Native California Culture

Some aspects of them went extinct, some changed and some stayed just as they were thousands of years ago. The cultures of native California tribes have experienced dramatic change under the direction of Spanish, Mexican and American rule. In each instance of rule there was an effort to assimilate the native Californians until the “old ways” were forgotten. As a result, languages – Sapir-Warf theory’s “distinct worlds” – were lost forever. What we newly see is native culture as a work in progress. How well native people of California could adapt to the conditions set by those in charge determined what from their cultures remained, changed and ultimately perished. I argue that nothing could have helped the native Californians preserve their cultures

perfectly once colonization and the Mission Period starting in 1769 began – for assimilation ensured annihilation and resistance to assimilation did not always ensure preservation.
In order to discuss the topic at hand, we must first define the concept of culture. On the subject of culture, American cultural anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber writes,
“… [Culture] consists of patterns, explicit or implicit, and of and for behavior [and ideas] acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e.

historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; Culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action.”
Culture is therefore defined as the connection between ideas (conditioning elements of further action) and (products of) action. Using Kroeber’s definition we find that manifestations of culture and culture itself existed throughout the diverse native tribes of precolonial California. For example, off the northern coast of California existed the Pomo tribe. Women belonging to the tribe learned centuries old techniques on how to weave baskets interlaced with patterns unique to their group. How was this tradition able to survive without a manual giving instruction on how to produce

baskets?
Further down the California coast lived the Chumash tribe. Canoes known as tomol were built by tribesmen to travel between the coast and the Channel Islands. The Chumash are also known for their extensive mythology that utilize the Channel Islands as a backdrop for their stories. These stories include accounts for the origin of man, the origin of death and reincarnation. The method used by native Californian societies to transmit traditions and mythology from one generation to the next, like that of the Pomo and Chumash, was through the use of language. Culture, through the transmission of oral history utilizing language, is thus created and moreover preserved with each instance of transmission and utterance of words.
The Sapir-Whorf theory presumes that language itself is powerful enough to shape our world view, for “… worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” In the Spanish language, a person does not declare one’s name by saying “My name is Juniper.” Instead one states, “I call myself Juniper” (“Yo me llamo Juniper.”) Similar examples are present in the language belonging to the Wintu tribe of northern California. People speaking the Wintu language would say “I am brothered” instead of making the statement “I have a brother” or “I have a sister.” The same message is ultimately conveyed, but the subtle difference in phrasing gives one an insight into how the Wintu people perceived their world. The implication seen here is that the Wintu speaker states that her existence is actively modified by her male sibling. While the English speaker uses the verb “have” to simply show possession of a brother.
The variations in languages and cultures of early native Californians are more diverse than one may imagine.

In Flutes of Fire by Leanne Hinton, Hinton estimates that nearly 90 distinct native languages were spoken within what today we call the state of California. These are all irreplaceable worlds of which only a few dozen remain. Dr. Kroeber made efforts to preserve one of these worlds in the early twentieth century. A man found near the town of Oroville, California was the last remaining member of the northern California Yahi tribe. When Kroeber met this man he named him “Ishi” – ishi being the Yahi word for man. Ishi revealed that early in his life he had escaped a massacre perpetrated by White settlers. He remained in hiding for 44 years with a handful of other Yahi natives. For three years after all the remaining Yahi natives he had lived with died, Ishi lived alone hiding in fear of suffering the same fate the yankees had dealt to the former members of his

tribe.
Kroeber took Ishi to live at the anthropology museum in Berkley. Here, Kroeber studied Ishi and used him to rebuild what Yahi culture was like. Ishi was forced to adapt to modern culture since he was now thrown into it. He was a very curious man and welcomed the change first cautiously but later with open arms. Kroeber enlisted the help of Dr. Sapir to decipher Ishi’s language. Sapir recorded Ishi reciting Yahi creation stories, folk tales and healing songs. At first Sapir was unable to understand what Ishi was saying. He hired a native Californian who spoke a vaguely similar dialect to unlock the meaning of Ishi’s words. The two men, Kroeber and Sapir, were able to preserve some of the Yahi tribe’s culture from the single individual called Ishi.
Contempt for yankees and their ways (culture) was deeply seeded in the minds of native Califonians. A prime reason for the contempt was the many open massacres executed by White forty-niners during the gold rush. The miners were responsible for the disappearance of Ishi’s tribe and many other native tribes and cultures in northern California. In 1874 field historian Henry Cerruti recorded the words of Isidora Filomena, a former Suisun princes who was married to Francisco Solano. She gave a candid and colorful account of her distaste of yankees. “I do not like the white man very much because he is very tricky and a thief,” Filomena said. “My compadre Peralta and friend Bernales had many cattle. [General] Sutter tricked them and took everything but paid for nothing.”
Ishi held contempt for yankees – a feeling that originated from his fear of them. However, had he stayed in hiding and not overcome his feelings, his culture would have died along with him. This is an instance where resistance to the dominant force and their culture would have not resulted in the preservation of another culture.