Our History from the Beginning
Valley Coast Miwok History by Tina Noble Our Valley’s story began with the vast, slow collision of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates over millions of years, crumpling up the hills and valleys of the California Coast Ranges. Twelve thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age melted away, the Valley was home to giant sloths, mastodons, bison, cam- elids and equids, short-faced bears and dire wolves. Shortly after, with the arrival of the first humans, most of this variety vanished. Humans, who arrived at least 10,000 years ago, almost certainly played a key role in this great extinction. We have no direct record of the Valley’s First People, those who came long after the first wave of big-game hunters—first the occasional hunter, and later whole families arriving for the acorn harvest. The Garden of Eden they lived in here and maintained for thousands of years persisted until the arrival of Europeans in the late 1700s. There were elk by the hundreds, grizzlies wading through the glut of salmon in the creek, con- dors wheeling above a cougar’s kill by Spirit Rock. The mead- ows were clothed in perennial bunchgrasses that supported coveys of many hundreds of quail. The First People here had no tribes, no chiefs, no armies. They lived in extended families or bands no larger than thirty or forty, and had the most democratic of all governance: long discussion concluding in consensus. The muscular men wore no clothes and walked unshod. They carried wooden bows and otter-skin quivers. Each had his glossy, oiled hair arranged in a net of iris fiber, and each was adorned in his own style with feathers and abalo- ne-shell pendants. The women wore two-piece skirts of deerskin and intri- cate basketry caps of black and russet-red, patterned to evoke quail or rattlesnake. They carried long, cone-shaped baskets supported by leather bands across the forehead. Home carried a meaning it’s hard for us to imagine. Every individual oak tree had its name and story. A girl barely old enough to talk knew dozens of food and medicinal plants. Young boys studied the animals and mimicked their move- ments in dance. An early French explorer tells of hunters clothed in deerskin drifting into herds of deer and elk to nudge their prey into position for a killing shot. The only essential the Valley could not provide was obsid- ian for tools, so they bartered with travelers from the peoples to the north. Life was spent in storytelling and ritual, playing with children, sweating, rhyming and word-play, and intricate gambling games. The essentials of life could be provided with two or three hours of work a day. These First People did not own the land; in their concep- tion, they were owned by it. A family might possess the rights to a particular tree’s acorns, but another might have the right to hunt or gather greens beneath it, and yet another to harvest
dead wood for fires. A band had a permanent home village, but moved with the seasons to other camps for harvest or hunting. When a place began to feel tired, the home camp would be burned and another built some distance away. In this way pests and disease were left behind and the harvest regenerated, and when they returned in a few years, the place would be renewed. They harvested bulbs for food in a way that encouraged the multiplication of the bulbs. They pruned the willows to provide the best shoots for basket making. The First People’s lives were well-ordered, with com- plex rules governing sex and hunting and relations with neighbors. This intricacy kept populations low and stable in relation to resources for millennia. Their stories told of coyote, who broke the rules and suffered dire—but often hilarious—consequences. When the first Europeans came and asked their name, they shook their heads at the rudeness and ignorance of the question. Sata-ko, they said. We are the human beings who belong to this place, Sata. Today we remember them, and honor those who still live among us, as the Coast Miwok.
Seed Day Dance with Pelican Skin Cloak. Drawing courtesy of Edward Willie, from The Coast Miwok Indians of the Point Reyes Area by Sylvia Barker Thalman
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50 th Anniversary
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