The following is an article excerpt from the Winter 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full story!
By Gayle Keck
At Mak-‘amham restaurant in Berkeley, California, you can sample “old school acorn bread” or more contemporary “acorn-flour brownies with walnuts + bay salt,” on a menu created from traditional Native Ohlone ingredients. In San Bernadino, elementary school students read a series of historical novels approved by Chumash tribal elders, tracing California history from a Native viewpoint, rather than constructing models of colonial Spanish missions like past generations. And Julia Parker, a Native Coast Miwok-Kashaya Pomo basket-weaver—whose works are owned by the Smithsonian Institution and Queen Elizabeth II—passes on her skills to four generations of her family.
All of these activities may come as a surprise to many who assume Native Californians and their traditional lifeways didn’t survive the Spanish Mission era (1769 – 1834). When California’s twenty-one missions were secularized in 1833, the popular belief was that Native Californians had all died, assimilated into other cultures, or intermarried, losing any traces of their traditions and practices. But in fact “Native people found ways to weather that period and survive,” according to Tsim Schneider, an enrolled citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo) and an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“For so long, all of the scholarship focused on the missions as a colonial space,” said Rebecca Allen, a mission researcher and president of the Society for California Archaeology. “Even when Native American peoples are talked about, it’s their role in that colonial space. The more archaeology and research, and the more Native Americans get involved in this dialog, we realize we need to reframe this and start to recognize the missions as Native space.”
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