Indigenous California Peoples

“Not only did we kill off the natives, but we deface everything that they held sacred.”

California Indians, before European invasion, numbered an estimated 300,000 people (reduced to 100,000 by 1848). California was inhabited, and in order for Europeans to get rich off the land, they needed to abduct the resources people depended upon for their livelihoods. Eliminating the people themselves was also necessary for some Europeans' dreams of grandeur to be realized. Enslaving the people was also important, especially for the missions. And introduced diseases took a horrible toll--not too far away in Mexico, 50% of Aztec deaths in the 1600s were from smallpox.

Restoring California's natural environment entails much more than protecting places from destruction, it involves managing the land in a sustainable fashion. The Indigenous Californians lived in harmony with their landscape, and managed it so that it would produce what they needed. California's landscape was adapted to people, however it was only 1% of our current population that the land had to sustain. With the elimination of the indigenous ways, the management that the land was adapted to also disappeared.

Historical accounts of the natives before European colonization show that they were happy and well-adapted to their home. In October 1769, Father Juan Crespi was on a Spanish expedition to Alta California in the vicinity of Monterey Bay :

"Here we stopped close to a large village of very well-behaved good heathens, who greeted us with loud cheers and rejoiced greatly at our coming. At this village was a very large grass-roofed house, round like a half-orange, which, by what we saw of it inside, could hold everyone in the whole village. Around the big house they had many little houses of split sticks set upright. The village lay within the little valley, all surrounded by grassy hills (nothing but soil and tall grass), a place well-sheltered from all quarters, and near the shore. ...They have a very dense little grove of nut-bearing pine trees dropping down some hills from the mountains running in back, which are grown over with these pines.

...We went in view of the shore, over high, big hills all covered with good soil and grass--though almost all the grasses had been burned--and all very bare of trees."

Vicente Santa Maria was on the first Spanish ship to enter San Francisco Bay in August, 1775:

"The Indians who came on this occasion were nine in number, three being old men, two of them with sight impaired by cataracts of some sort. The six others were young men of good presence and fine stature. ...They were by no means filthy, and the best favored were models of perfection; among them was a boy whose exceeding beauty stole my heart. ...Besides comely elegance of figure and quite faultless countenance there was also--as their chief adornment--the way they did up their long hair..."

The degradation of the native peoples began with the enslavement of the Indians at the missions. George Vancouver described in 1792:

"The women and girls being the dearest objects of affection amongst these Indians, the Spaniards deem it expedient to retain constantly a certain number of females immediately within their power, as a pledge for the fidelity of the men, and as a check on any improper designs the natives might attempt to carry into execution, either against the missionaries or the establishment in general."

In 1816 Adelbert von Chamisso described:

"At night, on the land behind the harbor, great fires burned. The natives are in the habit of burning the grass in order to further its growth."

In 1826, Frederick William Beechey described how the natural environment provided ample sustenance in hard times:

"If it should happen that there is a scarcity of provisions, either through failure in the crop or damage of that which is in store, as they have always two or three years in reserve, the Indians are sent off to the woods to provide for themselves, where, accustomed to hunt and fish, and game being very abundant, they find enough to subsist upon and return to the mission when they are required to reap the next year's harvest."

A noble goal in restoring the natural environment and creating a sustainable society is to try to manage the land the way the aborigines did. This means controlled burning more and using resources less. Getting our society in personal contact with the land is also important, so that people realize they depend on it and thus take care of it. Using local resources, adding labeling information about where products come from, pricing or taxing goods to reflect externalities, requiring manufacturers to take back their products at the end of their useful lives, conserving open space, using motor vehicles less, and getting as many people involved in producing what they consume are all excellent ways to do this.

Efforts at increasing farmers markets, community gardens, alternative transportation, greenways and river corridors, composting, recycling, resource conservation, and taxes on pollution and externalities all help bring us more in touch with the ecosystems that sustain us. If people don't feel like they belong in a place, it is no wonder that they will pollute, eat badly, waste resources, develop sprawling cities, never leave their cars, and consume like there is another planet we can move to once we've used this one up. And of course, have an empty feeling inside that they can't quite pinpoint, so they go for a drive, watch TV, and eat some junk food to try to fill that emptiness... all destructive activities if taken to the extreme.