MiWok nation of Northern California.

California Native Americans are not as well known as the Western Plains Native Americans, the Sioux, Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Apache. They are not fierce fighters, very peace loving. The Miwok consist of four main groups: Sierra Miwok (largest group, foothills/mountains), Plains Miwok (valleys), Coast Miwok (Marin/Sonoma), and Lake Miwok.

Traditional Life: They lived in semi-subterranean, earth-covered homes in the winter and temporary bark shelters in the summer. The core of their diet was acorn flour, supplemented by hunting (deer, rabbits) and fishing.

Religion and Beliefs: Spiritual life included the Kuksu cult, which involved ceremonies, rituals, and dances, sometimes using animal skins.

Language: They spoke several related languages within the Utian family.

History: The arrival of Spanish missions in the early 1800s and the California Gold Rush of 1848 devastated the population through disease, forced labor, and violence, forcing many to relocate or change their way of life.

Status: While many were displaced, thousands of Miwok people survive today, maintaining their cultural identity through community efforts and tribal organizations

The Native Americans known as the Miwok (or Mewuk) traditionally lived in central California. There were several different groups of Miwok. The largest group was the Sierra Miwok, who lived in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Sierra Miwok had more than 100 villages when Europeans arrived in their territory.

The Miwok lived in large, earth-covered houses. Some Miwok also made simple shelters called lean-tos from bark. The Miwok fished and hunted birds, deer, and other game with bows and arrows. They also gathered nuts, berries, and roots.

By the early 1800s Spanish priests and soldiers had started to build missions in Miwok territory. The Spanish forced some Miwok to live and work at the missions. In addition, Russian traders who came from the north sometimes attacked the Miwok.

In 1848 gold was discovered in California. Gold-seeking Americans rushed to California and took over Miwok lands. The settlers killed many Miwok.

The surviving Miwok scattered. Without land, many gave up their old way of life. They moved from place to place looking for work, often on farms or ranches. At the end of the 20th century there were about 3,000 Miwok.

An American Indian people, the Miwok traditionally lived in what is now central California. They were divided into seven groups that spoke dialects of Miwok, a language of the Penutian language family. Three groups lived on or near the Pacific coast: the Coast Miwok, just north of what is now San Francisco, California; the Lake Miwok, in the Clear Lake area; and the Bay Miwok (or Saclan), along the delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. The other groups lived farther inland: the Plains Miwok made their homes farther up the lower Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and three groups of Sierra Miwok—Northern, Central, and Southern—lived in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The Miwok shared cultural traits with other California Indians. They organized themselves into independent groups called tribelets, each of which consisted of several villages. The Sierra branches, which is where I live now, which accounted for most of the Miwok population, had more than 100 villages at the time of European contact. Acorns were a staple food for the Miwok, though they also fished and hunted deer and other game. All Miwok lived in pole- and earth-covered houses that they built partly underground. The Sierra and Plains groups also used temporary shelters called lean-tos, consisting of bark over a framework of saplings, during summer hunts in the mountains.

In the late 1700s Spanish priests began building missions in Miwok territory. They forced many Miwok to move to the missions, where the Indians were made to convert to Christianity and to do agricultural work for the Spanish. (Think slavery). The land came under Mexican control after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. Although the authority of the missions soon ended, the Miwok then faced waves of Mexican settlers. They killed many Miwok and forced others to work on their farms and ranches. (Also slavery).

California became part of the United States in 1848, the same year gold was discovered there. The ensuing gold rush brought a flood of American settlers, which proved disastrous for the Miwok. Thousands of tribal members died as a result of disease or violence, and the survivors were driven from their lands and forced to settle on small rancherías, or reservations. The U.S. census of 2010 counted about 6,700 people of Miwok ancestry.

Spanish Era: In the late 1700s, many were forced into missions, converting to Christianity and suffering from diseases.

Gold Rush: The 1848 Gold Rush brought massive population decline due to violence, forced labor, and disease, which has been described as a state-sanctioned genocide.

Survival: Despite near-eradication, Miwok descendants persevered. Today, groups like the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians and Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria hold federal recognition, engaging in tribal gaming, education, and cultural preservation.

Key Locations

Yosemite: The Sierra Miwok inhabited the Yosemite region. Of all the bands, the MiWok around Yosemite are the most well known, because of Yosemite and the tourists who flock there come in contact with the MiWok and their culture.

Point Reyes/Marin: The Coast Miwok lived in the area that is now Marin and southern Sonoma counties.

Central Valley/El Dorado: The Shingle Springs Band resides in El Dorado County.

The 2010 U.S. Census recorded approximately 6,700 people of Miwok ancestry.

The 2010 U.S. Census recorded approximately 6,700 people of Miwok ancestry.

The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family. The word Miwok means people in the Miwok language.

The Miwok lived in small bands without centralized political authority before contact with European Americans in 1769. They had domesticated dogs and cultivated tobacco but were otherwise hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists commonly divide the Miwok into four geographically and culturally diverse ethnic subgroups. These distinctions were not used among the Miwok before European contact. I have spoken to several MiWok about this, and they don’t associate with or trust other bands of MiWok outside of their immediate area. Even if the band is in the same valley but in a different village or town.

Plains and Sierra Miwok: from the western slope and foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Coast Miwok: from present day location of Marin County and southern Sonoma County (includes the Bodega Bay Miwok and Marin Miwok)

Lake Miwok: from Clear Lake basin of Lake County

Bay Miwok: from present-day location of Contra Costa County

The California- Miwok population data represent DNA samples from 33 unrelated individuals with self-identified affiliation with the California- Miwok tribe. Samples were obtained using the Globalfiler ® PCR Amplification kit to produce STR genotypic data.

Source publication: Native American Population data based on the Globalfiler® autosomal STR loci, Forensic Science International: Genetics, pp 12-13

Before Westerners arrived, the Miwok enjoyed thousands of peaceful years of pristine beauty on Angel Island. Native American use of the island began when people first came to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Coast Miwok Indians, who lived in what is now Marin County, reached the island with boats made from tule reeds. Some of these boats could carry eight to ten people. Though they tended to become waterlogged after prolonged use, these boats were adequate for short trips because their lightness made them fast and maneuverable. Long poles were used to propel the boats in shallow water; double ended paddles were used in deep water.

Miwok Indians established camps at what we know today as Ayala Cove, Camp Reynolds, Fort McDowell, and the Immigration Station. The Indians using the island were experts at fishing. They also hunted deer, seals, sea lions, and sea otter. Several kinds of fish and shellfish were available year-round, and salmon and other highly prized fish were seasonally plentiful. The annual spawning runs were made though Raccoon Strait, just offshore from Angel Island. The Indians also hunted duck and other sea fowl, and gathered acorns, buckeyes, and other seed crops, as well as certain roots and leaves, in order to round out their varied diet.

Beliefs

The Miwok had an animistic philosophy: they wanted no walls and trod lightly on the land, leaving no footsteps, always apologizing to the spirits in animals or nature whenever they disturbed them in whatever fashion. Their oral history was transmitted through the stories of the elders and shamans. Tribal boundaries were taught to children by rote.

Social Organization

Miwok tribelets preferred to live in villages of about one hundred persons. They kept their villages small in order to enjoy living at the peak of the environment around them without the need to destroy. There was a male elder in each village with a woman who was responsible for organizing the ceremonies. The Shamans provided both negative and positive rituals. They used local plants to create trances. (Think marijuana for at least one of the local plants). It was accepted that the Shaman had the power to cure, kill, predict the future, and start the rains.

Living Conditions

Only temporary houses were built on Angel Island: they did not live there permanently. Houses were made of branches covered with mats of tule. Each house had a small acorn house constructed on legs in order to store the acorns they would collect and protect from deer and insects.

The Miwoks had no pottery, made no fabric, and planted no seeds. They kept no domestic animals. Instead, they were gatherers, fisherman, hunters, and basket makers.

Several middens on Angel Island have produced bones, shell money from clams, abalone jewelry, skins, snail shell beads , sea shells like dentilium , mortars and pestles, wreckage from ships, and redwood driftwood from crematoriums. Obsidian points used in arrows were common.

Roles

Men and women had special roles, but equal standing. In the winter, men would make foot drums, rattles, reed flutes, and bone whistles. They would work on their boats, and hunted and fished all year long, the prey depending on the se season. Women would make tule mats, baskets, collect beads, (at least once Europeans made contact), feathers, and shells, and prepare skins to make both ceremonial clothing and capes for wear during the cool season. Women also made tule skirts, which was generally the only clothing they wore, along with their jewelry.

In the spring, women would collect greens such as lettuce, clover, and nettle, to supplement their winter diet. Miner’s lettuce would be collected and placed near a red ant hill. The ants walked on the leaves and exuded a vinegar-like substance, which became the Miwok’s salad dressing. In the summer, they collected seeds from wildflowers to make pinole, the basic ingredient for their bread. Autumn brought intensive labor for the whole family, as many hundreds of pounds of acorns had to be collected from the oak trees, sorted, prepared, and stored for the year ahead. Angel Island provided excellent nutrition for the Miwok. Plants and wildlife provided everything they needed.

The Miwok did not appear to differentiate between work and play. Everyone down to the smallest child was productive.

Hunting and Cooking

Hunting required extensive preparation, building the sweat lodge so that the hunters could get rid of the human smell. They made deer heads to wear, pulled bows and arrows through the smoke to take away the human odor, and rubbed their bodies with angelica and mugwort. The philosophy of the hunt was retreat and lure, rather than chase and flee. They caught birds using baskets, put plant bulbs in the water to stun the fish, and prepared various types of nets to catch salmon, geese, seagulls, and other wildlife.

Food preparation required intensive labor. Cooking was mainly done in water-proof baskets. Rocks were heated, mush and water were placed in the basket and rocks added carefully, being replaced as they grew cold. Meat, fowl, and fish were broiled over fires.

Other Plant Uses

Many plants on Angel Island were also used for health care. Galls from oak trees were chewed as their toothpaste, tea from iris bulbs was used for kidney stones, acorn mush was set aside to age and the mildew-like substance that resulted was scraped off and used like penicillin. Ceanothus leaves were used like tobacco.

Western Encounters and Influence

In 1579, Chaplain Fletcher with the Sir Francis Drake wrote: “They are of a free and loving nature, without guile or treachery.” In 1775, Father Vincente with Captain Ayala said, “I found the Indians very humorous, with courteous manner, mimicking my prayers with chuckles — they acted like tender lambs, had fine stature, clean and of good color, very elegant of figure — about four hundred naked men appeared.”

There were major differences in how various western groups treated the Miwok.

A letter from a Russian colonel to the lieutenant he is sending out to trade with the people: “Strictly forbid and punish the slightest rudeness toward the local inhabitants by your men. Seek to win their friendship and love in every way, by various favorable enticements stemming from the courtesy and love of mankind. Strictly forbid anyone to accept the smallest trifle as a gift, not even a morsel of food, but pay for everything with whatever seems appreciable to them. Train them to consider the Russians as benevolent friends.”

The Spanish needed labor for cattle lands, they enslaved the Miwok, changing their nutrition to western ways, thereby weakening their immune systems and making them vulnerable to diseases, which killed many of them.

The Americans started boarding schools and brought children from the villages with the intent of taking the Indian out of the Indian. Several still alive today have stories from their boarding school days.

Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park is in the Sierra Nevada foothills 11 miles east of Jackson, CA, where I lived for many years, and visited the state park and museum. The park is nestled in a little valley about 2,400 feet above sea level with open meadows and three species of oaks that produce acorns. The Northern Sierra Miwok settled in this area many centuries ago and gathered acorns as a main staple of their diet.

The 135-acre park preserves a great outcropping of marbleized limestone with some 1,185 mortar holes -- the largest collection of bedrock mortars in North America. A ceremonial roundhouse and reconstructed bark houses are present in the center of the park.

The park is northeast of Stockton in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Take State Highway 88 East through Jackson to the town of Pine Grove. That’s the town I lived in. Turn left turn on Pine Grove-Volcano Road and proceed approximately 1.5 miles. The first left is the campground and the second left is the park’s main entrance to the parking and the museum. It’s worth the visit.