Hist 240 lecture, Tuesday, 9/4

Began with the framing question, Where did Californians come from? A lecture on California's prehistory and its survivals into the present (namely its Native American population).

Geologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists generally agree that humans came to the Americas across the Bering land bridge (and possibly by canoe in some cases) some 10-12,000 years ago, probably pursuing animals for hunting.  Term: "Paleoindians" refers to these original nomadic people.

The animals were different: slides of La Brea tar pits, showing giant sloths and saber-toothed cats.

Native Americans tell a different story: each group has a myth that explains how they have lived in California since the Creation.  That feature, where every member of a group can tell the story of his group's claim to its region, is actually unusual in Native American ethnography: here too, Californians seem to think of themselves as "special."

[Note: that might be something to work with in an assignment analyzing diverse narratives.]

California is also one of the three most diverse language regions in the world: hundreds, possibly thousands of distinct Native American dialects.  Anthropologist Alfred C. Kroeber, student of Boas, mapped the groups (not really tribes: "tribelets") by language, and made a map of California divided into language regions.  Actually follows present state boundaries quite closely. Tribes were locally nomadic, moving within regions according to hunting and harvesting seasons.  One staple: acorns, which need intensive processing to remove poisons.  (Exception: the Chumash, who stayed in one area and were very hierarchical--others weren't.)

We heard a couple of creation stories: familiar sort of story, personified nature beings making the world in their interactions.  Accompanying rituals to act them out, ritual dress.

Lecture finished with cautionary tale for scholars: the story of obsessive collector of languages John P. Harrington, who collected them all for the Smithsonian, didn't catalogue properly, kept it all in his apartment, and bequeathed that mess to the museum when he died.  Result: much has been lost, or needs a reconstruction that no one can afford.  However, despite predictions of their extinction in the early part of this century, California's Native Americans are still here, still preserving (some of) their languages and much of their culture.