Lectures

Lecture 1: California Indian Beginnings

A friend of mine from the East Coast came to visit recently, after an extended road trip through California. I asked him what he thought of the state, and shaking his head in disgust, he said, "The south is full of nuts, the north is full of stoners, and the middle is infested with politicians. If it weren't for the scenery, the state wouldn't be worth a dime!"

Now, Easterners are notoriously snobbish about California, and he seemed extra determined not to like it, so I didn't take this too seriously (especially after he went all slack-jawed when we saw Salma Hayek in a restaurant). But he did raise a point that has come up over and over again in California literature: the disparity between promise and fulfillment.

California's size, its beauty, its majesty, its variety, and its resources all combine to create a sense of infinite promise: anything seems possible here. And every once in a while, for some, that promise is fulfilled. But more often, it is not. Some of the original explorers and colonists attained immense wealth, while others suffered terribly. The same was true of the Gold Rush, and the same is still true of Hollywood. The sun shines all year round here; and as the tourist brochures tell you, you can sun on the beach among the beautiful girls in the morning and drive to the mountains to ski in the afternoon. And yet everything here feels impermanent and precarious, even more so than in the rest of the United States. You can build your palace on the cliffs overlooking the beach, but you always know that in an instant, fire, flood, mudslide, or earthquake can turn it to rubble.

This is a recurring theme in California literature: the difference between the illusion and the reality; the beauty and the bitterness; the promise and the failure; the truth of the illusion, and the illusion of the truth.

Of course, these themes are constant throughout all of European literature. But California has always been as much a state of mind as a real place. Everyone has an image of California (including the people who live here) which has nothing to do with the everyday reality of life in California. That image began even before the first European explorers set foot here. "California" was a name for a mythical place invented by a writer named Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo in a book called The Adventures of Esplandian. His fictional Spanish knight has heroic adventures all over the world, and at one point visits an exotic island east of India, ruled by a queen named Calafia: "Know then, that on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it was peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they lived in the fashion of the Amazons. They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island was the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their armaments were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode. For in the whole island there was no metal but gold."

The book was published in Madrid in 1510. Perhaps Hernando Cortes had read it, because it was he or one of his men who, 25 years later, sighted and named the place we now call Baja California. As Juan Cabrillo explored farther north after 1542, the name came to denote the entire region. The Spanish never did find gold; that wouldn't happen until 1848, long after the Spanish and the mission system were gone. But the beauty and the dream lured hundreds, then thousands, to California, regardless.

Of course, the land was not uninhabited when they arrived. The California Indians were already here. To the Europeans, they were both a nuisance and a resource: they occupied land the explorers and missionaries wanted, but they were a good source of both slave labor and souls that could be saved for God. The Spanish found the Indian religions to be heretical and tried as much as possible to convert the Indians to Catholicism and absorb them into the mission system. They and the explorers and settlers who came after them did a great deal to decimate the indigenous peoples and their cultures.

The label "California Indians" is artificial and somewhat misleading. The various indigenous tribes who lived in what we now call California were in no way unified in a single group. There were at least a hundred separate tribes, each with its own culture, traditions, language, and mythology. By the late 1700s, there were approximately 300,000 Indians in California. But as in other regions, the Indians did not fare well under European expansion, and by the end of the 1800s, their population had fallen to only about 16,000. Only since the 1970s have they begun to reclaim their land, language, culture, and mythology.

To read a brief but informative summary of the history of California Indians, CLICK HERE.

For a map that shows the location of the specific California Indian tribes, CLICK HERE.

For this week, I have given you only a few of the hundreds of stories of the California Indian cultures. I have limited these to creation stories, as well. As you read them, think about the following questions (there's no need to answer these in writing; we'll talk about them in the discussion question next week):

• What are the similarities and differences between the stories? What do these similarities and differences reveal about the similarities and differences between the environments and customs of the peoples who told them?
• What do the stories reveal about the attitudes of the peoples who told them? What, for example, is their attitude toward animals? Human beings? The earth? The sun? Water? Etc.
• How are these stories similar to or different from the creation stories from your own culture?

Hollywood is where, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it.
~Rex Reed