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The Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay area and the Paipai of northern Baja California occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of Native Californian identities. Or so it would appear. While the Ohlone lack popular recognition and official acknowledgement from the United States government, the Paipai occupy a large reserve and celebrate their ongoing cultural traditions throughout Baja California and southern California. Yet the two groups share a similar colonial history: entanglements with early European explorers, labor and enculturation at Spanish missions, and sustained interactions with American and Mexican settler colonialism. Based on fifteen years of archaeological and historical research in the two regions, Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of the Ohlone and Paipai alongside a synthesis of Native Californian endurance over the past five centuries. As the case studies demonstrate, Ohlone and Paipai people made intelligent and culturally appropriate choices to cope with the impact of colonialism on their communities, even as they took different pathways to the present day. Lee M. Panich illustrates how changes in Native identity and practice within these colonial contexts were made to best conduct the groups' lives within shifting sets of colonial constraints. He draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities, offering a model for how scholars of Indigenous histories may think about the connections between the past and the present. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1476/thumbnail.jpg

There are more than one hundred federally recognized Native American tribes found within the present-day borders of California, a roughly equivalent number of indigenous Californian communities who are either unrecognized or currently petitioning for recognition by the United States government, and another eight indigenous reserves just across the international border in Baja California, Mexico. This impressive array of more than 200 Native American communities is not surprising, given what oral narratives, early ethnography, and precontact archaeology tell us about the densely populated sociopolitical landscape comprised of many hundreds of small-scale autonomous tribes that existed before colonization in the late-1700s. Separating these two eras of Native California, however, is the colonial period—a time when indigenous peoples faced directed culture change in the Spanish missions, joined multiethnic communities at mercantile outposts, and suffered greatly due to disease, violence, and the disastrous policies of elimination enacted during the early American period.

Rather than simply an arena for Euroamerican domination, recent archaeological research on Spanish missionization along the North American Borderlands points to opportunities for indigenous autonomy under missionary colonialism. We build from these discussions to foreground autonomy as it was expressed in multiple spatial contexts during the colonial period (ca. 1770s–1850s) in central California. Our goals are to evaluate freedom of action within the situational constraints imposed by Spanish missions in California and also to challenge archaeologists to move beyond prevailing narratives of decline to critically assess how native people negotiated colonialism across the landscape. Drawing on three archaeological examples from central California—including Mission Santa Clara de Asís, the marshlands of the San Joaquin Valley, and persistent Coast Miwok villages in the northern San Francisco Bay region—we outline a conceptual model comprised of three spatial zones: colonial settlements as native places; native homelands/colonial hinterlands; and interior worlds and interspaces. The model offers a way in which to expand mission archaeology by illuminating the opportunities for indigenous autonomy in social, political, and economic relationships that intersected colonial modes in various ways across time and space.

Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions considers how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into their own dynamic existence. The book, written by diverse scholars and edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, covers missions in the Spanish borderlands from California to Texas to Georgia. Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1078/thumbnail.jpg

For thousands of years before the coming of Europeans, Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples inhabited the coastal lands north of San Francisco Bay. Like many other California Indians, they were hunter-gatherers who harvested wild plants and animals from the sea and land for food, medicine, clothing, housing material, and ceremonial regalia. Villages nestled along protected coastal embayments and ridge tops of the Northern Coast Ranges mountains contained tule-thatched or redwood bark houses, ceremonial structures (round houses), sweat houses, dance enclosures, and extramural cooking and work areas. Large villages served as the political centers for broader communities of dispersed family groups who would come together for periodic dances, ceremonies, initiation rites, and feasts. With the founding of Colony Ross in 1812 by the Russian-American Company (RAC), a mercantile enterprise licensed by the tsar of Russia, life would change forever for the Kashaya Pomo and the Coast Miwok. The Russian merchants placed the primary administrative center of the colony, which they called the Ross settlement, in the heart of Kashaya Pomo territory, and they chose Bodega Harbor in Coast Miwok country to be the principal port facility (Port Rumiantsev) (Figure 7.15). The Russian-American Company came to California to profit from the exploitation of the region's natural bounty. The mercantile enterprise harvested sea mammals, primarily sea otters and fur seals, to fuel the lucrative maritime fur trade that supplied sea mammal pelts to China, Europe, and the United States, primarily for use as robes, fur trim, and other clothing accessories. The Russian merchants attempted to grow wheat, barley, and other crops, and to raise livestock at Colony Ross to feed other RAC colonies in the North Pacific (Aleutian Islands, Kodiak Island, Prince William Sound, etc.), which experienced periodic food shortages. The Ross settlement also served as a manufacturing center for the production of goods (timber, bricks, metal utensils, and tools) that were shipped to the other North Pacific colonies and also traded to the Franciscan missionaries in Alta California for foodstuffs grown in the extensive mission complexes.

This article advocates for a comparative approach to archaeological studies of colonialism that considers how Native American societies with divergent political economies may have influenced various kinds of processes and outcomes in their encounters with European colonists. Three dimensions of indigenous political economies (polity size, polity structure, and landscape management practices) are identified as critical variables in colonial research. The importance of considering these dimensions is exemplified in a case study from California, which shows how small-sized polities, weak to moderate political hierarchies, and regionally oriented pyrodiversity economies played significant roles in the kinds of colonial relationships that unfolded. The case study illustrates how the colonial experiences of Native Californians differed from those of other tribal groups that confronted similar kinds of colonial programs involving Franciscan missionaries elsewhere in North America. The article stresses that the archaeology of colonialism is not simply an arcane academic exercise but, rather, has real-life relevancy for people who remain haunted by the legacies of colonialism, such as those petitioning for federal recognition in California.