California History Middterm

The Indians, from 1769-1969 were seen in a negative light. They were often called "diggers" - a poor/derogatory term. They were seen as dumb, yet gentle, with generous supplies of food to offer and share.

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Society in order to make it seem better for what happened.

It begins to become unchangeable..

Since 1991, he adds, the Smithsonian’s Repatriation Office has returned more than 4,000 sets of remains to more than 40 Native American groups. An additional 30 repatriation requests are pending. The Repatriation Office’s intensive investigation of Ishi’s roots put to rest the notion that he was “the last Yahi,” Speaker says. It also found evidence that Ishi and his Yahi comrades did not lead an isolated, Stone Age existence. For instance, Ishi liked to make arrowheads from glass obtained from bottles gathered at white towns and camps. Yet for all that has been written and said about him, Ishi remains a puzzling figure. Even the arrowheads he fashioned to such acclaim while in San Francisco leave questions unanswered. Ishi’s arrowheads most closely resemble those of the Wintu tribe, a neighbor of the Yahi, according to Berkeley archaeologist M. Steven Shackley. In his youth, Ishi may have learned to make arrowheads from a Wintu relative or might even have lived among the Wintu, Shackley suggests. Killion doubts those scenarios. Ishi and other Yahi, however, probably interacted with other Native American groups to a greater extent than has been appreciated, he says. “A lot of what we think is known about Ishi’s life is rather fragmentary,” Speaker asserts. Ishi made it clear to Waterman, Kroeber, and others from the beginning that he didn’t want to talk about his family or his feelings about what had happened to them. In fact, he didn’t even divulge his real name, probably due to a Native American belief that it’s disrespectful and potentially dangerous to reveal one’s name to strangers, Speaker says. Consequently, he was dubbed Ishi, the Yana word for man.

.Of the 22 years, 1850-1872, the first ten after the gold rush might be said to have been the years of preparation. In those years, between disease and murderings and loss of free movement, the Yana became a desperate people. And the new settlers, their stereotype of the Yana as fixed and innacurate as the Yana's of them, were exasperated by the raid on their stock and destruction of their property, and fearful for their lives. Along Deer Creek and Mill Creek it was as elsewhere in California: the years of the Civil War were also the years when the clash between the Indians and whites reached its climax, breaking out more and more often into open hostility and violence after 10 years of increasing tension. The outcome at this distance is seen never to have been in doubt. The Indians were doomed. But to those embroiled or close at hand, Indian or white, the inequality of the struggle was not apparent.

The Spanish attitude toward indigeous people was to recognize them as human beings living in a natural relationship with their environs, rather like the animals of the forests. From a cultural point of view, generally speaking, they recognized no tendency toward civilization among these people and, instead, viewed them as entirely uncivilized. They responded by viewing themselves as "bringing the gifts of civilization" to these people, though later analysts have questioned whether such gifts were needed. From a Spanish theological standpoint, indigenous people were pagans who were desperately in need of conversion to Christianity for the salvation of their souls. This conversion was a high priority and was implemented through baptism, instruction in Catholic rituals, moral education, incorporation into the mission community, and enforcement of strict discipline. "Enforcement" included incarceration, public humiliation, flogging, and even capital punishment.

From an economic and political standpoint, indigenous people represented the lowest possible class of people in Spanish feudal society and were easily folded into the feudal system which the missionaries carried with them into Alta California. Under this system, only the highest classes of Spanish society actually owned land, had rights, and made decisions. It was expected that all others would sort themselves out into subordinate classes which, if they exercised power or autonomy, possessed importance only relative to each other. Of these classes, those who found themselves at the lowest levels were destined to work hardest and were expected to give up most of the product of their labors for the enrichment of the system as a whole. It was inherent to the Spanish view of life and society, in other words, that the Indian, once brought within the gifts of Spanish civilization, would occupy the lowest rung of social order and, thereupon, would perform the necessary labors of brick making, timber cutting, building construction, farm maintenance, and domestic service.

Mexicanization of California proceeded slowly, it was a very damaging period to California Indians. The rapid decline of Indian populations along the coast led the missionaries to seek neophytes from increasingly distant regions of the interior. Recruitments came closer to military campaigns than ever before; and the usefulness of Indians as a cheap labor supply became thoroughly confused with the mission of Catholic conversion. The mission economy of Alta California simply required Indian labor. The Indians were also citizens. By the time that California had become a state, in September 1850, the rush for gold had brought hundreds of thousands of people into the territory and California Indians, for the first time ever, had become a minority. Also, for the first time ever, the entire population of Indians was threatened. The intruding population of gold-seeking miners was hostile toward the Indians, except where they could secure Indian labor for their mines. The wave of Gold-Rush immigration brought the usual burden of European diseases, to which the indigenous population had no immunity.While the pre-mission population of 310,000 indigenous people had dropped to 200,000 during the mission period and dropped to 150,000 or fewer by the end of the Mexican period, it plummeted to less than 30,000 in the twenty years of Gold-Rush California, to 1870. In the aftermath, many California tribes were declared extinct and almost none had successfully preserved their cultural ways of life. For most, even the retention of a cultural memory, for traditional purposes and social order, was close to impossible. (Recall that these were oral histories, completely dependent upon survival of old masters and training of young people who would maintain the traditions.)

As constituted, the State of California made no recognition of Indians as citizens with civil rights; nor did the new state treat Indians in any way as sovereign people; indeed, a majority of Whites in the State hoped for the early removal of the Indian population. The attitude of California citizens and governors was shaped by a combination of early Spanish assumptions and American beliefs imported from the East, where the concept of "removal" had dominated policy for many decades. But "removal" had always before meant removal-to-the-west, to "Indian Territory." In California, there was nothing to the west!

California's most original contribution to mining science: hydraulic mining, which used high-pressure hoses to wash away whole hillsides. A decade after the Forty-niners' arrival, the gold fields were largely "a wasteland of caved-in hillsides, heaped debris, and tree stumps." Hydraulic mining had carved up the land and washed mud and silt into the rivers, which ran brown with waste. Streams and rivers were dammed, drained, and rerouted. Fish died. Wildlife was driven out. The altered environment affected Native American use of the land. Rivers that had been their waterways and fishing sites were cut off and spoiled, lands that had been hunting and gathering grounds were ruined. Of those not already driven off by violence, many more now either forsook their homelands for the higher hills or remained in poverty and deteriorating health.

Missions were built in order to convert Indians to catholicism, to gain power by getting land, and to make more Spanish people. They wanted to impress the Indians by making the missions look regal, which would in turn make Spain look like a more beautiful, powerful country. They also held a lot of people.

Indians were forced to be inside the missions, and were watched over by the padres and the soldiers. Only 10% of Indians were runaways, probably because of the severe punishments that were given if they tried to escape. There was a large population decline at every mission because of this. Intense, forced physical labor was a daily routine for the Indians.

Mission rolls were kept, which were diaries of the mission priests. Duhaut Cilly of France kept a mission roll, in which he described a runaway Indian, Pomponio, who cut his feet out of ankle shackles in a desperate attempt to escape and was caught and imprisoned.Lapérouse, of France, was another who kept records.

Interpretations of the mission system differ from one historian to the next. This is because the Catholic historians don't include the horrible torture they used on the Indians when stating what happened. People like Francis Guest, a Catholic historian, tend to leave all the bad things out, and make the mission seem like a beautiful, great place to live. People like Jim Rawls, a non-Catholic historian, give strictly the facts and don't beautify any of the gruesome yet true details.

The mission system was not unlike the plantations that held slaves in the South. Both incidents involved a people being captured, against their will, and forced to do harsh labor under poor conditions. Harsh punishments were inflicted upon both slaves and indians if they had tried to escape.