California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction (California Natural History Guides) Reviews
California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction (California Natural History Guides)
Capturing the vitality of California’s unique indigenous cultures, this major new introduction incorporates the extensive research of the past thirty years into an illuminating, comprehensive synthesis for a wide audience. Based in part on new archaeological findings, it tells how the California Indians lived in vibrant polities, each boasting a rich village life including chiefs, religious specialists, master craftspeople, dances, feasts, and ceremonies. Throughout, the book emphasizes how these diverse communities interacted with the state’s varied landscape, enhancing its already bountiful natural resources through various practices centered around prescribed burning. A handy reference section, illustrated with more than one hundred colo
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This Natural history guide is great!,
I read the first half of this book in part of a day and quite enjoyed the whole thing. The authors make a strong case that the California coastal Native Americans made intensive use of fire to clear shrub lands and promote the growth of plants and animals that they used. Native peoples were not the only source of fire, of course, but it is striking that the parts of the state where natural sources of ignition are common from lightning strikes (the Sierra Nevada and Sonoran deserts) are not the places (namely the coast) where low intensity fires like those set by native people were most common. The book has extensive discussion of fire as a tool of native people and also discusses coastal peoples at some length and their archaeological record. In contrast, interior Indian populations are not discussed in much depth. There is little discussion of genetic diversity of California Indians or their likely points of origin outside California. However, the book is well referenced and is a great source of recent academic literature in archaeology, environmental history and cultural anthropology.
The second half of the book is a series of annotated lists of native plants (and some animals) used by Native people. These native uses are discussed for major geographic regions in the state and often have rather extensive entries on major food plants or those used in tool manufacture. The second half of the book is not introduced with much in the way of an overview and so is better as a reference work than as something to read straight through.
On the whole, I find the California Natural History Guides to be really excellent stand-alone books. They are not field guides in the usual sense (the one on California Water has extensive discussions of how the State water system works, for example) but rather are written as fact-filled books that carry a distinct point of view and are fairly complete in their treatment. The California Indians volume clearly has an agenda–namely to demonstrate that the native people of the State were actively modifying the landscape and managing resources. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in native uses of resources, California pre-history, and a sense of what our state was like before Europeans turned up.
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|Rave review from a reservation Native Californian,
This book is daunting, but well worth the read.
While the book is huge, the print is small, it is several classrooms of material for teachers of all grades, and for reservation or urban cultural centers to base a class on tradition.
For any Native Californian, this book is a good reference to show your children, grandchildren and friends that indeed we existed and thrived for more than 200 years ( I was told recently by a friend from a foreign country that I could not be Native Californian, there was no one here before the Spanish, that apparently is what is taught in some foreign COLLEGES, let alone lower grades).
The foods, medicinal and other plant use portions are phenomenal, and bring back my Grandmother and Aunts. The pages brought back my childhood, in the silver trailer by the creek. No addresses in those days, no post office boxes, just one huge mailbox down on the road leading to Dry Creek lane, the little road my Dad put in with a little bobcat.
Gathering acorns, and seaweed, my Dad getting abalone, and cooking it after softening it with rocks, ON rock. My Mom, who was white could never believe he could cook right in the fire pit without ashes, she could not do it on a commercial BBQ on the rack.
What a great book. I think some areas of the ancient days are missing, at least for me, and would love to see another book about why the matriarchal tribal customs existed. I wondered. Today we have a male chair because my age group some years ago decided to give the guys a chance! The women were left to take the children and Elders to the mountains while the men and boys defended their escape. It left the women (in our family we called them all the Aunties) to run the community business. I would also like to see a comparison to ancient Asian and Hebrew medicine and the Shamans of California, but am not the person to do the research, too busy with gang abatement, sorry.
The book is great, give to children and grandchildren, to grandparents, aunts and uncles. For once a book that does not make us look like the bunny people in hides, out in the brush awed by the killers and what ended up being worse than Hitler to our amazing state and the original citizens.
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|A fine introduction,
Lightfoot, who is a UC, Berkeley Professor of Anthropology, and Parrish, who is an elder of the Kashaya Pomo tribe, bring the reader up to date on the latest research on California Indian culture with an emphasis on ecology from a historical and anthropologic perspective.
Much of the book is devoted to the pyrodiversity collecting economies of the California natives. The Indians routinely set fire to the land in order to increase the supply of desirable plants and animals. The main point is that because of the great range of different ecologies in California it was natural for the native Californians not to develop the kind of dependency agriculture typically found elsewhere in the world. The fact that El Nino and La Nina extremes and other phenomena made for a diverse and unpredictable abundance of various food sources made it natural for the native populations to diversify their techniques for food gathering.
There are a number of color plates showing important plants and animals harvested by the Indians as well as maps and charts showing where the various tribes and tribelets flourished. Included are notes on particular species and how they were gathered and processed by people in various parts of the state from the Northwest Coast Province to the Southern Desert Province. The writing is academic with the usual amount of specialized vocabulary but fairly easy to read.
One of the things I found out that I always wanted to know was how prehistoric people were able to make soup. It turns out that the California Indians, who were great weavers of baskets, actually made baskets that were water tight. The question then is how do you heat the water to make soup over an open fire? You don’t. You heat some rocks and put the hot rocks in the basket moving them around with a wooden paddle to keep them from burning the sides of the basket. This problem had always bothered me because I liked to imagine living in the prehistory but I was stymied in my imagining by the inability to purify water by boiling it. I simply could not figure out how to do it since there were no metal containers to put over the fire.
Another thing that bothers me is the thick stand of tan, dead cattails on the pond outside my back window obscuring my view of the pond and its wildlife. I would like to see them burn, and lo and behold I found in this book a photo of cattails burning! It seems that the native Californians routinely burned the cattails.
There was much I didn’t find out however. (But of course this book is merely an introduction.) The text reveals that the Indians harvested and ate the pine nuts of the Foothill or Gray pine tree (Pinus sabiniana, AKA as “Digger Pine”) but how they economically got the nutmeats out of the hard shell is not explained. I’ve harvested the seeds myself and found them delicious roasted or not, but cracking the shells is incredibly labor intensive. There must have been some trick they used, but I haven’t discovered it.
There is also mention of the California black walnut (Juglans californica) which I have also harvested and eaten. Again cracking the nuts and extracting the nutmeat is so labor intensive that by hand I was able to obtain but a third of a cup of nuts after an hour’s worth of work. I wonder had the native Californians did it, but this book doesn’t say.
Another problem in obtaining food is catching the abundant waterfowl, quail, rabbits and such without the use of firearms. This is a formidable task for the lone hunter, but the Indians worked co-operatively and employed nets and snares, sometimes driving the animals into a narrowing gap where they waited with clubs and bows and arrows.
Probably the most conspicuous natural food in California harvested by the natives is the acorn from oak trees. I have harvested and processed acorns myself. The book identifies the favorites of the various Indian tribes. It seems that the acorns of the Black Oak, the Blue Oak, and the Tan-oak (not really a true oak) were the most desirable. My limited experience agrees that the acorns of the Black Oak are tastier than those of the Valley Oak. However I want to note that the great Valley Oak which can yield as many as 500 pounds of acorns from a single tree (p. 320) has relatively little tannin in the acorns which need little to no leeching, whereas the Black Oak acorns need a lot of leeching.
Finally I want to report that the authors identify the California Buckeye (Aesculus californica) as a “less desirable, fall-back food source” that contains tannin like acorns that has to be leeched out before the seeds can be eaten. However I understand from other sources that the California Buckeye contains some kind of poison that is not identified. The authors do state that the seeds are “prepared” as a fish poison. (p. 224) It’s not explained here but the seeds are crushed and dumped into ponds…
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