available the enormous wealth of information collected by John and Grace Hudson from the Northern Pomo in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  By the time that professional ethnographers reached the Pomo, the genocidal effects of white settlement (well summarized by Welch) had led to much loss, and the Hudson material is invaluable (e.g. noting 12 more basket materials than previously known).  Fortunately, a good deal of Pomo knowledge did survive, and does so still (Goodrich et al. 1980). 

Plants provided a rich source of effective medicines.  Among those proved by chemical analysis to “work” are willows and several other species (salicylic acid—the source of aspirin), many mints (menthol and similar oils), sagebrush (thujone, which is vermifugal and in high doses abortifacient), many tannin-rich barks, and a whole range of mild but useful antibacterial and antifungal compounds.  Mineral medications include naturally occurring salts, antibacterial compounds, absorbent clays, and many more.  Hundreds of plants used medicinally have not yet been fully analyzed.  The Native Californians were also eclectic; modern healers freely use not only Native remedies from all over North America, but even Chinese herbal medicine, as well as drug store cures (see e.g. Peters and Ortiz 2010).  Medical knowledge was highly prized, healers were enormously valued, and traditional medicine by both herbal and religious methods was very widely known and practiced—and to a striking extent still is.

            Animal foods included deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits, gophers, squirrels and ground squirrels, and hundreds of bird species (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Countless insects were used (Sutton 1988).  Even the bones were ground up.  Small animals could be mashed whole, bones and all, into “gopher-burger.”  Larger animal bones were mashed and boiled to extract bone grease, an important food elsewhere in North America and probably locally in California (Sunseri 2015).

Hundreds of species of fish and shellfish were used. Sea mammals were important, perhaps more so than fish for the Chumash (Gamble 2008), such that some rookeries on shore were depleted (see below).  Areas along major rivers, and along parts of the coast with good harbors for canoes, could rely on extremely rich and reliable fish resources.  Shells were valuable for beads and tools after the animals within had been eaten.  The great salmon fisheries of the major rivers stretch the imagination.  Where there were no salmon, there were river-running trout; the huge rainbow trout of the Pyramid Lake drainage ran upriver to Truckee Lake to spawn, and at such times the river was described as more fish than water (LaRivers 1994, noting this is an exaggeration but that the runs were incredible; he notes that the Basin lakes are extremely nutrition-rich).  Ocean fisheries were important too, with vast runs of smelt of many species, sardines, anchovies, and herring, as well as plenty of larger fish.  A smelt run in 1857 left fish piled “a foot deep” on the beaches of northwestern California (Tushingham and Christiansen 2015:192).  Specialized fishing, with large seagoing canoes and huge riverine weirs and fish dams, developed after 1000 BCE, much of it within the last 1500-2000 years.  Intensive fishing and shellfishing in the south, however, came earlier, and indeed there were extensive shell middens dating to many thousand years ago.  (“Were,” because development has destroyed them on the mainland—within my memory, in Baja California and on Point Sal.  Research is now more or less confined to the islands.) 

Otherwise, animals could be very thin on the ground.  Ethnographic accounts suggest that rabbits (including jackrabbits, which are technically hares) were the most widespread and reliable land animal resource base.  Reptiles and predatory mammals were widely avoided as food. 

Mark Raab (1996), among others, has demolished the idea that Californians were rolling in food.  Most of the state is, after all, desert or barren mountain.  But some areas were indeed quite lush.  These were especially the interfaces between water and land, and most especially the high-energy ones: river deltas, current-swept channels, lakes with large feeder streams.  Populations were dense in the favored areas; numbers of people rose in feedback with elaborate technological and social systems.  In less favored areas, drought years or local disasters could produce real want.  Either way, population often pressed on resources.  Even so, with only some 250,000-300,000 people in a very rich landscape, California hardly suffered from serious long-term pressure on major resources.  Work-horse trees like oak and buckeye, and productive, management-responsive annuals like chia sage (Salvia columbariae), would support large populations in normal years.  Human populations would be trimmed back in years of extreme drought or flood.  Still, it is doubtful if the population figures represent a population at “carrying capacity.”  One suspects that they could have worked harder, stored more, fought less, and supported several times their contact-era population.

Storage was necessary, and many methods developed.  Meat and fish were dried or smoked.  Seeds were kept in baskets.  Acorns were stored in large raised granaries made of basketry, withes, or brush.  The Western Mono serve as a good example:  Christopher Morgan (2012) found that they lived in small communities (about 13 being typical but some reaching as many as 75) which had three or more granaries, but also had dispersed caches around the countryside, so that one was never far from stored acorns.  A granary held about 725 kg of acorns; about seven of these would support a community of 13, providing about 4 million calories (Morgan 2012:724-725).  Granaries were lined with pine needles—other groups sometimes used sagebrush, which is insecticidal—to discourage pests and keep the acorns dry.  Stored food had to sustain the groups during the long and harsh winter of their mountain habitat.  The far larger towns in lowland California had much less severe winters to contend with, but needed more food, and must have stored enormous quantities.  Bears raided caches, making extra storage necessary.

Bettinger (2015:90) has pointed out that meat, fish and the like are front-loaded: they are edible immediately and usually are so eaten, and if they are processed it has to be done immediately.  In California, that was largely an issue with fish, which had to be split and dried or smoked as soon as caught.  Nuts, especially acorns, are back-loaded: they are easy to gather and store, but take enormous amounts of processing.  So they are normally harvested in vast quantities in a brief harvest period, then stored to be processed and used at need.  This had social effects.  At one extreme, great assemblages of people were necessary to catch and dry salmon, but these assemblages would later disperse.  At the other, seed and nut dependence led to smaller but more stable, permanent groups.

Mineral resources were generally concentrated in a few spots, making widespread trade necessary.  Salt was required for survival and was sometimes hard to get.  Even more concentrated in source were obsidian and other silicates that would take a sharp edge; they were essential for points, knives, and the like.  At particularly good obsidian sources, I have seen the ground literally paved with flakes over many acres.  Good-quality grinding stone for mortars and metates could be surprisingly rare and valuable.  It is hard to imagine people carrying huge metates all over the desert, but they did, finding the labor worthwhile to get metates from superior quarries (Schneider 1993).  Soft chlorite schist, as on Santa Catalina Island, was mined for making bowls.   Marcasite became beads used as money in north-central California. 

The extent and importance of trade in California has sometimes been stressed (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), but on the whole it has been underestimated.  Some communities, especially on the rather impoverished Channel Islands of the south, may have actually depended on trade for food, at least in some seasons (Arnold 1987, 2004).  If true—and it is highly controversial—this would be a very rare case worldwide of a hunting-gathering population depending on trade in staples.  Inland, California shell beads got as far afield as Arizona and northern Mexico.  Dentalium shell beads from Vancouver Island got to northern California.

The degree to which all these items truly constituted money is not clear.  They could be used for buying food, so they were not merely ceremonial (Bettinger 2015:184).  They were certainly monetized in early Spanish times, in areas of dense population, but the Spanish may have had much to do with this.  Clearly the shell items represented a kind of money, but only a special purpose currency, used in specific contexts, perhaps largely ceremonial ones in many or most cases.  Dentalium shells were used as money in the northwest of the state (and further north), but the fact that they were adorned and decorated so they would be happy and would lure more money to the owner (Bettinger 2015:182) shows how different the concept of money was there from what we now experience.

Indigenous Management

            The Californian peoples generally lacked agriculture, but there were significant exceptions, proving that they knew full well how to grow crops and could have done so if they had found it worth while.  Tobacco was grown very widely over the state.  The Karok, otherwise nonagricultural, knew enough about farming it to fill an entire book (Harrington 1932).  The neighboring Yurok believed that wild tobacco was dangerous, only cultivated tobacco being safe to use (Heizer 1978:650).

The southeast part of the state was firmly agricultural, growing the famous trinity of maize, beans, and squash, as well as several minor crops.  They also sowed wild grass, including the possibly domesticated local millet Panicum sonorum.  They may have cultivated amaranth species (Castetter and Bell 1951; Forde 1931:107-109; Nabhan 1982, 1985). 

The Owens Valley Paiute irrigated wild plants (Lawton et al. 1993).  This was presumably derived from true agricultural practices their ancestors carried out further south, since it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the proto-Uto-Aztecans were farmers, and the loss of farming in the Great Basin is a recent and derived condition (Hill 2001).  The Southern Paiutes of Nevada had agriculture from ancient times.  Sowing of wild seed crops is attested for a few groups (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:127), and there were surely more groups who sowed.  Transplantation is also well attested, but especially for groups that had agriculture, notably the Kumeyaay (Shipek 1993).

Finally, increase in native barley (Hordeum sp.) seed size, to far beyond anything natural, took place in central California (Wohlgemuth 1996, 2004).  Similar seed dynamics are reported from the Los Angeles River area (Reddy 2016:237).  This implies either true domestication or at least intensive manipulation of stocks.  But the experiment ended:  the central Californians came to focus more and more on oaks and other tree crops, and the barley seeds shrank again, at least in central California.

In such a climatically fluctuating place as California, agriculture is difficult.  One need only read accounts by early European settlers trying to predict year by year, in the days before statewide irrigation systems.  Hunting and gathering must have seemed more reasonable.  But it too necessitated some higher organization if people were to manage the environment, store food, and accumulate fixed productive capital in the form of nets, weirs, canoes, and so on.  Hence the benefit of complex societies.  In an environment that is sometimes exceedingly rich but sometimes—and unpredictably—exceedingly poor, they make sense.

Also, the development of agriculture, throughout the world, took place in areas central to vast trade and communication routes.  Presumably the exchanges of goods and ideas were crucial.  Coastal California is a cul-de-sac.  Morever, the Californian biotic and cultural region has no single center; it is polycentric.  Even today, the Anglo-Americans of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and other cities all have their own subcultures and hinterlands.  There was no one confined lush area, like the Jordan Valley, Mesopotamia, or the Nile Valley in the Old World or like the Valley of Mexico in the New, to bring people together.   

The earliest agriculture in the world, that of the Near East, arose in a rather similar environment, but at oases within dry and desert-like parts of it.  Significantly, oases within California’s driest deserts are precisely the areas where agriculture waspracticed in the state.  Such lush pockets in an otherwise very challenging environment evidently make agriculture more appealing.  Near Eastern agriculture arose just after the Younger Dryas event, when environmental stresses and opportunities were high.  California had extremely few people at the time, and never had such climatic traumas afterward (cf. McCorriston 2000).

            Far more prevalent was intensive manipulation of wild plants (K. Anderson 2005; K. Anderson and Lake 2013, 2017; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Blackburn and K. Anderson 1993).  Native Californians pruned, trimmed, cultivated, selectively harvested, and in short did everything that a modern gardener does for her plants—but without domestication.  At the edge of the region, the level of cultivation of camas (Camassia spp.) and wokas (yellow waterlily seeds; Colville 1902; Deur 2009) reported for the Klamath and Modoc amounts to nearly or fully agricultural-level manipulation.  They also managed fish, and manipulated huckleberry intensively, as well as wild carrot and other root crops (Deur 2009).  So did their neighbors the Shasta, who also managed oaks for acorns (Gleason 2001).  Unfortunately, recording data on management was much less commonly done than recording ethnobotanical uses, and we are left in ignorance of most of it (see e.g. Welch 2013 on this issue).

            Geophytes—root, bulb and corm crops—were particularly subject to manipulation.  Corms of Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, and other plants (Anderson 2017; Gill 2017; Gill and Hoppa 2016; Wohlgemuth 2017) were particularly widespread and important.  Tubers of Cyperus esculentus, Eleocharis, and other plants (Lawton et al. 1976; Pierce and Scholtze 2016) were cultivated in the Owens Valley.

This level of management was a quite different startegy from agriculture.  It was, instead, whole-landscape cultivation, maximizing production across a huge range of resources.  By contrast, the Near Eastern Neolithic peoples in similar environments focused on two or three to cultivate intensively, thus inventing agriculture. 

The large bulbs and flowers of camas (specifically C. quamash  and—if it is a separate species–C. leichtlinii), the response of these plants to cultivation, and their striking failure to thrive and compete after the Native population was exiled from the meadows, all imply true domestication.  My impression from observing camas in the wild and growing it in my garden is that if it were grown by a “truly agricultural” people it would unhesitatingly be called a domesticate.

            Indeed, throughout California the level of management was impressive.  The area covered by camas and wokas was enormous.  Not far away, within California proper, the Shasta (Gleason 2001), Achomawi, and Atsugewi (T. Garth 1978) cultivated bulb- and root-rich meadows extensively.  Wild crops included monocots of many families—true lilies, Mariposa lilies, camas, and so on—as well as roots, mostly of the carrot family, such as wild carrots (Perideridea) and Lomatium.  Root-digging seems very generally to have involved careful cultivating:  small roots were left to regrow or were even planted; competing plants were removed; the soil was loosened; parts that could regrow roots were returned to the ground; and so on. 

Root-digging involved a veritable Protestant ethic of hard work and diligent, responsible effort.  Among the Atsugewi, men tried to marry the girls who brought in the most roots, and myths told of heroic diggers who married well (Garth 1978:237-238).  This was part of a more general ethic of hard work in all spheres of life, best studied by Garth among the Atsugewi, but generally found in California (see e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942 on the Yurok).  Garth reports chiefs calling everyone up at dawn with harangues such as: “Get up and do something for your living.  Be on your guard.  Be on the lookout for Paiute [raiders].  You have to work hard for your living.  There may be a long winter so put away all the food you can” (Garth 1978:237). 

Probably no bulb-rich meadow in the state was left alone, and apparently all that were even remotely close to a settlement were cultivated quite intensively (judging from K. Anderson 2005, 2017, and Gleason 2001).  Even the Paiute and Shoshone, in some of the most merciless deserts on earth, enormously modified their habitats.  They have been involved in management efforts recently.  Many desert habitats were improved for wildlife and biodiversity by their care, as shown by Catherine Fowler (1992, 2013).  They conserved waterfowl—a staple food—by leaving eggs if there were hatchlings in the nest (Fowler 2013:165-167; taking all eggs from a recently-laid clutch does no harm, since ducks and coots simply lay more).  They also had cautionary tales to keep children from stealing too many bird eggs.

With Fowler we move partly beyond state boundaries into neighboring Nevada.  This allows us to include also the careful review by Richard Clemmer (2009a) of “conservation” among the Western Shoshone.  These groups did not preserve pristine wilderness.  They burned carefully and according to plans, sowed grass seeds, and managed vegetation.  They hunted pronghorn sustainably, planning hunts only when pronghorn populations had built up.  It is absurdly easy to overhunt pronghorn, because they are easy to lure and are slow reproducers.  An estimated 30-40 million pronghorn were reduced to 13,000 around 1900 by settler hunting.  Before that, large communal drives, under some sort of direction but probably not a specialized shaman, took place, especially around the time and place of pinyon harvesting (Wilke 2013).  Charms were used but there is some indication that some pronhorn were allowed to escape.  Certainly the areas were allowed to recover before another hunt.

They may have managed rabbits and beaver locally; evidence is unclear.  I suspect they did.  Clemmer notes that there were many beaver in the tiny Great Basin rivers when Anglo-American trappers got there.  This suggests either management or great difficulty in hunting the beaver.  Since the Shoshone were expert hunters, the latter is unlikely, so good management is implied.  Historic fur trappers had no difficulty in trapping beavers from these small, accessible streams.  Clemmer finds no evidence for management of pine nuts or similar resources.  Pine nuts crop in only some years, and when they do they crop heavily, so there is no real way to manage them.  However, the Timbisha Shoshone of California most certainly do manage pine nuts, by cleaning up the groves to prevent wildfires, brush competition, and the like from damaging the pinyon pine trees (Catherine Fowler, pers. comm.).  It should be noted that pinyons are notoriously erratic croppers—a strategy to foil seed-eating insects—and crop only every few years (Bettinger 2015:68).  People had to scout the neighborhood to find groves that were productive—an easy task, fortunately, since one can monitor the developing cones over a year or so.  Wandering hunters would report back, and the group would know exactly when and where to go when the cones were pickable—just before maturity, since at maturity they open and the seeds scatter or are devoured by a host of animals. 

Clemmer also found no evidence for intensive fishing or management of fish, but data rapidly caught up with him here.  Just outside our area, a major study by Deward Walker and collaborators turned up evidence for fishing on an enormous scale, with a huge range of sophisticated technology, by the northern Shoshone and their neighbors, who lived in the fish-rich Snake River drainage (Walker 2010).  This information presumably applies to the Humboldt River too, and one can be fairly sure that all Great Basin rivers were heavily fished.  Significantly, Walker found it “necessary to conduct research interviews in either the Paiute/Bannock or Shoshone language” (Walker 2010:55)—in the 21^st century!  This is real tribute to cultural survival, and one that reminds us that lack of linguistic skills must have caused early investigators to miss a great deal.  Since the Shoshone (and closely related Paiute/Bannock) lived at the rivers’ headwaters, where streams are tiny, narrow, and often rather thin in fish, they could easily have wiped out the salmon and other large river-running fish.  The fact that salmon continued to abound proves some considerable degree of management.

Further, and much more thorough, work on plant and animal management in Nevada results from the comprehensive and thorough work of Jeremy Spoon and his many Southern Paiute coworkers in the White/Muddy river drainage of southern Nevada (Spoon and Arnold 2014; Spoon, Armold, and Newe/Nuwuvi Working Group 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler, Wendel, and Nuwuvi Working Group 2013, 2014a, 2014b; these reports are quite repetitious but each has its own findings also).  Among newly reported information are care about pruning mistletoe from pinyon pines, and a great deal about managing water—desperately scarce in their area.  One elder observed:  “Science is a tool to measure stuff.  Culture is a tool to maintain what you have.  That’s what I believe” (Spoon et al. 2013:56).  These elders contrasted interaction with “management,” the latter seen as a not-so-good idea from the white settlers.  They noted a high respect for rocks, which remember whether they were moved for good or bad reasons—a belief I have encountered in Mongolia. One of Spoon’s reports is in fact titled The Voices of the Rocks Sing Through Us (Spoon et al. 2014b).  They also discuss talking with trees.  This makes solid sense when one is used to the significant silences—often filled with nonverbal communication—that mark and enhance Native American conversations.  Fire management is as among California groups described below; pruning, small patch burns in the right season, some clearing of brush beforehand, and general careful preparation and timing (Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015).

The level of personal restraint and responsibility involved could reach quite incredible proportions.  Philip Wilke (1988) found that desert junipers cropped for bow staves were carefully conserved.  A juniper with a straight branch was a rare commodity.  About one bow stave per twenty years could be taken from such a branch, preferably from the compression wood on the under side; then the juniper had to be left to recover.  Yet there are such trees all over the range of the juniper.  Bowyers had to be on their own recognizance—no one was out there patrolling.  Individual conscience restrained them from taking too much.  This self-policing went on for countless centuries over millions of square miles.  I have observed the same for yews in the Pacific Northwest; any venerable yew with straight branches shows the long, straight scars.  Such “culturally managed trees” are often well known locally, to the point that “CMT” has become a normal word in modern archaeology and land management.

California’s and Nevada’s indigenous people normally engaged in long migrations between winter villages and spring and summer harvesting grounds.  These migrations took them through successive habitats, usually on the route from lowlands to highlands and back.  Presumably the routes would change to avoid places heavily harvested in immediately previous years.  No meadow in the state, except extremely remote and high-altitude ones, would have been long ignored.  Archaeology shows this clearly.  Look around any meadow anywhere in the state, and (unless settlement or flooding have destroyed the record) you will find tiny scatters of flakes where someone sharpened a knife, broke an arrow point, or quickly flaked out a skinning tool.

            On the other hand, recent writers have been too quick to maintain that all California was highly managed, with wilderness a meaningless concept.  The Native Californians did not greatly affect the rough, infertile parts of the state, or the high mountains.  This was not purely because of indifference.   More significant was the use of remote mountaintops and high-mountain environments for vision quests and meditation, with the goal of gaining spiritual insights, knowledge, and ability.  Anthropologists generally refer to this as “power,” but, significantly, Native people speaking English usually call it “knowledge.”  It refers to a comprehensive spiritual vision that gives the visionary enough self-efficacy to accomplish important matters; the highest knowledge is generally considered to be that of healing.  In any case, all western North American peoples sought this, and depended on mountain wilderness for it.  All groups knew certain spots, called “power places” in the literature, that were particularly good for vision questing; mountaintops were particularly favored, but remotes lakes, waterfalls, and springs were important.  Of this more anon; at present we need note only that wilderness was required for a specific important use.

Most important of all was burning, but readers should remember that all those other techniques were important as well.  This was not simply “firestick farming.” 

            Fire was the chief way of managing the environment, and here the record is somewhat confusing.  There is no question that California Native peoples set fires everywhere that would burn, and that these very substantially altered the vegetation over vast areas of the state (K. Anderson 1999, 2005; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Lewis 1973; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, with major review of literature; Pyne 2004; Timbrook 2007).  This was to be expected, for all Native American peoples except those in non-combustible environments (basically, Arctic and high-alpine areas and sand deserts) burned regularly (Pyne 2004; Stewart et al. 2002), and the effects on the vegetation were considerable; it is possible that the entire Eastern North American forest was deliberately maintained as an oak-chestnut-hickory community by burning (Delcourt and Delcourt 2004).

Juan Crespí’s diary from 1769 (Brown 2001; see Gamble 2008) is particularly revealing.  He noted not only widespread deliberate burning, but also that the vegetation in many areas was short annual pasture rather than the chaparral and coastal sage scrub that are now, or recently were, found in those locations.  The reviews by K. Anderson and by Lightfoot and Parrish list hundreds of sources covering dozens of groups. 

            On the other hand, a few doubters have raised their voices, and one of them is a formidable authority: Richard Minnich (1983, 1987, 2001a, 2001b, 2008), one of the two or three leading experts on California fire ecology.  He points out at length that much of the state is affected by dry lightning, which in the mountains can be an almost daily phenomenon in late summer, and that other sources of ignition exist.  (These might range from volcanism to spontaneous combustion in animal nests.)   California’s bone-dry summers and highly inflammable vegetation combine to guarantee natural fires on a cyclic basis.  California would burn sooner or later, indigenous people or no (see also Sugihara et al. 2006). 

Chaparral and some California forest formations are characterized by large numbers of species that seem actually designed to burn:  they dry out in summer and contain resins, waxes, and other compounds that are highly inflammable.  These species all either stump-sprout aggressively after fire, have fruits that need fire to open them, or have seeds that need fire to germinate.  Some authorities think that these plants evolved to eliminate competition and maximize their own dominance by this aggressive route. 

For instance, California’s most distinctive pine groups, the closed-cone and knobcone pines, have cones that normally do not open unless burned.  They live in chaparral, grow and fruit rapidly, and are designed to burn on 20-to-50-year cycles.  I have lived to see the knobcone pine forest on the San Bernardino Mountains go through two cycles and get well into a third.  Obviously they did not evolve in the last few centuries, and thus it is clear that California has burned since long before the Native Americans perfected their management systems.

Be that as it may, Native Californians burned chaparral regularly, to increase edible plant, mammal, and even insect resources.  Kat Anderson and Jeffrey Rosenthal (2015) report, for instance, that caterpillars, as well as grasshoppers, were managed by fire, which causes rapid regrowth of the tender new shoots on which they feed.   These authors describe the values of each stage of regrowth after fire.  Burning also opened the brush, making travel possible; a stand of mature chaparral is impenetrable, or at best very slow going.  Annual plants often produce more seeds (they need heavy seeding to survive) and greens than perennials do. 

Even fish could be helped.  Michelle Stevens and Emilie Zelazo (2015) point out that burning in summer opened up floodplains that flooded in fall, winter and spring.  Fish that spawned in those areas, including many important ones endemic to the central part of the state, were increased.  Another benefit was increase in number and quality of stems of plants used to make fishnets, such as Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) and milkweed.  These plants grow in moist areas and produce longer, straighter stems after burning.

            A contrarian work is a volume edited by Thomas Vale (2002), which contains some articles on California.  Vale took a considerably more extreme position than Minnich, and argued that Native Americans did little managing by fire (or, for that matter, anything else).  Vale’s work might have had more impact if it had not been almost immediately buried under the enormous floods of counter-evidence in Stewart et al. (2002), Pyne (2004) and K. Anderson (2005).  Vale’s book was effectively answered, and refuted, by in a review by Henry Lewis (2003), the pioneer investigator of fire in Native North America.

            Vale, like Minnich, emphasized the probability that remote and mountainous parts of the state would be more influenced by lightning than by Native burning.  Lightning strikes were and are so much commoner that Native burning would not have affected the cycle.  Fire scars on trees have been used to assess the frequency of fires, but the vast majority of lightning strikes burn one tree (and perhaps its immediate neighbors) without starting a serious fire.

However, in California, the areas near dense Indigenous settlement are also the areas with the least lightning.  Dry lightning is almost nonexistent in coastal California.  Rivers and barren areas prevent the spread of fire from distant mountains, though it certainly does spread from nearby ranges (especially in the Santa Barbara area).  Fire return intervals in all these areas, even redwood forest, are so extremely frequent that lightning is highly unlikely to be the major cause (Kat Anderson, pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014).

            Moreover, the testimonies of Crespí and others make it clear that the vegetation was burned far more frequently than even frequent lightning strikes would do.  Taken together, they describe millions of acres of annual pasturage.  Yet, in early historic times, these areas were brushlands. 

Minnich (2008) has established that the bunchgrass prairies of California’s interior valleys were nonnatural, and indeed many of them were purely mythical—early mappers’ overgeneralizations.  The potential vegetation of most of the valleys is saltbush and other brush.   Minnich has qualified his stand on the inexorable nature of burning cycles (Minnich 2008 and pers. comm, 2009-2010; Minnich and Franco-Vizcaino 2002).  It appears that chaparral and even desert vegetation can be burned much more often than it would naturally do.  This has made him more open to Native American burning as a landscape shaper.

            Californians were careful fire managers; they made very small fires for their own use.  J. W. Powell, writing on the Paiute, says: “…an Indian never builds a large fire…and expresses great contempt for the white man who builds his fire so large that the blaze and smoke keep him back in the cold” (Powell 1971:53; this confirms a very widespread American folk observation that I have heard since my childhood). 

            In short, the evidence is unequivocal.  They certainly managed well-populated parts of the state by burning.  On the other hand, their ability to reshape the vast lightning-prone mountains of the state seems limited.  K. Anderson (2005, and pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014) finds that they maintained and expanded the mountain meadows and coastal prairies of the state.  These are now rapidly growing up to forest, in spite of lightning strikes; but deliberate fire suppression and the current years of drought (which favor trees over meadow grass) are involved in this. 

Another equivocal case is oak woodlands.  Oak seedlings die when burned.  Frequent burning of oak groves would eliminate them.  On the other hand, oaks survive burning when they grow large enough to have thick bark.  I have seen coast liveoaks sprout rapidly back from the very hottest fires.  It takes about ten years for a live oak to reach fire-withstanding age.  Thus, rarer burning—once a new generation of oaks had grown up—would eliminate fungal and insect pests, thin out the competition, and maintain the groves. 

A problem for everyone trying to reconstruct Californian vegetation as of 1700 is that Europeans replaced deliberate burning with deliberate fire suppression.  The Chumash were already seeing this as a major hardship, and complaining about it, by 1800 (Gamble 2008; Timbrook 2007).  The Achomawi, later, complained and regretted the ruin of the forests (Rhoades 2013:112).

The only possible conclusion is that human-set fire profoundly affected areas near large population centers, minimally affected remote mountain and desert areas, and affected to an unknown and probably unknowable degree the vast in-between zone.

            The situation in regard to animals is even less clear.  California Native peoples overharvested the choicest shellfish, such as abalone, which are delectable and easy to over-collect (Jones, Porcasi, Gaeta and Codding 2008; Kennett 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, summarizing a very large and contentious literature; Rick et al. 2008).  It seems clear that depletion was very slow and gradual, and frequently reversed (Rick et al. 2008).  People were fairly careful stewards.  They may have overharvested fish, but the wild swings in fish populations caused by ocean dynamics make this impossible to judge.  Fish have to accommodate to the sudden alternations of El Niño’s warm water and La Niña’s cold, both unpredictable in extent and reach.  Anyone familiar with fishing in California (especially the south) knows that species of fish, sometimes in enormous numbers, suddenly appear and as suddenly disappear when such events occur (cf. Gamble 2015; Jones et al. 2016). 

Chumash fishing pressure in the Santa Barbara Channel, however, was enormous, and declines of easily overharvested species like sheepshead in the archaeological record are therefore significant.  The Chumash had several named types of net.  A 20-foot gill net required 12,500 stems of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), which would have to be prepared, retted, and spun.  A 40-foot seine required 35,000 stems.  With these nets they took great quantities of small fish (Johnson 2015).  With these, they could easily fish out streams and bays.  Indian hemp was carefully managed—pruned, selectively harvested (K. Anderson 2005).  Its sporadic occurrence, especially in places where it does not normally grow (such as dry lowlands) and which are not very near other stands, strongly suggests deliberate planting.  Apocynum androsaemifolium was an inferior substitute in dry mountain areas, and nettles were also widely used for cordage; both were managed.

Recent research on the Channel Islands shows a tendency for popular resources to decline in hard times, but the staple shellfish—mussels—was about equally common through time (Lapeña et al. 2015; cf. Joslin 2015).  Mussels still abound on the islands.  The highly favored abalones were sharply reduced during hungry times, but were still abundant till modern settler societies got at them and destroyed the resource—a fate conspicuously absent from the closely corresponding Isla Cedros in Mexico, where local conservation is still the rule (Des Lauriers 2010).  The Channel Islands were settled by 13,000 years ago, and quite densely populated for most of the time since.  In spite of epidemics, they remained densely populated till the people were forcibly removed to the mainland in the Spanish colonial period.  These islands are small and absurdly easy to overexploit, so the fact that they were still resource-rich through the 18^th and 19^th centuries implies extremely careful and thorough resource management.

Seabirds were little disturbed, but a flightless duck (Chendytes lawi) became extinct, through human hunting and probably also through predation by human-introduced animals including foxes (Jones et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2009; Whisler et al. 2015; there was also a puffin, Fratercula dowi, but it was so rare that no one knows what happened to it).  The duck lasted for some 8,000 years after human contact, however (Jones et al. 2008; Jones and Codding 2010), which indicates human restraint.  Indeed, one wonders why the Chumash allowed it to die out; it could easily have been quasi-domesticated.  They may have hunted it for prestige (Hildebrandt et al. 2010) but probably did not (Jones and Codding 2010; I agree with them that hunting a smallish bird that could not escape would not give anyone much prestige).  I suspect that period of unfavorable climate may have led to both natural decline and desperation-caused overhunting.  The case seems to me more interesting than the insignificance of the bird would warrant, since we have here a prey that could very easily be exterminated, yet was not for many millennia.   

            A classic study of indigenous conservation was Sean Swezey and Robert Heizer’s study of salmon management on the Klamath River (Swezey and Heizer1977; see also Kroeber and Barrett 1960, Tushingham and Christiansen 2015).  The tribes there allowed escapement of salmon to preserve the stocks.  This was ritually represented; first-salmon rites, weir inauguration rites, and other ceremonies provided a cycle that regulated take and escapement.  Prayers to the salmon to return in abundance were part of the maintenance; the Karuk prayed with the wonderful word ?imshírihraavish, “you will shine upriver quickly” (O’Neill 2008:101).

However, this was not all; any temptation to cheat was reduced by the fact that the tribes upstream would protest, often violently, if escapements were inadequate.  People kept each other honest.  Everyone wanted an equal chance at the fish, and would enforce it through warfare if necessary. 

Rules on fishing were tight.  Robert Spott reported that his people, in the first half of the year (by their reckoning), could not take or eat salmon below Cannery Creek; if a salmon was caught right at the point where the creek entered the Klamath River, only the part that had passed the creek mouth border could be eaten (Spott and Kroeber 1942:172; a great deal more about salmon rituals follows).  Weirs that could take 50 days to build were demolished after 10 days of fishing, to allow escapement.  This emphasizes how strict the conservation rules were on the Klamath.

            Recall that the Native people of California’s northwest were blissfully lacking in formal government, so, as with Great Basin bow stave trees, this management was entirely based on people’s individual consciences reinforced by public opinion. 

            It seems highly likely, and locally certain, that similar fishing regulations held throughout the state.  At contact, most of southern California’s small streams had steelhead runs.  A run even survives, or did until very recently, in tiny San Mateo Creek in Orange County, and, again until recently, in Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County.  All the streams in the region are so small that a single determined fisherman could wipe out a run.  The San Mateo Creek run was down to one female at one point.  These runs could not have survived without deliberate restraint, given the high aboriginal hunter-gatherer populations.  Similarly, the dense population of Pomo around Clear Lake could not possibly have subsisted on its fish resources (as they did:  McLendon and Lowy 1978) unless they practiced careful conservation.  There were just too few fish, and these few have to run up the creeks or concentrate in shallows to spawn, making them utterly vulnerable.  Even the simplest aboriginal fishery could have wiped out the runs within a year or two.  But we have no documentation on this; apparently nobody thought to ask.

Another case in point is the abundance of enormous trout and suckers, and the lack of decline in their numbers, in the Lost and upper Klamath Rivers of the California-Oregon border country (Stevenson and Butler 2015).  The Lost River in particular is a tiny stream that almost dries up in drought years (hence its name—it tends to disappear in, or even before reaching, the vast Tule Lake sink), and only careful management could have preserved large fish in it.  Mismanagement since contact almost wiped out the Lost River sucker, but it is recovering under intensive management.  Suckers were also important on the upper Pit River, where the Achomawi not only still fish for them but still carefully manage them, watching and protecting their spawning areas and not taking too many (Floyd Buckskin, pers. comm.). 

Native Californians probably overharvested mainland colonies of seals and sea lions (Broughton 1994, 2002; Jones et al. 2004), but probably not as much as sometimes alleged (Jones et al 2004 pull back from their own earlier estimates; and see Rick et al. 2008).  Remember that grizzly bears and gray wolves entered the state at the same time humans did, and would have made mainland pinniped colonies nonviable, humans or no.  Native hunters probably kept numbers of elk and deer well below potential (Kay and Simmons 2002; compare the much better evidence for the Columbia River area, in Martin and Szuter 1999).  They tried their best to keep the numbers of grizzly bears down, but probably with limited success.  How much they could affect these animals, and how much they tried, remains unclear.  Extermination of the megafauna no doubt allowed deer and elk to expand their populations enormously, because of competitive release.  I suspect the Native peoples came into some degree of conscious equilibrium with them.  Elk, deer and mountain sheep all tame themselves if given any chance, and herds habituated to human presence might have been cropped almost like livestock.  Indeed, red deer are farmed today in Europe and New Zealand; red deer are basically the same as Californian “elk.”  They are tamed, but not domesticated; true domestication involves a genetic change to a new and artificially selected strain, but red deer remain genetically wild. 

William Hildebrandt (e.g. Hildebrandt et al. 2010) has long argued that much hunting was done for prestige rather than for economic return; very likely true, but I doubt whether this was significant.  The Native peoples had too little margin.  They had to hunt rationally for food.  Prestige would naturally accrue to anyone bringing in a huge amount of meat, but I believe people forewent rabbits to hunt deer because they knew the deer would provide more meat rather than because it would provide more prestige.  After all, a good-sized deer, around 180 lb., would dress out around 100 lb meat, and thus provide as much meat as 100-150 cottontails or 1600 sizable shellfish.  Even a fair chance at a deer would thus beat all but the biggest rabbit hunt or shellfish expedition in economic terms.

California’s sparse population was really not enough to do much damage to fleet, widely-dispersed game like deer and pronghorn, though the effect on more concentrated stocks like sea lions and tule elk, to say nothing of abalone, could be severe.  Burning would be likely to lead to increases in deer and elk.  Slow-moving animals like porcupines would be caught in the fires.  Many species would be indirectly affected by opening up the landscape. 

California’s population was not evenly distributed.  Along the Santa Barbara Channel and the lower Sacramento, and around San Francisco Bay, there were at least ten persons per square mile (judging especially from Chumash population estimates, the best we have for a densely-populated part of the state; see Gamble 2008, Kennett 2005).  Conversely, the higher mountains and the Mohave Desert had a tiny fraction of a person per mile (I would estimate one person per ten square miles for the Mohave).  Intensity of management and of hunting obviously varied proportionately.

However, the Mohave Desert people managed to overhunt the bighorn sheep seriously.  They were bighorn specialists, and when the bow and arrow came in, a fatal temptation presented itself.  Sites show rapid decrease of bighorns; the rock art showing thousands of bighorns in that area may have been made in an increasingly desperate attempt to call the sheep back spiritually (Garfinkel et al. 2010).  It stopped short around 1300, probably because Numic speakers with a different lifestyle replaced whoever was there before.  Possibly the latter were dying out from the consequences of their folly.  One assumes that this was not the only overhunting story in ancient California.

An  insight into Californian hunting is found in Frank Latta’s work on the Yokuts (Latta 1977).  Asking Yokuts hunters how far their bows would shoot, he was told that no one knew.  No one would waste an arrow and its valuable stone point by shooting it at a distant target.  Hunters disguised themselves in deerskins and sneaked up on deer and other animals, finally shooting from 10-20 yard range.  John Wesley Powell noted the same thing among the Paiute (Powell 1971:49), and, indeed, traditional hunters worldwide did the same.  This indicates an appreciable tameness on the part of the deer.  Deer are not stupid, and are notoriously hard to sneak up on.  The author recalls a story from many years ago:  just before hunting season, a couple of California wildlife trackers painted a buck deer bright orange, fitted him with a radio tracker, and followed him for a day through the brush of the Shasta County back-country.  They knew exactly where he was at all times, thanks to the radio, but they saw nothing of him except a flash of orange for a few minutes. In Michigan, a herd of deer in a 50-acre fenced enclosure were intensively studied and censused year after year, but the lead buck was never seen.  He avoided all contact even in that tiny space, being known only from his tracks and shed antlers (Pierotti 2011:87).

Wanton, uncontrolled hunting would make close-hunting tactics impossible.  Early explorers were told similar things by coastal peoples.  The exceptionally powerful Hupa bows could shoot a deer at 50 to 75 yards off, and the Hupa could shoot clear through the soft parts of an animal (Goddard 1903:33).  But the Hupa preferred to get close, and disguised themselves as deer so well that they had to take pains to avoid mountain lion attacks (Goddard 1903:21).  So did the Maidu—one hunter was attacked within living memory (Jewell 1987:125). 

Deer were occasionally driven over cliffs, at least by the Wintu (Lapena 1978:336), but this must have been an exceedingly rare event.  To anyone who wants to drive deer over a cliff, all I can say is Good luck!  I’d rather try to push water uphill with a rake.  Deer jumps are known for the Spokan (Ross 2011:304), but required extensive and careful planning, as well as rituals.  The gullibility of city anthropologists on the subject of “jumps” and “cliff drives” never ceases to amaze those of us who have some field experience.  Game animals are not stupid, and know a cliff when they see one.  Cliff drives required very careful preparation, with many people organized to panic the animals and keep them stampeded in the right direction, and if possible with fires.  People must line the intended drive path, yelling and waving blankets.  If possible, fences or barriers will be set.  This works for buffalo and sometimes with elk, but was evidently an uncommon way to get deer.

Pomo hunters supposedly knew, individually, every deer in their hunting radius, and indeed it is fairly easy to learn to recognize individual deer and know their peculiarities.  My Maya friends in Yucatan know their local deer that way, and, for comparison, early Irish hunters did too, as shown by the individually named stags in Irish epics.  This allowed the Pomo to manage the deer (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20, citing Burt Aginsky).  Indeed, traditional Native American hunters are apt to know individually every large animal in their regular hunting areas—at least that is my experience in the Northwest, Mexico, and the western United States.

            The much-debated “Pleistocene overkill” need not concern us very long here, since we are dealing with recent management systems.  Still, it requires a note.  Paul S. Martin inferred long ago that Native American hunting was the sole factor in the disappearance of most of the large mammal species in the Americas around 12,000-14,000 years ago (Martin and Klein 1984).  In its original form—involving a sudden enormous expansion of human populations and hunting—this thesis is not credible.  It assumes a population growth rate of 3% over a vast area and a long time; nothing remotely like this has ever been observed in premodern populations.  It assumes people spread with lightning speed throughout the Americas.  And it assumes that people killed wantonly, since even a high population would not have needed more than a tiny fraction of the meat supposedly taken.  Surely, even without any conservation ideology, hunters would have thought twice about going after mammoths and mastodons simply to destroy them.  The danger would have been daunting.

            Moreover, mass kill sites are singularly absent.  We have a few scattered mammoth and mastodon kills, but not much else.  This is in stark contrast to the huge bison kills, involving thousands of animals, that happened later, without exterminating the bison.  Contrasting, also, are the massive boneyards on Sicily and Cyprus, where humans unquestionably exterminated the local dwarf elephants and hippos (Simmons 2007; displays in Sicily’s historical museum at Syracuse, studied Jan. 1, 2009).  On Cyprus, one site alone has the bones of over 500 pigmy hippos (Simmons 2007:231)—couple that with post-Pleistocene drying and heating, and there is no question why that species went extinct!  This is exactly what we do not find anywhere in early North America.  It is simply not credible that the there was better preservation on a couple of Mediterranean islands than in the whole North American continent.  There is also the fact that the vast terminal-Pleistocene boneyards we do have, such as the La Brea tar pits, contain few or no human kills.

            Thus, many authorities, notably archaeozoologists such as Donald Grayson (over many years—e.g. 1977, 1991, 2001), and Steve Wolverton (Wolverton et al 2009 and references therein) have given no credence to this hypothesis.  Neither have Native American authorities like Raymond Pierotti (2011).  Grayson pointed out long ago that many bird species, and several small hard-to-catch animals such as rabbits and dwarf pronghorns, went extinct.  The birds were mostly carrion-eaters that died out when their food did, but some were large water birds such as storks, and only climate change can explain their demise.

            On the other hand, it is hard to deny some role for human hunting (see, once again, Kay and Simmons 2002; also Krech 1999 for a relatively balanced review).  This is especially true since we now know that people were in North America earlier than Martin thought, and that some of the megafauna—notably the mastodons—persisted much longer than he thought.  Spreading out the time frame makes the levels of population growth and hunting much more believable.

People are highly efficient hunters.  Animals like giant ground sloths would have seemed like walking free-lunch counters.  The native mammals had no evolved or learned knowledge of humans and no defenses against group hunting with spears.  On the other hand, they would have learned it fast—certainly the mastodons had plenty of time.  It is not credible that animals used to avoiding sabretooths, lions, dire wolves, short-faced bears and the like would not soon figure out that humans were dangerous (veteran field biologist Raymond Pierotti 2011 makes this point).

The most convincing argument for overkill is indirect:  everywhere that Homo sapiens has gone, large animals have immediately begun to disappear.  This effect has been observed, archaeologically, from Australia, Madagascar, Indonesia, east Asia, and indeed everywhere carefully studied on the globe.  Some scholars have made far too much of this, though, by blaming even the extermination of tiny flightless island birds on humans; in this case the damage was surely done by the rats, dogs and pigs that people generally bring with them.  In New Zealand, for instance, rats came with the Maori, and probably did more than humans did to exterminate the moas.  The latter were ground-nesters with eminently edible eggs, and rats love nothing better than bird eggs.

In the Americas, the extinction pattern fits climate, not hunting.  The uncommon meso-size fauna went first, not last.  If humans had hunted everything out, the biggest, slowest, meatiest animals like ground sloths and mastodons would have gone first, the mesoprey later, according to all tenets of optimal foraging theory and common sense.  The truth was exactly the reverse.

I believe that, in the Americas, human-set fires were surely far more important than hunting.  (This is based partly on my observations of, and my reading of scholarly research on, burning in Australia and Madagascar.  It seems to be now generally accepted that fire, not hunting, was the human factor in extinctions in Australia around 50,000 years ago.  Both humans and climate change are implicated in the rise of fire.) Slow-moving species like the giant ground sloths could hardly have withstood frequent burning. 

Also, humans and other invading species after the peak of the last glaciation probably introduced diseases, and epidemic disease could well have had a role in wiping out the big game.  Within historic times, diseases have decimated North American trees such as the chestnut, white pines, and California oaks, and have wiped out Hawaiian native birds. 

Last and most serious, climate change after the glaciation was extremely rapid and disruptive.  Similar rapid and dramatic extinction events occurred at the ends of previous glaciaations, such as the Ordovician-Silurian event (Finnegan et al. 2011).  Humans were, obviously, not involved in those events.

North America 18,000-20,000 years ago was probably the coldest it has ever been.  It was hot and dry by 12,000, but then the Younger Dryas event dropped temperatures back to Ice Age levels around 11,000 years ago.  This in turn reversed, and an extremely hot and dry period set in by about 6-7,000 BCE.  (On ancient California, see Jones and Klar 2007.)  The changes were extremely rapid.

It would take only a few successive years like the horrific droughts of 2001-2002 and 2011-2015 to exterminate all lowland big game in California.  There would simply not be enough water for them.  Alternatively, and more probably, a couple of very dry years would so concentrate the megafauna, and so reduce human hunters to starvation, that any notions of conservation would go by the board, and desperate humans would indeed kill the last few mammoths.  I expect that climate change (basically drought), fire, disease, and hunting, in that order of importance, were all factors.

            The whole controversy has been greatly exacerbated by personal feelings.  The overkill hypothesis has proved popular with those who have an exceedingly limited faith in humanity’s ability to manage anything, especially biologists.  Some of these are frankly anti-Native American.  However, also among these ranks are more pro-human and pro-Indigenous anthropologists and other social scientists who dislike the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Some of these scholars, like Raymond Hames (2007; his experience is in South America), have worked with Indigenous groups that lack any conservation ideology and hunt without restraint.  Others, including Kay and Simmons (and the present writer), see the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype as patronizing, and prefer to contemplate efficient if merciless hunters rather than meek and inept ones. 

Skeptics who doubt that humans exterminated the megafauna have included not only Indigenous writers like Vine Deloria, but also those who have little vested interest one way or another (such as Grayson and Wolverton), and even those who stalwartly reject the “ecologically noble savage” concept but are even more skeptical about Martin’s hypothesis (e.g. Krech 1999). 

            As with fire, we are left in some doubt.  California’s indigenous people certainly hunted hard and cropped the more vulnerable fish and shellfish as close as they could.  On the other hand, there were no extinctions after the end of the Pleistocene, and archaeology shows only rather minor declines in game populations over time.  Apparently people and wildlife reached a loose equilibrium. 

Ownership

            Ownership is critical to management.  Since John Locke, conventional wisdom has it that private ownership is best, but modern experience suggests that ownership at appropriate levels of management is better.  The California peoples already knew this.  Resources were owned or held at various levels (Bettinger 2015).  Individuals owned their own tools and implements.  Large productive capital goods like canoes could be owned by rich individuals, families, or associations.  Houses were owned by the families that lived in them.  Generally, but not everywhere, families or lineages owned particular patches of food-producing plants, or individual oak trees, or other productive land resources.  More remote areas of the state, however, tended to have community ownership of land, at least of remote lands.  Families or village communities owned good fishing spots.  The village community owned ceremonial structures and grounds, and held control with varying degrees of formality over resources.  As usual, there was variation in different parts of the state, from the far northwest where everything was owned by individuals or families to the much more collectivist northeast and south. 

The Luiseño, for instance, had four levels of ownership.  Individuals owned their portable goods.  Kingroups or groups of related people owned tungva “gardens,” understood to be oak groves, productive berry patches, and the like.  Village communities owned tchon tcho’mi, specific areas for collective exploitation. Larger tracts of relatively useless land were held as territory of particular village communities, but were not subject to specific management by socially constituted groups (White 1963).  The Achomawi maintained rights to hunt and gather on land, owned by kingroups or possibly local groups (Rhoades 2013:68). 

Fighting was generally about revenge, sometimes women, rarely property.  Still, land and resource conflicts were numerous and important enough to define groups and color lifestyles.  Access to resources was generally restricted to the owners, especially relative to other North American peoples (Bettinger 2015:132-134).  We read of people fighting over berries, oak trees, and productive areas of land (e.g. Gamble 2008:258; Rhoades 2013; White 1963).  Like many other people, they exaggerated their grievances; Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, and Frank Essene, comparing notes in the 1930s, found that the groups they were studying described the same war, but each claimed it was the aggrieved one, and that it held on though badly outnumbered (Goldschmidt et al. 1939).  Raymond White (1963) recorded in detail the wars between Luiseño villages over resource encroachments.

The Yurok had an exceedingly complex ownership system.  Some things were owned in common (“’everybody’ ownership”), others by the village or group of houses, others by the house (which usually contained an extended family), others by individuals (note that this is very similar to Luiseño ownership).  At least after white settlement, individual land ownership existed.  Individuals might hold fractional shares of an item.  Songs and ceremonies as well as resources and wealth goods were named (Pilling 1978:146-147).  For the neighboring Hupa, Goddard (1903:26) notes extended-family ownership of acorn groves and of fishing sites and stretches of fishing streams.  Bettinger (2015:168-70) sees this as the limiting case of his “orderly anarchy.”  He clearly underestimates the role of community and elders, since the large towns of the northwest did function smoothly and coordinate everything from weir-building to the yearly ceremonial round, but certainly ownership tended to be at a grassroots level.

The Nomlaki occupy an intermediate position, with individual ownership of personal goods and also certain trees and the like; otherwise they preferred community ownership—villages headed by chiefs who administered (Goldschmidt 1951:340).

For the Cahuilla, Lowell Bean and Katherine Saubel (1972) describes family ownership of small plant resources, lineage ownership of individual oaks, and village community ownership of land and major resource clusters. For the Chemehuevi, descent groups owned territories.  These groups owned songs—notably the Mountain Sheep, Deer, and Salt songs—by hereditary right, and sang them to assert ownership and to show and teach knowledge of the ground.  Large, vague divisions of the Chemehuevi owned the songs.  Families owned specific versions of them, and these went with territory they owned, controlled, or habitually visited.  Such song groups were exogamous (Laird 1976:21).  The songs described the country, often in the form of travels through it; the Salt Song, for instance, traced a circle from the Bill Williams River (in southwest Arizona) through southern Nevada, eastern California, and back.  In striking parallel to the Australian Aborigines, these ownership songs recounted travel over the country, with human reactions, sacred places, waterholes, and other important matters incorporated (Laird 1976:6-18).

Since we are not talking about formal states, land was not formally owned, surveyed, and measured; vast remote tracts were open for anyone (though loosely held by the nearest village), and large shadow-zones existed between village holdings in such resource-poor areas.  Conversely, rich lands were grounds for major and serious conflict. 

            All this was less complicated than it looks.  The basic principle is that everything was owned at the level at which ownership was most efficient.  It would hardly be sensible for the whole community to own a bow and arrow set.  Conversely, an individual could not possibly hold (even if he or she owned) a large oak woodland.  The size of a particular resource item or patch seems to have determined the size of group owning it.  My sense is that a group owned a patch it could easily crop, manage, and defend (cf. K. Anderson 2005; also the studies in Bean and Blackburn 1976).

            Population density must have affected this.  It certainly seems, from the rather thin evidence, as if ownership was a more serious matter among the Chumash than among the desert Shoshoneans (Clemmer 2009a, 2009b), and more serious among the Yurok and Karok than among the tribes inland of them.  Evidence is thin (though see Bettinger 2015), and some of it goes against this generalization; ownership of choice fishing spots by lineages is still very much alive among the Achomawi (inland from the Karok), even after 200 years of oppressive contact with Euro-Americans.  Good fishing spots are highly concentrated there, and it could well be that there—and elsewhere—concentration of resources was more crucial than density of people.  Similarly, the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley, though they had the sparsest population of any California group, still maintain ideas of ownership of mesquite trees and pinyon groves.

Representations:  Sources

            The early and devastating decline of the Native Californians has left us quite poorly informed about them.   

Fortunately, a few exceptional collaborations between particular researchers and consultants have produced comprehensive and sensitively recorded bodies of data.  We can be enormously grateful that California was blessed with ethnographers who, whatever their faults may have been, actually cared about traditional people and cultures, and wanted to learn all they could.  Even today, when many ethnographers are interested only in high theory or in playing political games, California remains blessed with a stunning array of people who care—including Native ethnographers like Julian Lang and Katherine Saubel, as well as people like Thomas Blackburn, Lowell Bean, and others cited in the present work. 

  Particularly notable are certain cases of longstanding cooperation between an ethnographer and a Native Californian individual.  A. L. Kroeber’s work with the traditional Yurok elder Robert Spott is outstanding (e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Roland Dixon evidently managed exceptional rapport with the Maidu mythographer Hanc’ibyjim (Shipley 1991).  John Harrington’s work with the Chumash, especially Fernando Librado Kitsepawit (1981), is famous.  Harrington’s former wife, Carobeth Laird, cemented a particularly close collaboration by marrying her main consultant, George Laird; she produced a trio of books (Laird  1975, 1976, 1984) that are California literary classics in their own right—possibly the most sensitive, well-written, and moving collections of lore and texts from the state.  They have languished in some obscurity, ironically because they were published by a Native Californian organization (Malki Museum) rather than an academic press! 

Finally, special mention goes to the incredible efforts of the few Native Californians who have studied and recorded their own cultural traditions.  Julian Lang has done yeoman service on the Karuk and their neighbors (Lang 1994).  Native Californian elder, ethnographer, and writer Katherine Siva Saubel has for several decades been the unofficial dean of Native California studies (Bean and Saubel 1976; Saubel 2004).  Self-taught and with no “position” other than head of Malki Museum for most of its career, she compiled a record of publication, research, public service, and collaboration with international experts that is matched by few if any “formal” academics in the field. 

Susan Suntree (2010) has integrated many southern California Native origin stories and environmental teachings into a beautiful, poetic volume that catches much of the essence of the land.

            Unfortunately, all the above, together with the enormous mass of other ethnographic work, still fails to give a complete picture of the life and culture of any group.  Often, our knowledge of a whole group depends on one individual who did not actually grow up in traditional times.  George Laird had forgotten much of Chemehuevi lore, and we have essentially no other source.  Fernando Librado and Candelaria Valenzuela, our sources on the Ventureno Chumash, were raised long after the missions had changed Chumash life.  Our knowledge of the Kiliwa (just across the line into Baja California) derives from one man, Rufino Ochurte.  At least, he remembered quite traditional times and did find an exceptional ethnographer in Mauricio Mixco (1983), so when he does not mention conservation beliefs we can probably take it that there were no important ones.  (The Kiliwa maintained a very sparse, highly migratory population in a harsh desert, and probably had no need of them.)  Otherwise, however, a lack of reports of conservation myths and injunctions means nothing; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

We are best informed for the Yurok and Karok, who (with the Hupa) have been most successful at maintaining their culture till now, so that information derives from their own highly educated scholars such as Julian Lang as well as from many consultants interviewed over many years by many investigators.  Many other cultural groups were contacted too late, and often by “green hands” doing practice field work.  Material culture and ordinary social life have generally been well covered, since they show up in the archaeological and historical records as well as in ordinary ethnography.  The situation for myth and religion is far less good.  These leave little mark, and require extremely sensitive ethnography over many years to document adequately.  The contrast between the myth records of Hanc’ibeyjim or the Lairds on the one hand, and the hasty recordings by less sensitive ethnographers on the other, is most striking.  It reminds one of the contrast between Homer and the children’s books summarizing his stories for the subteen trade.

            One final problem with the sources is that California ethnography suffered from a tendency to compartmentalize “religion” and “subsistence” (or “environment”) as two separate things.  “Religion” covered abstract notions of gods’ “subsistence” meant pounding acorns and hunting deer.  Ways that religion sanctioned ecological behavior fell between the chairs.  Few recorded such data.  This problem is endemic in Kroeber’s Handbook (1925) and the larger Smithsonian Institution handbook (Heizer 1978).  Kroeber’s trait-list ethnographic method did not help the situation.  (Cf. Swezey and Heizer 1977 to show what could be done when the blinders were off.)  On the other hand, ethnographers not bedeviled by artificial boundaries do not report much specifically conservationist religious teaching, either (see e.g. Laird 1976, 1984).  It would probably be more accurate to see the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as basic, with “religion” and “subsistence” as segregates imposed artificially on Californian culture by outside ethnographers.

            One recalls that it took three generations of ethnographic work to get much sense of how Australian Aboriginal religion constructed landscape.  Californian ethnographers, working with memory cultures from the beginning, had no opportunity to do likewise.

Attitudes and Representations:  Specific teachings

            As elsewhere, conservation derived from more general postulates about the world.  These have been best summarized by Thomas Blackburn in December’s Child (1975; this book refers to the Chumash but what follows applies equally well to all California groups).  He lists fourteen postulates about the world as central to Indigenous thought:

A personalized universe

Kinship of all sentient beings

Existence and potential of supernatural or nonordinary Power

Determinism (within broad limits)

Negative-positive interaction (rather than pure good separate from pure evil)

A dangerous universe (with many frightening supernatural as well as natural beings)

Unpredictability

Inevitable, inherent inequality (especially of powers)

Affectability (all can potentially affect all)

Entropy (disorder builds up unless controlled)

Mutability

Closed universe

Dynamic equilibrium of oppositions

Centricity (the Chumash at the center of a circular world, itself the middle plane in a multiplanar cosmos) (Blackburn 1975:65, with my explanatory extensions)

            Of these, the most important in general and in managing landscapes are the first three.  The others may be considered ancillary.

            Blackburn also lists thirteen things that are highly respected:

Knowledge

Age and seniority

Prudence

Self-consraint

Moderation

Reciprocity

Honesty (but also trickiness in the face of frightening beings)

Industriousness

Dependability and responsibility

Self-asertion and self-respect

Pragmatism

Etiquette (proper behavior)

Language (Blackburn 1975:65)

            Explicit conservation in California representations of nature are rare, but Kat Anderson found a great deal of conservationist ideology in her studies of Native Californian plant management.  She found two universal rules: “Leave some of what is gathered for the other animals and Do not waste what you have harvested” (K. Anderson 2005:55; her italics; see also Blackburn and Anderson 1993).  In fact, there is evidently a general rule not to waste at all.  What is not harvested is left for later, or left for the other people (the four-footed or winged ones).  Native Californians would steal stored seeds from mice and other rodents, and acorns from woodpeckers, but would always leave some for the rightful “owners.” 

People approached plants with reverence and respect.  They felt the usual Native American kinship with nature (K. Anderson 2005:57-59).  Their ceremonies for first fruits and seasonal foods bonded people to the resource base.  People were close to the land.  Kat Anderson recorded a revealing comment from a Chukchansi Yokuts elder:  “I’ve alwas wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’  We don’t think of them that way.  They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place” (K. Anderson 2007:41).  She and Thomas Blackburn note:  “Today, native peoples still retain a deep respect for the natural world, and retell stories that remind them of the absolute necessity for judicious harvesting.  Elders are quick to tell younger gatherers, ‘Do not take all—and leave the small ones behind’” (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20).

Kat Anderson found that a general sense of kinship with nature, or at least consociality with it, and a more specific sense of genuine deeply-felt responsibility for conserving resources for the wider good, were the basic attitudes of management.  Yet—whether because it is really lacking or because ethnography is so thin—there is little record of its being verbalized explicitly in a philosophic ideology, as it is on the Northwest Coast (Atleo 2004). 

An important exception is the Klamath River region, where traditional culture continues to an appreciable degree.  For that area we have not only a great deal of good ethnography, but a unique source in the form of an early book by a Native Californian woman—Lucy Thompson’s To the American Indian (1991, orig. 1916).  In it, she points out that the Yurok carefully protected sugar pines, source of nuts and sugary sap (Thompson 1991:28ff).  They conserved fish (Thompson 1991:178-179) and burned carefully and systematically (Thompson 1991:31-33).  In general, she stands in striking contrast to ethnographies by outsiders—she stresses the religious interaction with nature and its function in maintaining conservation.  It seems highly likely that this was universal, and that it was missed by early ethnographers for the reasons above noted. 

Confirmation for the Yurok case comes from more recent work.  The Yurok spiritual teacher Harry Williams (on whom see Buckley 2002) tells:  “I was with my grandfather, Charley Williams.  We were walking on a dirt path down to the ocean.  There was a bug crossing our path, and my grandfather told me, ‘Reach down and help that bug on its way.’  So I did.  I reached down and helped the bug on the path to where it was going.  ‘Now, do you know what you have done?’ Grandfather continued.  ‘You won’t feel badly now, for perhaps a bird will someday eat the bug.  But you must remember that the Creator created the bug for birds to eat.  He didn’t create them to get stepped on’” (Burrill 1993:43; presumably the Creator is Wohpekumeu, the Yurok trickster-transformer; strictly speaking there is no Yurok Creator, since the Yurok teach that the universe has always existed).  Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, I can testify that the Yucatec Maya routinely do things of this sort, with similar teachings.  Maya who picked up a bug to show me would always put it back on the path, unharmed, and headed the way it had been going (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).  Williams’ grandfather also said that rocks are living things, and that “the white man is like the wind.  Nobody knows where he comes from.”  Williams also tells of a line he heard at a Native American conference:  “Creator gave man two ears, and two eyes, but only one mouth.  But the white man thinks he has five mouths, no ears, and no eyes.  That must be why he talks so much” (Burrill 1993:106). 

For the Karok, the “Ikxareyavs were old-time people, who turned into animals, plants, rocks, mountains, plots of ground, and even parts of the house, dances, and abstractions when the Karuk came to the country” (Harrington 1932:8).   Many of the most feared of these prior beings turned into large and spectacular rocks, a story which the Karok supposedly proved to Harrington by pointing out that you can still see the rocks.  The Ikxareyavs who turned into abstractions remind us yet again of classical Greece, with its goddesses such as Sophia and Nike, as well as the ancient Hindus, who visualized Time (kali) as a goddess.

The Hupa, culturally very close to the Karok though linguistically unrelated, held that one Yinukatsisdai “made all the trees and plants which furnish food for men….  If he sees food being wasted he withholds the supply and produces a famine.”  If pleaded with, he may relent, and “then gives the food…in such bountiful quantities that acorns are found even under the pines” (Goddard 1903:77).  The puritanical and religious Hupa shared the Northwest Coast view of punishment for waste, but added a fascinating touch in the mercy of the creator.  The corresponding masters of deer are the Tans, who withhold deer from hunters if deer are not treated with respect.  As elsewhere in the wider Northwest and California (e.g. Rhoades 2013:81), respect means not only treating the dead deer respectfully but also totally refraining from waste, overhunting, and hunting without serious need for food.  Yet other deities care for fish in similar ways (Goddard 1903:77-78).  The fish, like the deer and other food animals, had been kept by the supernaturals, and had to be liberated by culture-heroes; there are many stories of these events, and the stories are used in ceremonies to maintain the stock (Goddard 1904).  Less effective, but not unrelated, were prayers that birds and squirrels might not desire to eat the acorn crop (in competition with the Hupa) (Goddard 1903:81).  The Hupa regarded trails as sacred persons. 

The Yurok, Karok and Hupa joined in enormous ceremonies that were intended to preserve and renew the world and its resources.  These ceremonies almost died out, but managed to survive, and are now once again celebrated regularly.  The belief in the need of humans to hold elaborate and active rituals to keep the game, fish, and plant foods productive has itself been preserved and renewed, especially since these groups have seen the result of modern Californian indifference to conservation.  Many myths detail the origin of these ceremonies and the need for them, but specific teachings of directly conservationist behavior are rather limited.  However, it seems clear that a general reverence and spiritual concern for the landscape has a preservationist effect.  People will not thoughtlessly waste resources that are personally and spiritually important.

Among the Lake Miwok, as in several other parts of North America, “game animals were believed to be immortal and under spirit control, and it was believed that animals sometimes transformed themselves into other species” (Callahan 1978:272).  The Yuki held that deer are immotal, their souls living in a mountain under care of a Deer Guardian who is second only to the Creator and who controls obsidian as well as deer.  This belief in animal souls within a mountain occurs widely in North America, as far as Huitepec, the sacred mountain near San Cristobal in Chiapas. It is more than likely that the immortality and protectedness of spirits of game was universal. 

The Northern Pomo had a concept of “xa, manifestations of the supernatural spirits…left on earth from the beginnings and investing certain peculiar objects with supernatural attributes….  Xa  is the genius of procreation, acquisition, alien to human activities…but a spiritual concomity of men whose aid may be engaged through prayer and possession of its symbols….   Xa is summoned by sexual contact, is the mystery of conception and gestation, leaves its stamp on the buttocks of new born till erased by cognoscence; places an indelible mark on the skin of a favored mortal…. Xa is the inspiration of song…, the rhythmic impulse of song-dance ceremonies, the buoyancy of regalia…and the stimulus of fingers tapping upon the flute. It is the celestial, beneficent influence as opposed to the terrestrial demon of diaster…”  (notes of John Hudson, ca. 1900, from Welch 2013:169).  Xa resides in hawk and falcon and eagle feathers, in crests and red tails of birds such as woodpeckers, and in omens and apparitions.  Five plants have it: trail plant (Adenocaulon bicolor), angelica, sweet cicely (Osmorhiza sp.), Fendler’s meadowrue (Thalictrum fendleri), and leather root (Welch 2013:169).  As elsewhere in California, tobacco and Jimson weed (Datura wrightii) were sacred in a different way: they gave direct visions and healings.  All this must have fed back on resource management, but no early record of this seems to have survived.

Equally revealing is a story related by Fernando Librado (1979:113):  A man was trapping rats in a pitfall trap, and an old Santa Rosa Chumash told him:  “’You are polluting our mother, Xutash!  [The Chumash earth goddess.]  Remove this at once, If you defile our Mother, she will give us nothing.’”

The Cocopa, who lived in a landscape of abundance in the fertile Colorado River delta, lived simply and never worried much about food—though famine threatened if a drought led to the river being very low.  William Kelly made careful enquiries about religious beliefs connected with fertility, harvest, wild foods, agriculture, and the whole suite, and found:  “Harvest festivals…were…religious in nature; yet their function, explicit and implicit, was in connection with group life and social organization, and they were neither related to the harvest as such nor a mechanism aimed at increasing effort or diligence in farming” (Kelly 1977:44).  This seems general throughout California (the Cocopa live in Baja California).  The only rule related to such issues that is even remotely ecological in function was the universal Native American rule that a boy could not eat his own first kills (Kelly 1977:45).  This has no conservation function in itself, but in most of North America is part of teaching the boy respect for both the game and the human social group that shares the kill.  The Cocopa tabooed doves but apparently for totemic, not environmental, reasons.  As agricultural people, they probably had a different take on myth, with Coyote a creator of good crops and transformer of insulted ones into bitter wild foods, rather than a producer of good wild foods for people to gather (see Nabhan 2013 for a brilliant, incisive analysis of this contrast in southwestern mythology).

We are, however, surely missing a great deal.  The Northern Paiute, whose territory included the northeast corner of California, offered prayers to slain game animals.  They left the tail tip of a hunted deer under a rock with the prayer “’Deer, thank you, and come again.’  A similar offering was made for bighorn sheep” (Fowler 1992:181).  Note that the deer will be reincarnated, and will again offer itself to the hunter if treated well—a universal North American belief.  Even roots required an offering or prayer.  Eagle feathers were harvested without killing the eagle (ibid.).  A number of prayers, to the Sun and othe powers, were given daily or frequently.  Ceremonies insured continued production of food resources.  Yet Fowler does not record conservation myths either.

            Taboos may also have had a conservation effect.  The Yana, for instance, did not allow salmon to be eaten with deer meat, small game, or roots taken from gopher burrows (Sapir 1910:156).  The salmon would cease to come if this taboo was violated.  One assumes it was disrespectful to them.  Possibly they did not like to associate with prototypically “land” foods.  There is no evident conservation here, but at least some respect for the salmon was apparent.  The Wintu and related peoples tabooed a large number of things, including most birds of prey and predatory animals (Du Bois 1935).  The Nutuwich Yokuts even tabooed bear and deer, being thus reduced to eating rabbits for meat, a most unusual degree of forbearance (Gayton 1948:166).  Taboos this extensive would have a major ecological effect.  They preserved even the hunted species indirectly, by preserving keystone species in the ecosystem.  Heizer (1978) cites a number of taboos and rules from around the state that affect land use. 

            The Chilula (Athapaskan) culture is barely known from a very few elderly people just after 1900.  One of them “was a medicine woman for troubles caused by the deer gods” (Goddard 1914:379).  That is all we know of Chilula animal religion, outside of a few generic myths, but it implies spirit guardians of the game such as we know from most of Native America.

            Attested from one end of the state to the other are harangues by chiefs telling people to work hard and diligently at hunting, gathering, and food production in general.  (The best description is for the Atsugewi, but the custom is attested all the way to the Mohave [Kroeber 1972] and Cocopa [Kelly 1977:66].)  Many groups  had a special designated Orator as well, who could do this.  People could ignore if they chose, but they would then be subject to major criticism and coolness, and hard work was a strong value everywhere from the northwest corner (e.g. Buckley 2002, Kroeber 1972 for the Yurok) to just beyond the southeast one (Cocopa:  Kelly 1977:23).  This would rather tend toward overexploitation of the resources than conservation of them, and thus may have much to do with the archaeological evidence noted above of local over-harvest.

Attitudes and Representations:  General

Native American biologist Raymond Pierotti states:  “A common general philosphy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behavior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  This and all it implies is fully true for California.

Respect.   The full panoply of North American Native conservation attitudes is reflected in an astonishing prophecy that Cora Du Bois recorded from Kate Luckie, a Wintu shaman, in 1925:

“When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north.  Everyone will drown.  That is because the white people never cared for land or deer or bear.  When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.  When we dig roots, we make little holes.  When we build houses, we make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things.  We shake down acorns and pine nuts.  We don’t chop down the trees.  We only use dead wood.  But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything.  The tree says, ‘Don’t.  I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up.  The spirit of the land hates them…  The indians neverf hurt anything, but the white people destroy all.  They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth.  The rocks says, ‘Don’t!  You are hurting me.’  But the white people pay no attention.  When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking.  The white people dig deep long tunnels.  They make roads.  They dig as much as they wish.  They don’t care how much the ground cries out.  How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?  That is why God will upset the world—because it is sore all over” (Du Bois 1935:75-6; cf. Heizer 1978:650). 

Luckie continued to say that water could not be permanently hurt, because it eventually runs to the ocean, and that it would thus survive to destroy the current world by flood.  The Wintu share the widespread North American belief that there have been four worlds of people so far, and we are in the fifth; it is to be destroyed by flood, according to Wintu tradition.  Another Wintu shaman commented that “the gold feels sorry” for the Indian people because they were driven from their homes by men seeking that metal (Du Bois 1935:76).  (It is worth noting that Du Bois had no special interest in ecology or environment, but was meticulous about documenting shamans and all they said; hence these unique recordings.)

The California Native peoples shared the widespread Native American belief that disrespect of powerful animals brought danger.   A story has made it from the Chumash consultant Juan Justo to early ethnographer John Peabody Harrington, thence to Chumash expert John Johnson, and then into Lynn Gamble’s book on the Chumash—a typically indirect route: 

            “…Juan’s uncle began to laugh and shout and make fun of [a rattlesnake]…. The other man advised Juan’s uncle to be quiet,…but Juan’s uncle made all the more noise….whereupon the other man left him and went on alone.  When he was alone, Juan’s uncle looked around a saw a whole pile of guicos [alligator lizards] with their mouths open towards him and their tongues out….he…shut his eyes and went jumping and climbing to break through the lizards, and when he opened his eyes there was nothing there” (Gamble 2008:216, quoting John Johnson’s edited version of a Harrington text). 

I have heard very similar stories on the Northwest Coast and among the Maya.  If the parallels hold—and I am sure they do—the lizards were warning Juan’s uncle that if he teased a snake again he would suffer, probably through a bite from the snake. 

General respect for plants and animals and their spirits and spirit guardians existed.  Respect guided conservation generally.  “One took what he needed and expressed appreciation…. Without these attitudes the California Indians could have laid waste to California long before the Europeans appeared” (Heizer 1978:650).

There was a very general sense that plants needed human care, a sentiment backed up by experience, but going well beyond the facts of Native management and care.  Plants and animals need to be used, as a mark of respect.  Neglecting them wounds their spirits.  They decline and become weedy, poorly grown, and despondent-looking (K. Anderson 20005; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; McCarthy 1993:225).  I have run into the same idea among Northwest Coast peoples and something very close to it among my Maya friends.  In fact, California’s useful plants do respond to care; basketry plants put out long straight shoots, nut trees crop more, and so on (Anderson 2005). 

Such attitudes survive today in areas where something like traditional plant uses can exist.  Michael Wilken-Robertson, interviewing Kumeyaay people in Mexico just south of the California border, heard from elder Teodora Dcuero Robles:

“This I can assure you, the ancient ones never damaged a tree, no, never; they loved them as something very sacred.  They would tell us not to go breaking the branches of the pines, not to play there, nor to climb up on any small tree, they said that they were almost juist like humans; ‘They are watching us, they are taking care of us, they give us our food.  Don’t go around damaging them don’t be shouting, none of that,’ they would say, ‘take special care of them,’ for this reason we know very well that we must take care of these trees.  Also the medicinal herbs, those they especially charged us to care for, we shouldn’t just go out and cut for no reason, go out and cut them and throw them away to dry up, no.  They told us many things, that we should even care for the rocks, just imagein!  The rocks, the sand, the springs, the water flowing, all these things they said we must respect” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:49, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:231-232).  From the Paipai, a group that moved from Arizona to northern Baja California about 300 years ago, comes a story told by Eufemio Sandoval.  The Mexican government forbid them cutting juniper posts because the junipers were getting rare.  Sandoval commented “we have never cut the plant to the root, but rather it has been a form of pruning that we carry out. We just take what is useful as a post and leave the rest to keep growing and developing” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:53-54, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:236).  Sandoval held that this was better conservation than pure neglect.  Recall Wilke’s findings on Great Basin junipers. 

There is little reference to animals letting themselves be taken if they are respected, but apparently the belief existed.  One Mohave did say that the Creator gave hunting to the desert tribes but not the Mohave, so when the Chemehuevi “see game, the animals cannot run fast, or they sit down…they want to be caught.  The same with the Walapai.  But if Mohave go to hunt, the animals run swiftly away” (Kroeber 1972:84).  A Wintu hunter who failed to get deer would say “The deer don’t want to die for me any more” (Heizer 1978:651).  Many stories around the state imply that animals not respected will not let themselves be killed.  Conversely, they might go away.  Elsewhere in North America, some groups have noted that game disappears as white settlers fill up the landscape, and suspect this is because Native hunting is outlawed and the game is offended and leaves.  I am certainly aware that dramatic declines of deer have taken place since hunting has been banned in settled areas, but in fact the reasons are drought (first of all), suburbanization, and introduced diseases.  Still, the Native view has its merits; failing to keep the game alert, and failing to weed out sick and slow individuals, has its costs.

The belief that wild plants and animals, and even rocks, must be treated with respect is shared all over North America and among similar societies in Asia.  In Mongolia I learned immediately that one had to treat all these entities with respect (shuutekh, a word whose root meaning is respect for one’s elders).  All have spirits and the spirits are ever-present; they deserve respect as elders, helpers, friends, and possible sacrificers of themselves to the human hunter or forager.  Thus there are absolute rules against overhunting, overcollecting, and waste, and these are observed in the remotest areas.

The widespread North American taboo against a youth eating his first kill was probably general, and among the Chumash one report says that a hunter or fisher could never eat his own kill, on pain of never succeeding again (Grant 1978:512, citing Z. Engelhardt).  This is evidently part of the North American complex of respect for animals.  The Chumash are known to have prayed to the swordfish to drive whales on shore, and to have had a swordfish dance; they revered other powers of the sea also (Blackburn 1975; Gamble 2008). 

They also had the idea, general in western North America, that the bones of an animal should be treated carefully and respectfully, because such things as breaking a bone would mean the animal would reincarnate with a broken or missing leg; at least this is attested in myth, if not in actual practice (Blackburn 1975:131, in a myth recorded by Harrington).  Another version of the same myth has Momoy—Datura personified as an old woman—protesting against a boy (her grandson in other versions) killing unnecessarily:  “Have you no sense at all?  You are just killing for the sake of killing” (Blackburn 1975:147).  Occurrences like this, in Harrington’s very complete materials on the Chumash, make it seem very likely that California Indians did not lack the usual western North American values; ethnographers simply failed to record them.

And yet, among the Monache, careful enquiry indicated otherwise:  “No special ritual precautions accompanied the hunting of deer or bear.  Animals were not addressed before, during, or after the kill” (Spier 1978:428).  This is reported because it is in such marked contrast to the situation in the Northwest Coast and many other areas, where respectful addresses to the animals were required, and were part of a conservation-related ideology.  Generally, nothing is reported either way for California peoples; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but the lack is suggestive given Spier’s report.

Social Bonds with Nature.  All California groups thought of the natural world as closely allied to the human one, almost always with actual kin relations or equivalent social bonds.

Many Californian groups, especially in the center and south, had lineages and moieties with animal emblems.  Moieties named Coyote and Wildcat (Bobcat) were found widely, as among the Cahuilla and Serrano.  The Yokuts named them West and East, but divided the animals among them; “the Tachi assigned Eagle, Crow, Killdeer, Raven, Antelope, and Beaver to the…West moiety and Coyote, Prairie Falcon, Ground [Burrowing] Owl, Great Horned Owl, Skunk, Seal” and other beings to the East (Wallace 1978:453, from E. W. Gifford’s data; reference to Valley Yokuts, but all Yokuts groups apparently had more or less the same).  Anna Gayton (1976) points out that people really felt close to their lineage animals.  Eagle and Coyote were the lead animals respectively.  Within the moieties were animal-named patrilineages; the Eagle lineage supplied chiefs. The Coyote moiety had its own chiefs, however (Wallace 1978:454).  Moieties sometimes owned certain foods, and feasted each other with their respective foods (Gayton 1976:84).

The Miwok seem to have reached an extreme, extending human society to the entire cosmos by classifying everything (at least everything they noticed) into either the Land or the Water Moiety; the former included mostly up-country beings, the latter not only water but also lowland creatures (Gifford 1916, summary in Kroeber 1925:455; it is worth noting that Gifford’s rather scattered and obscure studies of Miwok society are one of the more amazing achievements in the history of kinship studies, being far ahead of their time in almost every way; Gifford had a high-school education and was a true autodidact).  These had nothing to do with individuals’ spirit power animals or other less global social symbolism.

The Monache had lineages named after birds or sometimes other animals; a lineage’s namesake was called its “dog” in the sense of  “pet animal” (Spier 1978:433).  The Eagle lineage was the chiefly one; messengers (and talking leaders?) came from Roadrunner and Dove lineages.  The Yokuts used their Dove lineages for this purpose, and Magpie lineage members as criers.

Humans as Part of the Ecological System.  This phrase understates the powerful, deep and complex emotional attachments to the land.  For every Californian group, their land is home—not just their personal home but the home of their people since the time of creation (or at least of transformation into our recognizable world).  Lynn Gamble and Michael Wilken-Robertson, in a recent, particularly sensitive account of Native Californian relationships with the land (2009), describe “…a landscape that is permeated with symbolic and ritual meanings[,] that embraces mythical histories, ancestral pasts, and moral messages that overlay a landscape where economic resources, such as foods and medicines, abound. 

Related to this ideational landscape are the themes of landscape as memory and landscape as identity.  Specific places are reminders of a social past that was filled with triumphs and disasters” and other stories.  People remember “not just a boulder, but the significant events associated with the boulder” (Gamble and Wilken-Robertson 2009:148).  Every stream and hill, as well as every sizable boulder, has its stories, and even individual trees are often important landmarks.  Often the historic associations of these landmarks blend into myths and origin stories.  Other, related groups in Baja California maintain similar ties with the land, including long-lost homes on the United States side of the border, where they have kin and other social relations (Garduño 2016).

The article refers specifically to the people of the Tijuana River basin in Baja California, but it could be said with equal truth of every group in California, or for that matter the whole of the North American Pacific coast. Every ethnographer who has written much about the ideational culture of Native Californians has emphasized their extreme attachment to and concern for the land, and I can certainly attest it from my own experience there and in the Northwest Coast.  Directions—including up toward the sky and down toward the lower world—as well as places have enormous significance ritually and culturally.

The Yumans of the Colorado River drainage—close linguistic relatives of the Tijuana River people— speak of “’Coyote Law,’…the law of the land—sometimes capricious and unreasonable like Coyote himself—but nevertheless, the way things are.  [Their] tales tell about Coyote Law” (Hinton and Watahomigie 1984:6).

This train of investigation leads to two broad conclusions.  First and most important, views of the land and its resources are impassioned.  Native people are not sizing up “resources” with the cold eye of the economic planner.  They are looking at their home.  For California’s people, the whole land is not only their family home, but the home of their entire people since the beginning of time.  We may understand the latter clause as meaning “since the beginning of the group as an identifiable cultural and social entity,” but that does not diminish its psychological force.  The land is loved, but the emotional involvement is much more than that; it is a total personal involvement, the sort of interaction that Emmanuel Levinas regarded as literally infinitely important, because it makes us who and what we are (Levinas 1969).

Second, knowledge is derived from interactive practice, not from passive book-learning.  Knowing the land comes from living on it and making a living from it.  Knowledge of plants and animals comes from working with them in the field, not from a biology text.  Rural Anglo-Americans in my youth learned the same way, and contrasted it quite sharply with “book learning.”  They knew that interactive practice is far better for learning actual life skills and work skills, whatever it may cost in knowledge of grand theory.  However, their wider knowledge of the world was book-learning (or TV-learning).  For traditional Californians, all knowledge came from interactive practice.  People grew up knowing the local ecology from personal experience; they knew what the fish ate, which plants grew together, what was needed for a healthy ecosystem.  Research comparing Native and White rural folk in the northern Midwest is relevant here; even Whites who knew the outdoors as intimately as the Natives thought very differently, seeing species as separate and relatively isolated rather than part of a great web that included humans (Medin et al. 2006).

Awareness of the possibility of overpopulation—too much population pressure—is found in the story, reported for every well-studied Californian group, of Coyote or Lizard or some similar creature bringing death because the world would become too crowded if people lived forever.  Where Coyote is the death-bringer, his own child is usually the first to die, and he regrets his choice.  The Mohave shaman Nyavarup had “the small lizard” as deathbringer; the lizard says “’I wish people to die.  If they all keep on growing, there will be no room.  There will be no place to go; if we defecate, the exrement will fall on someone’s foot’”  (Kroeber 1972:6).

Mythic Construction.  Even myths and chants came not from mindless classroom memorization but from ritualized transmission around the flickering winter-season fire.  Myths could not be lightly told.  Relating them in summer could lead to rattlesnake bite, among other things.

            Mythic animals were most conspicuously predators:  Coyote, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, Falcon, Condor, and so on.  Many game animals seem to have been merely game animals even in mythic time.  Among the Wappo, Elk was a humanoid pre-animal in mythic time, but hunted deer, which were ordinary game animals (see tales in Radin 1924).  Deer are rather rarely seen as having been humanoid in mythic time (though the Karok have several Deer stories; Kroeber and Gifford 1980).  Among the Chemehuevi, Coyote and Fox hunted rats and mice (Laird 1976).  

            Southern Californian groups had long and complex origin cycles, involving creation by heroic individuals.  In the Serrano song cycle for mourning ceremonies, the first song spoke of the earth, the second chukiam, “all growing things” (Lerch 1981:11).  This refers to plants and animals, but apparently to plants above all; it included a passage about the Datura plant, ritually used as a halluncinogen in puberty rites and in medicine.  Cognate words such as chukit are known among other southern Californian Shoshonean groups.  The Serrano creator died in Big Bear Valley, which thus has an enormous variety of plants, many of them endemic.  It is interesting that “[t]he Serrano “were not only aware of the phenomenon, they had an explanation for it in their cosmology” (Lerch 1981:14). The mourners turned to pines, which still stand in ranks around the valley (due, in modern terms, to the layered rock outcrops).  The related Cahuilla have a long cycle of creation myths centering on Mukat, a human-like figure who brought agriculture among other useful plant and animal management strategies.

            By contrast, the far northwest of the state had no origin myths; the cosmos always existed.  However, creator-like beings had altered it greatly and made it suitable for humans, who appear after the time of such beings as the Karok ikxareyavs (see below).

The Yuki and Kato had something close to monotheism; their high god (Taikomol in Yuki, Nagaitcho to the Kato; Goddard 1909) was far above Coyote and his fellow creatures, though they fine-tuned the creation.  Taikomol created the universe by song and speech.  In a beautiful Kato telling of the creation story by Bill Ray in 1906, Nagaitcho and the dog he has created end by rejoicing in their world:

“My dog, come along behind me and look.”

Vegetation had grown, fish had come into the creeks.

Rocks had become large….

“Walk fast, my dog.”

The land was good.  Valleys had appeared….

Water had begun to flow.  Springs had come….

“I made the land good, my dog,

Walk fast, my dog.”

Acorns were growing, pine cones were hanging,

Tarweed seeds were ripe, chestnuts were ripe,

Hazelnuts were good, manazanita berries were getting white,…

Buckeyes were good, peppernuts were black-ripe,

Bunch grass was ripe, grasshoppers were growing,

Clover was with seed.  Bear-clover was good.  Mountains had grown.
Rocks had grown, different foods were grown.

“My dog, we made it good.”

Fish had grown that they will eat.

“Waterhead Place we have come to now.”

Different plants were ripe.  They went back, they say,

His dog with him.

“We will go back,” he said.

(Goddard 1909:9394; slightly rewritten for comprehensibility.  Nagaitcho and his dog return to the north, whence they came, and leave us this beautiful world.)

This hymn to all the wonderful foods of the north coast ranges—and indeed they are excellent eating—is only a tiny part of a very long creation story that mentions virtually every plant, animal, fish, and geological feature in Kato habitat.  It is all very reminiscent of Psalm 104, but far more richly detailed.  It also reveals something of Bill Ray’s personal narrative style, which included long chanted lists of plants, animals, and geographic features of the environment, alternating with narrative that is largely spoken and is so telegraphic as to be dreamlike.  The combination is powerful enough to make Ray one of the more distinctive and poetically gifted California myth-tellers.  Such lists are a widespread stylistic feature in myths in many languages of north-central California and elsewhere in the world (think of Hesiod’s Theogony).

The Athapaskan original takes full advantage of the exquisite beauty and potential for sound-poetry of the Athapaskan languages.  The above is rhythmical and rhymed poetry in the original, rhyming with the repeated chorus-line word kwanang (“they say”).  Note that the mountains and rocks grow; they are living things in California belief.  Like Hanc’ibeyjim’s creation story (Appendix) Ray’s is one of the greatest religious poems in world literature, and it deserves more than languishing in a forgotten monograph.  Here are the first few lines, in Kato, simplified for easier reading from Goddard’s linguistic transcription:

“E lot, shiit la, nan dal, o dut t ge ka la e kwanang,

To nai nas de le kwanang.

Sha na ta se gun cha ge kwanang

N gun sho ne kwanang.

Kakw chqal yani kakw ko winyal, e lots ul chin yani ne n gun sho ne kwanang….”

Many other groups had Earthmaker and Coyote or Wolf and Coyote as creators.  Earthmaker or Wolf was the senior, more responsible and sober one, the stereotypic elder brother.  Coyote was young and wild, everybody’s crazy kid brother.  Of course, everyone respected Earthmaker but loved Coyote.  A particularly beautiful and moving version of this story is William Benson’s Pomo version (2002, where Coyote is called by his Pomo name or alternative incarnation Marumda).  The Pomo had a range of creation stories, often conflicting, because of their diversity and the diversity of peoples around them; they were influenced by the monotheistic Yuki to the north, the Guksu Cult of the Patwin to the east, and so on (Barrett 1933).   Other fine stories are Hancibeyjim’s Maidu one (Dixon 1912; Shipley 1991; cf. below),  Laird’s Chemehuevi stories (Laird 1976, 1984), and stories from the Kiliwa (Mixco 1983) and Kawaiisu (Zigmond 1980, 1991). 

The Yuman groups had humanlike but mystical and powerful creators.  The Yuman peoples and the culturally related Chemehuevi told of these in long song cycles, that describe the courses of the creator beings as they traveled around the world—the known habitat of the people, that is—creating, transforming, teaching, and instituting practices (see e.g. Kelly 1977; Kroeber 1972; Laird 1976, 1984).  Individuals dreamed their own versions of the song cycles. 

Some Mohave song cycles are given by Kroeber (1972; see also 1925:754-770), including a Mohave version of the Salt cycle known also by the Chemehuevi.  It contains not only the origin of salt, but of tobacco, the stars, and much else.

Kroeber found the cycles rambling and uneventful, but he recorded them in his youth from elderly individuals, and he was not fluent in the language; he seems to have gotten bland and truncated versions.  (Compare, for instance, Paul Talejie’s short but brilliant creation tale in the closely related Walapai language, in Hinton and Watahomigie 1984, and Laird’s Chemehuevi renderings.)  Even Kroeber’s recordings contain some striking poetry; one cycle begins:  “At Ha’avulypo Matavilya [the original creator] had made a house out of darkness and lived there” (Kroeber 1972:44).  The cycle continues to tell of his death and burial. In the cycle of Yellak (goose?), Yellak’s end is noted by Halykupa: “I know what made Yellak die.  He became sick from the sky, the clouds, the earth, the water, and the wind….Now cry.  Cry with the sky and with the wind…” (Kroeber 1972:63).  His skin sank into the Colorado River and turned into animals.

One reason Kroeber rather wearied of these cycles is that they detail almost all important actions as having been done and repeated facing each of the four directions in sequence, and there are other stylized repetitions as well.  Another is that some of the memorialized events, complete with long songs, are nothing more than the hero seeing a badger or catching a rat (Kroeber 1925:756).  The interest in these cycles attaches to their detailing geographical points and the creation events that took place there—of sheep, deer, grapes, salt, everything—rather than to exciting stories.  California Native people have an unexcelled sense of place, and—today as in the past—can find the simple mention of familiar spots enormously moving.

With the songs, which were repeated over and over, these cycles took anywhere from a night to several weeks of nights to perform.  Some were never performed in their entirety, because, like epics everywhere, they could be lengthened out indefinitely by adding elements and repeating songs. 

Separate (or possibly, at some level, from the Yellak bird myth cycle), but part of the same general tradition of singing to create and transform, were the bird song cycles, which survive among the Yuman and neighboring Uto-Aztecan peoples; these are not only about birds, but can be about anything, and are sung for entertainment—often with slow dancing.  Bird songs were in decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but have been enthusiastically revived, and now abound, with several good recordings commercially available. 

These spirit beings transformed the world for their own reasons, but also to make it ready for humans.  This can be compared to the Australian Aboriginal beliefs in the Dreamtime, and to the most ancient stratum of Greek myths.  These latter, at least some of which go back to a very ancient stratum of belief, lie behind the “metamorphoses” that the Roman poet Ovid turned into art long after the highly-charged shamanic power had gone out of them. 

Thus at the south end of the state, the Tipay (Diegueño) taught that Chaup, the focal deity of their religion, “named and marked all animals whereby they lost their ti.pay (‘human’) nature” (Luomala 1978:604).

Thought and song created much of the world.  The very long and circumstantial Achomawi origin tales of Istet Woiche (1992) and Maidu tales of Hanc’ibyjim 1991) seem to indicate that this belief reached a peak in the northeastern corner of the state.

Calendars everywhere recognized months, and frequently named them from the subsistence activities or seasonal nature events that went with them.

California is distinctly lacking in the specifically conservationist texts so commonly recorded from the Northwest Coast and Mexico.  There are none in the above-cited major collections.  Even Zigmond, focusing on ethnobiological research, found none.  Almost nowhere are there mythic stories about animals driven away by overhunting.  One intriguing exception concerns the Patwin Hesi cycle of the Kuksu religion.  Four songs were obtained from the deer of the Marysville Buttes, back when deer were humanoid in mythic time; enemies took advantage of the deer while the latter were ceremonially sweating, and exterminated them, which is why there are no deer on the Buttes (Kroeber 1925:385-386).  This is quite a different story from the widespread  North American motif of overhunting followed by famine, but is clearly a relative with the same general perception behind it.  The Kuksu cult is associated with morals and discipline, and this myth is surely significant.  Farther afield are various myths in which evil entities wreck the environment for no special reason, and are eventually transformed into their present animal form, as for instance in the Yurok myth of the origin of the mole and Jerusalem cricket (Kroeber 1976:47-54).  These animals, in their humanoid form of mythic time, bring death as well as widespread ecological damage.  The sense that the environment has to be orderly, constant, and well-managed to be fruitful lies behind this and similar myths, and evidently served as a general sanction against damaging the environment.

Apparently universal, however, is a myth of a time when animals and fish were held by supernatural beings who would not release them.  A culture hero such as Coyote or the Yurok Pulekukwerek outwits the keepers and releases the prey them through a mix of heroism, trickery and magic. 

Masters of the game animals—almost universally recognized in the Native Americas—seem less common in California.  Supernatural beings controlling or watching over plant and animal resources are mentioned, but without much detail.  The Southern Paiute, who range into California (where they are called Chemehuevi), had this belief:  “All the deer on Kaibab Plateau were believed to be owned by a supernatural being named Qainacav.  During the hunting season (July and June, also early fall), his name must not be mentioned, or else the luck of the whole hunting season would be spoiled.”  Hunters sometimes encountered him in human or deer form, but seeing him meant no luck that day.  Anyone who offended him would be lured off by deer tracks that eventually disappeared (Sapir 1992:829, from notes made around 1910), one way of explaining one’s inability to follow a trackway.

Few myths that I can find give specific directions or charters for the plant and animal management that we know was so universal (although some myths mention it in passing).  Quite the contrary; animals in their mythic humanoid forms go hunting and collecting quite at will, killing enormous numbers of game animals and gathering all the seeds they want.  The wishful dreams of the storytellers are evident, but conservation teachings are not evident at all.  The myths are extremely well supplied with moral teachings, but the morals are social.  Tales show the awful results of condemning ungenerousness, vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, violence, sexual sins, ignoring good advice, and trying to imitate others mindlessly, but not the awful results of mismanaging resources.  The stories are set the times before human people, and thus I suspect they date back to a time so ancient that the people were still few, with simple technology, when they could take without a second thought.  The Northwest Coast conservation stories seem usually to concern real people, albeit in long-ago times.

One exception is in an astonishing Wappo text, “The Chicken-Hawk Cycle,” recorded by Paul Radin from Jim Tripo (Radin 1924:87-147).  This is one of the most impressive and striking mythic texts ever recorded in California, and deserves better than to languish obscure in a forgotten volume.  Tripo spins it out to 60 pages; more typical is a Karok version of the same story that manages only two pages (Kroeber and Gifford 1980:250-252.)  Much of the plot turns on the anger of Moon, a captious old man, at the Hawk chief and his son harvesting pine cones by breaking off the branches of Moon’s pine trees.  Moon is not portrayed in a sympathetic light, but it is clear that such a damaging way of getting pine nuts was genuinely bad by Wappo standards. 

            Education of the young came through these myths, through specific instruction, through reprimand, but above all through interaction with the world, guided to varying degrees by elders and peers (see Margolin 2005 for a fine summary of Native Californian education).  Autobiographies recount dramatic experiences—accidents, vision quests, special hunting accounts, personal crises—that were interpreted, usually briefly but in extremely telling words, by elders.  Apparently this was a canonical way of learning, along with myths and initiation rites.  The long and complex initiation rites of such groups as the Luiseno involved detailed explanations of cosmology and of human life, including life crisis ritualization.  Other rites of passage, such as marriages and funerals, provided opportunities for songs, stories, and speeches that provided a great deal of instruction.  Finally, chiefs at dawn often harangued their communities on the need to be up and working.  Overall, there was a great deal of education, much of it quite formalized:  winter myth cycles, sings, initiations, funeral orations, and many more occasions. 

Religion, Cosmology, and Spiritual Concerns

A whole cosmology based on interactive practice and intense emotional involvement is bound to be quite different from one based on books, deductive logic, and laboratory experiments.  For one thing, it is hard to avoid personalizing the land—seeing the rocks, plants, and animals as people.  Even modern Anglo-Americans name their cars, talk to their dogs, and cherish their plants. 

Thousands of years of such interaction, in a world without labs and mass media, will inevitably make the nonhuman world more personal.  The nonhuman beings are “other-than-human persons.”  They have will and intellect, but not like ours; they plan and communicate, but we have to know how to hear them.  They have supernatural power to transmit.  

            The Californians shared the almost universal Native American belief in a prior cosmos, ruled by animal powers, that changed dramatically to make our present cosmic order.  The earlier beings included Coyote, Quail, Wildcat, and other beings.  There seems to be a vague tendency for interior and mountain groups to have more strictly animal powers in mythic time.  At least, the mythic-time people of the Yurok and the larger southern California tribes were very often humanoid, especially the main characters.  The large, rich tribes of the Delta and Bay Area are not well enough known for many conclusions.

Widely, however, especially in central California, an apparently human-like high god or pair of gods was the chief agent.  The Wiyot were the northwest pole of this belief; the Yurok, distantly related in language, lacked it (Kroeber 1925:119).  The Maidu, Wintu and their neighbors had a high creator or Earthmaker/Earthnamer.  Some (or all) Pomo groups had a similar high god.  Everywhere, he was very often assisted by Coyote, who royally messed up the process (see e.g. Hanc’ibyjim in Shipley 1991).  Similar pairings in southern California include Wolf and Coyote or Southern Fox and Coyote (Laird 1976, 1984).

            What Walter Goldschmidt said of the Nomlaki would apply equally well to all California Native peoples:  “To the Nomlaki, the world of reality and the world of the supernatural were inseparable, so that even the most practical undertaking was circumscribed by elaborate ritual inspired by the religious ideas with which the act was invested….  The Nomlaki world was animistic.  ‘Everything in this world talks, just as we are now,’” one Nomlaki man told him (Goldschmidt 1978:345).  There was, in fact, no concept of “reality” or of “supernatural”; there was simply the cosmos, with a gradient from clearly visible and tangible beings to invisible and intangible ones, and with a gradient from animals that were just animals to the mythic human-like animals of prehuman times.

Goddard, missionary turned ethnographer, was deeply struck by the religious nature of the Hupa, and sardonically remarked that “this undercurrent of deep religious feeling makes the life and deeds of the Indian seem…strange to the white man” (Goddard 1903:88).  Similar comments (if without the depreciative aside about Anglo-Americans!) could be made about all California Native people.  Religion was deeply felt and important in all aspects of life.  This was closely connected with plant and animal interactions.  Like their neighbors, they had a first salmon ceremony in the spring and a first acorns ceremony in the fall, as well as a first-lamprey (“eel”) ceremony (Goddard 1903).  (The related Lassik had a bulbous-plant ceremony; Elsasser 1978.)  All this involved stressing the importance of maintaining the resource; the ceremony was intended to keep the salmon and acorns coming, probably by showing proper respect and entertainment.  I strongly suspect that conservation lessons were once part of the rituals. 

Thomas Buckley discusses the importance of the spirit world, of doctoring power, and of “wealth” objects (actually ritual objects), among the Yurok, as Goddard does for the Hupa.  Of the wealth objects, Buckley says that “[d]ance regalia are not objects but ‘people,’ sentient beings (like deer) that have wewecek’, ‘spirit’ or ‘life,’ and that ‘cry to dance.’  As people, their ‘prupose in life’ is to get out of the baskets and boxes in which they’re stored and dance to ‘fix the world…’ (Buckley 2002:175).  They sometimes ask their owners to be loaned out so they can be danced at a ceremony in a neighboring community. 

Buckley, like the Karok anthropologist Julian Lang (1994), faults A. L. Kroeber for holding that the Yurok were obsessed with material wealth per se.  Kroeber was not entirely unaware that wealth objects (dentalia shells, obsidian blades, white deerskins, woodpecker scalps, and so on) were spiritual things and tokens of spiritual power.  He recorded many stories in which they are personified and spiritualized (Kroeber 1976, e.g. 200-204; cf. Kroeber 1925:40-42).  However, these objects, the dentalium shells in particular, were used as regular money too, for ordinary purchases and bargains. 

Kroeber was writing at a time when materialism, Marxian and otherwise, was dominant in American social science.  Not only Kroeber himself, but his main Yurok coworker, Robert Spott, seem rather matter-of-fact and materialist in their narratives (Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Euro-American readers might recall the Renaissance associations of gold:  money and material wealth, but also a spiritual and magical substance.  Interesting is one rather barbed comment that Kroeber recorded from Dick of Wohkero.  To a myth about Earthquake, who is personified among the Yurok, Dick added that “[n]ow Earthquake is angry because the Americans have bought up Indian treasures and formulas and taken them away to San Francisco to keep.  He knew that, so he tore the ground up there (referring to the earthquake of the year before, in 1906)” (Kroeber 1976:418).

Unsurprisingly, religion was thoroughly embedded in the natural world, and ceremonies continually constructed and reinforced ties with nature.  The Chumash had a particularly complex and arcane cosmology, paralleling their complex socioreligious organization (Hudson et al. 1977).

The dances of the Kuksu religion of central California included duck, grizzly, deer, coyote, goose, grasshopper, turtle,condor, and other dances based on animals; presumably the dances invoked them and imitated their motions.  These were not mere dances, but entire ceremonies centered on dancing (Kroeber 1925:378-380).  These ceremonies were “thought to bring rains, nourish the earth, and produce a bountiful natural crop; perhaps also to ward off epidemcis, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters…” as well as producing “an abundance of bulbs and greens, and…acorns…” as well as game (Kroeber 1925:383-384).  I take it this means that the dances were essential to co-create the natural community as well as the human one; human society being extended to include wild animals and plants, it is natural that human community-building rituals would impact the other-than-human community members favorably as well. Kroeber notes the significant lack of dances for critically important animals like fish and rabbits; there was no one-to-one mapping.  Of course it is possible that such dances existed but were lost before ethnography began.

Of course the agricultural tribes of the southeast part of the state had agricultural ceremonies, like most farming peoples of the world.  Yet, as with the Cocopa (see above), these seem not to have been elaborated as fertility or harvest ceremonies. 

Girls and boys coming of age went through initiation rituals, sometimes involving hallucinogenic plants that produced visions interpreted as spirit communications.  These initiation rites seem to have been among the most important ceremonies of the Native peoples.  Many smaller groups had no other major ceremonies, leaving initiation rites as the most important part of their religion (cf. Kroeber 1925, e.g. p. 428; the Yurok, alone among major groups, had no girls’ rites and apparently no true male rites either).  This is particularly true in the south (north through the Yokuts lands), where the use of toloache (Datura spp.) as a hallucinogenic drink made another link with the plant world.  The Luiseño youths acquired animal guardian spirits while under its influence, and did not subsequently kill the animal received (Kroeber 1925:670).  Toloache was widely used medicinally as well (see e.g. Librado 1979, esp. pp. 68-72).

Widely, across the state, puberty rites were the occasion for telling the longest, most detailed, most sacred myths and group histories.  This was when people really learned their culture in its depth.  All accounts agree that detailed and extensive teachings were  part of this, but no accounts give us much detail on the contents of the teachings, primarily because the rites vanished or went underground quite early.  (Constance Du Bois found some among the Luiseño.)  One suspects that ecological and conservation teachings were a major part of this initiation, but we will never know.

At the other end of the life cycle, groups in southern and central California burned the possessions of the dead, and then in memorial ceremonies burned large quantities of their own goods.  This prevented a buildup of material wealth, and indirectly served to eliminate the possibility of accumulating wealth for status display.  This seems to have mattered little, however, since the northwestern groups that did accumulate wealth for (spiritual) status did no notable damage to the environment thereby.

            There were several major religious cults or general ceremonial complexes in the state, each one confined to a few neighboring groups, possibly because of the difficulties of translation into the many different languages of the state.  The Northwest group of Yurok, Wiyot, Karok and Hupa (and to a lesser extent their hill neighbors) shared a focus on fish ceremonials, world renewal dances and ceremonies, the white deerskin dance, and other dances displaying ancient prized items of spiritual power.  The center of the state was dominated by the Kuksu and related cults, centering on the Patwin, Wappo, and Pomo groups.  The spectacular rock art of the Chumash and Yokuts (and probably the Gabrielino and other Shoshoneans, though evidence is mostly lost) indicates another religious area.  The bird songs of the lower Colorado and the Chinigchinich cult of the Luiseno and their neighbors also involved two or three major linguistic groupings each (counting the river Yumans as basically one group).  Finally, the rock art of the inner deserts, focusing on mountain sheep in many sites, is distinctive. 

            By contrast, more general folklore, as well as material culture, spread widely; it could be shared by anyone within hundreds of miles.  Folktales gradually transform, with north and south being quite different.  Language was not much of a barrier, and of course hardly a barrier at all to the spread and copying of material items.

Central to religion was spiritual ability and efficacy.  I have noted above the tendency of anthropologists to use the word “power” for what Native people generally call “knowledge.”  One could use the phrase “power/knowledge” if it had not been preempted by Foucault for a very different idea.

A model developed especially with the Luiseño concept of ayelkwi, but valid rather widely (especially for groups in the south coast, of course), lists four characteristics:  “Power is sentient and the principal causative agent in the universe”; it is found in the upper, middle, and lower worlds and “possessed by anything having ‘life,’” which can include rocks and tools as well as biota; it is in some degree of equilibrium in the cosmos; and man is a central figure in power networks (Bean 1992:22, citing and partly following White 1963).  One might qualify this for other parts of the state primarily in regard to clause 4; in some places (including central California, if I read the myths aright), humans are definitely less central than some supernatural beings, and probably some of the larger natural ones too.  Power is totally bound up in geography, with dramatic rocks, peaks, mountains, waterfalls, and other striking landmarks being major “power places.” 

People got power from vision questing in the wilderness.  They would undergo strong physical discipline:  enduring cold and heat, bathing in freezing waters, living with little or no food and water, and so on.  (The classic account of vision questing, Ruth Benedict [1923], refers to the Plateau area just north of California; her account is broadly valid for the latter place.)  The Achomawi preserved this knowledge later than most and were more willing to share it, so the map of their power spots provided by D. L. Olmstedt and Omer Stewart (1978:226) is exceptionally valuable.  Famous rock art sites are often power places.  (Places I know personally, but that are unpublished, shall remain unidentified!)  

  Most of the spots are dramatic peaks, but some are canyons, lakes, and large springs.  Power is largely a spiritual essence that allows beings (including humans—to the degree they have learned it) to control and create.  It is typically exercised through song.  Shamans cure by singing just as the creator beings shaped the world by singing.  However, actual physical and mental ability to do things is an expression of power, so it is not entirely “supernatural” by European standards.  It is learned through conventional training as well as through visions and dreams.  Knowledge of how to manage natural resources is a key part of power.

As noted previously, California Native peoples sought visions, usually in arduous vision quests, at puberty, in the wilderness.  This was another religious mechanism binding Californians to their landscape.  Apparently some groups, at least the Coast Central Pomo (Loeb 1926:320), did not have the vision quest.  Indeed, Loeb notes that the Pomo in general lacked a belief in guardian spirits, otherwise the goal of vision quests among most California (and indeed most North American) peoples.  They did have shamans and shamanic healers, however, and must have done something to get that power.  However, the Pomo and Native people everywhere dreamed of animals, daydreamed about animals, and interpreted their dreamings as important.

 Shamans operate by controlling power; but, again, in the center and north, they operate more by controlling specific “pains” that they own.  To be shamans or other religious officiants they had to have visions giving medicine power.  (Strictly speaking, the term “shaman” applies to healers of the ancient societies of Siberia, and it might be better to call the Californian healers “medicine persons,” but “shaman” is established in the literature and fairly well justified by the similarity of beliefs and practices to Siberian ones.  See Bean [ed.] 1992.)

The culturally and technologically simpler groups had vision-questing shamans and no other religious practitioners, but the complex chiefdoms had whole ranges of religious officiants.  These including true priests: officiants of organized religious cults (as opposed to shamans, who are independent individuals with special healing and visionary powers).  The Kuksu cult complex of central California had a priesthood (Loeb 1926:320), which presumably led to the decline or disappearance of vision questing among the Coast Central Pomo.  The Chumash of southwestern California had a whole range of shamans and priests with specialized functions, ranging from weather control to fishing to canoe safety (Bean and King 1974; Gamble 2008).  

Californians feared shamans and wizards with transforming and poisoning powers.  They acquired special visions of their familiar spirits.  These were often animal powers, but could be other natural or supernatural beings.  Different animals gave different powers, often related to the animal’s traits; rattlesnake power often involved the ability to cure rattlesnake bites, for instance.  These beliefs closely resemble shamanistic beliefs elsewhere, from eastern North America to Siberia.

A particularly important problem was “bear doctors,” men who had bear power knew the magic for transforming themselves into grizzlies at will.  These were known and feared all over the state, from the Hupa to the Chemehuevi (Burrill 1993; Laird 1976:38).  Real grizzlies usually prefer to leave humans alone, but bear doctors transform themselves in order to do harm.  One remembers the bear transformation stories in the Old World, from the berserk (“bear shirt”) men of ancient Scandinavia and the Celtic Arthur (“bear man,” “were-bear”) to the Ainu bear cult with its divinization of bears.  People could sometimes transform into other kinds of animals, and animals and spirits could become or appear to be people; of course the animals in the time before people came were humanoid to varying degrees.  Related Old World figures are the werewolf, were-tiger, and leopard-man.  All come from a stratum of thought that is most famously seen in Siberian shamanism but is far more widespread.  Animal transformations are central to this cosmology. 

Other supernatural and ghostly transformations are known.  People with supernatural powers can invoke and control this shape-shifting.  So can many animals.  The raccoon dog (tanuki, often mistranslated “badger”) is a shape-shifter in Japan, and some tanuki stories are related to Californian Coyote tales.  The trickery of the fox is proverbial throughout Eurasia.  Modern Europeans have lost the transformation tales, but foxes in east Asia routinely turn into beautiful women to beguile men.

Common all over the state, but especially in the dry southeast, were weather shamans who could bring rain and snow.  Some songs for this purpose have been recorded, and a rain shaman’s bundle has been almost miraculously preserved and studied (Fenenga et al. 2012; Hopkins et al. 2012).  It came from the Tübatulabal of the Kern River valley, but incorporated many items, especially steatite smoking pipes, from the Chumash.  These are known to have been used by the coastal tribes to blow smoke clouds that invited rain clouds by a form of sympathetic magic.  Sometimes water was thrown into the air, during ceremonies, for similar reasons.  The bundle was used in ceremonies along with detailed chants that were guaranteed to bring rain (if properly carried out, of course).  Shamans had to know how to stop rain, to prevent large rains they invoked from causing floods.  There were many adept weather shamans among the Tübatulabal and their neighbors until quite recently.  The use of a magic bundle, incorporating a collection of sacred stones and other items, is very widespread in North America (see esp. Wildschut 1975 on Crow bundles; one Crow doctor, showing some small stones with some gravel near them, said—with a twinkle in his eye—that the rocks in the bundle had mated and had a litter).

Other “Indian doctors” could send pains into people.  These were often pebbles, small snakes, or other physical objects.  A “sucking doctor” would be called to suck this pain out.  He (rarely she) would suck on the belly or chest of the patient, sometimes hard enough to draw blood (assumed to be posioned).  Often he would produce the stone or small animal.  I have encountered this practice among the Maya as well; my old friend Don José Cauich Canul sucked a live scorpion from the little niece of my field assistant Don Felix Medina Tzuc.  I did not see this, but Don Felix described it.  He was duly impressed.  Don José has taught me something of his craft, including his use of sleight-of-hand, so I know where the centipede really came from.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]) has pointed out that this sort of deception is typically done by doctors who believe that the old-timers really had such powers, but modern ones have less power and must imitate the old-timers as best they can.  This seems to fit California and Maya cases.

            Arts represented interaction with the nonhuman realm. Among the Yokuts, people wore crowns of flowers during spring (Gayton 1976:83).  

Much of the art were clearly associated with shamanism; more is inferentially so.  The spectacular rock art of southern and Baja California—some of the most outstanding in the world—is highly abstract, and also features strange and unearthly creatures.  Most viewers of the art, from anthropologists to artists, feel that shamanism and vision states must be involved.  (Some reviews include Campbell 2007; Grant 1965; Whitley 2000, notably speculative; and for Baja California, Crosby 1997, a more ambitious work than anything devoted to Alta California.  See also Jean Clottes’ stunning book Cave Art, 2008, which deals with the paleolithic art of Europe but presents California material for comparison on pp. 300-303.)  Other, more unassuming or crude pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly mere “Kilroy was here” markers, or at best markers of local descent-group territory.  Unfortunately, we do not have the keys (though see Spoon et al. 2014a, 2014b—the Nevada Paiute still know something).  The shamans are gone. 

There are a few recorded explanations, most of which refer not to shamanic visions but to puberty rites.  Often, puberty rites involved explanations of the cosmos using pictorial but abstract symbols, and sometimes the initiates were supposed to draw geometric designs of their own.  The Luiseno girls’ puberty rite, for instance, involved drawing red checkerboard, diamond, or maze patterns on rocks, and many of these survived in my younger days in the Riverside area.  Unfortunately most have faded now. 

Otherwise, outside of fairly obvious representations of animals, we have little identifiable rock art.  Earlier theories of hunting magic have gone by the wayside.  Besides the known cases just noted, other rock art sites are very often astronomically aligned—in canyons down which the equinoctial sunrise strikes, for instance—or are on remote and spectacular rock outcrops or in caves, rather than along game trails or near water holes or the like.  It is very possible that a general relationship with the cosmos was intended and good luck in hunting was one perceived consequence.  However, the focus remains on that general relationship, not on a specific pragmatic application.

An excellent analysis of a mountain sheep shrine, by Robert Yohe and Alan Garfinkel (2012), summarizes all that is known of mountain sheep ceremonies, rock art, and hunting lore from southeast California.  Clearly, mountain sheep were important game animals, and a huge and complex body of lore surrounded them.  (They were once extremely abundant; their rarity today is due to introduced sheep diseases as well as overhunting and habitat destruction.)  The content of ritual is lost to us, but at least there are still large amounts of art and religious construction to analyze.

Songs were basic to activities and teachings.  They gave and expressed power, and had power themselves.  A good explanation was given by a California basketmaker, Mrs. Mattz.  Richard West reports that she

            “…was hired to teach basket making at a local university.  After three weeks, her students complained that all they had done was sing songs…. Mrs. Mattz, taken aback, replied that the were learning to make baskets.  She explained that the process starts with songs that are sung so as not to insult the plants when the materials for the baskets are picked.  So her students learned the songs….. Upon their return to the classroom, however, the students again were dismayed when Mrs. Mattz began to teach them yet more songs.  This time she wanted them to learn the songs that must be sung as yo soften the materials in your mouth before you start to weave….  The students protested…. Mrs. Mattz…patiently explained the obvious to them: “You’re missing the point,” she said, “a basket is a song made visible.”  (Quoted Wilkinson 2010:382). 

Appendix

            To give the flavor of Californian religious narrative, let us consider the beginning of the creation myth told by Hanc’ibyjim (Tom Young) to Roland Dixon in 1902-03 (Dixon 1912).  This myth was partially retranslated and massively rewritten by William Shipley (1991).  I will do still another rewrite, though I do not know the Maidu language and have to rely on Dixon and Shipley.

            Neither of the translators refers to the incredible chantlike prosody of the narrative, which comes across even to a non-Maidu-speaker like me.  It is worth setting some of this up in poetic form.  Hanc’ibyjim uses the obligatory marker of speech, –tsoia (“it is said”), as a chorus, its sharp sound contrasting with the beautiful flow of the narrative, full of “a” and “m” sounds.  Simply enjoy the sounds before reading the meaning.  (Most letters are pronounced as in Spanish, umlaut vowels as in German.  The apostrophe marks the accented syllable [not a glottal stop].)

Kō’doyapen kan ūniñ’ ko’do momim’ opit’mőni hintsetō’yetsoiam.

Hin’tstetoyewē’bisim hōmōñ’ jidiu; dunaat yj;tun jawun;naat tsemen’tsoia.

Tsai’tsainom mai’dűm hesī’kimaat hesim’maat kai’noyemen’tsoia.

Amőn’ikan ūniñ’ ka’dom tsewu’suktipem ka’dom yőtson’otsoia.

Epin’iñkoyōdi kō’do tsehe’hetsonopem yak’hubőktsoia.

Adōñ’kan wasā’ hubőktsoia.  (Dixon 1912:4.)

Literally, the first two lines means “Earth-Maker and this world water full-when drifted about, it is said.  Kept drifting about where world-in indeed little earth indeed saw-not, it is said.”

            Translating the first part of the story (and leaving out the endless repetition of “it is said,” so effective in Maidu, so monotonous in English):

Earthmaker, when this world was covered with water, drifted.

He kept drifting; he saw nothing, not even a bit of earth.

He saw no creatures of any kind, nothing flying.

He went on and on, over the unseen earth.

The world seemed transparent, like the Valley Above in the sky.

He felt sad.

“How, I wonder—how, I wonder—where, I wonder, in what world or place, can we see the earth?”  he said.  (After Dixon 1912:4 and Shipley 1991:18.)

[Coyote then appears, and he and Earthmaker discuss creating the world.  Earthmaker sings:]

Where are you, my great mountains, my world mountains?

            [Coyote sings:]

Where are you, my foggy mountains, my world I could travel?

            [A tiny piece of land like a bird’s nest then appears, and the two succeed in stretching it to make a world.  Meadowlark joins them, and Coyote goes on:]

My world, where I can go along the edge of the meadow,

My world, where I can travel side to side, wander all ways,

My world of mountains beyond mountains,

I call, singing, to my traveling-world,

In such a world shall I wander.

            [There is some conference among the three, about how to paint the world, and Coyote continues:]

I will paint it with blood,

There will be blood in the world,

Creatures with blood will be born,

Animals with blood will be born,

Deer and other animals,

People shall be born,

Nothing will be missing, all those with blood will be born.

Red rocks will come into being,

The world will seem painted with blood,

It will be beautiful.  (After Dixon 1912:5-10 and Shipley 1991:19-22.)

Coyote…stretched out the land with his feet.

‘Pushing it out, little by little,

He stretched it out to where the usn rises—

Foirst, he stretched it out to there.

Then, to the south, and to where the sun sets,

He stretched it out, little by little.  (Shipley 1991:22.)

            Creation continues, in an epic poem filled with intense images like those above.  This story is as beautiful and powerful as Genesis and one of the great religious poems of the world, yet it remains unknown, and neither Dixon’s nor Shipley’s translations do it justice (judging from analysis of Dixon’s line-by-line translation).  We need a Maidu to do a real translation that can bring out the full meanings and keep the power of the language.

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d Animals

Work in progress; please do not cite without permission.

This is intended to be one part of a book that will also include a section on the Pacific Northwest, thus covering the Pacific coast of North America from the Mexican border (or just south of it) to southern Alaska.  The book is on traditional plant and animal management and ideology.  It draws heavily on myths and texts, especially early recordings from the days when texts were important to anthropology (sadly no longer true—though some stalwart souls are still recording them).  I am interfacing biology with culture, using phenomenology and ethnobiology as the main ways into the latter. 

Unfortunately, events are making it impossible to work on the book.  The California section is substantially finished, though I am updating it as new materials appear.  These now are largely supportive of the basic points, so the time has come to post this work on my website for anyone to use. 

“…we are constantly walking on herbs, the virtues of which no one knows.”  -Pastor, Chujmas elder, as quoted by Fernando Librado Kitsepawit, Ventureño Chumash (Librado 1979:56; cf. Blackburn 1975:258)

Californian Environments

            The Pacific Coast of North America, in pre-European times, had the distinction of supporting large, populous, highly complex societies that lived by hunting and gathering and that almost totally lacked agriculture.  Many groups along the immediate coast and major rivers were not only larger and more differentiated than most hunter-gatherer cultures, but more so than many horticultural societies around the world.  (On California Native environments, see Jones and Klar 2007; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.)

            The reason has traditionally been considered “the rich environment,” but actually the environment is not incredibly rich.  The Northwest Coast has huge salmon resources, but to balance this out it has millions of acres of dense evergreen forest with almost nothing for humans to eat.  California and the interior regions have rich seed resources and appreciable game, but are dry at best, and are subject to frequent prolonged droughts that make finding food a desperate proposition.  Irrigated agriculture on a large scale has made these dry areas productive, but without that they can be quite barren.

            It is not surprising, then, to learn from archaeology that complex societies did not exist until around 3,000 years ago (give or take a millennium).  What is surprising is the rise of such societies—a phenomenon still unexplained.  Before even attempting explanation, we need to understand the complexity.

            Let us, then, look at how such societies maintained themselves. 

            For convenience, I will make the arbitrary decision to divide these two regions by the California state line.  Groups split by the line will be considered to lie in the state where their major population once dwelt (except for the Modoc, who belong properly to the Plateau region, and are poorly known because of the genocidal “Modoc War”).  The decision is slightly less arbitrary than it looks.  In spite of often being classified as “Northwest Coast,” the Karok, Yurok, and Athapaskan groups of northwest California are politically, mythologically, and socially rather typical Californians, and lived by a Californian economy depending heavily on acorns. 

            This distinction gives us a Californian region whose economy was based on management of varied seed and nut resouces.  The northwest part of the state depended largely on fish, with seed and root foods important.  The Central Valley and other regions living near rivers and lakes had a similar economy, with perhaps relatively more seeds and nuts.  The Plateau region of traditional anthropology begins from the Cascade Range crest and extends eastward to the Rockies, and is defined in terms of human ecology by the intensive focus on wild root, corm and bulb foods, which are cultivated and stored(see e.g. Hunn 1991; Turner et al 1990).  The Plateau economy grades into the Californian economy in the northeast corner of the state, where the Achomawi and Atsugewi lived on fish, acorns, seeds, and root crops (Garth 1978; Olmsted and Stewart 1978).  Most of the rest of California depended largely on acorns, and to a lesser extent other nuts, with seed and root crops important.  The thinly-occupied deserts had few acorns, and life here depended on a wide range of plant foods; pinyon nuts were locally common and important.  I will not be dealing with the Great Basin or Baja California, except that far northern Baja California is linguistically and culturally a part of Native California by all standards, and will be included. 

            I shall, however, include the southeastern groups in California, which depended to a great extent on agriculture rather than, or along with, wild seed management.  As usual, culture areas grade into each other; agriculture supplied about half or less of the food of the Mohave and Quechan along the Colorado on the state line, and only a small percentage of the food of the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla.  Montane and coastal Kumeyaay probably did not practice it at all.  By contrast, agriculture supplied most of the food of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) in south Arizona, and most other culturally Southwestern groups.

            Classic ethnographic California thus focuses on the Mediterranean and montane parts of the state.  Most of the large, complex cultures developed in the former.  In spite of being called “Mediterranean,” California is not much like the Mediterranean Sea region.  The Mediterranean is landlocked and sun-warmed—a downright hot-tub.  This keeps its bordering countries warm in winter, and hot and often rainy in summer.  California’s coast is chilled by the California Current, a vast river of ocean water flowing down from Vancouver Island at a temperature around 55 F.  This creates such extreme conditions that the diving seabirds of Baja California are arctic forms (auklets, murrelets, and subarctic cormorants), while the soaring ones are tropical (terns, frigatebirds).  Thus coastal California is always cool and pleasant, but is quite dry.  More important to Native peoples, the California current and related upwelling produces fantastic biological productivity in coastal waters, and keeps the land cool and moist, permitting great productivity there too.  (Morocco’s Atlantic coast is similar, but the Mediterranean Sea shores are not.)

            This cold ocean keeps even southern California’s mountains pleasant and forested.  At elevations equivalent to California’s giant sequoia belt, Turkey’s mountains have thin woods, and reach a timberline around 8000 feet.  This low line is set not by cold but by drought due to Saharan and Arabian winds. 

            Conversely, much of the Mediterranean is exposed to winter storms and summer rains from farther north.  I have been caught in a major winter snowstorm on the Riviera (but, then, I have seen snow down to 1000’ in southern California) and subjected to days of rain in August in Rome.  California is walled off by mountains from the full force of northern and eastern winds.  The exception is southern California, where major passes allow such winds to roar down as the dreaded “santanas,” named because they pour down the Santa Ana River and other canyonways.  A desert wind, it combines the violence of the mistral with the heat of the scirocco.

            California ranges from warm to hot in summer, cool to cold in winter.  Rains varied (before recent climate change) from 130” a year in the far northwest mountains to 2” or less in the lowest valleys of the eastern deserts.   Such “average” figures mask incredible variation.  El Centro, on the Mexican border in southeastern California, averages 2” a year.  In the middle 1970s it made its average perfectly:  there was essentially no rain for six years, and then in August of 1976 a west Mexican chubasco (hurricane) dropped 12” in one day. 

Northern California has its own variety.  In February 1964, I saw the Sacramento River running more than ten miles wide.  A bridge about 100’ above the normal level of the Eel River was washed out.  Yet in summer 2009 the Sacramento was far below its usual banks and the Eel was almost totally dry, and in 2015 the rivers were still lower.  Within my years in Riverside, yearly rainfall has fluctuated by an order of magnitude (2” to over 20”), and the deserts eastward varied even more than that.  Such conditions would stress anyone, and they certainly proved difficult for hunting-gathering peoples.

Throughout California there is an alternation of El Niño conditions with drier years.  El Niño is caused by warm water in the east Pacific, and brings heavy winter rains.  They start just after the winter solstice, and thus around Christmas—hence the name (originated in Peru), which refers to the baby Jesus.  El Niños came every 5-7 years in the late 20^th century, but before and since that time they were less frequent.  They provide about twice as much rain as normal years.  In the normal years, the warm-water pool of the Pacific is around Indonesia, bringing the rain to that country and to Australia instead of to the American coasts.  Recently, a tendency has arisen to refer to particularly cool and dry conditions in California as “La Niña” years, as if Jesus had a long-lost sister!  All, in turn, is part of the vast global El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system.

            Globally warm periods, like the Medieval Warm Period and the present, are hot and dry in California.  Globally cool periods like the Pleistocene and the Little Ice Age are generally wet, but California suffered some searing droughts at the height of the Little Ice Age, which was globally dry (Gamble 2008).

            Today, global warming, partly natural and partly due to human release of greenhouse gases, is drying and heating California.  Vegetation is dying, and animal life with it.  Drastic reduction of both natural vegetation and agriculture is now in progress, and the future is bleak.  California has taken a world lead in combatting global warming, but without national and world support, all efforts will have little effect.  Political activity funded and driven by oil and coal companies have checkmated all attempts to slow—let alone stop—the warming process.  Unless greenhouse gas release is controlled, California could easily become a lifeless desert, like the central Sahara, within a few centuries. 

The Chumash saw it all as a gambling game.  All year, Coyote (with his allies) gambles with the Sun (with his).  On the winter solstice, the Moon judges the game.  If Coyote has won, the winter will be rainy and there will be much food.  If the Sun wins, winter conditions all too familiar to southern Californians will ensue:  the sun will beat down, day after day, from a brazen sky, and no food will grow (Blackburn 1975).  In the Santa Barbara County mountains, there is a cave where the Chumash bored a hole through solid rock.  The rising sun on the winter solstice morning strikes straight through the hole and illuminates a painting of a coyote on the cave wall.  One can easily guess what magic was tried there.  Alas, modern science cannot do much better than the ancient Chumash at predicting, and no better at controlling.

Biotic California

            The Californian region of the biologists is Mediterranean California.  It includes several formations:  chaparral (dense brushlands), scrub formations of many types, montane and lowland forests, Mediterranean steppe and grassland, winter-rain deserts, and the rainy, wooded northwest part of the state (Barbour et al. 2007).   Over 8000 native species of plants occur.  In spite of claims for extreme diversity (e.g. Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), this is less than comparable Mediterranean-climate zones of the world in Turkey and South Africa, and far less than many dry-tropical areas.  Still, it is diverse enough to provide tremendous variety and opportunity for hunters and gatherers. 

            Any account of the state will describe these plant associations.  However, earlier accounts exaggerate the extent of grassland.  Contrary to earlier assessments, it is now clear that the vast flat lowland valleys of California were usually covered by sparse scrub and annual wildflowers, not bunchgrass (Minnich 2008).  One can still see this in the few areas of the Central Valley that are not cultivated.  The wildflowers were thick and tall near the coast, but inland they would wither away to very little, leaving the ground sparsely covered, or, in such desert plains as the Antelope Valley and southern Central Valley, absolutely bare.  This was especially true where salt was concentrated by deposition in closed drainage basins (as can be seen in several areas today, e.g. the salt lake in Carrizo Plain).   

Anna Gayton (1948) was perceptive enough to notice these facts in early accounts, and realize what it meant for the Yokuts who lived there:  they could not find game, or even water, in the vast burning flats, and had to live near rivers and lakes.  These, at contact (following the wet centuries of the Little Ice Age), were very extensive; there was a vast chain of marshy lakes in the San Joaquin Valley that supported enormous fish and water plant resources (Latta 1977).  I can barely imagine this, being able to recall the last bits of marsh and lake, still visible in the 1950s.  Today, it is difficult to imagine the drought-starved plowed fields having been, only recently, huge marshy lakes teeming with fish, ducks, geese, turtles, frogs, tule elk, and every sort of water plant and insect.

The deserts also were covered with scattered bushes and, in wet springs, annual wildflowers.  The current cover of grass that dominates most of lowland California is made up of introduced Mediterranean weeds, which have outcompeted native plants (Minnich 2008), even replacing chaparral and woodland after hot fires.  The state looks very different today from its aboriginal appearance.  Even in the wildest parts of the western United States, enormous deterioration in the environment was occurring by the 1870s.  One of J. W. Powell’s workmen—a semiliterate frontiersman who cannot be accused of romantic environmentalism—wrote to Powell in 1880, describing southern Utah: “The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out [sic] by stock” (Powell 1971:47). 

Animal life was equally rich.  The vast herds of deer and elk reported by explorers probably involved recovery from heavy hunting by Native Californians and heavy predation by bears, but there were evidently always many cervids.  Moutain sheep, including the desert bighorn, were evidently abundant before diseeases introduced by domestic sheep virtually exterminated them (they survive today partly because Fish and Game workers patiently catch and inocuate them).  Fish choked the rivers.  Salmon and steelhead were particularly prominent. Fall, winter, and spring runs of salmon stayed in the rivers for months until spawning time; they had to run when the streams had enough cool water, making summer runs impossible.  Steelhead (sea-running rainbow trout) still occur in many rivers, but in small numbers.  The salmon runs are disappearing fast, except in the Klamath, where Native Californians have fought desperately to keep the runs alive.  Even there, the outlook is cloudy.  Trout have done much better, thanks in large measure to stocking, and to vigilant monitoring by fishers.   Other fish, including the native warm-water fish of the Sacramento, Colorado, and elsewhere, are extinct or nearly so. 

The end is near; the usual combination of global warming, suburbanization, agribusiness, waste of water, and pollution are closing in fast on what is left of Californian nature, and all will be gone within a few decades unless desperate measures are taken.  (For a good, and depressing, summary see Allen et al. 2014).

Cultural Contours

            Humans have been in California for a long time.  The oldest date so far is 13,000 years ago (give or take a bit; see Erlandson 2015 for this and following dates) from Santa Rosa Island, but to get down the coast and out to a rather remote island would have taken some time.  Just north of California, at Paisley Cave in Oregon, there are dates as far back as 14,800 years ago.  People had reached Monteverde in southern Chile by 13,000 years ago.  So California was almost surely settled by 15,000 years ago.  Settlers probably came down the coast at first, but Paisley Cave is far inland.

            The initial population was small, and increased only slowly.  A few fluted points show that California was not entirely untouched by the Clovis style of spearpoint around 12,000 years ago, but points are few and scattered.  More local and more numerous points follow.  Then a very long period coinciding with the hot, dry Altithermal demonstrates that California was thinly populated by atlatl-wielding hunters from 8000 to 5000 years ago.  Conditions during the Altithermal were like those of the “new normal” developing after 2014, with extreme heat and dryness, though the southeast had higher rain than now, due to expansion of the summer monsoon from Arizona.  Ancient pack rat middens made of local twigs reveal that mountains now bare had juniper and other bushes.

            Climate ameliorated after 5000 years ago, and people responded by becoming more numerous and sedentary.  They began a shift to acorns, small seeds, and geophyte (root, bulb and corm foods; see Pierce and Scholtze 2016; Reddy 2016).

Increase was faster from about 3000 years ago, and in fact seems to have increased exponentially after that.  Hunting was still with the atlatl, but more attention was paid to plants and fish than to land game.  Robert Bettinger (2015:34) points out how this tracked improvements in plant use technology.  The importance of better acorn processing has long been well known, and seeds became so important that there was even local domestication (see below).  There was evidently a positive feedback: the improvements allowed more population growth, which in turn made people want more improvements. 

We must avoid recourse to explanation through “population pressure,” however, since groups evidently differed in their responses to the rising population.  They could innovate, borrow, migrate, fight, starve, or otherwise deal.  Migration, especially, is well attested by linguistic and archaeological data.   Humans love sociability above all other things, and want to live together, share, intermarry, dance, and generally have fun in groups.  They also like good food better than bad food—however their culture defines those.  Thus, wanting to procure more and better animal and plant resources is not a mindless reflex of “population pressure.”  It is a way to cope with scarcity, but also a way to support larger, livelier setttlements with a higher quality of life, however defined by the people in question.  Also, humans do not always love the neighbors, as shown inter alia by the number of skeletons with projectile points in their bones in California cemeteries, and large settlements afford protection.  Pierce and Scholtze (2016) echo Bruce Smith’s call to look at cultural niche construction.  People increasingly create their own environments (not just niches!).  In California, burning and other management techniques clearly increased along with acorn and small seed reliance.

            The bow and arrow probably caused a minor revolution (Bettinger 2015:44-48).  Bows and arrows are better for getting game, especially small game, than the previous technology based on spears, spear-throwers (atlatls), nets, and traps.  An increase in animal bones appears at the time the bow and arrow reached California, around 400-500 CE.  This allowed people to capitalize on the improved plant management, because it provided enough protein to allow more sedentization in remote back-country areas rich in plant resources.  (Less remote areas had access to fish, shellfish, and nuts, and were not limited by quality protein availability.)  It allowed more sedentary lifestyles and more dispersal into small groups (especially in summer), for the same reason.  The land was used more efficiently.  Cultivation and, in the southeast, true agriculture expanded and flourished.  In the pinyon areas, for instance, pinyon exploitation greatly increased, because it was possible to spend extended time in the dry, otherwise-resource-poor areas where pinyons grow.  Vessels for carrying water must have had a lot to do with that.  Bettinger stresses the importance of stored food (largely nuts), which were family property rather than shared by all.

            Along the coast, things were very different.  The bow and arrow had much less effect, since the staples were fish, shellfish, and sea mammals (speared at landings or from boats).  What mattered most was sea temperature, especially in southern California, where warm currents from far south often intrude on the more usual cool water.  Warm currents brought fewer fish, and those larger, faster, and harder to catch.  Thus they were lean times for local people.  This affected demographics over time.  Yet, here too, there was a sharp inflection in the population growth curve around 4000-3000 years ago.  In this case, it seems to result from better marine technology, ranging from the Chumash plank canoe (dating to perhaps 2000-2500 years ago; Gamble 2002) to superior fishhook and net designs.  Again this went in tandem with social structure. Villages got large, with notable differentiation in burials.  The bow and arrow came even later on the coast, in some places as late as 1250 in some areas (Bettinger 2015:100).  It reached the Chumash around 500 CE, following which there was a rise in violence, and presumptively war, that cooled slowly as people adjusted to the new weapon (Bettinger 2015:109). 

This has recently had fateful effects, as southern California has been one of the poster children for the frequency and violence of war among hunter-gatherers alleged by Steven  Pinker (2011) and others.  If the violence-ridden cemeteries sample only a brief and atypical time, Pinker’s ideas need adjusting (as pointed out in detail from much other evidence in Fry 2013).  

Complexity, and probably language distributions, reached something like contact-period levels around 400-600 CE.  By this time, bow hunting, mortars to grind acorns and other large seeds, sophisticated metate production for small seeds, and agriculture in the far south were established.  Corn-bean-squash agriculture spread in from the southwest at some quite early stage, and was probably still spreading when the Spanish came; it was long-established by then in the Colorado River and Imperial valleys.  Local cultivation and possibly domestication of wild seeds—barley and, in the south, maygrass (Reddy 2016:237)—is implied by the seed record. 

            The weather turned hot and dry again after 900, reaching a climax in the late 1200s, which were apparently as hot and dry as the mid-2010’s.  Californians endured, turning to more intensive use of still-available resources, especially marine ones where available.  Shifts away from the formerly vast marshes of the interior are noteworthy.  California’s eastern neighbors crashed.  The Four Corners and Utah were about 90% depopulated.  Incipient civilization crashed into small village societies in the southern southwest.  People migrated, dispersed, set up villages wherever water was still available. The effect on California’s rather extensive trade with Arizona and points east must have been substantial. “[P]rehistoric interaction between the two regions was regular and sustained and…economic or political developments in one area are likely to have hadhad important implications in the other” (Smith and Fauvelle 2015:710), as shown by the very extensive and long-lasting trade that brought shells, asphaltum, and the like from the coast, turquoise from the California desert, and pottery and stone goods (and probably cloth) from the Southwest.  The trade dropped off sharply after the 1200s, but California kept growing in population and social complexity.

            Cooler, wetter times followed, and the Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1700-1750 restored glaciers to California’s highest peaks.  Plant resources exploded, and human populations grew accordingly.

There were only 250,000-300,000 Native Californians as of 1700 (Cook 1976).  This means fewer than two persons per square mile (California’s area is 158,633 sq. mi.).  This population likely represents a reduction from peak, however, because Spanish diseases had already ravaged the state (Preston 1996), having been introduced when Spanish first touched on what is now California—1540 along the lower Colorado, 1542 on the coast. 

Languages and Society

California is famous for the diversity of its indigenous languages (Golla 2011 provides an encyclopedic survey).  At least 64, possibly 80, languages were spoken (Shipley 1978; Golla treats 78), including two whole language families—Yukian and Chumashan—that are completely confined to the state.  Many people were multilingual, and in some areas it seems that the very concept of a single “native language” did not exist (Dixon 1907—if I read him aright; cf. Golla 2011)—a worthy example for us today.  (For background on California Native peoples, the classic account by Kroeber, 1925, is dated and now sometimes sounds patronizing, but is still a superb summary; more up-to-date and sensitive are the great Handbooks of the Smithsonian Institution, but one must not only read the huge California volume [1978] but also relevant parts of the Plateau volume [Walker 1998] and the Southwest volumes, since the state was divided among these various cultural regions.  For prehistoric times, see Jones and Klar 2007, especially Victor Golla’s excellent article on languages and language prehistory, which is summarized and updated in Golla 2011.)

Relationships of California languages with languages elsewhere are usually so remote as to be unclear.  Chumashan was once tentatively linked with several other Californian and Southwestern languages in the “Hokan phylum,” but Chumashan is in fact very distant from other “Hokan” languages.  Edward Sapir, and later in more detail Joseph Greenberg (1987), provided intriguing evidence for linking Yuki with the languages of southern Louisiana, and this appears to be a good likelihood (Golla 1911; it may also be very distantly related to Siouan). 

Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh thought the Penutian family of languages of central California were related to the Mayan languages of Mesoamerica, and Greenberg (1987) accepted this.  There is much evidence, most obviously the win- root for “person,” as in Wintu wintu and Maya winik, and the tendency to count using base 20, which in Mayan is also “winik”—because the number is derived from counting on fingers and toes, so 20 is a whole “person.”  The Mayanist Cecil Brown and I investigated this idea some years ago, and found dozens of intriguiging pairs like that, but unfortunately the Penutian languages are so poorly attested in the record that we could not come to any definite conclusions and did not publish our work.  I remain convinced, however.  Penutian is generally thought to be related to most of the Plateau languages in a Penutian phylum.  Sapir and some followers considered it to be related to the Tsimshian languages of British Columbia, but that link is, at best, controversial.

One very important problem in understanding Californian, and other Native American, languages is that much was lost by the time that even the earliest ethnographers spread out to study the cultures.  In particular, all these languages had the same sorts of style registers that English or any other world language has.  There were styles appropriate to chiefly speeches, styles appropriate to medicine formulas, styles peculiar to particular animal characters in myths, and so on.  Particularly important was the division into high style, such as a chief would use in a formal speech, and ordinary daily style.  Victor Golla (2011:226-227) discusses what little is known, from the very few languages that survived long enough for such refinements to be noted. 

There was another, intermediate, register, such as a chief might use in his daily directives to the people (recall Garth’s observations cited above).  There were also special modes of speech used by shamans, and still others for myth-telling.  There were evidently some lower registers too, the equivalent of rustic dialect or slang.  We have no idea of most of these.  On the whole, all that was recorded was the ordinary register, the others having been forgotten (as noted by e.g. Laird 1976 for the Chemehuevi).  A. L. Kroeber did hear some formal speaking from Yurok and Mohave consultants, and gives tantalizingly short transcriptions of the Mohave (Kroeber 1972:81-83).

Hokan, Chumashan, and Yukian languages have been spoken in California for many thousands of years and presumably originated there.  Penutian languages are thought to have intruded from the north several millennia ago.  The Algonkian-related Yurok and Wiyot came later, and the Athapaskan and Uto-Aztekan languages later still, probably in the last 2000-3000 years.  Intrusion of the Shoshonean languages into the coastal areas happened about 1500 years ago, give or take a few centuries.  Dissimilar song and vocal styles (Keeling 1992a, 1992b) and vocabularies (O’Neill 2009) fit with other cultural differences, separating e.g. the otherwise culturally close Karuk and Yurok.  Both, for instance, indicate direction upriver/downriver/away from river, rather than by compass points, for reasons that will be obvious if you look at a map or satellite photograph, but Karuk—longer established—has a more complex and intricate system for marking it (O’Neill 2008).

Dramatic shifts in languages probably track changes in resource procurement.  The spectacular radiation of the Shoshonean groups from the southern Sierra into southern California (Takic) and across the Great Basin (Numic) coincides with the coming of the bow and arrow and probably has something to do with it—not only because of fighting and hunting power, but also because of better plant resource procurement (Bettinger 2015:48-49)

The state is traditionally divided into subcultural areas.  We may ignore these; they are rather debatable.  There are, expectably, cultural gradations at the margins into the neighboring culture areas. 

            More interesting to us here is the question of social complexity.  In general, Californian peoples lived in small village communities (“tribelets”; Kroeber 1925) of about 200-1000 people.  They centered around a single winter village or a very small group of such.  People dispersed in the spring and summer to forage and amass storable foods.  Some of these village communities were notably self-sufficient.  A. L. Kroeber interviewed one old man who had never been more than a day’s walk from his home in the remote northern California coast ranges (Kroeber 1925:145).   Bettinger (2015) takes limited mobility as usual.  Archaeology, however, shows substantial trade, and it appears more likely that this old man and others like him were limited in their travels by post-Anglo-settlement conditions.

            The smallest communities were apparently those in the Mohave Desert and Great Basin.  Even along the Colorado River and in the densely populated northwest, the operational unit was often the family; tribal consciousness existed but there was no real tribal government.  People lived in what Robert Bettinger calls “orderly anarchy” (Bettinger 2015).  He traces it to the effects of the bow and arrow on settlement (see above). 

William Kelly reported “anarchy” for the Cocopa (Kelly 1977, esp. p. 78).  For them, the word for “leader” literally meant “mad dog, crazy person” (Frank Blue, quoted Kelly 1977:80).  So much for leaders!  The Cocopa, like other groups, had orators, who performed the hard-work harangues noted above (Kelly 1977:80), but had no real designated authority. 

Even so, riverine communities on the Klamath, Sacramento, and (probably) other major rivers, and the coastal communities of the Santa Barbara Channel, were large.  Many of these in the latter two areas seem to have gone on to become chiefly villages ruling over whole polities, with small tributary villages in the hinterland.  This is believably, but not certainly, attested for the Chumash and Tongva (Gabrielino) of southern California.  It is a more than reasonable inference for the Patwin and neighboring groups of central California (cf. Kroeber 1932).  Chumash polities of up to 2500 square miles are possible.  (See Bean and Blackburn 1976 for several articles on California politics and group sizes.  Bettinger 2015 clearly underestimates the level of chieftainship and chiefdom organization.)  Unfortunately, we shall never know the truth, for these groups were shattered by conquest and disease in the early historic period.  The Patwin and several Chumash groups narrowly avoided total extinction.

            In terms of Julian Steward’s useful if imperfectly defined “levels of sociocultural integration” (Steward 1955), these were simple chiefdoms.  This means that they were organized into ranked descent groups, with chiefly lineages ruling over commoner lineages.  One village would be the chiefly seat; other, smaller settlements would be tributary.  Some Californian societies got substantially more complex, as will appear (see Arnold 2004; Bean and Blackburn 1976; Gamble 2008).  These groups thus not only had dense populations; they had complex societies with chiefs who evidently practiced redistribution economies.  Early accounts (Crespí 2001; Gamble 2008; Kitsepawit 1981) show that Chumash chiefs gathered fish and seed resources and lavished them on guests and others.  Their society was not much less complex that of the Iron Age Irish that we will consider anon, though the latter had sophisticated metallurgy, the wheel, writing, beer, wine, and other trappings of civilization. 

            On the other hand, we are not to see these societies as necessarily very similar to chiefdoms elsewhere, especially agricultural ones.  California’s societies were very different.  Kent Lightfoot and coworkers (1911) have pointed out that the vast shellmounds and earthmounds of central California, some of which contained hundreds or thousands of burials, are a unique feature that indicates a very different society, one about which we know little (most of the mounds are very old, up to 3000 years or more).  Villages of that time were large, but not of the size one would normally associate with huge earthworks.  This and other complex early manifestations indicate a society apparently rather different from any now known.

            They also warred, as chiefdoms do.  As in other chiefdoms from the Northwest to Ancient Ireland, chiefs held feasting and dancing parties that had a competitive edge.  To refuse an invitation to a chief’s fiesta could be cause for war, at least among the Chumash (Gamble 2008:194).  Wars over slights of this kind occurred also in northwestern California.  As is chiefdoms everywhere, feasts were important (Gamble 2008:224-227).  One reason was recruiting fighting men.  Another was cementing alliances with rivals would would otherwise have become enemies.  Cemeteries in the relevant parts of the state show high levels of violent death (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:85-89), as is true in chiefdoms everywhere.  The Yurok writer Lucy Thompson stresses the enormous value of the huge Klamath River dance ceremonies in reducing conflict. All local groups were invited and had to settle disputes before participating.  Apparently this worked well, since no one wanted to miss these events (Thompson 1991:145-146 and elsewhere).  Presumably, large ceremonies in other parts of the state had somewhat similar effects.

Steward’s other levels of integration were tribes, bands, and states.  (Note, incidentally, that these are not “evolutionary stages” and were never intended to be taken as such [Steward 1955].  They are all the end products of very long and intricate developmental sequences.  Some of his students confused the issue by hanging an evolutionary scheme on them.)  The smaller village communities would be “tribes” in his sense (though not as organized as his general characterization implies).  Steward’s “band level” of integration was modeled on what he thought was characteristic of the Shoshonean groups of the Great Basin, but they have turned out to be much more organized and sizable, definitely “tribes” in his sense.  Steward mischaracterized them for several reasons, but the main one was that he studied them in their late historic condition, devastated by disease, massacre, oppression, and forced acculturation (Clemmer 2009b.)  States did not exist in California, or anywhere else north of central Mexico, until European colonization.

All the above typology crosscuts what is probably a more important truth:  All the California groups were organized into village-level or village-cluster-level societies, led by a not-very-powerful chief or a patrilineal chiefly group, and showing some occupational specialization.  All else was elaboration on this basic pattern.  The central village was not only the winter residence, but was the ceremonial center, where rituals and fiestas were held (Bean and Blackburn 1976).  It was the meeting ground not only for the community but for visitors and traders.  It was often regarded as the center of the world, or at least the center of the little world of its community members.  The situation of the typical village society was dynamic, with back and forth changes in complexity over time (Bettinger 2015), but it was oscillation around the village level of organization.

These groups managed to stay together and maintain their ceremonies and organization with minimal government, apparently through simple sociability and shared culture.  Even if the sources have exaggerated the “anarchy” of California, it was a world held together by norms, which in turn had their force because people needed each other and thus needed shared rules to live by.  Neither organized religion nor organized government were necessary.  Thomas Hobbes was exactly wrong; monarchy was not only unnecessary, it was downright undesirable.  Grassroots self-organization literally beat it out of the field.  There is, obviously, a lesson here.  California was no dream of peace.  There were countless feuds and small wars.  Steven Pinker (2011) exaggerates its violence, but probablly not by much.  Yet California was no “savage state” either; the life of Californians was the antithesis of being “nasty, poore, solitary, brutish and short” (Hobbes 1950 [1657]).  And the dramatically more hierarchic and class-ridden Northwest Coast had at least as much violence.

In the larger groups, the chief had an assistant or cochief who did the orating and much organizing (see e.g. Goldschmidt 1951; Librado 1977).  This dual leadership is probably related to the “peace chief/war chief” team found eastward throughout the continent.

 In general, the larger and more dense the population, the larger the elite group, and the more different it was from the commoners.  Also, the larger and denser the population, the more specializations could exist.  The deep interior groups had chiefs and shamans and little (if anything) more.  Leaders for irrigation, rabbit hunting, and other collective activities were selected ad hoc or were chosen for long periods by the tribe; they were known to the Anglo settlers as “water bosses,” “rabbit bosses,” and so on.  At the other extreme stood the Chumash, with specialized priests, healers, canoe makers, canoe owners and operators, and other formally recognized and named occupational specialties (Gamble 2008). 

Chumash elites formed a group known (in at least one Chumash area) as the ‘antap.  Data are not clear as to whether it was a hereditary class-like formation, a hereditary council of lineage elders, or a sodality like the Plains Indians warrior societies.  Perhaps it was somewhere in between all these.  We cannot tell from the late accounts that survive.  Similar groups of elites or ceremonial leaders are known for other chiefdoms in the state.  The Chumash also had a “Brotherhood of the Canoe” (Kitsepawit 1977), made up of canoe owners and makers; it was an elite, specialized society. 

My impression is that trade was more important than population size or density in driving these distinctions of rank and specialty.  Groups central to great trade routes, and especially the groups that lived where land trade had to shift to the water, were the most chiefdom-like.  This meant especially the great villages of the Chumash and Tongva, gathered around lagoons that made good harbors; the large Patwin and Nisenan settlements on the lower Sacramento and the Sacramento delta; the towns near the junction of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers; and the towns at good harbors on San Francisco Bay and Clear Lake.  I believe that organization for trade was more important than population in driving social complexity.  On the other hand, areas central to trade but low in population density, like the obsidian quarry areas of the East Sierra and elsewhere, were not socially complex, so a fair density of population is evidently a sine qua non for complexity. 

In spite of the well-known fondness of California groups for staying at home and never straying far, trade was important, and trading went on (see below).  People’s unwillingness to travel meant that many intermediaries might be involved, but contact was real, and small “world-systems” developed.  Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly Mann (1998) have described the world-system of the Wintu (see Goldschmidt 1951, one of the sources they used, for a notable account).  The Wintu was probably a subsystem of the great Sacramento drainage network focused on the Patwin.  Similar very small world-systems centered on the Yurok, the Chumash and Tongva, and the Lower Colorado River, and rather predict or map out Kroeber’s cultural subareas within the wider California system.  A world-system assumes a core group or groups; a semi-periphery; and a periphery.  For the Chumash-Tongva, the semiperiphery might be seen as including the interior Chumashan groups, the Salinan, Juaneno, Luiseno and Cahuilla; the periphery the Serrano, Vanyume and Alliklik.  The Chumash and Tongva were richer and more populous.  Unlike modern core nations, did not have a stable advantage in trade over these groups, but did have some advantage, and could defeat them in conflict.

The desert and Colorado River tribes had to travel much farther to stay alive, and thus came to love traveling, and to make long journeys fairly often.  In a striking passage, James O. Pattie (1962 [1831]), a fur trapper, tells of walking from the Colorado to the mountains of far northern Baja California in the 1820s.  He and his band of hardened mountain men barely made it—they crawled the last miles on hands and knees.  Their Indian guides not only ran on ahead to check the route, and ran back to the men, but when they all made it to water Pattie and his company collapsed while the Indians had a dance!   His group and other trappers took over a million beaver from the lower Colorado in those decades, eliminating the beaver and permanently changing and degrading the hydrology of the whole region.

California’s indigenous groups were shattered beyond all measure by European contact (Castillo 1978).  Diseases no doubt came with the first Spanish contacts in Baja California, the Lower Colorado (1540), and Cabrillo’s coastal voyage (1542).  Disease surely ran far ahead of Europeans thereafter, as it did elsewhere in the continent (Hull 2009, 2015; Preston 1996, but, as Hull points out, Preston goes far beyond the evidence).  Actual Spanish settlement in 1769—much earlier in Baja California—brought much more disease, as well as military action.  Indigenous peoples were gathered into the missions, which supplied little food, oppressed the Native peoples without providing rights or protection, and stopped much of the burning, hunting, and gathering (K. Anderson 2005; Timbrook 2007).  However, Native Californians could maintain some of their lifestyle, gathering wild seeds and hunting, since the missions could not feed them.  Virginia Popper (2016), analyzing plant remains from colonial sites, found several local adaptations, from Spanish continuing their Mexican lifestyles to Native people living quite traditionally.

Anglo contact was even more traumatic.  Diseases swept through the population.  A malaria epidemic in 1833 killed 1/3 of the population of the north-central part of the state (Cook 1955), and went on to ravage Oregon, where Robert Boyd’s study is exemplary (1999).  Smallpox epidemics were frequent, and endemic disease also occurred.  The relative role of disease in depopulation has been exaggerated (Cameron et al. 2015; Hull 2015).  Its absolute role was horrific, but genocide, virtual enslavement in the missions, poor nutrition, disruption of Indigenous lifeways, and other causes were probably as important in the declines of the Californian nations.

In the 1850s, northern California became one of the areas of the United States subjected to outright genocide:  state-backed, official or quasi-official campaigns of extermination (Madley 2012, 2016; Trafzer and Hyer 1999).  Most of this took place under the brief reign in the 1850s of the Know-Nothing party, which was pro-slavery and openly genocidal toward Native Americans.  The Yahi were eliminated except for a few survivors, notably the famous “Ishi” (R. Heizer and T. Kroeber 1979; T. Kroeber 1961).  The Yuki and their neighbors were almost wiped out (Miller 1979), as were several small groups.  The Wiyot of the Eureka area were subjected to massacre and were almost all killed (Elsasser 1978).  The Tolowa were decimated, as a spillover of the Rogue River War (Madley 2012).  This at least had the effect of showing the three connected tribes of Yurok, Karok and Hupa what was in store for them.  The Karok, and to some extent the other two with them, holed up in the fantastically rugged and inaccessible mountains of their homelands and fought back, in one of the very few genuinely successful resistance movements in the United States.  After decades of sporadic warfare, they received treaties and reservations, and are still among the most numerous and culturally intact groups in the western United States.  This is a story that, amazingly, has never been told, and it deserves a major historical study.  Heroic but ultimately futile resistance by the Cahuilla (Phillips 1975) and the Central Valley tribes (Phillips 1993) has received more and better historical attention.  So have the resistance campaigns of the relatively nearby Seri, Yaqui and Apache in Mexico and along the border, but, in general, successful resistance to genocide has not been much studied—a surprising and deplorable omission.

Elsewhere, Madley documents the murder of 1,340 Native people by California militias, 1680 by the U.S. Army, and 6,460 by settlers and vigilantes.  These are reasonable figures, but one suspects that many a murder is lost in the records.  Madley’s work has brought the California genocide from one of the least-known in history (my use of the term has been questioned in the past) to perhaps the best-documented genocide of an Indigenous population, with the possible exception of parts of Australia.  The sheer death figures do not even begin to describe the cultural effects, however.  Cultural repression in day schools and boarding schools, segregation, prejudice, deliberate breaking up of populations, scattering of groups between reservations that opened and closed with dizzying speed in the 19^th century, and other methods calculated to destroy California cultures persisted for decades.  It is testimony to incredible resistance, resilience, and sheer toughness that some cultural groups survived as identifiable “tribes.”  More than a few white settlers, also, rallied to the cause, including such early “Indian lovers” as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  They could be unenlightened by modern standards, but they saved many people.

The Modoc War is perhaps the best known of the sad stories (Dillon 1973).  The Modoc were forced onto a reservation established for their traditional enemies the Klamath.  They were there subjected to harassment by both Klamaths and whites.  A small band left the reservation, holed up in the horribly rough and inaccessible lava beds of Modoc County, and held off the United States Army for six months, only to be ultimately starved out and sent to die in a prison camp in Oklahoma. 

The struggle still needs full treatment; it has always seemed to me to be the archetypal story of the conquest of the Americas.  We have the story in many versions.  In addition to the historical and anthropological accounts, we have contemporary accounts from several different points of view.  The settlers spewed out racist hate via local newspapers.  The army’s deep concerns and tactical debates are available in full (Cozzens 2002:98-298).  The Indian agent for Oregon desperately tried to prevent the war, but was overwhelmed, and we have his heartbroken story (Meacham 1875).  Most interesting, perhaps, is the narrative of the incredibly heroic Native interpreter Winona, transmitted through her son Jeff Riddle (1974).  Winona shuttled back and forth, at constant risk of her life, interpreting and mediating for both sides.  With this Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of views, and with the story’s location in the black and starkly beautiful lava beds, the tale would make a stunning film, but a tragic one, not a Hollywood show.

Throughout California and the west, even after pacification and treaties, food supplies were stolen by corrupt officials (Jackson1885; Phillips 1997), and educational institutions did more sexual abuse and labor exploitation than teaching.  Before 1863 Native people could be enslaved, and conditions after Emancipation were not always much better.  They could still be thrown off their lands illegally, as at Cupa in San Diego County (Castillo 1978).  Many groups had their reservations “terminated” in the late 19^th and again in the mid-20^th centuries; this involved giving them individual allotments, which they usually soon lost to sharp dealers or outright illegal squatters.  A thorough history of the Wintu (Hoveman 2002) provides documentation of one of the more fortunate groups; the Wintu, in the upper Sacramento drainage, survive, but were almost exterminated and lost almost all their land.

The last termination in the area was the Klamath Reservation termination in southern Oregon in 1954 (Stern 1966), the effects of which were so horrific that terminations were virtually ended nationwide.  Local entrepreneurs even resorted to the classic 19^th-century trick of giving men bottles of whiskey in exchange for signing their names on blank sheets of paper—the paper later being filled in with a deed of sale of allotted land.

The sordid record of murder and destruction has been often told, and would not be worth raising yet again if it were not for the fact that, today, denial or partial denial of it has become commonplace.  Not only do the Euro-Americans gloss over it; the surviving Native groups often do.  This is an understandable but sadly misdirected reaction to their being called “extinct” or “culturally extinct,” for decades.  They naturally want to assert their survival. 

Indeed, they survived, and by truly heroic efforts—especially their own, but also the efforts of a few Anglos, such as Helen Hunt Jackson and George Wharton James.  But it was a near thing.  In 1900 there were only about 15,000 identifiable California Indians.  This fits perfectly with Henry Dobyns’ “95% rule” (Dobyns 1983)—the average Native American group was reduced 95% from settlement to lowest point.  There were actually many more individuals, mostly of mixed ancestry, hiding out or calling themselves “Mexicans,” but the total number was still tiny.  Only around 1900 did the precipitous decline from disease and cruel treatment begin to reverse itself.  In the 19^th century, there was every reason to assume the California Indians would be gone in a few years, at least as identifiable ethnic groups. 

As it was, though population has fortunately rebounded, most of the languages are now lost, and the last few are kept alive by diligent efforts of a handful of Native people and cooperating linguists (see Leanne Hinton 1994, whose work has been outstanding). 

I would thus urge modern people, including Native people, to be understanding of the “vanishing Indian” attitude of 1900.  We should pay more attention than we have done to the level of loss through disease, oppression, and outright genocide.  We should pay far more attention to the relatively few people—including those forgotten Yurok and Karok fighters—who prevented the vanishing from being total. 

Native Californian Uses of Biota

Major resources are listed in Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish’s recent book, California Indians and Their Environment (2009).  The most useful plant resources were divided into two types:  nuts and seeds.  Nuts grew on trees.  Acorns were by far the most important.  The classic account is E. W. Gifford’s “California Balanophagy” (1957), “balanophagy” being a delightful coinage for “acorn eating.”  They could produce around 70,000 kg/sq km in prime habitat (Bettinger 2015:110, citing Martin Baumhoff), enough to feed far more people than California ever had.  There were many species, cropping on different cycles, so nuts were always plentiful.

Pine nuts, walnuts, buckeyes, laurel nuts, wild cherry kernels, and many other nuts were also important, more so than the literature generally suggests.  Resources such as pine nuts from gray and Coulter pines, for instance, were surely more important than the literature suggests.  Seeds came from a vast range of annual and small-sized perennial plants.  Some major ones were sage species, notably chia (Salvia columbariae), tansy-mustard (Descurania pinnata), redmaids (Calandrinia ciliata), tarweeds (Madia and Hemizonia spp.), sunflowers of several genera, and a great profusion of grass species.  Loss of people, especially from remote and mountainous areas, came early after Spanish settlement, losing us knowledge of much resource use.

Berries, fruits, shoots, sap, roots, bulbs, corms, cambium, and every other plant part short of hard wood were eaten.  Berries were particularly rich and prone to follow fires.  An odd line in Pedro Fages’ accounts of Spanish conquest mentions wine from elderberry fruits; he may have meant “juice,” but the Paiute made real wine from cactus fruits (Powell 1971:50), presumably having learned it from the Oodham, and the Opata of Sonora did indeed make elderberry wine—a lot of it—and it was apparently strong and good (Yetman 2010:38-39).  (The Fages entry spawned an odd story about wine from willow fruit, because someone misread saucos “elderberries” as sauces “willows.”)

            California ethnobotany has been richly explored over several generations, but we have probably lost most of the old knowledge.  Even so, what remains is stunning.  Most of the southern California tribes have produced full ethnobotanical books (for the Cahuilla, Bean and Saubel 1972; Chumash, Timbrook 2007; Kawaiisu, Zigmond 1981; Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay, Hedges and Beresford 1986; Baja California Kumeyaay, Wilken-Robertson 2018; Serrano, Lerch 1981; others in manuscript) and northern California has not been neglected (e.g. Welch 2013; for Northern Paiute, just across the line in Nevada, Fowler 1991; reviews, K. Anderson 2005; Mead 1986).  Ethnozoology is less well covered (but see Timbrook and Johnson’s Chumash ethnoornithology, 2013).

Old records remain important.  J. P. Harrington’s are the richest (see Timbrook 2007).  Powers’ Tribes of California (1877) preserved much.  Records are still being discovered and made available.  A recent publication by James Welch (2013) makes available the enormous wealth of information collected by John and Grace Hudson from the Northern Pomo in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  By the time that professional ethnographers reached the Pomo, the genocidal effects of white settlement (well summarized by Welch) had led to much loss, and the Hudson material is invaluable (e.g. noting 12 more basket materials than previously known).  Fortunately, a good deal of Pomo knowledge did survive, and does so still (Goodrich et al. 1980). 

Plants provided a rich source of effective medicines.  Among those proved by chemical analysis to “work” are willows and several other species (salicylic acid—the source of aspirin), many mints (menthol and similar oils), sagebrush (thujone, which is vermifugal and in high doses abortifacient), many tannin-rich barks, and a whole range of mild but useful antibacterial and antifungal compounds.  Mineral medications include naturally occurring salts, antibacterial compounds, absorbent clays, and many more.  Hundreds of plants used medicinally have not yet been fully analyzed.  The Native Californians were also eclectic; modern healers freely use not only Native remedies from all over North America, but even Chinese herbal medicine, as well as drug store cures (see e.g. Peters and Ortiz 2010).  Medical knowledge was highly prized, healers were enormously valued, and traditional medicine by both herbal and religious methods was very widely known and practiced—and to a striking extent still is.

            Animal foods included deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits, gophers, squirrels and ground squirrels, and hundreds of bird species (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Countless insects were used (Sutton 1988).  Even the bones were ground up.  Small animals could be mashed whole, bones and all, into “gopher-burger.”  Larger animal bones were mashed and boiled to extract bone grease, an important food elsewhere in North America and probably locally in California (Sunseri 2015).

Hundreds of species of fish and shellfish were used. Sea mammals were important, perhaps more so than fish for the Chumash (Gamble 2008), such that some rookeries on shore were depleted (see below).  Areas along major rivers, and along parts of the coast with good harbors for canoes, could rely on extremely rich and reliable fish resources.  Shells were valuable for beads and tools after the animals within had been eaten.  The great salmon fisheries of the major rivers stretch the imagination.  Where there were no salmon, there were river-running trout; the huge rainbow trout of the Pyramid Lake drainage ran upriver to Truckee Lake to spawn, and at such times the river was described as more fish than water (LaRivers 1994, noting this is an exaggeration but that the runs were incredible; he notes that the Basin lakes are extremely nutrition-rich).  Ocean fisheries were important too, with vast runs of smelt of many species, sardines, anchovies, and herring, as well as plenty of larger fish.  A smelt run in 1857 left fish piled “a foot deep” on the beaches of northwestern California (Tushingham and Christiansen 2015:192).  Specialized fishing, with large seagoing canoes and huge riverine weirs and fish dams, developed after 1000 BCE, much of it within the last 1500-2000 years.  Intensive fishing and shellfishing in the south, however, came earlier, and indeed there were extensive shell middens dating to many thousand years ago.  (“Were,” because development has destroyed them on the mainland—within my memory, in Baja California and on Point Sal.  Research is now more or less confined to the islands.) 

Otherwise, animals could be very thin on the ground.  Ethnographic accounts suggest that rabbits (including jackrabbits, which are technically hares) were the most widespread and reliable land animal resource base.  Reptiles and predatory mammals were widely avoided as food. 

Mark Raab (1996), among others, has demolished the idea that Californians were rolling in food.  Most of the state is, after all, desert or barren mountain.  But some areas were indeed quite lush.  These were especially the interfaces between water and land, and most especially the high-energy ones: river deltas, current-swept channels, lakes with large feeder streams.  Populations were dense in the favored areas; numbers of people rose in feedback with elaborate technological and social systems.  In less favored areas, drought years or local disasters could produce real want.  Either way, population often pressed on resources.  Even so, with only some 250,000-300,000 people in a very rich landscape, California hardly suffered from serious long-term pressure on major resources.  Work-horse trees like oak and buckeye, and productive, management-responsive annuals like chia sage (Salvia columbariae), would support large populations in normal years.  Human populations would be trimmed back in years of extreme drought or flood.  Still, it is doubtful if the population figures represent a population at “carrying capacity.”  One suspects that they could have worked harder, stored more, fought less, and supported several times their contact-era population.

Storage was necessary, and many methods developed.  Meat and fish were dried or smoked.  Seeds were kept in baskets.  Acorns were stored in large raised granaries made of basketry, withes, or brush.  The Western Mono serve as a good example:  Christopher Morgan (2012) found that they lived in small communities (about 13 being typical but some reaching as many as 75) which had three or more granaries, but also had dispersed caches around the countryside, so that one was never far from stored acorns.  A granary held about 725 kg of acorns; about seven of these would support a community of 13, providing about 4 million calories (Morgan 2012:724-725).  Granaries were lined with pine needles—other groups sometimes used sagebrush, which is insecticidal—to discourage pests and keep the acorns dry.  Stored food had to sustain the groups during the long and harsh winter of their mountain habitat.  The far larger towns in lowland California had much less severe winters to contend with, but needed more food, and must have stored enormous quantities.  Bears raided caches, making extra storage necessary.

Bettinger (2015:90) has pointed out that meat, fish and the like are front-loaded: they are edible immediately and usually are so eaten, and if they are processed it has to be done immediately.  In California, that was largely an issue with fish, which had to be split and dried or smoked as soon as caught.  Nuts, especially acorns, are back-loaded: they are easy to gather and store, but take enormous amounts of processing.  So they are normally harvested in vast quantities in a brief harvest period, then stored to be processed and used at need.  This had social effects.  At one extreme, great assemblages of people were necessary to catch and dry salmon, but these assemblages would later disperse.  At the other, seed and nut dependence led to smaller but more stable, permanent groups.

Mineral resources were generally concentrated in a few spots, making widespread trade necessary.  Salt was required for survival and was sometimes hard to get.  Even more concentrated in source were obsidian and other silicates that would take a sharp edge; they were essential for points, knives, and the like.  At particularly good obsidian sources, I have seen the ground literally paved with flakes over many acres.  Good-quality grinding stone for mortars and metates could be surprisingly rare and valuable.  It is hard to imagine people carrying huge metates all over the desert, but they did, finding the labor worthwhile to get metates from superior quarries (Schneider 1993).  Soft chlorite schist, as on Santa Catalina Island, was mined for making bowls.   Marcasite became beads used as money in north-central California. 

The extent and importance of trade in California has sometimes been stressed (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), but on the whole it has been underestimated.  Some communities, especially on the rather impoverished Channel Islands of the south, may have actually depended on trade for food, at least in some seasons (Arnold 1987, 2004).  If true—and it is highly controversial—this would be a very rare case worldwide of a hunting-gathering population depending on trade in staples.  Inland, California shell beads got as far afield as Arizona and northern Mexico.  Dentalium shell beads from Vancouver Island got to northern California.

The degree to which all these items truly constituted money is not clear.  They could be used for buying food, so they were not merely ceremonial (Bettinger 2015:184).  They were certainly monetized in early Spanish times, in areas of dense population, but the Spanish may have had much to do with this.  Clearly the shell items represented a kind of money, but only a special purpose currency, used in specific contexts, perhaps largely ceremonial ones in many or most cases.  Dentalium shells were used as money in the northwest of the state (and further north), but the fact that they were adorned and decorated so they would be happy and would lure more money to the owner (Bettinger 2015:182) shows how different the concept of money was there from what we now experience.

Indigenous Management

            The Californian peoples generally lacked agriculture, but there were significant exceptions, proving that they knew full well how to grow crops and could have done so if they had found it worth while.  Tobacco was grown very widely over the state.  The Karok, otherwise nonagricultural, knew enough about farming it to fill an entire book (Harrington 1932).  The neighboring Yurok believed that wild tobacco was dangerous, only cultivated tobacco being safe to use (Heizer 1978:650).

The southeast part of the state was firmly agricultural, growing the famous trinity of maize, beans, and squash, as well as several minor crops.  They also sowed wild grass, including the possibly domesticated local millet Panicum sonorum.  They may have cultivated amaranth species (Castetter and Bell 1951; Forde 1931:107-109; Nabhan 1982, 1985). 

The Owens Valley Paiute irrigated wild plants (Lawton et al. 1993).  This was presumably derived from true agricultural practices their ancestors carried out further south, since it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the proto-Uto-Aztecans were farmers, and the loss of farming in the Great Basin is a recent and derived condition (Hill 2001).  The Southern Paiutes of Nevada had agriculture from ancient times.  Sowing of wild seed crops is attested for a few groups (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009:127), and there were surely more groups who sowed.  Transplantation is also well attested, but especially for groups that had agriculture, notably the Kumeyaay (Shipek 1993).

Finally, increase in native barley (Hordeum sp.) seed size, to far beyond anything natural, took place in central California (Wohlgemuth 1996, 2004).  Similar seed dynamics are reported from the Los Angeles River area (Reddy 2016:237).  This implies either true domestication or at least intensive manipulation of stocks.  But the experiment ended:  the central Californians came to focus more and more on oaks and other tree crops, and the barley seeds shrank again, at least in central California.

In such a climatically fluctuating place as California, agriculture is difficult.  One need only read accounts by early European settlers trying to predict year by year, in the days before statewide irrigation systems.  Hunting and gathering must have seemed more reasonable.  But it too necessitated some higher organization if people were to manage the environment, store food, and accumulate fixed productive capital in the form of nets, weirs, canoes, and so on.  Hence the benefit of complex societies.  In an environment that is sometimes exceedingly rich but sometimes—and unpredictably—exceedingly poor, they make sense.

Also, the development of agriculture, throughout the world, took place in areas central to vast trade and communication routes.  Presumably the exchanges of goods and ideas were crucial.  Coastal California is a cul-de-sac.  Morever, the Californian biotic and cultural region has no single center; it is polycentric.  Even today, the Anglo-Americans of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and other cities all have their own subcultures and hinterlands.  There was no one confined lush area, like the Jordan Valley, Mesopotamia, or the Nile Valley in the Old World or like the Valley of Mexico in the New, to bring people together.   

The earliest agriculture in the world, that of the Near East, arose in a rather similar environment, but at oases within dry and desert-like parts of it.  Significantly, oases within California’s driest deserts are precisely the areas where agriculture waspracticed in the state.  Such lush pockets in an otherwise very challenging environment evidently make agriculture more appealing.  Near Eastern agriculture arose just after the Younger Dryas event, when environmental stresses and opportunities were high.  California had extremely few people at the time, and never had such climatic traumas afterward (cf. McCorriston 2000).

            Far more prevalent was intensive manipulation of wild plants (K. Anderson 2005; K. Anderson and Lake 2013, 2017; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Blackburn and K. Anderson 1993).  Native Californians pruned, trimmed, cultivated, selectively harvested, and in short did everything that a modern gardener does for her plants—but without domestication.  At the edge of the region, the level of cultivation of camas (Camassia spp.) and wokas (yellow waterlily seeds; Colville 1902; Deur 2009) reported for the Klamath and Modoc amounts to nearly or fully agricultural-level manipulation.  They also managed fish, and manipulated huckleberry intensively, as well as wild carrot and other root crops (Deur 2009).  So did their neighbors the Shasta, who also managed oaks for acorns (Gleason 2001).  Unfortunately, recording data on management was much less commonly done than recording ethnobotanical uses, and we are left in ignorance of most of it (see e.g. Welch 2013 on this issue).

            Geophytes—root, bulb and corm crops—were particularly subject to manipulation.  Corms of Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, and other plants (Anderson 2017; Gill 2017; Gill and Hoppa 2016; Wohlgemuth 2017) were particularly widespread and important.  Tubers of Cyperus esculentus, Eleocharis, and other plants (Lawton et al. 1976; Pierce and Scholtze 2016) were cultivated in the Owens Valley.

This level of management was a quite different startegy from agriculture.  It was, instead, whole-landscape cultivation, maximizing production across a huge range of resources.  By contrast, the Near Eastern Neolithic peoples in similar environments focused on two or three to cultivate intensively, thus inventing agriculture. 

The large bulbs and flowers of camas (specifically C. quamash  and—if it is a separate species–C. leichtlinii), the response of these plants to cultivation, and their striking failure to thrive and compete after the Native population was exiled from the meadows, all imply true domestication.  My impression from observing camas in the wild and growing it in my garden is that if it were grown by a “truly agricultural” people it would unhesitatingly be called a domesticate.

            Indeed, throughout California the level of management was impressive.  The area covered by camas and wokas was enormous.  Not far away, within California proper, the Shasta (Gleason 2001), Achomawi, and Atsugewi (T. Garth 1978) cultivated bulb- and root-rich meadows extensively.  Wild crops included monocots of many families—true lilies, Mariposa lilies, camas, and so on—as well as roots, mostly of the carrot family, such as wild carrots (Perideridea) and Lomatium.  Root-digging seems very generally to have involved careful cultivating:  small roots were left to regrow or were even planted; competing plants were removed; the soil was loosened; parts that could regrow roots were returned to the ground; and so on. 

Root-digging involved a veritable Protestant ethic of hard work and diligent, responsible effort.  Among the Atsugewi, men tried to marry the girls who brought in the most roots, and myths told of heroic diggers who married well (Garth 1978:237-238).  This was part of a more general ethic of hard work in all spheres of life, best studied by Garth among the Atsugewi, but generally found in California (see e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942 on the Yurok).  Garth reports chiefs calling everyone up at dawn with harangues such as: “Get up and do something for your living.  Be on your guard.  Be on the lookout for Paiute [raiders].  You have to work hard for your living.  There may be a long winter so put away all the food you can” (Garth 1978:237). 

Probably no bulb-rich meadow in the state was left alone, and apparently all that were even remotely close to a settlement were cultivated quite intensively (judging from K. Anderson 2005, 2017, and Gleason 2001).  Even the Paiute and Shoshone, in some of the most merciless deserts on earth, enormously modified their habitats.  They have been involved in management efforts recently.  Many desert habitats were improved for wildlife and biodiversity by their care, as shown by Catherine Fowler (1992, 2013).  They conserved waterfowl—a staple food—by leaving eggs if there were hatchlings in the nest (Fowler 2013:165-167; taking all eggs from a recently-laid clutch does no harm, since ducks and coots simply lay more).  They also had cautionary tales to keep children from stealing too many bird eggs.

With Fowler we move partly beyond state boundaries into neighboring Nevada.  This allows us to include also the careful review by Richard Clemmer (2009a) of “conservation” among the Western Shoshone.  These groups did not preserve pristine wilderness.  They burned carefully and according to plans, sowed grass seeds, and managed vegetation.  They hunted pronghorn sustainably, planning hunts only when pronghorn populations had built up.  It is absurdly easy to overhunt pronghorn, because they are easy to lure and are slow reproducers.  An estimated 30-40 million pronghorn were reduced to 13,000 around 1900 by settler hunting.  Before that, large communal drives, under some sort of direction but probably not a specialized shaman, took place, especially around the time and place of pinyon harvesting (Wilke 2013).  Charms were used but there is some indication that some pronhorn were allowed to escape.  Certainly the areas were allowed to recover before another hunt.

They may have managed rabbits and beaver locally; evidence is unclear.  I suspect they did.  Clemmer notes that there were many beaver in the tiny Great Basin rivers when Anglo-American trappers got there.  This suggests either management or great difficulty in hunting the beaver.  Since the Shoshone were expert hunters, the latter is unlikely, so good management is implied.  Historic fur trappers had no difficulty in trapping beavers from these small, accessible streams.  Clemmer finds no evidence for management of pine nuts or similar resources.  Pine nuts crop in only some years, and when they do they crop heavily, so there is no real way to manage them.  However, the Timbisha Shoshone of California most certainly do manage pine nuts, by cleaning up the groves to prevent wildfires, brush competition, and the like from damaging the pinyon pine trees (Catherine Fowler, pers. comm.).  It should be noted that pinyons are notoriously erratic croppers—a strategy to foil seed-eating insects—and crop only every few years (Bettinger 2015:68).  People had to scout the neighborhood to find groves that were productive—an easy task, fortunately, since one can monitor the developing cones over a year or so.  Wandering hunters would report back, and the group would know exactly when and where to go when the cones were pickable—just before maturity, since at maturity they open and the seeds scatter or are devoured by a host of animals. 

Clemmer also found no evidence for intensive fishing or management of fish, but data rapidly caught up with him here.  Just outside our area, a major study by Deward Walker and collaborators turned up evidence for fishing on an enormous scale, with a huge range of sophisticated technology, by the northern Shoshone and their neighbors, who lived in the fish-rich Snake River drainage (Walker 2010).  This information presumably applies to the Humboldt River too, and one can be fairly sure that all Great Basin rivers were heavily fished.  Significantly, Walker found it “necessary to conduct research interviews in either the Paiute/Bannock or Shoshone language” (Walker 2010:55)—in the 21^st century!  This is real tribute to cultural survival, and one that reminds us that lack of linguistic skills must have caused early investigators to miss a great deal.  Since the Shoshone (and closely related Paiute/Bannock) lived at the rivers’ headwaters, where streams are tiny, narrow, and often rather thin in fish, they could easily have wiped out the salmon and other large river-running fish.  The fact that salmon continued to abound proves some considerable degree of management.

Further, and much more thorough, work on plant and animal management in Nevada results from the comprehensive and thorough work of Jeremy Spoon and his many Southern Paiute coworkers in the White/Muddy river drainage of southern Nevada (Spoon and Arnold 2014; Spoon, Armold, and Newe/Nuwuvi Working Group 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015; Spoon, Arnold, Lefler, Wendel, and Nuwuvi Working Group 2013, 2014a, 2014b; these reports are quite repetitious but each has its own findings also).  Among newly reported information are care about pruning mistletoe from pinyon pines, and a great deal about managing water—desperately scarce in their area.  One elder observed:  “Science is a tool to measure stuff.  Culture is a tool to maintain what you have.  That’s what I believe” (Spoon et al. 2013:56).  These elders contrasted interaction with “management,” the latter seen as a not-so-good idea from the white settlers.  They noted a high respect for rocks, which remember whether they were moved for good or bad reasons—a belief I have encountered in Mongolia. One of Spoon’s reports is in fact titled The Voices of the Rocks Sing Through Us (Spoon et al. 2014b).  They also discuss talking with trees.  This makes solid sense when one is used to the significant silences—often filled with nonverbal communication—that mark and enhance Native American conversations.  Fire management is as among California groups described below; pruning, small patch burns in the right season, some clearing of brush beforehand, and general careful preparation and timing (Spoon, Arnold, Lefler and Milton 2015).

The level of personal restraint and responsibility involved could reach quite incredible proportions.  Philip Wilke (1988) found that desert junipers cropped for bow staves were carefully conserved.  A juniper with a straight branch was a rare commodity.  About one bow stave per twenty years could be taken from such a branch, preferably from the compression wood on the under side; then the juniper had to be left to recover.  Yet there are such trees all over the range of the juniper.  Bowyers had to be on their own recognizance—no one was out there patrolling.  Individual conscience restrained them from taking too much.  This self-policing went on for countless centuries over millions of square miles.  I have observed the same for yews in the Pacific Northwest; any venerable yew with straight branches shows the long, straight scars.  Such “culturally managed trees” are often well known locally, to the point that “CMT” has become a normal word in modern archaeology and land management.

California’s and Nevada’s indigenous people normally engaged in long migrations between winter villages and spring and summer harvesting grounds.  These migrations took them through successive habitats, usually on the route from lowlands to highlands and back.  Presumably the routes would change to avoid places heavily harvested in immediately previous years.  No meadow in the state, except extremely remote and high-altitude ones, would have been long ignored.  Archaeology shows this clearly.  Look around any meadow anywhere in the state, and (unless settlement or flooding have destroyed the record) you will find tiny scatters of flakes where someone sharpened a knife, broke an arrow point, or quickly flaked out a skinning tool.

            On the other hand, recent writers have been too quick to maintain that all California was highly managed, with wilderness a meaningless concept.  The Native Californians did not greatly affect the rough, infertile parts of the state, or the high mountains.  This was not purely because of indifference.   More significant was the use of remote mountaintops and high-mountain environments for vision quests and meditation, with the goal of gaining spiritual insights, knowledge, and ability.  Anthropologists generally refer to this as “power,” but, significantly, Native people speaking English usually call it “knowledge.”  It refers to a comprehensive spiritual vision that gives the visionary enough self-efficacy to accomplish important matters; the highest knowledge is generally considered to be that of healing.  In any case, all western North American peoples sought this, and depended on mountain wilderness for it.  All groups knew certain spots, called “power places” in the literature, that were particularly good for vision questing; mountaintops were particularly favored, but remotes lakes, waterfalls, and springs were important.  Of this more anon; at present we need note only that wilderness was required for a specific important use.

Most important of all was burning, but readers should remember that all those other techniques were important as well.  This was not simply “firestick farming.” 

            Fire was the chief way of managing the environment, and here the record is somewhat confusing.  There is no question that California Native peoples set fires everywhere that would burn, and that these very substantially altered the vegetation over vast areas of the state (K. Anderson 1999, 2005; K. Anderson and Rosenthal 2015; Lewis 1973; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, with major review of literature; Pyne 2004; Timbrook 2007).  This was to be expected, for all Native American peoples except those in non-combustible environments (basically, Arctic and high-alpine areas and sand deserts) burned regularly (Pyne 2004; Stewart et al. 2002), and the effects on the vegetation were considerable; it is possible that the entire Eastern North American forest was deliberately maintained as an oak-chestnut-hickory community by burning (Delcourt and Delcourt 2004).

Juan Crespí’s diary from 1769 (Brown 2001; see Gamble 2008) is particularly revealing.  He noted not only widespread deliberate burning, but also that the vegetation in many areas was short annual pasture rather than the chaparral and coastal sage scrub that are now, or recently were, found in those locations.  The reviews by K. Anderson and by Lightfoot and Parrish list hundreds of sources covering dozens of groups. 

            On the other hand, a few doubters have raised their voices, and one of them is a formidable authority: Richard Minnich (1983, 1987, 2001a, 2001b, 2008), one of the two or three leading experts on California fire ecology.  He points out at length that much of the state is affected by dry lightning, which in the mountains can be an almost daily phenomenon in late summer, and that other sources of ignition exist.  (These might range from volcanism to spontaneous combustion in animal nests.)   California’s bone-dry summers and highly inflammable vegetation combine to guarantee natural fires on a cyclic basis.  California would burn sooner or later, indigenous people or no (see also Sugihara et al. 2006). 

Chaparral and some California forest formations are characterized by large numbers of species that seem actually designed to burn:  they dry out in summer and contain resins, waxes, and other compounds that are highly inflammable.  These species all either stump-sprout aggressively after fire, have fruits that need fire to open them, or have seeds that need fire to germinate.  Some authorities think that these plants evolved to eliminate competition and maximize their own dominance by this aggressive route. 

For instance, California’s most distinctive pine groups, the closed-cone and knobcone pines, have cones that normally do not open unless burned.  They live in chaparral, grow and fruit rapidly, and are designed to burn on 20-to-50-year cycles.  I have lived to see the knobcone pine forest on the San Bernardino Mountains go through two cycles and get well into a third.  Obviously they did not evolve in the last few centuries, and thus it is clear that California has burned since long before the Native Americans perfected their management systems.

Be that as it may, Native Californians burned chaparral regularly, to increase edible plant, mammal, and even insect resources.  Kat Anderson and Jeffrey Rosenthal (2015) report, for instance, that caterpillars, as well as grasshoppers, were managed by fire, which causes rapid regrowth of the tender new shoots on which they feed.   These authors describe the values of each stage of regrowth after fire.  Burning also opened the brush, making travel possible; a stand of mature chaparral is impenetrable, or at best very slow going.  Annual plants often produce more seeds (they need heavy seeding to survive) and greens than perennials do. 

Even fish could be helped.  Michelle Stevens and Emilie Zelazo (2015) point out that burning in summer opened up floodplains that flooded in fall, winter and spring.  Fish that spawned in those areas, including many important ones endemic to the central part of the state, were increased.  Another benefit was increase in number and quality of stems of plants used to make fishnets, such as Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) and milkweed.  These plants grow in moist areas and produce longer, straighter stems after burning.

            A contrarian work is a volume edited by Thomas Vale (2002), which contains some articles on California.  Vale took a considerably more extreme position than Minnich, and argued that Native Americans did little managing by fire (or, for that matter, anything else).  Vale’s work might have had more impact if it had not been almost immediately buried under the enormous floods of counter-evidence in Stewart et al. (2002), Pyne (2004) and K. Anderson (2005).  Vale’s book was effectively answered, and refuted, by in a review by Henry Lewis (2003), the pioneer investigator of fire in Native North America.

            Vale, like Minnich, emphasized the probability that remote and mountainous parts of the state would be more influenced by lightning than by Native burning.  Lightning strikes were and are so much commoner that Native burning would not have affected the cycle.  Fire scars on trees have been used to assess the frequency of fires, but the vast majority of lightning strikes burn one tree (and perhaps its immediate neighbors) without starting a serious fire.

However, in California, the areas near dense Indigenous settlement are also the areas with the least lightning.  Dry lightning is almost nonexistent in coastal California.  Rivers and barren areas prevent the spread of fire from distant mountains, though it certainly does spread from nearby ranges (especially in the Santa Barbara area).  Fire return intervals in all these areas, even redwood forest, are so extremely frequent that lightning is highly unlikely to be the major cause (Kat Anderson, pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014).

            Moreover, the testimonies of Crespí and others make it clear that the vegetation was burned far more frequently than even frequent lightning strikes would do.  Taken together, they describe millions of acres of annual pasturage.  Yet, in early historic times, these areas were brushlands. 

Minnich (2008) has established that the bunchgrass prairies of California’s interior valleys were nonnatural, and indeed many of them were purely mythical—early mappers’ overgeneralizations.  The potential vegetation of most of the valleys is saltbush and other brush.   Minnich has qualified his stand on the inexorable nature of burning cycles (Minnich 2008 and pers. comm, 2009-2010; Minnich and Franco-Vizcaino 2002).  It appears that chaparral and even desert vegetation can be burned much more often than it would naturally do.  This has made him more open to Native American burning as a landscape shaper.

            Californians were careful fire managers; they made very small fires for their own use.  J. W. Powell, writing on the Paiute, says: “…an Indian never builds a large fire…and expresses great contempt for the white man who builds his fire so large that the blaze and smoke keep him back in the cold” (Powell 1971:53; this confirms a very widespread American folk observation that I have heard since my childhood). 

            In short, the evidence is unequivocal.  They certainly managed well-populated parts of the state by burning.  On the other hand, their ability to reshape the vast lightning-prone mountains of the state seems limited.  K. Anderson (2005, and pers. comm, Feb. 4, 2014) finds that they maintained and expanded the mountain meadows and coastal prairies of the state.  These are now rapidly growing up to forest, in spite of lightning strikes; but deliberate fire suppression and the current years of drought (which favor trees over meadow grass) are involved in this. 

Another equivocal case is oak woodlands.  Oak seedlings die when burned.  Frequent burning of oak groves would eliminate them.  On the other hand, oaks survive burning when they grow large enough to have thick bark.  I have seen coast liveoaks sprout rapidly back from the very hottest fires.  It takes about ten years for a live oak to reach fire-withstanding age.  Thus, rarer burning—once a new generation of oaks had grown up—would eliminate fungal and insect pests, thin out the competition, and maintain the groves. 

A problem for everyone trying to reconstruct Californian vegetation as of 1700 is that Europeans replaced deliberate burning with deliberate fire suppression.  The Chumash were already seeing this as a major hardship, and complaining about it, by 1800 (Gamble 2008; Timbrook 2007).  The Achomawi, later, complained and regretted the ruin of the forests (Rhoades 2013:112).

The only possible conclusion is that human-set fire profoundly affected areas near large population centers, minimally affected remote mountain and desert areas, and affected to an unknown and probably unknowable degree the vast in-between zone.

            The situation in regard to animals is even less clear.  California Native peoples overharvested the choicest shellfish, such as abalone, which are delectable and easy to over-collect (Jones, Porcasi, Gaeta and Codding 2008; Kennett 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, summarizing a very large and contentious literature; Rick et al. 2008).  It seems clear that depletion was very slow and gradual, and frequently reversed (Rick et al. 2008).  People were fairly careful stewards.  They may have overharvested fish, but the wild swings in fish populations caused by ocean dynamics make this impossible to judge.  Fish have to accommodate to the sudden alternations of El Niño’s warm water and La Niña’s cold, both unpredictable in extent and reach.  Anyone familiar with fishing in California (especially the south) knows that species of fish, sometimes in enormous numbers, suddenly appear and as suddenly disappear when such events occur (cf. Gamble 2015; Jones et al. 2016). 

Chumash fishing pressure in the Santa Barbara Channel, however, was enormous, and declines of easily overharvested species like sheepshead in the archaeological record are therefore significant.  The Chumash had several named types of net.  A 20-foot gill net required 12,500 stems of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), which would have to be prepared, retted, and spun.  A 40-foot seine required 35,000 stems.  With these nets they took great quantities of small fish (Johnson 2015).  With these, they could easily fish out streams and bays.  Indian hemp was carefully managed—pruned, selectively harvested (K. Anderson 2005).  Its sporadic occurrence, especially in places where it does not normally grow (such as dry lowlands) and which are not very near other stands, strongly suggests deliberate planting.  Apocynum androsaemifolium was an inferior substitute in dry mountain areas, and nettles were also widely used for cordage; both were managed.

Recent research on the Channel Islands shows a tendency for popular resources to decline in hard times, but the staple shellfish—mussels—was about equally common through time (Lapeña et al. 2015; cf. Joslin 2015).  Mussels still abound on the islands.  The highly favored abalones were sharply reduced during hungry times, but were still abundant till modern settler societies got at them and destroyed the resource—a fate conspicuously absent from the closely corresponding Isla Cedros in Mexico, where local conservation is still the rule (Des Lauriers 2010).  The Channel Islands were settled by 13,000 years ago, and quite densely populated for most of the time since.  In spite of epidemics, they remained densely populated till the people were forcibly removed to the mainland in the Spanish colonial period.  These islands are small and absurdly easy to overexploit, so the fact that they were still resource-rich through the 18^th and 19^th centuries implies extremely careful and thorough resource management.

Seabirds were little disturbed, but a flightless duck (Chendytes lawi) became extinct, through human hunting and probably also through predation by human-introduced animals including foxes (Jones et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2008; Rick et al. 2009; Whisler et al. 2015; there was also a puffin, Fratercula dowi, but it was so rare that no one knows what happened to it).  The duck lasted for some 8,000 years after human contact, however (Jones et al. 2008; Jones and Codding 2010), which indicates human restraint.  Indeed, one wonders why the Chumash allowed it to die out; it could easily have been quasi-domesticated.  They may have hunted it for prestige (Hildebrandt et al. 2010) but probably did not (Jones and Codding 2010; I agree with them that hunting a smallish bird that could not escape would not give anyone much prestige).  I suspect that period of unfavorable climate may have led to both natural decline and desperation-caused overhunting.  The case seems to me more interesting than the insignificance of the bird would warrant, since we have here a prey that could very easily be exterminated, yet was not for many millennia.   

            A classic study of indigenous conservation was Sean Swezey and Robert Heizer’s study of salmon management on the Klamath River (Swezey and Heizer1977; see also Kroeber and Barrett 1960, Tushingham and Christiansen 2015).  The tribes there allowed escapement of salmon to preserve the stocks.  This was ritually represented; first-salmon rites, weir inauguration rites, and other ceremonies provided a cycle that regulated take and escapement.  Prayers to the salmon to return in abundance were part of the maintenance; the Karuk prayed with the wonderful word ?imshírihraavish, “you will shine upriver quickly” (O’Neill 2008:101).

However, this was not all; any temptation to cheat was reduced by the fact that the tribes upstream would protest, often violently, if escapements were inadequate.  People kept each other honest.  Everyone wanted an equal chance at the fish, and would enforce it through warfare if necessary. 

Rules on fishing were tight.  Robert Spott reported that his people, in the first half of the year (by their reckoning), could not take or eat salmon below Cannery Creek; if a salmon was caught right at the point where the creek entered the Klamath River, only the part that had passed the creek mouth border could be eaten (Spott and Kroeber 1942:172; a great deal more about salmon rituals follows).  Weirs that could take 50 days to build were demolished after 10 days of fishing, to allow escapement.  This emphasizes how strict the conservation rules were on the Klamath.

            Recall that the Native people of California’s northwest were blissfully lacking in formal government, so, as with Great Basin bow stave trees, this management was entirely based on people’s individual consciences reinforced by public opinion. 

            It seems highly likely, and locally certain, that similar fishing regulations held throughout the state.  At contact, most of southern California’s small streams had steelhead runs.  A run even survives, or did until very recently, in tiny San Mateo Creek in Orange County, and, again until recently, in Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County.  All the streams in the region are so small that a single determined fisherman could wipe out a run.  The San Mateo Creek run was down to one female at one point.  These runs could not have survived without deliberate restraint, given the high aboriginal hunter-gatherer populations.  Similarly, the dense population of Pomo around Clear Lake could not possibly have subsisted on its fish resources (as they did:  McLendon and Lowy 1978) unless they practiced careful conservation.  There were just too few fish, and these few have to run up the creeks or concentrate in shallows to spawn, making them utterly vulnerable.  Even the simplest aboriginal fishery could have wiped out the runs within a year or two.  But we have no documentation on this; apparently nobody thought to ask.

Another case in point is the abundance of enormous trout and suckers, and the lack of decline in their numbers, in the Lost and upper Klamath Rivers of the California-Oregon border country (Stevenson and Butler 2015).  The Lost River in particular is a tiny stream that almost dries up in drought years (hence its name—it tends to disappear in, or even before reaching, the vast Tule Lake sink), and only careful management could have preserved large fish in it.  Mismanagement since contact almost wiped out the Lost River sucker, but it is recovering under intensive management.  Suckers were also important on the upper Pit River, where the Achomawi not only still fish for them but still carefully manage them, watching and protecting their spawning areas and not taking too many (Floyd Buckskin, pers. comm.). 

Native Californians probably overharvested mainland colonies of seals and sea lions (Broughton 1994, 2002; Jones et al. 2004), but probably not as much as sometimes alleged (Jones et al 2004 pull back from their own earlier estimates; and see Rick et al. 2008).  Remember that grizzly bears and gray wolves entered the state at the same time humans did, and would have made mainland pinniped colonies nonviable, humans or no.  Native hunters probably kept numbers of elk and deer well below potential (Kay and Simmons 2002; compare the much better evidence for the Columbia River area, in Martin and Szuter 1999).  They tried their best to keep the numbers of grizzly bears down, but probably with limited success.  How much they could affect these animals, and how much they tried, remains unclear.  Extermination of the megafauna no doubt allowed deer and elk to expand their populations enormously, because of competitive release.  I suspect the Native peoples came into some degree of conscious equilibrium with them.  Elk, deer and mountain sheep all tame themselves if given any chance, and herds habituated to human presence might have been cropped almost like livestock.  Indeed, red deer are farmed today in Europe and New Zealand; red deer are basically the same as Californian “elk.”  They are tamed, but not domesticated; true domestication involves a genetic change to a new and artificially selected strain, but red deer remain genetically wild. 

William Hildebrandt (e.g. Hildebrandt et al. 2010) has long argued that much hunting was done for prestige rather than for economic return; very likely true, but I doubt whether this was significant.  The Native peoples had too little margin.  They had to hunt rationally for food.  Prestige would naturally accrue to anyone bringing in a huge amount of meat, but I believe people forewent rabbits to hunt deer because they knew the deer would provide more meat rather than because it would provide more prestige.  After all, a good-sized deer, around 180 lb., would dress out around 100 lb meat, and thus provide as much meat as 100-150 cottontails or 1600 sizable shellfish.  Even a fair chance at a deer would thus beat all but the biggest rabbit hunt or shellfish expedition in economic terms.

California’s sparse population was really not enough to do much damage to fleet, widely-dispersed game like deer and pronghorn, though the effect on more concentrated stocks like sea lions and tule elk, to say nothing of abalone, could be severe.  Burning would be likely to lead to increases in deer and elk.  Slow-moving animals like porcupines would be caught in the fires.  Many species would be indirectly affected by opening up the landscape. 

California’s population was not evenly distributed.  Along the Santa Barbara Channel and the lower Sacramento, and around San Francisco Bay, there were at least ten persons per square mile (judging especially from Chumash population estimates, the best we have for a densely-populated part of the state; see Gamble 2008, Kennett 2005).  Conversely, the higher mountains and the Mohave Desert had a tiny fraction of a person per mile (I would estimate one person per ten square miles for the Mohave).  Intensity of management and of hunting obviously varied proportionately.

However, the Mohave Desert people managed to overhunt the bighorn sheep seriously.  They were bighorn specialists, and when the bow and arrow came in, a fatal temptation presented itself.  Sites show rapid decrease of bighorns; the rock art showing thousands of bighorns in that area may have been made in an increasingly desperate attempt to call the sheep back spiritually (Garfinkel et al. 2010).  It stopped short around 1300, probably because Numic speakers with a different lifestyle replaced whoever was there before.  Possibly the latter were dying out from the consequences of their folly.  One assumes that this was not the only overhunting story in ancient California.

An  insight into Californian hunting is found in Frank Latta’s work on the Yokuts (Latta 1977).  Asking Yokuts hunters how far their bows would shoot, he was told that no one knew.  No one would waste an arrow and its valuable stone point by shooting it at a distant target.  Hunters disguised themselves in deerskins and sneaked up on deer and other animals, finally shooting from 10-20 yard range.  John Wesley Powell noted the same thing among the Paiute (Powell 1971:49), and, indeed, traditional hunters worldwide did the same.  This indicates an appreciable tameness on the part of the deer.  Deer are not stupid, and are notoriously hard to sneak up on.  The author recalls a story from many years ago:  just before hunting season, a couple of California wildlife trackers painted a buck deer bright orange, fitted him with a radio tracker, and followed him for a day through the brush of the Shasta County back-country.  They knew exactly where he was at all times, thanks to the radio, but they saw nothing of him except a flash of orange for a few minutes. In Michigan, a herd of deer in a 50-acre fenced enclosure were intensively studied and censused year after year, but the lead buck was never seen.  He avoided all contact even in that tiny space, being known only from his tracks and shed antlers (Pierotti 2011:87).

Wanton, uncontrolled hunting would make close-hunting tactics impossible.  Early explorers were told similar things by coastal peoples.  The exceptionally powerful Hupa bows could shoot a deer at 50 to 75 yards off, and the Hupa could shoot clear through the soft parts of an animal (Goddard 1903:33).  But the Hupa preferred to get close, and disguised themselves as deer so well that they had to take pains to avoid mountain lion attacks (Goddard 1903:21).  So did the Maidu—one hunter was attacked within living memory (Jewell 1987:125). 

Deer were occasionally driven over cliffs, at least by the Wintu (Lapena 1978:336), but this must have been an exceedingly rare event.  To anyone who wants to drive deer over a cliff, all I can say is Good luck!  I’d rather try to push water uphill with a rake.  Deer jumps are known for the Spokan (Ross 2011:304), but required extensive and careful planning, as well as rituals.  The gullibility of city anthropologists on the subject of “jumps” and “cliff drives” never ceases to amaze those of us who have some field experience.  Game animals are not stupid, and know a cliff when they see one.  Cliff drives required very careful preparation, with many people organized to panic the animals and keep them stampeded in the right direction, and if possible with fires.  People must line the intended drive path, yelling and waving blankets.  If possible, fences or barriers will be set.  This works for buffalo and sometimes with elk, but was evidently an uncommon way to get deer.

Pomo hunters supposedly knew, individually, every deer in their hunting radius, and indeed it is fairly easy to learn to recognize individual deer and know their peculiarities.  My Maya friends in Yucatan know their local deer that way, and, for comparison, early Irish hunters did too, as shown by the individually named stags in Irish epics.  This allowed the Pomo to manage the deer (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20, citing Burt Aginsky).  Indeed, traditional Native American hunters are apt to know individually every large animal in their regular hunting areas—at least that is my experience in the Northwest, Mexico, and the western United States.

            The much-debated “Pleistocene overkill” need not concern us very long here, since we are dealing with recent management systems.  Still, it requires a note.  Paul S. Martin inferred long ago that Native American hunting was the sole factor in the disappearance of most of the large mammal species in the Americas around 12,000-14,000 years ago (Martin and Klein 1984).  In its original form—involving a sudden enormous expansion of human populations and hunting—this thesis is not credible.  It assumes a population growth rate of 3% over a vast area and a long time; nothing remotely like this has ever been observed in premodern populations.  It assumes people spread with lightning speed throughout the Americas.  And it assumes that people killed wantonly, since even a high population would not have needed more than a tiny fraction of the meat supposedly taken.  Surely, even without any conservation ideology, hunters would have thought twice about going after mammoths and mastodons simply to destroy them.  The danger would have been daunting.

            Moreover, mass kill sites are singularly absent.  We have a few scattered mammoth and mastodon kills, but not much else.  This is in stark contrast to the huge bison kills, involving thousands of animals, that happened later, without exterminating the bison.  Contrasting, also, are the massive boneyards on Sicily and Cyprus, where humans unquestionably exterminated the local dwarf elephants and hippos (Simmons 2007; displays in Sicily’s historical museum at Syracuse, studied Jan. 1, 2009).  On Cyprus, one site alone has the bones of over 500 pigmy hippos (Simmons 2007:231)—couple that with post-Pleistocene drying and heating, and there is no question why that species went extinct!  This is exactly what we do not find anywhere in early North America.  It is simply not credible that the there was better preservation on a couple of Mediterranean islands than in the whole North American continent.  There is also the fact that the vast terminal-Pleistocene boneyards we do have, such as the La Brea tar pits, contain few or no human kills.

            Thus, many authorities, notably archaeozoologists such as Donald Grayson (over many years—e.g. 1977, 1991, 2001), and Steve Wolverton (Wolverton et al 2009 and references therein) have given no credence to this hypothesis.  Neither have Native American authorities like Raymond Pierotti (2011).  Grayson pointed out long ago that many bird species, and several small hard-to-catch animals such as rabbits and dwarf pronghorns, went extinct.  The birds were mostly carrion-eaters that died out when their food did, but some were large water birds such as storks, and only climate change can explain their demise.

            On the other hand, it is hard to deny some role for human hunting (see, once again, Kay and Simmons 2002; also Krech 1999 for a relatively balanced review).  This is especially true since we now know that people were in North America earlier than Martin thought, and that some of the megafauna—notably the mastodons—persisted much longer than he thought.  Spreading out the time frame makes the levels of population growth and hunting much more believable.

People are highly efficient hunters.  Animals like giant ground sloths would have seemed like walking free-lunch counters.  The native mammals had no evolved or learned knowledge of humans and no defenses against group hunting with spears.  On the other hand, they would have learned it fast—certainly the mastodons had plenty of time.  It is not credible that animals used to avoiding sabretooths, lions, dire wolves, short-faced bears and the like would not soon figure out that humans were dangerous (veteran field biologist Raymond Pierotti 2011 makes this point).

The most convincing argument for overkill is indirect:  everywhere that Homo sapiens has gone, large animals have immediately begun to disappear.  This effect has been observed, archaeologically, from Australia, Madagascar, Indonesia, east Asia, and indeed everywhere carefully studied on the globe.  Some scholars have made far too much of this, though, by blaming even the extermination of tiny flightless island birds on humans; in this case the damage was surely done by the rats, dogs and pigs that people generally bring with them.  In New Zealand, for instance, rats came with the Maori, and probably did more than humans did to exterminate the moas.  The latter were ground-nesters with eminently edible eggs, and rats love nothing better than bird eggs.

In the Americas, the extinction pattern fits climate, not hunting.  The uncommon meso-size fauna went first, not last.  If humans had hunted everything out, the biggest, slowest, meatiest animals like ground sloths and mastodons would have gone first, the mesoprey later, according to all tenets of optimal foraging theory and common sense.  The truth was exactly the reverse.

I believe that, in the Americas, human-set fires were surely far more important than hunting.  (This is based partly on my observations of, and my reading of scholarly research on, burning in Australia and Madagascar.  It seems to be now generally accepted that fire, not hunting, was the human factor in extinctions in Australia around 50,000 years ago.  Both humans and climate change are implicated in the rise of fire.) Slow-moving species like the giant ground sloths could hardly have withstood frequent burning. 

Also, humans and other invading species after the peak of the last glaciation probably introduced diseases, and epidemic disease could well have had a role in wiping out the big game.  Within historic times, diseases have decimated North American trees such as the chestnut, white pines, and California oaks, and have wiped out Hawaiian native birds. 

Last and most serious, climate change after the glaciation was extremely rapid and disruptive.  Similar rapid and dramatic extinction events occurred at the ends of previous glaciaations, such as the Ordovician-Silurian event (Finnegan et al. 2011).  Humans were, obviously, not involved in those events.

North America 18,000-20,000 years ago was probably the coldest it has ever been.  It was hot and dry by 12,000, but then the Younger Dryas event dropped temperatures back to Ice Age levels around 11,000 years ago.  This in turn reversed, and an extremely hot and dry period set in by about 6-7,000 BCE.  (On ancient California, see Jones and Klar 2007.)  The changes were extremely rapid.

It would take only a few successive years like the horrific droughts of 2001-2002 and 2011-2015 to exterminate all lowland big game in California.  There would simply not be enough water for them.  Alternatively, and more probably, a couple of very dry years would so concentrate the megafauna, and so reduce human hunters to starvation, that any notions of conservation would go by the board, and desperate humans would indeed kill the last few mammoths.  I expect that climate change (basically drought), fire, disease, and hunting, in that order of importance, were all factors.

            The whole controversy has been greatly exacerbated by personal feelings.  The overkill hypothesis has proved popular with those who have an exceedingly limited faith in humanity’s ability to manage anything, especially biologists.  Some of these are frankly anti-Native American.  However, also among these ranks are more pro-human and pro-Indigenous anthropologists and other social scientists who dislike the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype (Kay and Simmons 2002).  Some of these scholars, like Raymond Hames (2007; his experience is in South America), have worked with Indigenous groups that lack any conservation ideology and hunt without restraint.  Others, including Kay and Simmons (and the present writer), see the “ecologically noble savage” stereotype as patronizing, and prefer to contemplate efficient if merciless hunters rather than meek and inept ones. 

Skeptics who doubt that humans exterminated the megafauna have included not only Indigenous writers like Vine Deloria, but also those who have little vested interest one way or another (such as Grayson and Wolverton), and even those who stalwartly reject the “ecologically noble savage” concept but are even more skeptical about Martin’s hypothesis (e.g. Krech 1999). 

            As with fire, we are left in some doubt.  California’s indigenous people certainly hunted hard and cropped the more vulnerable fish and shellfish as close as they could.  On the other hand, there were no extinctions after the end of the Pleistocene, and archaeology shows only rather minor declines in game populations over time.  Apparently people and wildlife reached a loose equilibrium. 

Ownership

            Ownership is critical to management.  Since John Locke, conventional wisdom has it that private ownership is best, but modern experience suggests that ownership at appropriate levels of management is better.  The California peoples already knew this.  Resources were owned or held at various levels (Bettinger 2015).  Individuals owned their own tools and implements.  Large productive capital goods like canoes could be owned by rich individuals, families, or associations.  Houses were owned by the families that lived in them.  Generally, but not everywhere, families or lineages owned particular patches of food-producing plants, or individual oak trees, or other productive land resources.  More remote areas of the state, however, tended to have community ownership of land, at least of remote lands.  Families or village communities owned good fishing spots.  The village community owned ceremonial structures and grounds, and held control with varying degrees of formality over resources.  As usual, there was variation in different parts of the state, from the far northwest where everything was owned by individuals or families to the much more collectivist northeast and south. 

The Luiseño, for instance, had four levels of ownership.  Individuals owned their portable goods.  Kingroups or groups of related people owned tungva “gardens,” understood to be oak groves, productive berry patches, and the like.  Village communities owned tchon tcho’mi, specific areas for collective exploitation. Larger tracts of relatively useless land were held as territory of particular village communities, but were not subject to specific management by socially constituted groups (White 1963).  The Achomawi maintained rights to hunt and gather on land, owned by kingroups or possibly local groups (Rhoades 2013:68). 

Fighting was generally about revenge, sometimes women, rarely property.  Still, land and resource conflicts were numerous and important enough to define groups and color lifestyles.  Access to resources was generally restricted to the owners, especially relative to other North American peoples (Bettinger 2015:132-134).  We read of people fighting over berries, oak trees, and productive areas of land (e.g. Gamble 2008:258; Rhoades 2013; White 1963).  Like many other people, they exaggerated their grievances; Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, and Frank Essene, comparing notes in the 1930s, found that the groups they were studying described the same war, but each claimed it was the aggrieved one, and that it held on though badly outnumbered (Goldschmidt et al. 1939).  Raymond White (1963) recorded in detail the wars between Luiseño villages over resource encroachments.

The Yurok had an exceedingly complex ownership system.  Some things were owned in common (“’everybody’ ownership”), others by the village or group of houses, others by the house (which usually contained an extended family), others by individuals (note that this is very similar to Luiseño ownership).  At least after white settlement, individual land ownership existed.  Individuals might hold fractional shares of an item.  Songs and ceremonies as well as resources and wealth goods were named (Pilling 1978:146-147).  For the neighboring Hupa, Goddard (1903:26) notes extended-family ownership of acorn groves and of fishing sites and stretches of fishing streams.  Bettinger (2015:168-70) sees this as the limiting case of his “orderly anarchy.”  He clearly underestimates the role of community and elders, since the large towns of the northwest did function smoothly and coordinate everything from weir-building to the yearly ceremonial round, but certainly ownership tended to be at a grassroots level.

The Nomlaki occupy an intermediate position, with individual ownership of personal goods and also certain trees and the like; otherwise they preferred community ownership—villages headed by chiefs who administered (Goldschmidt 1951:340).

For the Cahuilla, Lowell Bean and Katherine Saubel (1972) describes family ownership of small plant resources, lineage ownership of individual oaks, and village community ownership of land and major resource clusters. For the Chemehuevi, descent groups owned territories.  These groups owned songs—notably the Mountain Sheep, Deer, and Salt songs—by hereditary right, and sang them to assert ownership and to show and teach knowledge of the ground.  Large, vague divisions of the Chemehuevi owned the songs.  Families owned specific versions of them, and these went with territory they owned, controlled, or habitually visited.  Such song groups were exogamous (Laird 1976:21).  The songs described the country, often in the form of travels through it; the Salt Song, for instance, traced a circle from the Bill Williams River (in southwest Arizona) through southern Nevada, eastern California, and back.  In striking parallel to the Australian Aborigines, these ownership songs recounted travel over the country, with human reactions, sacred places, waterholes, and other important matters incorporated (Laird 1976:6-18).

Since we are not talking about formal states, land was not formally owned, surveyed, and measured; vast remote tracts were open for anyone (though loosely held by the nearest village), and large shadow-zones existed between village holdings in such resource-poor areas.  Conversely, rich lands were grounds for major and serious conflict. 

            All this was less complicated than it looks.  The basic principle is that everything was owned at the level at which ownership was most efficient.  It would hardly be sensible for the whole community to own a bow and arrow set.  Conversely, an individual could not possibly hold (even if he or she owned) a large oak woodland.  The size of a particular resource item or patch seems to have determined the size of group owning it.  My sense is that a group owned a patch it could easily crop, manage, and defend (cf. K. Anderson 2005; also the studies in Bean and Blackburn 1976).

            Population density must have affected this.  It certainly seems, from the rather thin evidence, as if ownership was a more serious matter among the Chumash than among the desert Shoshoneans (Clemmer 2009a, 2009b), and more serious among the Yurok and Karok than among the tribes inland of them.  Evidence is thin (though see Bettinger 2015), and some of it goes against this generalization; ownership of choice fishing spots by lineages is still very much alive among the Achomawi (inland from the Karok), even after 200 years of oppressive contact with Euro-Americans.  Good fishing spots are highly concentrated there, and it could well be that there—and elsewhere—concentration of resources was more crucial than density of people.  Similarly, the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley, though they had the sparsest population of any California group, still maintain ideas of ownership of mesquite trees and pinyon groves.

Representations:  Sources

            The early and devastating decline of the Native Californians has left us quite poorly informed about them.   

Fortunately, a few exceptional collaborations between particular researchers and consultants have produced comprehensive and sensitively recorded bodies of data.  We can be enormously grateful that California was blessed with ethnographers who, whatever their faults may have been, actually cared about traditional people and cultures, and wanted to learn all they could.  Even today, when many ethnographers are interested only in high theory or in playing political games, California remains blessed with a stunning array of people who care—including Native ethnographers like Julian Lang and Katherine Saubel, as well as people like Thomas Blackburn, Lowell Bean, and others cited in the present work. 

  Particularly notable are certain cases of longstanding cooperation between an ethnographer and a Native Californian individual.  A. L. Kroeber’s work with the traditional Yurok elder Robert Spott is outstanding (e.g. Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Roland Dixon evidently managed exceptional rapport with the Maidu mythographer Hanc’ibyjim (Shipley 1991).  John Harrington’s work with the Chumash, especially Fernando Librado Kitsepawit (1981), is famous.  Harrington’s former wife, Carobeth Laird, cemented a particularly close collaboration by marrying her main consultant, George Laird; she produced a trio of books (Laird  1975, 1976, 1984) that are California literary classics in their own right—possibly the most sensitive, well-written, and moving collections of lore and texts from the state.  They have languished in some obscurity, ironically because they were published by a Native Californian organization (Malki Museum) rather than an academic press! 

Finally, special mention goes to the incredible efforts of the few Native Californians who have studied and recorded their own cultural traditions.  Julian Lang has done yeoman service on the Karuk and their neighbors (Lang 1994).  Native Californian elder, ethnographer, and writer Katherine Siva Saubel has for several decades been the unofficial dean of Native California studies (Bean and Saubel 1976; Saubel 2004).  Self-taught and with no “position” other than head of Malki Museum for most of its career, she compiled a record of publication, research, public service, and collaboration with international experts that is matched by few if any “formal” academics in the field. 

Susan Suntree (2010) has integrated many southern California Native origin stories and environmental teachings into a beautiful, poetic volume that catches much of the essence of the land.

            Unfortunately, all the above, together with the enormous mass of other ethnographic work, still fails to give a complete picture of the life and culture of any group.  Often, our knowledge of a whole group depends on one individual who did not actually grow up in traditional times.  George Laird had forgotten much of Chemehuevi lore, and we have essentially no other source.  Fernando Librado and Candelaria Valenzuela, our sources on the Ventureno Chumash, were raised long after the missions had changed Chumash life.  Our knowledge of the Kiliwa (just across the line into Baja California) derives from one man, Rufino Ochurte.  At least, he remembered quite traditional times and did find an exceptional ethnographer in Mauricio Mixco (1983), so when he does not mention conservation beliefs we can probably take it that there were no important ones.  (The Kiliwa maintained a very sparse, highly migratory population in a harsh desert, and probably had no need of them.)  Otherwise, however, a lack of reports of conservation myths and injunctions means nothing; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

We are best informed for the Yurok and Karok, who (with the Hupa) have been most successful at maintaining their culture till now, so that information derives from their own highly educated scholars such as Julian Lang as well as from many consultants interviewed over many years by many investigators.  Many other cultural groups were contacted too late, and often by “green hands” doing practice field work.  Material culture and ordinary social life have generally been well covered, since they show up in the archaeological and historical records as well as in ordinary ethnography.  The situation for myth and religion is far less good.  These leave little mark, and require extremely sensitive ethnography over many years to document adequately.  The contrast between the myth records of Hanc’ibeyjim or the Lairds on the one hand, and the hasty recordings by less sensitive ethnographers on the other, is most striking.  It reminds one of the contrast between Homer and the children’s books summarizing his stories for the subteen trade.

            One final problem with the sources is that California ethnography suffered from a tendency to compartmentalize “religion” and “subsistence” (or “environment”) as two separate things.  “Religion” covered abstract notions of gods’ “subsistence” meant pounding acorns and hunting deer.  Ways that religion sanctioned ecological behavior fell between the chairs.  Few recorded such data.  This problem is endemic in Kroeber’s Handbook (1925) and the larger Smithsonian Institution handbook (Heizer 1978).  Kroeber’s trait-list ethnographic method did not help the situation.  (Cf. Swezey and Heizer 1977 to show what could be done when the blinders were off.)  On the other hand, ethnographers not bedeviled by artificial boundaries do not report much specifically conservationist religious teaching, either (see e.g. Laird 1976, 1984).  It would probably be more accurate to see the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as basic, with “religion” and “subsistence” as segregates imposed artificially on Californian culture by outside ethnographers.

            One recalls that it took three generations of ethnographic work to get much sense of how Australian Aboriginal religion constructed landscape.  Californian ethnographers, working with memory cultures from the beginning, had no opportunity to do likewise.

Attitudes and Representations:  Specific teachings

            As elsewhere, conservation derived from more general postulates about the world.  These have been best summarized by Thomas Blackburn in December’s Child (1975; this book refers to the Chumash but what follows applies equally well to all California groups).  He lists fourteen postulates about the world as central to Indigenous thought:

A personalized universe

Kinship of all sentient beings

Existence and potential of supernatural or nonordinary Power

Determinism (within broad limits)

Negative-positive interaction (rather than pure good separate from pure evil)

A dangerous universe (with many frightening supernatural as well as natural beings)

Unpredictability

Inevitable, inherent inequality (especially of powers)

Affectability (all can potentially affect all)

Entropy (disorder builds up unless controlled)

Mutability

Closed universe

Dynamic equilibrium of oppositions

Centricity (the Chumash at the center of a circular world, itself the middle plane in a multiplanar cosmos) (Blackburn 1975:65, with my explanatory extensions)

            Of these, the most important in general and in managing landscapes are the first three.  The others may be considered ancillary.

            Blackburn also lists thirteen things that are highly respected:

Knowledge

Age and seniority

Prudence

Self-consraint

Moderation

Reciprocity

Honesty (but also trickiness in the face of frightening beings)

Industriousness

Dependability and responsibility

Self-asertion and self-respect

Pragmatism

Etiquette (proper behavior)

Language (Blackburn 1975:65)

            Explicit conservation in California representations of nature are rare, but Kat Anderson found a great deal of conservationist ideology in her studies of Native Californian plant management.  She found two universal rules: “Leave some of what is gathered for the other animals and Do not waste what you have harvested” (K. Anderson 2005:55; her italics; see also Blackburn and Anderson 1993).  In fact, there is evidently a general rule not to waste at all.  What is not harvested is left for later, or left for the other people (the four-footed or winged ones).  Native Californians would steal stored seeds from mice and other rodents, and acorns from woodpeckers, but would always leave some for the rightful “owners.” 

People approached plants with reverence and respect.  They felt the usual Native American kinship with nature (K. Anderson 2005:57-59).  Their ceremonies for first fruits and seasonal foods bonded people to the resource base.  People were close to the land.  Kat Anderson recorded a revealing comment from a Chukchansi Yokuts elder:  “I’ve alwas wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’  We don’t think of them that way.  They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place” (K. Anderson 2007:41).  She and Thomas Blackburn note:  “Today, native peoples still retain a deep respect for the natural world, and retell stories that remind them of the absolute necessity for judicious harvesting.  Elders are quick to tell younger gatherers, ‘Do not take all—and leave the small ones behind’” (Blackburn and Anderson 1993:20).

Kat Anderson found that a general sense of kinship with nature, or at least consociality with it, and a more specific sense of genuine deeply-felt responsibility for conserving resources for the wider good, were the basic attitudes of management.  Yet—whether because it is really lacking or because ethnography is so thin—there is little record of its being verbalized explicitly in a philosophic ideology, as it is on the Northwest Coast (Atleo 2004). 

An important exception is the Klamath River region, where traditional culture continues to an appreciable degree.  For that area we have not only a great deal of good ethnography, but a unique source in the form of an early book by a Native Californian woman—Lucy Thompson’s To the American Indian (1991, orig. 1916).  In it, she points out that the Yurok carefully protected sugar pines, source of nuts and sugary sap (Thompson 1991:28ff).  They conserved fish (Thompson 1991:178-179) and burned carefully and systematically (Thompson 1991:31-33).  In general, she stands in striking contrast to ethnographies by outsiders—she stresses the religious interaction with nature and its function in maintaining conservation.  It seems highly likely that this was universal, and that it was missed by early ethnographers for the reasons above noted. 

Confirmation for the Yurok case comes from more recent work.  The Yurok spiritual teacher Harry Williams (on whom see Buckley 2002) tells:  “I was with my grandfather, Charley Williams.  We were walking on a dirt path down to the ocean.  There was a bug crossing our path, and my grandfather told me, ‘Reach down and help that bug on its way.’  So I did.  I reached down and helped the bug on the path to where it was going.  ‘Now, do you know what you have done?’ Grandfather continued.  ‘You won’t feel badly now, for perhaps a bird will someday eat the bug.  But you must remember that the Creator created the bug for birds to eat.  He didn’t create them to get stepped on’” (Burrill 1993:43; presumably the Creator is Wohpekumeu, the Yurok trickster-transformer; strictly speaking there is no Yurok Creator, since the Yurok teach that the universe has always existed).  Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, I can testify that the Yucatec Maya routinely do things of this sort, with similar teachings.  Maya who picked up a bug to show me would always put it back on the path, unharmed, and headed the way it had been going (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).  Williams’ grandfather also said that rocks are living things, and that “the white man is like the wind.  Nobody knows where he comes from.”  Williams also tells of a line he heard at a Native American conference:  “Creator gave man two ears, and two eyes, but only one mouth.  But the white man thinks he has five mouths, no ears, and no eyes.  That must be why he talks so much” (Burrill 1993:106). 

For the Karok, the “Ikxareyavs were old-time people, who turned into animals, plants, rocks, mountains, plots of ground, and even parts of the house, dances, and abstractions when the Karuk came to the country” (Harrington 1932:8).   Many of the most feared of these prior beings turned into large and spectacular rocks, a story which the Karok supposedly proved to Harrington by pointing out that you can still see the rocks.  The Ikxareyavs who turned into abstractions remind us yet again of classical Greece, with its goddesses such as Sophia and Nike, as well as the ancient Hindus, who visualized Time (kali) as a goddess.

The Hupa, culturally very close to the Karok though linguistically unrelated, held that one Yinukatsisdai “made all the trees and plants which furnish food for men….  If he sees food being wasted he withholds the supply and produces a famine.”  If pleaded with, he may relent, and “then gives the food…in such bountiful quantities that acorns are found even under the pines” (Goddard 1903:77).  The puritanical and religious Hupa shared the Northwest Coast view of punishment for waste, but added a fascinating touch in the mercy of the creator.  The corresponding masters of deer are the Tans, who withhold deer from hunters if deer are not treated with respect.  As elsewhere in the wider Northwest and California (e.g. Rhoades 2013:81), respect means not only treating the dead deer respectfully but also totally refraining from waste, overhunting, and hunting without serious need for food.  Yet other deities care for fish in similar ways (Goddard 1903:77-78).  The fish, like the deer and other food animals, had been kept by the supernaturals, and had to be liberated by culture-heroes; there are many stories of these events, and the stories are used in ceremonies to maintain the stock (Goddard 1904).  Less effective, but not unrelated, were prayers that birds and squirrels might not desire to eat the acorn crop (in competition with the Hupa) (Goddard 1903:81).  The Hupa regarded trails as sacred persons. 

The Yurok, Karok and Hupa joined in enormous ceremonies that were intended to preserve and renew the world and its resources.  These ceremonies almost died out, but managed to survive, and are now once again celebrated regularly.  The belief in the need of humans to hold elaborate and active rituals to keep the game, fish, and plant foods productive has itself been preserved and renewed, especially since these groups have seen the result of modern Californian indifference to conservation.  Many myths detail the origin of these ceremonies and the need for them, but specific teachings of directly conservationist behavior are rather limited.  However, it seems clear that a general reverence and spiritual concern for the landscape has a preservationist effect.  People will not thoughtlessly waste resources that are personally and spiritually important.

Among the Lake Miwok, as in several other parts of North America, “game animals were believed to be immortal and under spirit control, and it was believed that animals sometimes transformed themselves into other species” (Callahan 1978:272).  The Yuki held that deer are immotal, their souls living in a mountain under care of a Deer Guardian who is second only to the Creator and who controls obsidian as well as deer.  This belief in animal souls within a mountain occurs widely in North America, as far as Huitepec, the sacred mountain near San Cristobal in Chiapas. It is more than likely that the immortality and protectedness of spirits of game was universal. 

The Northern Pomo had a concept of “xa, manifestations of the supernatural spirits…left on earth from the beginnings and investing certain peculiar objects with supernatural attributes….  Xa  is the genius of procreation, acquisition, alien to human activities…but a spiritual concomity of men whose aid may be engaged through prayer and possession of its symbols….   Xa is summoned by sexual contact, is the mystery of conception and gestation, leaves its stamp on the buttocks of new born till erased by cognoscence; places an indelible mark on the skin of a favored mortal…. Xa is the inspiration of song…, the rhythmic impulse of song-dance ceremonies, the buoyancy of regalia…and the stimulus of fingers tapping upon the flute. It is the celestial, beneficent influence as opposed to the terrestrial demon of diaster…”  (notes of John Hudson, ca. 1900, from Welch 2013:169).  Xa resides in hawk and falcon and eagle feathers, in crests and red tails of birds such as woodpeckers, and in omens and apparitions.  Five plants have it: trail plant (Adenocaulon bicolor), angelica, sweet cicely (Osmorhiza sp.), Fendler’s meadowrue (Thalictrum fendleri), and leather root (Welch 2013:169).  As elsewhere in California, tobacco and Jimson weed (Datura wrightii) were sacred in a different way: they gave direct visions and healings.  All this must have fed back on resource management, but no early record of this seems to have survived.

Equally revealing is a story related by Fernando Librado (1979:113):  A man was trapping rats in a pitfall trap, and an old Santa Rosa Chumash told him:  “’You are polluting our mother, Xutash!  [The Chumash earth goddess.]  Remove this at once, If you defile our Mother, she will give us nothing.’”

The Cocopa, who lived in a landscape of abundance in the fertile Colorado River delta, lived simply and never worried much about food—though famine threatened if a drought led to the river being very low.  William Kelly made careful enquiries about religious beliefs connected with fertility, harvest, wild foods, agriculture, and the whole suite, and found:  “Harvest festivals…were…religious in nature; yet their function, explicit and implicit, was in connection with group life and social organization, and they were neither related to the harvest as such nor a mechanism aimed at increasing effort or diligence in farming” (Kelly 1977:44).  This seems general throughout California (the Cocopa live in Baja California).  The only rule related to such issues that is even remotely ecological in function was the universal Native American rule that a boy could not eat his own first kills (Kelly 1977:45).  This has no conservation function in itself, but in most of North America is part of teaching the boy respect for both the game and the human social group that shares the kill.  The Cocopa tabooed doves but apparently for totemic, not environmental, reasons.  As agricultural people, they probably had a different take on myth, with Coyote a creator of good crops and transformer of insulted ones into bitter wild foods, rather than a producer of good wild foods for people to gather (see Nabhan 2013 for a brilliant, incisive analysis of this contrast in southwestern mythology).

We are, however, surely missing a great deal.  The Northern Paiute, whose territory included the northeast corner of California, offered prayers to slain game animals.  They left the tail tip of a hunted deer under a rock with the prayer “’Deer, thank you, and come again.’  A similar offering was made for bighorn sheep” (Fowler 1992:181).  Note that the deer will be reincarnated, and will again offer itself to the hunter if treated well—a universal North American belief.  Even roots required an offering or prayer.  Eagle feathers were harvested without killing the eagle (ibid.).  A number of prayers, to the Sun and othe powers, were given daily or frequently.  Ceremonies insured continued production of food resources.  Yet Fowler does not record conservation myths either.

            Taboos may also have had a conservation effect.  The Yana, for instance, did not allow salmon to be eaten with deer meat, small game, or roots taken from gopher burrows (Sapir 1910:156).  The salmon would cease to come if this taboo was violated.  One assumes it was disrespectful to them.  Possibly they did not like to associate with prototypically “land” foods.  There is no evident conservation here, but at least some respect for the salmon was apparent.  The Wintu and related peoples tabooed a large number of things, including most birds of prey and predatory animals (Du Bois 1935).  The Nutuwich Yokuts even tabooed bear and deer, being thus reduced to eating rabbits for meat, a most unusual degree of forbearance (Gayton 1948:166).  Taboos this extensive would have a major ecological effect.  They preserved even the hunted species indirectly, by preserving keystone species in the ecosystem.  Heizer (1978) cites a number of taboos and rules from around the state that affect land use. 

            The Chilula (Athapaskan) culture is barely known from a very few elderly people just after 1900.  One of them “was a medicine woman for troubles caused by the deer gods” (Goddard 1914:379).  That is all we know of Chilula animal religion, outside of a few generic myths, but it implies spirit guardians of the game such as we know from most of Native America.

            Attested from one end of the state to the other are harangues by chiefs telling people to work hard and diligently at hunting, gathering, and food production in general.  (The best description is for the Atsugewi, but the custom is attested all the way to the Mohave [Kroeber 1972] and Cocopa [Kelly 1977:66].)  Many groups  had a special designated Orator as well, who could do this.  People could ignore if they chose, but they would then be subject to major criticism and coolness, and hard work was a strong value everywhere from the northwest corner (e.g. Buckley 2002, Kroeber 1972 for the Yurok) to just beyond the southeast one (Cocopa:  Kelly 1977:23).  This would rather tend toward overexploitation of the resources than conservation of them, and thus may have much to do with the archaeological evidence noted above of local over-harvest.

Attitudes and Representations:  General

Native American biologist Raymond Pierotti states:  “A common general philosphy and concept of community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North America, which includes:  1) respect for nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behavior, and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti 2011:198-199).  This and all it implies is fully true for California.

Respect.   The full panoply of North American Native conservation attitudes is reflected in an astonishing prophecy that Cora Du Bois recorded from Kate Luckie, a Wintu shaman, in 1925:

“When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north.  Everyone will drown.  That is because the white people never cared for land or deer or bear.  When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.  When we dig roots, we make little holes.  When we build houses, we make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things.  We shake down acorns and pine nuts.  We don’t chop down the trees.  We only use dead wood.  But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything.  The tree says, ‘Don’t.  I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up.  The spirit of the land hates them…  The indians neverf hurt anything, but the white people destroy all.  They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth.  The rocks says, ‘Don’t!  You are hurting me.’  But the white people pay no attention.  When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking.  The white people dig deep long tunnels.  They make roads.  They dig as much as they wish.  They don’t care how much the ground cries out.  How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?  That is why God will upset the world—because it is sore all over” (Du Bois 1935:75-6; cf. Heizer 1978:650). 

Luckie continued to say that water could not be permanently hurt, because it eventually runs to the ocean, and that it would thus survive to destroy the current world by flood.  The Wintu share the widespread North American belief that there have been four worlds of people so far, and we are in the fifth; it is to be destroyed by flood, according to Wintu tradition.  Another Wintu shaman commented that “the gold feels sorry” for the Indian people because they were driven from their homes by men seeking that metal (Du Bois 1935:76).  (It is worth noting that Du Bois had no special interest in ecology or environment, but was meticulous about documenting shamans and all they said; hence these unique recordings.)

The California Native peoples shared the widespread Native American belief that disrespect of powerful animals brought danger.   A story has made it from the Chumash consultant Juan Justo to early ethnographer John Peabody Harrington, thence to Chumash expert John Johnson, and then into Lynn Gamble’s book on the Chumash—a typically indirect route: 

            “…Juan’s uncle began to laugh and shout and make fun of [a rattlesnake]…. The other man advised Juan’s uncle to be quiet,…but Juan’s uncle made all the more noise….whereupon the other man left him and went on alone.  When he was alone, Juan’s uncle looked around a saw a whole pile of guicos [alligator lizards] with their mouths open towards him and their tongues out….he…shut his eyes and went jumping and climbing to break through the lizards, and when he opened his eyes there was nothing there” (Gamble 2008:216, quoting John Johnson’s edited version of a Harrington text). 

I have heard very similar stories on the Northwest Coast and among the Maya.  If the parallels hold—and I am sure they do—the lizards were warning Juan’s uncle that if he teased a snake again he would suffer, probably through a bite from the snake. 

General respect for plants and animals and their spirits and spirit guardians existed.  Respect guided conservation generally.  “One took what he needed and expressed appreciation…. Without these attitudes the California Indians could have laid waste to California long before the Europeans appeared” (Heizer 1978:650).

There was a very general sense that plants needed human care, a sentiment backed up by experience, but going well beyond the facts of Native management and care.  Plants and animals need to be used, as a mark of respect.  Neglecting them wounds their spirits.  They decline and become weedy, poorly grown, and despondent-looking (K. Anderson 20005; Blackburn and Anderson 1993; McCarthy 1993:225).  I have run into the same idea among Northwest Coast peoples and something very close to it among my Maya friends.  In fact, California’s useful plants do respond to care; basketry plants put out long straight shoots, nut trees crop more, and so on (Anderson 2005). 

Such attitudes survive today in areas where something like traditional plant uses can exist.  Michael Wilken-Robertson, interviewing Kumeyaay people in Mexico just south of the California border, heard from elder Teodora Dcuero Robles:

“This I can assure you, the ancient ones never damaged a tree, no, never; they loved them as something very sacred.  They would tell us not to go breaking the branches of the pines, not to play there, nor to climb up on any small tree, they said that they were almost juist like humans; ‘They are watching us, they are taking care of us, they give us our food.  Don’t go around damaging them don’t be shouting, none of that,’ they would say, ‘take special care of them,’ for this reason we know very well that we must take care of these trees.  Also the medicinal herbs, those they especially charged us to care for, we shouldn’t just go out and cut for no reason, go out and cut them and throw them away to dry up, no.  They told us many things, that we should even care for the rocks, just imagein!  The rocks, the sand, the springs, the water flowing, all these things they said we must respect” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:49, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:231-232).  From the Paipai, a group that moved from Arizona to northern Baja California about 300 years ago, comes a story told by Eufemio Sandoval.  The Mexican government forbid them cutting juniper posts because the junipers were getting rare.  Sandoval commented “we have never cut the plant to the root, but rather it has been a form of pruning that we carry out. We just take what is useful as a post and leave the rest to keep growing and developing” (Wilken-Robertson 2004:53-54, reprinted in Wilken-Robertson 2018:236).  Sandoval held that this was better conservation than pure neglect.  Recall Wilke’s findings on Great Basin junipers. 

There is little reference to animals letting themselves be taken if they are respected, but apparently the belief existed.  One Mohave did say that the Creator gave hunting to the desert tribes but not the Mohave, so when the Chemehuevi “see game, the animals cannot run fast, or they sit down…they want to be caught.  The same with the Walapai.  But if Mohave go to hunt, the animals run swiftly away” (Kroeber 1972:84).  A Wintu hunter who failed to get deer would say “The deer don’t want to die for me any more” (Heizer 1978:651).  Many stories around the state imply that animals not respected will not let themselves be killed.  Conversely, they might go away.  Elsewhere in North America, some groups have noted that game disappears as white settlers fill up the landscape, and suspect this is because Native hunting is outlawed and the game is offended and leaves.  I am certainly aware that dramatic declines of deer have taken place since hunting has been banned in settled areas, but in fact the reasons are drought (first of all), suburbanization, and introduced diseases.  Still, the Native view has its merits; failing to keep the game alert, and failing to weed out sick and slow individuals, has its costs.

The belief that wild plants and animals, and even rocks, must be treated with respect is shared all over North America and among similar societies in Asia.  In Mongolia I learned immediately that one had to treat all these entities with respect (shuutekh, a word whose root meaning is respect for one’s elders).  All have spirits and the spirits are ever-present; they deserve respect as elders, helpers, friends, and possible sacrificers of themselves to the human hunter or forager.  Thus there are absolute rules against overhunting, overcollecting, and waste, and these are observed in the remotest areas.

The widespread North American taboo against a youth eating his first kill was probably general, and among the Chumash one report says that a hunter or fisher could never eat his own kill, on pain of never succeeding again (Grant 1978:512, citing Z. Engelhardt).  This is evidently part of the North American complex of respect for animals.  The Chumash are known to have prayed to the swordfish to drive whales on shore, and to have had a swordfish dance; they revered other powers of the sea also (Blackburn 1975; Gamble 2008). 

They also had the idea, general in western North America, that the bones of an animal should be treated carefully and respectfully, because such things as breaking a bone would mean the animal would reincarnate with a broken or missing leg; at least this is attested in myth, if not in actual practice (Blackburn 1975:131, in a myth recorded by Harrington).  Another version of the same myth has Momoy—Datura personified as an old woman—protesting against a boy (her grandson in other versions) killing unnecessarily:  “Have you no sense at all?  You are just killing for the sake of killing” (Blackburn 1975:147).  Occurrences like this, in Harrington’s very complete materials on the Chumash, make it seem very likely that California Indians did not lack the usual western North American values; ethnographers simply failed to record them.

And yet, among the Monache, careful enquiry indicated otherwise:  “No special ritual precautions accompanied the hunting of deer or bear.  Animals were not addressed before, during, or after the kill” (Spier 1978:428).  This is reported because it is in such marked contrast to the situation in the Northwest Coast and many other areas, where respectful addresses to the animals were required, and were part of a conservation-related ideology.  Generally, nothing is reported either way for California peoples; “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but the lack is suggestive given Spier’s report.

Social Bonds with Nature.  All California groups thought of the natural world as closely allied to the human one, almost always with actual kin relations or equivalent social bonds.

Many Californian groups, especially in the center and south, had lineages and moieties with animal emblems.  Moieties named Coyote and Wildcat (Bobcat) were found widely, as among the Cahuilla and Serrano.  The Yokuts named them West and East, but divided the animals among them; “the Tachi assigned Eagle, Crow, Killdeer, Raven, Antelope, and Beaver to the…West moiety and Coyote, Prairie Falcon, Ground [Burrowing] Owl, Great Horned Owl, Skunk, Seal” and other beings to the East (Wallace 1978:453, from E. W. Gifford’s data; reference to Valley Yokuts, but all Yokuts groups apparently had more or less the same).  Anna Gayton (1976) points out that people really felt close to their lineage animals.  Eagle and Coyote were the lead animals respectively.  Within the moieties were animal-named patrilineages; the Eagle lineage supplied chiefs. The Coyote moiety had its own chiefs, however (Wallace 1978:454).  Moieties sometimes owned certain foods, and feasted each other with their respective foods (Gayton 1976:84).

The Miwok seem to have reached an extreme, extending human society to the entire cosmos by classifying everything (at least everything they noticed) into either the Land or the Water Moiety; the former included mostly up-country beings, the latter not only water but also lowland creatures (Gifford 1916, summary in Kroeber 1925:455; it is worth noting that Gifford’s rather scattered and obscure studies of Miwok society are one of the more amazing achievements in the history of kinship studies, being far ahead of their time in almost every way; Gifford had a high-school education and was a true autodidact).  These had nothing to do with individuals’ spirit power animals or other less global social symbolism.

The Monache had lineages named after birds or sometimes other animals; a lineage’s namesake was called its “dog” in the sense of  “pet animal” (Spier 1978:433).  The Eagle lineage was the chiefly one; messengers (and talking leaders?) came from Roadrunner and Dove lineages.  The Yokuts used their Dove lineages for this purpose, and Magpie lineage members as criers.

Humans as Part of the Ecological System.  This phrase understates the powerful, deep and complex emotional attachments to the land.  For every Californian group, their land is home—not just their personal home but the home of their people since the time of creation (or at least of transformation into our recognizable world).  Lynn Gamble and Michael Wilken-Robertson, in a recent, particularly sensitive account of Native Californian relationships with the land (2009), describe “…a landscape that is permeated with symbolic and ritual meanings[,] that embraces mythical histories, ancestral pasts, and moral messages that overlay a landscape where economic resources, such as foods and medicines, abound. 

Related to this ideational landscape are the themes of landscape as memory and landscape as identity.  Specific places are reminders of a social past that was filled with triumphs and disasters” and other stories.  People remember “not just a boulder, but the significant events associated with the boulder” (Gamble and Wilken-Robertson 2009:148).  Every stream and hill, as well as every sizable boulder, has its stories, and even individual trees are often important landmarks.  Often the historic associations of these landmarks blend into myths and origin stories.  Other, related groups in Baja California maintain similar ties with the land, including long-lost homes on the United States side of the border, where they have kin and other social relations (Garduño 2016).

The article refers specifically to the people of the Tijuana River basin in Baja California, but it could be said with equal truth of every group in California, or for that matter the whole of the North American Pacific coast. Every ethnographer who has written much about the ideational culture of Native Californians has emphasized their extreme attachment to and concern for the land, and I can certainly attest it from my own experience there and in the Northwest Coast.  Directions—including up toward the sky and down toward the lower world—as well as places have enormous significance ritually and culturally.

The Yumans of the Colorado River drainage—close linguistic relatives of the Tijuana River people— speak of “’Coyote Law,’…the law of the land—sometimes capricious and unreasonable like Coyote himself—but nevertheless, the way things are.  [Their] tales tell about Coyote Law” (Hinton and Watahomigie 1984:6).

This train of investigation leads to two broad conclusions.  First and most important, views of the land and its resources are impassioned.  Native people are not sizing up “resources” with the cold eye of the economic planner.  They are looking at their home.  For California’s people, the whole land is not only their family home, but the home of their entire people since the beginning of time.  We may understand the latter clause as meaning “since the beginning of the group as an identifiable cultural and social entity,” but that does not diminish its psychological force.  The land is loved, but the emotional involvement is much more than that; it is a total personal involvement, the sort of interaction that Emmanuel Levinas regarded as literally infinitely important, because it makes us who and what we are (Levinas 1969).

Second, knowledge is derived from interactive practice, not from passive book-learning.  Knowing the land comes from living on it and making a living from it.  Knowledge of plants and animals comes from working with them in the field, not from a biology text.  Rural Anglo-Americans in my youth learned the same way, and contrasted it quite sharply with “book learning.”  They knew that interactive practice is far better for learning actual life skills and work skills, whatever it may cost in knowledge of grand theory.  However, their wider knowledge of the world was book-learning (or TV-learning).  For traditional Californians, all knowledge came from interactive practice.  People grew up knowing the local ecology from personal experience; they knew what the fish ate, which plants grew together, what was needed for a healthy ecosystem.  Research comparing Native and White rural folk in the northern Midwest is relevant here; even Whites who knew the outdoors as intimately as the Natives thought very differently, seeing species as separate and relatively isolated rather than part of a great web that included humans (Medin et al. 2006).

Awareness of the possibility of overpopulation—too much population pressure—is found in the story, reported for every well-studied Californian group, of Coyote or Lizard or some similar creature bringing death because the world would become too crowded if people lived forever.  Where Coyote is the death-bringer, his own child is usually the first to die, and he regrets his choice.  The Mohave shaman Nyavarup had “the small lizard” as deathbringer; the lizard says “’I wish people to die.  If they all keep on growing, there will be no room.  There will be no place to go; if we defecate, the exrement will fall on someone’s foot’”  (Kroeber 1972:6).

Mythic Construction.  Even myths and chants came not from mindless classroom memorization but from ritualized transmission around the flickering winter-season fire.  Myths could not be lightly told.  Relating them in summer could lead to rattlesnake bite, among other things.

            Mythic animals were most conspicuously predators:  Coyote, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, Falcon, Condor, and so on.  Many game animals seem to have been merely game animals even in mythic time.  Among the Wappo, Elk was a humanoid pre-animal in mythic time, but hunted deer, which were ordinary game animals (see tales in Radin 1924).  Deer are rather rarely seen as having been humanoid in mythic time (though the Karok have several Deer stories; Kroeber and Gifford 1980).  Among the Chemehuevi, Coyote and Fox hunted rats and mice (Laird 1976).  

            Southern Californian groups had long and complex origin cycles, involving creation by heroic individuals.  In the Serrano song cycle for mourning ceremonies, the first song spoke of the earth, the second chukiam, “all growing things” (Lerch 1981:11).  This refers to plants and animals, but apparently to plants above all; it included a passage about the Datura plant, ritually used as a halluncinogen in puberty rites and in medicine.  Cognate words such as chukit are known among other southern Californian Shoshonean groups.  The Serrano creator died in Big Bear Valley, which thus has an enormous variety of plants, many of them endemic.  It is interesting that “[t]he Serrano “were not only aware of the phenomenon, they had an explanation for it in their cosmology” (Lerch 1981:14). The mourners turned to pines, which still stand in ranks around the valley (due, in modern terms, to the layered rock outcrops).  The related Cahuilla have a long cycle of creation myths centering on Mukat, a human-like figure who brought agriculture among other useful plant and animal management strategies.

            By contrast, the far northwest of the state had no origin myths; the cosmos always existed.  However, creator-like beings had altered it greatly and made it suitable for humans, who appear after the time of such beings as the Karok ikxareyavs (see below).

The Yuki and Kato had something close to monotheism; their high god (Taikomol in Yuki, Nagaitcho to the Kato; Goddard 1909) was far above Coyote and his fellow creatures, though they fine-tuned the creation.  Taikomol created the universe by song and speech.  In a beautiful Kato telling of the creation story by Bill Ray in 1906, Nagaitcho and the dog he has created end by rejoicing in their world:

“My dog, come along behind me and look.”

Vegetation had grown, fish had come into the creeks.

Rocks had become large….

“Walk fast, my dog.”

The land was good.  Valleys had appeared….

Water had begun to flow.  Springs had come….

“I made the land good, my dog,

Walk fast, my dog.”

Acorns were growing, pine cones were hanging,

Tarweed seeds were ripe, chestnuts were ripe,

Hazelnuts were good, manazanita berries were getting white,…

Buckeyes were good, peppernuts were black-ripe,

Bunch grass was ripe, grasshoppers were growing,

Clover was with seed.  Bear-clover was good.  Mountains had grown.
Rocks had grown, different foods were grown.

“My dog, we made it good.”

Fish had grown that they will eat.

“Waterhead Place we have come to now.”

Different plants were ripe.  They went back, they say,

His dog with him.

“We will go back,” he said.

(Goddard 1909:9394; slightly rewritten for comprehensibility.  Nagaitcho and his dog return to the north, whence they came, and leave us this beautiful world.)

This hymn to all the wonderful foods of the north coast ranges—and indeed they are excellent eating—is only a tiny part of a very long creation story that mentions virtually every plant, animal, fish, and geological feature in Kato habitat.  It is all very reminiscent of Psalm 104, but far more richly detailed.  It also reveals something of Bill Ray’s personal narrative style, which included long chanted lists of plants, animals, and geographic features of the environment, alternating with narrative that is largely spoken and is so telegraphic as to be dreamlike.  The combination is powerful enough to make Ray one of the more distinctive and poetically gifted California myth-tellers.  Such lists are a widespread stylistic feature in myths in many languages of north-central California and elsewhere in the world (think of Hesiod’s Theogony).

The Athapaskan original takes full advantage of the exquisite beauty and potential for sound-poetry of the Athapaskan languages.  The above is rhythmical and rhymed poetry in the original, rhyming with the repeated chorus-line word kwanang (“they say”).  Note that the mountains and rocks grow; they are living things in California belief.  Like Hanc’ibeyjim’s creation story (Appendix) Ray’s is one of the greatest religious poems in world literature, and it deserves more than languishing in a forgotten monograph.  Here are the first few lines, in Kato, simplified for easier reading from Goddard’s linguistic transcription:

“E lot, shiit la, nan dal, o dut t ge ka la e kwanang,

To nai nas de le kwanang.

Sha na ta se gun cha ge kwanang

N gun sho ne kwanang.

Kakw chqal yani kakw ko winyal, e lots ul chin yani ne n gun sho ne kwanang….”

Many other groups had Earthmaker and Coyote or Wolf and Coyote as creators.  Earthmaker or Wolf was the senior, more responsible and sober one, the stereotypic elder brother.  Coyote was young and wild, everybody’s crazy kid brother.  Of course, everyone respected Earthmaker but loved Coyote.  A particularly beautiful and moving version of this story is William Benson’s Pomo version (2002, where Coyote is called by his Pomo name or alternative incarnation Marumda).  The Pomo had a range of creation stories, often conflicting, because of their diversity and the diversity of peoples around them; they were influenced by the monotheistic Yuki to the north, the Guksu Cult of the Patwin to the east, and so on (Barrett 1933).   Other fine stories are Hancibeyjim’s Maidu one (Dixon 1912; Shipley 1991; cf. below),  Laird’s Chemehuevi stories (Laird 1976, 1984), and stories from the Kiliwa (Mixco 1983) and Kawaiisu (Zigmond 1980, 1991). 

The Yuman groups had humanlike but mystical and powerful creators.  The Yuman peoples and the culturally related Chemehuevi told of these in long song cycles, that describe the courses of the creator beings as they traveled around the world—the known habitat of the people, that is—creating, transforming, teaching, and instituting practices (see e.g. Kelly 1977; Kroeber 1972; Laird 1976, 1984).  Individuals dreamed their own versions of the song cycles. 

Some Mohave song cycles are given by Kroeber (1972; see also 1925:754-770), including a Mohave version of the Salt cycle known also by the Chemehuevi.  It contains not only the origin of salt, but of tobacco, the stars, and much else.

Kroeber found the cycles rambling and uneventful, but he recorded them in his youth from elderly individuals, and he was not fluent in the language; he seems to have gotten bland and truncated versions.  (Compare, for instance, Paul Talejie’s short but brilliant creation tale in the closely related Walapai language, in Hinton and Watahomigie 1984, and Laird’s Chemehuevi renderings.)  Even Kroeber’s recordings contain some striking poetry; one cycle begins:  “At Ha’avulypo Matavilya [the original creator] had made a house out of darkness and lived there” (Kroeber 1972:44).  The cycle continues to tell of his death and burial. In the cycle of Yellak (goose?), Yellak’s end is noted by Halykupa: “I know what made Yellak die.  He became sick from the sky, the clouds, the earth, the water, and the wind….Now cry.  Cry with the sky and with the wind…” (Kroeber 1972:63).  His skin sank into the Colorado River and turned into animals.

One reason Kroeber rather wearied of these cycles is that they detail almost all important actions as having been done and repeated facing each of the four directions in sequence, and there are other stylized repetitions as well.  Another is that some of the memorialized events, complete with long songs, are nothing more than the hero seeing a badger or catching a rat (Kroeber 1925:756).  The interest in these cycles attaches to their detailing geographical points and the creation events that took place there—of sheep, deer, grapes, salt, everything—rather than to exciting stories.  California Native people have an unexcelled sense of place, and—today as in the past—can find the simple mention of familiar spots enormously moving.

With the songs, which were repeated over and over, these cycles took anywhere from a night to several weeks of nights to perform.  Some were never performed in their entirety, because, like epics everywhere, they could be lengthened out indefinitely by adding elements and repeating songs. 

Separate (or possibly, at some level, from the Yellak bird myth cycle), but part of the same general tradition of singing to create and transform, were the bird song cycles, which survive among the Yuman and neighboring Uto-Aztecan peoples; these are not only about birds, but can be about anything, and are sung for entertainment—often with slow dancing.  Bird songs were in decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but have been enthusiastically revived, and now abound, with several good recordings commercially available. 

These spirit beings transformed the world for their own reasons, but also to make it ready for humans.  This can be compared to the Australian Aboriginal beliefs in the Dreamtime, and to the most ancient stratum of Greek myths.  These latter, at least some of which go back to a very ancient stratum of belief, lie behind the “metamorphoses” that the Roman poet Ovid turned into art long after the highly-charged shamanic power had gone out of them. 

Thus at the south end of the state, the Tipay (Diegueño) taught that Chaup, the focal deity of their religion, “named and marked all animals whereby they lost their ti.pay (‘human’) nature” (Luomala 1978:604).

Thought and song created much of the world.  The very long and circumstantial Achomawi origin tales of Istet Woiche (1992) and Maidu tales of Hanc’ibyjim 1991) seem to indicate that this belief reached a peak in the northeastern corner of the state.

Calendars everywhere recognized months, and frequently named them from the subsistence activities or seasonal nature events that went with them.

California is distinctly lacking in the specifically conservationist texts so commonly recorded from the Northwest Coast and Mexico.  There are none in the above-cited major collections.  Even Zigmond, focusing on ethnobiological research, found none.  Almost nowhere are there mythic stories about animals driven away by overhunting.  One intriguing exception concerns the Patwin Hesi cycle of the Kuksu religion.  Four songs were obtained from the deer of the Marysville Buttes, back when deer were humanoid in mythic time; enemies took advantage of the deer while the latter were ceremonially sweating, and exterminated them, which is why there are no deer on the Buttes (Kroeber 1925:385-386).  This is quite a different story from the widespread  North American motif of overhunting followed by famine, but is clearly a relative with the same general perception behind it.  The Kuksu cult is associated with morals and discipline, and this myth is surely significant.  Farther afield are various myths in which evil entities wreck the environment for no special reason, and are eventually transformed into their present animal form, as for instance in the Yurok myth of the origin of the mole and Jerusalem cricket (Kroeber 1976:47-54).  These animals, in their humanoid form of mythic time, bring death as well as widespread ecological damage.  The sense that the environment has to be orderly, constant, and well-managed to be fruitful lies behind this and similar myths, and evidently served as a general sanction against damaging the environment.

Apparently universal, however, is a myth of a time when animals and fish were held by supernatural beings who would not release them.  A culture hero such as Coyote or the Yurok Pulekukwerek outwits the keepers and releases the prey them through a mix of heroism, trickery and magic. 

Masters of the game animals—almost universally recognized in the Native Americas—seem less common in California.  Supernatural beings controlling or watching over plant and animal resources are mentioned, but without much detail.  The Southern Paiute, who range into California (where they are called Chemehuevi), had this belief:  “All the deer on Kaibab Plateau were believed to be owned by a supernatural being named Qainacav.  During the hunting season (July and June, also early fall), his name must not be mentioned, or else the luck of the whole hunting season would be spoiled.”  Hunters sometimes encountered him in human or deer form, but seeing him meant no luck that day.  Anyone who offended him would be lured off by deer tracks that eventually disappeared (Sapir 1992:829, from notes made around 1910), one way of explaining one’s inability to follow a trackway.

Few myths that I can find give specific directions or charters for the plant and animal management that we know was so universal (although some myths mention it in passing).  Quite the contrary; animals in their mythic humanoid forms go hunting and collecting quite at will, killing enormous numbers of game animals and gathering all the seeds they want.  The wishful dreams of the storytellers are evident, but conservation teachings are not evident at all.  The myths are extremely well supplied with moral teachings, but the morals are social.  Tales show the awful results of condemning ungenerousness, vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, violence, sexual sins, ignoring good advice, and trying to imitate others mindlessly, but not the awful results of mismanaging resources.  The stories are set the times before human people, and thus I suspect they date back to a time so ancient that the people were still few, with simple technology, when they could take without a second thought.  The Northwest Coast conservation stories seem usually to concern real people, albeit in long-ago times.

One exception is in an astonishing Wappo text, “The Chicken-Hawk Cycle,” recorded by Paul Radin from Jim Tripo (Radin 1924:87-147).  This is one of the most impressive and striking mythic texts ever recorded in California, and deserves better than to languish obscure in a forgotten volume.  Tripo spins it out to 60 pages; more typical is a Karok version of the same story that manages only two pages (Kroeber and Gifford 1980:250-252.)  Much of the plot turns on the anger of Moon, a captious old man, at the Hawk chief and his son harvesting pine cones by breaking off the branches of Moon’s pine trees.  Moon is not portrayed in a sympathetic light, but it is clear that such a damaging way of getting pine nuts was genuinely bad by Wappo standards. 

            Education of the young came through these myths, through specific instruction, through reprimand, but above all through interaction with the world, guided to varying degrees by elders and peers (see Margolin 2005 for a fine summary of Native Californian education).  Autobiographies recount dramatic experiences—accidents, vision quests, special hunting accounts, personal crises—that were interpreted, usually briefly but in extremely telling words, by elders.  Apparently this was a canonical way of learning, along with myths and initiation rites.  The long and complex initiation rites of such groups as the Luiseno involved detailed explanations of cosmology and of human life, including life crisis ritualization.  Other rites of passage, such as marriages and funerals, provided opportunities for songs, stories, and speeches that provided a great deal of instruction.  Finally, chiefs at dawn often harangued their communities on the need to be up and working.  Overall, there was a great deal of education, much of it quite formalized:  winter myth cycles, sings, initiations, funeral orations, and many more occasions. 

Religion, Cosmology, and Spiritual Concerns

A whole cosmology based on interactive practice and intense emotional involvement is bound to be quite different from one based on books, deductive logic, and laboratory experiments.  For one thing, it is hard to avoid personalizing the land—seeing the rocks, plants, and animals as people.  Even modern Anglo-Americans name their cars, talk to their dogs, and cherish their plants. 

Thousands of years of such interaction, in a world without labs and mass media, will inevitably make the nonhuman world more personal.  The nonhuman beings are “other-than-human persons.”  They have will and intellect, but not like ours; they plan and communicate, but we have to know how to hear them.  They have supernatural power to transmit.  

            The Californians shared the almost universal Native American belief in a prior cosmos, ruled by animal powers, that changed dramatically to make our present cosmic order.  The earlier beings included Coyote, Quail, Wildcat, and other beings.  There seems to be a vague tendency for interior and mountain groups to have more strictly animal powers in mythic time.  At least, the mythic-time people of the Yurok and the larger southern California tribes were very often humanoid, especially the main characters.  The large, rich tribes of the Delta and Bay Area are not well enough known for many conclusions.

Widely, however, especially in central California, an apparently human-like high god or pair of gods was the chief agent.  The Wiyot were the northwest pole of this belief; the Yurok, distantly related in language, lacked it (Kroeber 1925:119).  The Maidu, Wintu and their neighbors had a high creator or Earthmaker/Earthnamer.  Some (or all) Pomo groups had a similar high god.  Everywhere, he was very often assisted by Coyote, who royally messed up the process (see e.g. Hanc’ibyjim in Shipley 1991).  Similar pairings in southern California include Wolf and Coyote or Southern Fox and Coyote (Laird 1976, 1984).

            What Walter Goldschmidt said of the Nomlaki would apply equally well to all California Native peoples:  “To the Nomlaki, the world of reality and the world of the supernatural were inseparable, so that even the most practical undertaking was circumscribed by elaborate ritual inspired by the religious ideas with which the act was invested….  The Nomlaki world was animistic.  ‘Everything in this world talks, just as we are now,’” one Nomlaki man told him (Goldschmidt 1978:345).  There was, in fact, no concept of “reality” or of “supernatural”; there was simply the cosmos, with a gradient from clearly visible and tangible beings to invisible and intangible ones, and with a gradient from animals that were just animals to the mythic human-like animals of prehuman times.

Goddard, missionary turned ethnographer, was deeply struck by the religious nature of the Hupa, and sardonically remarked that “this undercurrent of deep religious feeling makes the life and deeds of the Indian seem…strange to the white man” (Goddard 1903:88).  Similar comments (if without the depreciative aside about Anglo-Americans!) could be made about all California Native people.  Religion was deeply felt and important in all aspects of life.  This was closely connected with plant and animal interactions.  Like their neighbors, they had a first salmon ceremony in the spring and a first acorns ceremony in the fall, as well as a first-lamprey (“eel”) ceremony (Goddard 1903).  (The related Lassik had a bulbous-plant ceremony; Elsasser 1978.)  All this involved stressing the importance of maintaining the resource; the ceremony was intended to keep the salmon and acorns coming, probably by showing proper respect and entertainment.  I strongly suspect that conservation lessons were once part of the rituals. 

Thomas Buckley discusses the importance of the spirit world, of doctoring power, and of “wealth” objects (actually ritual objects), among the Yurok, as Goddard does for the Hupa.  Of the wealth objects, Buckley says that “[d]ance regalia are not objects but ‘people,’ sentient beings (like deer) that have wewecek’, ‘spirit’ or ‘life,’ and that ‘cry to dance.’  As people, their ‘prupose in life’ is to get out of the baskets and boxes in which they’re stored and dance to ‘fix the world…’ (Buckley 2002:175).  They sometimes ask their owners to be loaned out so they can be danced at a ceremony in a neighboring community. 

Buckley, like the Karok anthropologist Julian Lang (1994), faults A. L. Kroeber for holding that the Yurok were obsessed with material wealth per se.  Kroeber was not entirely unaware that wealth objects (dentalia shells, obsidian blades, white deerskins, woodpecker scalps, and so on) were spiritual things and tokens of spiritual power.  He recorded many stories in which they are personified and spiritualized (Kroeber 1976, e.g. 200-204; cf. Kroeber 1925:40-42).  However, these objects, the dentalium shells in particular, were used as regular money too, for ordinary purchases and bargains. 

Kroeber was writing at a time when materialism, Marxian and otherwise, was dominant in American social science.  Not only Kroeber himself, but his main Yurok coworker, Robert Spott, seem rather matter-of-fact and materialist in their narratives (Spott and Kroeber 1942).  Euro-American readers might recall the Renaissance associations of gold:  money and material wealth, but also a spiritual and magical substance.  Interesting is one rather barbed comment that Kroeber recorded from Dick of Wohkero.  To a myth about Earthquake, who is personified among the Yurok, Dick added that “[n]ow Earthquake is angry because the Americans have bought up Indian treasures and formulas and taken them away to San Francisco to keep.  He knew that, so he tore the ground up there (referring to the earthquake of the year before, in 1906)” (Kroeber 1976:418).

Unsurprisingly, religion was thoroughly embedded in the natural world, and ceremonies continually constructed and reinforced ties with nature.  The Chumash had a particularly complex and arcane cosmology, paralleling their complex socioreligious organization (Hudson et al. 1977).

The dances of the Kuksu religion of central California included duck, grizzly, deer, coyote, goose, grasshopper, turtle,condor, and other dances based on animals; presumably the dances invoked them and imitated their motions.  These were not mere dances, but entire ceremonies centered on dancing (Kroeber 1925:378-380).  These ceremonies were “thought to bring rains, nourish the earth, and produce a bountiful natural crop; perhaps also to ward off epidemcis, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters…” as well as producing “an abundance of bulbs and greens, and…acorns…” as well as game (Kroeber 1925:383-384).  I take it this means that the dances were essential to co-create the natural community as well as the human one; human society being extended to include wild animals and plants, it is natural that human community-building rituals would impact the other-than-human community members favorably as well. Kroeber notes the significant lack of dances for critically important animals like fish and rabbits; there was no one-to-one mapping.  Of course it is possible that such dances existed but were lost before ethnography began.

Of course the agricultural tribes of the southeast part of the state had agricultural ceremonies, like most farming peoples of the world.  Yet, as with the Cocopa (see above), these seem not to have been elaborated as fertility or harvest ceremonies. 

Girls and boys coming of age went through initiation rituals, sometimes involving hallucinogenic plants that produced visions interpreted as spirit communications.  These initiation rites seem to have been among the most important ceremonies of the Native peoples.  Many smaller groups had no other major ceremonies, leaving initiation rites as the most important part of their religion (cf. Kroeber 1925, e.g. p. 428; the Yurok, alone among major groups, had no girls’ rites and apparently no true male rites either).  This is particularly true in the south (north through the Yokuts lands), where the use of toloache (Datura spp.) as a hallucinogenic drink made another link with the plant world.  The Luiseño youths acquired animal guardian spirits while under its influence, and did not subsequently kill the animal received (Kroeber 1925:670).  Toloache was widely used medicinally as well (see e.g. Librado 1979, esp. pp. 68-72).

Widely, across the state, puberty rites were the occasion for telling the longest, most detailed, most sacred myths and group histories.  This was when people really learned their culture in its depth.  All accounts agree that detailed and extensive teachings were  part of this, but no accounts give us much detail on the contents of the teachings, primarily because the rites vanished or went underground quite early.  (Constance Du Bois found some among the Luiseño.)  One suspects that ecological and conservation teachings were a major part of this initiation, but we will never know.

At the other end of the life cycle, groups in southern and central California burned the possessions of the dead, and then in memorial ceremonies burned large quantities of their own goods.  This prevented a buildup of material wealth, and indirectly served to eliminate the possibility of accumulating wealth for status display.  This seems to have mattered little, however, since the northwestern groups that did accumulate wealth for (spiritual) status did no notable damage to the environment thereby.

            There were several major religious cults or general ceremonial complexes in the state, each one confined to a few neighboring groups, possibly because of the difficulties of translation into the many different languages of the state.  The Northwest group of Yurok, Wiyot, Karok and Hupa (and to a lesser extent their hill neighbors) shared a focus on fish ceremonials, world renewal dances and ceremonies, the white deerskin dance, and other dances displaying ancient prized items of spiritual power.  The center of the state was dominated by the Kuksu and related cults, centering on the Patwin, Wappo, and Pomo groups.  The spectacular rock art of the Chumash and Yokuts (and probably the Gabrielino and other Shoshoneans, though evidence is mostly lost) indicates another religious area.  The bird songs of the lower Colorado and the Chinigchinich cult of the Luiseno and their neighbors also involved two or three major linguistic groupings each (counting the river Yumans as basically one group).  Finally, the rock art of the inner deserts, focusing on mountain sheep in many sites, is distinctive. 

            By contrast, more general folklore, as well as material culture, spread widely; it could be shared by anyone within hundreds of miles.  Folktales gradually transform, with north and south being quite different.  Language was not much of a barrier, and of course hardly a barrier at all to the spread and copying of material items.

Central to religion was spiritual ability and efficacy.  I have noted above the tendency of anthropologists to use the word “power” for what Native people generally call “knowledge.”  One could use the phrase “power/knowledge” if it had not been preempted by Foucault for a very different idea.

A model developed especially with the Luiseño concept of ayelkwi, but valid rather widely (especially for groups in the south coast, of course), lists four characteristics:  “Power is sentient and the principal causative agent in the universe”; it is found in the upper, middle, and lower worlds and “possessed by anything having ‘life,’” which can include rocks and tools as well as biota; it is in some degree of equilibrium in the cosmos; and man is a central figure in power networks (Bean 1992:22, citing and partly following White 1963).  One might qualify this for other parts of the state primarily in regard to clause 4; in some places (including central California, if I read the myths aright), humans are definitely less central than some supernatural beings, and probably some of the larger natural ones too.  Power is totally bound up in geography, with dramatic rocks, peaks, mountains, waterfalls, and other striking landmarks being major “power places.” 

People got power from vision questing in the wilderness.  They would undergo strong physical discipline:  enduring cold and heat, bathing in freezing waters, living with little or no food and water, and so on.  (The classic account of vision questing, Ruth Benedict [1923], refers to the Plateau area just north of California; her account is broadly valid for the latter place.)  The Achomawi preserved this knowledge later than most and were more willing to share it, so the map of their power spots provided by D. L. Olmstedt and Omer Stewart (1978:226) is exceptionally valuable.  Famous rock art sites are often power places.  (Places I know personally, but that are unpublished, shall remain unidentified!)  

  Most of the spots are dramatic peaks, but some are canyons, lakes, and large springs.  Power is largely a spiritual essence that allows beings (including humans—to the degree they have learned it) to control and create.  It is typically exercised through song.  Shamans cure by singing just as the creator beings shaped the world by singing.  However, actual physical and mental ability to do things is an expression of power, so it is not entirely “supernatural” by European standards.  It is learned through conventional training as well as through visions and dreams.  Knowledge of how to manage natural resources is a key part of power.

As noted previously, California Native peoples sought visions, usually in arduous vision quests, at puberty, in the wilderness.  This was another religious mechanism binding Californians to their landscape.  Apparently some groups, at least the Coast Central Pomo (Loeb 1926:320), did not have the vision quest.  Indeed, Loeb notes that the Pomo in general lacked a belief in guardian spirits, otherwise the goal of vision quests among most California (and indeed most North American) peoples.  They did have shamans and shamanic healers, however, and must have done something to get that power.  However, the Pomo and Native people everywhere dreamed of animals, daydreamed about animals, and interpreted their dreamings as important.

 Shamans operate by controlling power; but, again, in the center and north, they operate more by controlling specific “pains” that they own.  To be shamans or other religious officiants they had to have visions giving medicine power.  (Strictly speaking, the term “shaman” applies to healers of the ancient societies of Siberia, and it might be better to call the Californian healers “medicine persons,” but “shaman” is established in the literature and fairly well justified by the similarity of beliefs and practices to Siberian ones.  See Bean [ed.] 1992.)

The culturally and technologically simpler groups had vision-questing shamans and no other religious practitioners, but the complex chiefdoms had whole ranges of religious officiants.  These including true priests: officiants of organized religious cults (as opposed to shamans, who are independent individuals with special healing and visionary powers).  The Kuksu cult complex of central California had a priesthood (Loeb 1926:320), which presumably led to the decline or disappearance of vision questing among the Coast Central Pomo.  The Chumash of southwestern California had a whole range of shamans and priests with specialized functions, ranging from weather control to fishing to canoe safety (Bean and King 1974; Gamble 2008).  

Californians feared shamans and wizards with transforming and poisoning powers.  They acquired special visions of their familiar spirits.  These were often animal powers, but could be other natural or supernatural beings.  Different animals gave different powers, often related to the animal’s traits; rattlesnake power often involved the ability to cure rattlesnake bites, for instance.  These beliefs closely resemble shamanistic beliefs elsewhere, from eastern North America to Siberia.

A particularly important problem was “bear doctors,” men who had bear power knew the magic for transforming themselves into grizzlies at will.  These were known and feared all over the state, from the Hupa to the Chemehuevi (Burrill 1993; Laird 1976:38).  Real grizzlies usually prefer to leave humans alone, but bear doctors transform themselves in order to do harm.  One remembers the bear transformation stories in the Old World, from the berserk (“bear shirt”) men of ancient Scandinavia and the Celtic Arthur (“bear man,” “were-bear”) to the Ainu bear cult with its divinization of bears.  People could sometimes transform into other kinds of animals, and animals and spirits could become or appear to be people; of course the animals in the time before people came were humanoid to varying degrees.  Related Old World figures are the werewolf, were-tiger, and leopard-man.  All come from a stratum of thought that is most famously seen in Siberian shamanism but is far more widespread.  Animal transformations are central to this cosmology. 

Other supernatural and ghostly transformations are known.  People with supernatural powers can invoke and control this shape-shifting.  So can many animals.  The raccoon dog (tanuki, often mistranslated “badger”) is a shape-shifter in Japan, and some tanuki stories are related to Californian Coyote tales.  The trickery of the fox is proverbial throughout Eurasia.  Modern Europeans have lost the transformation tales, but foxes in east Asia routinely turn into beautiful women to beguile men.

Common all over the state, but especially in the dry southeast, were weather shamans who could bring rain and snow.  Some songs for this purpose have been recorded, and a rain shaman’s bundle has been almost miraculously preserved and studied (Fenenga et al. 2012; Hopkins et al. 2012).  It came from the Tübatulabal of the Kern River valley, but incorporated many items, especially steatite smoking pipes, from the Chumash.  These are known to have been used by the coastal tribes to blow smoke clouds that invited rain clouds by a form of sympathetic magic.  Sometimes water was thrown into the air, during ceremonies, for similar reasons.  The bundle was used in ceremonies along with detailed chants that were guaranteed to bring rain (if properly carried out, of course).  Shamans had to know how to stop rain, to prevent large rains they invoked from causing floods.  There were many adept weather shamans among the Tübatulabal and their neighbors until quite recently.  The use of a magic bundle, incorporating a collection of sacred stones and other items, is very widespread in North America (see esp. Wildschut 1975 on Crow bundles; one Crow doctor, showing some small stones with some gravel near them, said—with a twinkle in his eye—that the rocks in the bundle had mated and had a litter).

Other “Indian doctors” could send pains into people.  These were often pebbles, small snakes, or other physical objects.  A “sucking doctor” would be called to suck this pain out.  He (rarely she) would suck on the belly or chest of the patient, sometimes hard enough to draw blood (assumed to be posioned).  Often he would produce the stone or small animal.  I have encountered this practice among the Maya as well; my old friend Don José Cauich Canul sucked a live scorpion from the little niece of my field assistant Don Felix Medina Tzuc.  I did not see this, but Don Felix described it.  He was duly impressed.  Don José has taught me something of his craft, including his use of sleight-of-hand, so I know where the centipede really came from.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]) has pointed out that this sort of deception is typically done by doctors who believe that the old-timers really had such powers, but modern ones have less power and must imitate the old-timers as best they can.  This seems to fit California and Maya cases.

            Arts represented interaction with the nonhuman realm. Among the Yokuts, people wore crowns of flowers during spring (Gayton 1976:83).  

Much of the art were clearly associated with shamanism; more is inferentially so.  The spectacular rock art of southern and Baja California—some of the most outstanding in the world—is highly abstract, and also features strange and unearthly creatures.  Most viewers of the art, from anthropologists to artists, feel that shamanism and vision states must be involved.  (Some reviews include Campbell 2007; Grant 1965; Whitley 2000, notably speculative; and for Baja California, Crosby 1997, a more ambitious work than anything devoted to Alta California.  See also Jean Clottes’ stunning book Cave Art, 2008, which deals with the paleolithic art of Europe but presents California material for comparison on pp. 300-303.)  Other, more unassuming or crude pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly mere “Kilroy was here” markers, or at best markers of local descent-group territory.  Unfortunately, we do not have the keys (though see Spoon et al. 2014a, 2014b—the Nevada Paiute still know something).  The shamans are gone. 

There are a few recorded explanations, most of which refer not to shamanic visions but to puberty rites.  Often, puberty rites involved explanations of the cosmos using pictorial but abstract symbols, and sometimes the initiates were supposed to draw geometric designs of their own.  The Luiseno girls’ puberty rite, for instance, involved drawing red checkerboard, diamond, or maze patterns on rocks, and many of these survived in my younger days in the Riverside area.  Unfortunately most have faded now. 

Otherwise, outside of fairly obvious representations of animals, we have little identifiable rock art.  Earlier theories of hunting magic have gone by the wayside.  Besides the known cases just noted, other rock art sites are very often astronomically aligned—in canyons down which the equinoctial sunrise strikes, for instance—or are on remote and spectacular rock outcrops or in caves, rather than along game trails or near water holes or the like.  It is very possible that a general relationship with the cosmos was intended and good luck in hunting was one perceived consequence.  However, the focus remains on that general relationship, not on a specific pragmatic application.

An excellent analysis of a mountain sheep shrine, by Robert Yohe and Alan Garfinkel (2012), summarizes all that is known of mountain sheep ceremonies, rock art, and hunting lore from southeast California.  Clearly, mountain sheep were important game animals, and a huge and complex body of lore surrounded them.  (They were once extremely abundant; their rarity today is due to introduced sheep diseases as well as overhunting and habitat destruction.)  The content of ritual is lost to us, but at least there are still large amounts of art and religious construction to analyze.

Songs were basic to activities and teachings.  They gave and expressed power, and had power themselves.  A good explanation was given by a California basketmaker, Mrs. Mattz.  Richard West reports that she

            “…was hired to teach basket making at a local university.  After three weeks, her students complained that all they had done was sing songs…. Mrs. Mattz, taken aback, replied that the were learning to make baskets.  She explained that the process starts with songs that are sung so as not to insult the plants when the materials for the baskets are picked.  So her students learned the songs….. Upon their return to the classroom, however, the students again were dismayed when Mrs. Mattz began to teach them yet more songs.  This time she wanted them to learn the songs that must be sung as yo soften the materials in your mouth before you start to weave….  The students protested…. Mrs. Mattz…patiently explained the obvious to them: “You’re missing the point,” she said, “a basket is a song made visible.”  (Quoted Wilkinson 2010:382). 

Appendix

            To give the flavor of Californian religious narrative, let us consider the beginning of the creation myth told by Hanc’ibyjim (Tom Young) to Roland Dixon in 1902-03 (Dixon 1912).  This myth was partially retranslated and massively rewritten by William Shipley (1991).  I will do still another rewrite, though I do not know the Maidu language and have to rely on Dixon and Shipley.

            Neither of the translators refers to the incredible chantlike prosody of the narrative, which comes across even to a non-Maidu-speaker like me.  It is worth setting some of this up in poetic form.  Hanc’ibyjim uses the obligatory marker of speech, –tsoia (“it is said”), as a chorus, its sharp sound contrasting with the beautiful flow of the narrative, full of “a” and “m” sounds.  Simply enjoy the sounds before reading the meaning.  (Most letters are pronounced as in Spanish, umlaut vowels as in German.  The apostrophe marks the accented syllable [not a glottal stop].)

Kō’doyapen kan ūniñ’ ko’do momim’ opit’mőni hintsetō’yetsoiam.

Hin’tstetoyewē’bisim hōmōñ’ jidiu; dunaat yj;tun jawun;naat tsemen’tsoia.

Tsai’tsainom mai’dűm hesī’kimaat hesim’maat kai’noyemen’tsoia.

Amőn’ikan ūniñ’ ka’dom tsewu’suktipem ka’dom yőtson’otsoia.

Epin’iñkoyōdi kō’do tsehe’hetsonopem yak’hubőktsoia.

Adōñ’kan wasā’ hubőktsoia.  (Dixon 1912:4.)

Literally, the first two lines means “Earth-Maker and this world water full-when drifted about, it is said.  Kept drifting about where world-in indeed little earth indeed saw-not, it is said.”

            Translating the first part of the story (and leaving out the endless repetition of “it is said,” so effective in Maidu, so monotonous in English):

Earthmaker, when this world was covered with water, drifted.

He kept drifting; he saw nothing, not even a bit of earth.

He saw no creatures of any kind, nothing flying.

He went on and on, over the unseen earth.

The world seemed transparent, like the Valley Above in the sky.

He felt sad.

“How, I wonder—how, I wonder—where, I wonder, in what world or place, can we see the earth?”  he said.  (After Dixon 1912:4 and Shipley 1991:18.)

[Coyote then appears, and he and Earthmaker discuss creating the world.  Earthmaker sings:]

Where are you, my great mountains, my world mountains?

            [Coyote sings:]

Where are you, my foggy mountains, my world I could travel?

            [A tiny piece of land like a bird’s nest then appears, and the two succeed in stretching it to make a world.  Meadowlark joins them, and Coyote goes on:]

My world, where I can go along the edge of the meadow,

My world, where I can travel side to side, wander all ways,

My world of mountains beyond mountains,

I call, singing, to my traveling-world,

In such a world shall I wander.

            [There is some conference among the three, about how to paint the world, and Coyote continues:]

I will paint it with blood,

There will be blood in the world,

Creatures with blood will be born,

Animals with blood will be born,

Deer and other animals,

People shall be born,

Nothing will be missing, all those with blood will be born.

Red rocks will come into being,

The world will seem painted with blood,

It will be beautiful.  (After Dixon 1912:5-10 and Shipley 1991:19-22.)

Coyote…stretched out the land with his feet.

‘Pushing it out, little by little,

He stretched it out to where the usn rises—

Foirst, he stretched it out to there.

Then, to the south, and to where the sun sets,

He stretched it out, little by little.  (Shipley 1991:22.)

            Creation continues, in an epic poem filled with intense images like those above.  This story is as beautiful and powerful as Genesis and one of the great religious poems of the world, yet it remains unknown, and neither Dixon’s nor Shipley’s translations do it justice (judging from analysis of Dixon’s line-by-line translation).  We need a Maidu to do a real translation that can bring out the full meanings and keep the power of the language.

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