California's Native Americans are a story of survival.

Without resiliency, adaptability, innovation and opportunism, they never would have made it.

California Indian history didn’t end with the Gold Rush. It’s still in progress. California Indians make baskets and manage landscapes with fire — and drive pickup trucks and earn doctorates — in the present tense, planning for a future seven generations distant. In that sense, the thread of California Native history extends farther into the future than that of mainstream society, focused on the next fiscal year at most.

Before Contact

It’s a matter of rough consensus these days that California’s Native people numbered from 100,000 to 300,000 before Spanish and Russian explorers first visited the state. The precise population is a matter that spurs some disagreement among scholars. For some time, historians assumed that California’s indigenous people were spared the worst of the first few waves of epidemics the Europeans brought with them to the Americas. Before Spanish settlement in 1769, the thinking went, the state’s relative isolation on the far side of tall mountains and impassable deserts likely protected California Indians from the plagues that had ravaged the rest of the continent since the early 1500s. If California was indeed isolated from those epidemics, then its pre-contact population would have been not too far different from the numbers the Spanish found.

Recently, researchers have pointed out what Native Californians themselves knew all along: the mountains and deserts weren’t obstacles to Native travel. Far from it: people lived throughout the hottest deserts and the coldest mountain ranges, traveling regularly for trade and other reasons. Once European diseases got a foothold in the Southwest and Mexico, they likely crossed into California. Besides which, it’s likely that Manila galleons traveling from the Philippines to Acapulco stopped off along the California coast on regular, if unrecorded, occasions. And if diseases had ravaged the diverse societies of California well before the Spanish came, then Native populations before the epidemics would obviously have been considerably higher.

Some scholars contend that California may have been home to a third of North America’s population before 1492. Regardless of the total count, uncolonized California was well-populated. Along the shores of Tulare Lake in the San Joaquin Valley, as many as 70,000 people, mainly Yokuts, may have gathered at least seasonally. The Chumash and Tongva regions of coastal Southern California were dotted with thriving villages, many just a short walk from their neighbors. The Bay Area, with its immensely productive wetland ecosystem, was populated by tens of thousands of Ohlone, Coast Miwok and Sierra Miwok, Patwin, and Wappo people. Around 300 dialects of 100 distinct languages were spoken in California, one of the highest concentrations of cultural diversity in the world.

The Missions

That intimate, interwoven relationship with the landscape was the California Indians’ strength, but it also proved to be an ironic vulnerability. In 1769, acting in part out of concern that the British would lay claim to the area, the Kingdom of Spain began to establish what would become a chain of missions and forts stretching from San Diego to Sonoma.

Two aspects of the burgeoning Mission system would end up doing serious harm to California Indian peoples, and to their landscape-based cultures. The first was that the Spanish brought few civilian settlers with them. That was a response to Indian resistance to Spanish colonialism elsewhere in the Southwest, such as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in what is now New Mexico, in which 400 colonists were killed and another 2,000 forced to flee. In Alta California, the Spanish would do things differently. Each of what was eventually 21 missions would be staffed by just two Franciscan priests, with a defense complement of half a dozen soldiers.

Alta California was considered one of the farthest-flung, least important parts of the Spanish Empire, and the effort to colonize received very little in the way of material support from the crown. Each Mission was expected to become a self-sufficient agricultural settlement as quickly as possible. Without civilian colonists to cultivate crops and tend livestock, the priests chose to harness California Indians to do the actual labor of farming, animal husbandry, building construction, and domestic work.

The American Nadir

The Mexican-American War, which resulted in the conquest of California by the United States, was very bad news for Californian Indians. As brutal and cavalier as Spanish and Mexican rule had been for Native Californians, it was the onset of American rule that brought with it the worst period in the entire known history of California’s indigenous people.

The barbarism and racial hatred toward indigenous people American settlers brought with them to California can hardly be overstated. Over the 27 years from 1846 — when American settlers started making themselves at home in Mexican California — and 1873, when the last California Indian War ended with the defeat of the Modocs at their Tule Lake stronghold, California’s Native population declined by at least 80 percent, from around 150,000 to perhaps 30,000. Or perhaps far fewer. The 1870 federal census tallied 7,241 remaining California Indians. Given the state of the federal census in 1870, some Indians may have been missed.

Many of the deaths were due to starvation and disease, as Native bands of refugees hid in some of the new state’s most inaccessible, inhospitable places to avoid what must have seemed certain doom at the hands of Americans.
But a very distressing number of those deaths came as the result of what American settlers often expressly referred to as a campaign of extermination.

Indian schools and termination

By the mid-1870s, white Californians had largely lost interest in exterminating the remaining California Indians on a systematic basis. “Pacification” of the tribes had been in the hands of the Army for some years, and many Californians seemed to be willing to take a more expansive view of how to rid the nation of Indians: by turning them white, or as close to it as possible.

California’s first off-reservation boarding school, the Sherman Indian School, was founded in Perris, California in 1892. It moved to Riverside a decade later. Children from tribes across southern California and the desert regions of adjoining states were sent to the Sherman Indian School for decades. Students ranged in age from 5 to 20. No visits home were allowed for several years at a time. A cemetery on the campus holds the remains of youth who died while in the school’s custody.

Termination

By the 1940s, the United States Congress had grown tired of waiting for boarding schools to slowly assimilate Native children into mainstream society, and decided to forcibly assimilate Native peoples by speedier methods. The solution Congress came up with was called “termination.” Termination was intended to strip Native tribes of any sovereignty they still enjoyed, starting with depriving tribes of the right to handle their own criminal cases. In California, the first Native tribe to be affected was the Agua Caliente Cahuilla, whose lands in the Palm Springs area were declared subject to state civil and criminal law in 1949.

In 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 made termination the official federal policy toward Native nations. The language of the resolution specifically targeted California Indians, declaring that all recognized tribes in California — along with New York, Florida and Texas — were terminated. Termination meant an immediate end to federal funding, social services, legal and law enforcement protection, and to recognition of the tribes’ rights to reservations even if guaranteed by treaty.

In the same year, Congress passed Public Law 280, which (among other things) declared that all tribal criminal and civil cases in California would be under state rather than tribal jurisdiction.

From 1956 through 1958, Congress passed three laws specifically targeting 41 California Indian Rancherias for termination. The laws required that the Rancheria lands be divided up among tribe members and made their personal property. The idea was that by becoming property owners and taxpayers, Native people would assimilate into American society more quickly.

Some Native people accepted the idea of termination, in part because the Federal government offered assurances of greater education funding and infrastructure improvements to native communities in return. Those promises went largely unfulfilled. Opposition to termination grew among both Natives and non-Natives. The issue gained enough prominence that both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon publicly called for a repeal of termination policies.

Renaissance and Restoration

The attempts to forcibly assimilate Native peoples into American society had two unintended consequences that played a big role in California Indian history. Boarding schools, by creating bonds between children of different tribes, often made it more likely that Native activists would adopt pan-Indian approaches to organizing, rather than working on a tribe by tribe basis. And one termination-era law, the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, encouraged Native people to leave the reservation and look for jobs in cities. As a result, many Native people from tribes outside California emigrated to Los Angeles and San Francisco, providing ideal organizing circumstances for those pan-Indian activists.

In November, 1969, a group with the expressly pan-Indian name “Indians of All Nations” occupied the decommissioned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The occupation, which made world headlines, lasted for nearly two years, and raised the visibility of both the Native cause and Native organizing. Though the visible leadership of the occupation was largely made up of members of tribes from outside California, California Indians were nonetheless well-represented among the initial wave of occupiers.

The occupation bore fruit. A chastened Congress responded to the unfavorable press by passing reforms of Indian health and education policies and bills returning lands to the Yakima Indians and Taos Pueblo. President Nixon did his part by rescinding Termination during the occupation as well.

The lessons of Alcatraz — a reminder that activism could be both effective and a source of pride — had an immeasurable effect on Native peoples across the United States. California was no exception. California Indians had never stayed silent about the injustices done them, but the 1970s saw a renewed surge of activism both political and cultural. In 1979, Tillie Hardwick, a Pomo woman who grew up on the terminated Pinoleville Rancheria, sued the federal government to restore recognition to Pinoleville, arguing that the roads, sewers, and water mains the federal government had promised in return for termination were never delivered.

Hardwick prevailed. In 1983, a U.S. District Court ruled on Tillie Hardwick v. United States by reversing terminations of 17 small Rancherias throughout the state. Other tribe members, noting Hardwick’s success, launched their own suits. To date, more than 30 California rancherias, bands, and reservations have had their terminations rescinded.

Tribes in California began to generate revenue by holding bingo games in the late 1970s. Predictable tension between the tribes and the state over gambling regulation ensued. The Cabazon Band of Mission Indians sued California over state attempts to shut down a card club on the Band’s reservation near Palm Springs. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that states have no authority to regulate gaming on Indian lands.

In 1988, the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act amended Public Law 280 to make that SCOTUS decision formal, and establish a federal regulatory framework for Indian gaming. Indian gaming took off nationwide as a result. An attempt in 1998 by then-governor Pete Wilson to drastically limit the scope of Indian gaming in California briefly raised ire, but after a series of court battles and a pro-Indian gaming proposition on the 1998 ballot, 58 gaming tribes reached an amicable agreement with Wilson’s successor Gray Davis in 1999. The casino operated by the Cabazon Band is now the tallest building between Los Angeles and Phoenix.

There are usually multiple sides to every culture's story and undoubtedly, California's Native American story is the same.

Regardless, though, the Native American tribes in California endured some pretty horrible stuff, yet, are here today and are seizing opportunities provided by a much friendlier environment.

To read more on California's Native American history, please check out kcet.