A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810. Randall Milliken. Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 43, 1995, xvi -l- 364 pp., 17 figs., 5 maps, 12 tables, and 4 appendices, $32.95 (hard cover), $24.95 (paper)

Farris, Glenn J

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UC MercedJournal of California and Great Basin AnthropologyTitleMilliken: A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810Permalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5470g07cJournalJournal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 18(2)ISSN0191-3557AuthorFarris, Glenn JPublication Date1996-07-01 Peer reviewedeScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaREVIEWS 319 Kroeber, Theodora 1970 Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configura-tion. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press. Margolin, Malcolm 1990 The Retum of the Hundred-and-Elevens to Northwest Califomia. News from Native Califomia 4(4):7-9. Ortiz, Bev 1990 A Rich Red Hue: Yurok Dugout Canoes. News from Native Califomia 5(1): 12-16. Palmquist, Peter E. 1983 The Roberts Collection of Califomia Indian Photographs: A Brief Review. Journal of Califomia and Great Basin Anthropology 5(1-2):3-32. Parkman, E. Breck 1987 Building a Yurok Village. News from Native Califomia 1(3): 8-10. 1991 Dedicating Sumeg. Califomia 5(2):4-8. News from Native Pilling, Arnold 1978 Yurok. In: Handbook of North Amer-ican Indians, Vol. 8, Califomia, Robert F. Heizer, ed., pp. 137-154. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 1989 Yurok Aristocracy and "Great Houses." American Indian Quarterly 13(4):421-436. Roberts, Harry 1987 A Yurok Story. News from Native Cali-fornia 1(1): 1, 3. A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810. Randall Milliken. Ballena Press Andiropological Papers No. 43, 1995, xvi -l-364 pp., 17 figs., 5 maps, 12 tables, and 4 appendices, $32.95 (hard cover), $24.95 (pa-per). Reviewed by: GLENN J. FARRIS Archeology Lab, Cahf. Dept. of Parks and Recreation, 2505 Port Street, West Sacramento, CA 95616. For those of us who have been immersed in the ethnohistory of the California Spanish Mission-California Indian interaction, this book version of the dissertafion by Randy Milliken has been long awaited. If anything, it is better than I had hoped. Building on pioneering work by one of his mentors, the late James Bennyhoff", Milliken has taken the multitude of written ex-ploration accounts, as well as military and mis-sion records kept by the Spanish (principally in the San Francisco Bay area), and developed from them an invaluable ethnogeography of the Indian villages found in the present-day counties of Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa, along with portions of neighboring counties. The maps he provides will be utilized by archaeologists and historians from now on. Milliken then draws from his painstaking work of reconstituting die Indian famUies taken into the missions to create a comprehensible In-dian history of dieir side of the first contacts with explorers and clerics like Pedro Pages, Juan Crespl, Junipero Serra, Pedro Font, Vicen-te de Santamaria, Miguel Costans(3, Fernando Rivera y Moncada, and many more. Though the accounts of many of diese Spaniards have long been available to scholars, they portrayed only dieir impressions of the interaction. Milliken's study goes a long way to providing us the odier side of the story, or at least putting diese obser-320 JOURNAL OF CALIFORNIA AND GREAT BASIN ANTHROPOLOGY vations into perspective. In doing so, he adds greatly to a more credible and eminendy read-able history of the Bay Area in the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book is divided into 10 chapters. Chap-ter 1 is a comprehensive introduction to the study, laying out the scene of the Bay Area in about 1770 and explaining to the reader the vari-ous factors, including differing world views, that created a confrontation of cultures bound to lead to disaster. Milliken's approach is remarkably objective and allows the reader to absorb the varying attitudes and prejudices of the protago-nists that led to what must be seen as an inevita-ble and horrific outcome. Chapter 2, The Tribal World, seeks to paint an image of the cultural landscape of the Bay Area prior to the intervention of the Spanish ex-plorers. Succeeding chapters fill in the history of action and reaction, starting with initial con-tact with the Portoli expedition in 1769 and other exploratory contacts (1769 to 1776) through the initiation of the Indians into the Christian religion (1776 to 1784). Next came a time of "mutual accommodation" (1785 to 1792) which shifted to a period of social trans-formation (1793 to 1795) among the Indian peo-ple, which in turn spawned an era of reconsid-eration (1795 to 1799), during which the cumu-lative impacts of epidemic disease prompted flight from the missions and countermeasures by the Spanish to bring back those who had been baptized. Chapter 8 details the effects of regional disin-tegration (1800 to 1805) in which the decimation of the native cultural geography in the immedi-ate proximity of the missions created large areas of abandoned lands where many villages had once resonated with life. This led to a period of "recapitulation" (1806 to 1810), during which the missionaries and military moved out to more distant areas adjacent to the villages that were already subjected under the policy of reduccidn, and through a combination of epidemic disease and military intervention the earlier process was repeated. Finally, diere is the conclusion to the story, derived from Milliken's painstaking exegesis in which he expounds the thesis evinced in the book's tide, that the Indian people were at a point of very limited choice. In this state, re-sistance faltered, with numerous people entering the mission more or less voluntarUy when this had become the only rational choice left to them. Aldiough I find Milliken's thesis of limited choice very compelling, I wonder at the merit of the term "choice." This seems to be a westem notion ded to free will. In the sense of people finding themselves between a rock and a hard place, I suppose that a choice was still avadable. At the same time, I wonder if this choice was simply a fatalistic bowing to a nearly incompre-hensible set of events that had overtaken them. The analogy of indigenous people of Southeast Asia having had their lives and landscape mas-sively impacted by a western power, then flock-ing as refugees to take a place in the lowest rungs of our nation's social structure came to mind. In much the same way, Indian peoples were drawn to the missions by offerings of vari-ous trinkets and clothing, and above all food. Once baptized, the Indians found themselves un-able to remrn home except as proselytizers to draw more of their fellow villagers to the newly created rancherias near the missions. Intervillage feuds and the newfound Christian viewpoint to-ward gentiles (read infidels) were manipulated to further break down levels of what resistance could be mustered by people living a subsistence existence in which their collected foodstuffs were so easily subject to intervention and de-struction. I would agree that in the time subse-quent to the period covered here (1769 to 1810), as generations grew up within the missions and better understood the strengths and weaknesses of the gente de razdn, there did come a time of choice, but the early experience was simply overwhelming. REVIEWS 321 I was a bit disappointed that Milliken did not consider more extensively aspects of the ritual spectacles offered by die Roman Catholic priest-ly community, including magnificent robes, dra-matic statuary, and pictorial representations, and the inevitable efforts of die church to co-opt var-ious local traditional beliefs to pave the transi-tion from non-Christian to Christian. I do not diink the story of this conquista can be limited to military prowess and offers of food to starv-ing peoples. To borrow a phrase from the Viet-nam war, the priests were seeking to control the hearts and minds of the native Califomians. That diey succeeded to some degree is indicated by the number of former mission Indians who have remained Catholic or at least stayed within die Chrisfian fold. To anyone who really is intrigued with the history of the Bay Area and its transition from an Indian to a Spanish cultural landscape in a few short decades, this book is a must. For those who are fascinated with what can be done with painstaking analyses of the records left be-hind (mainly by the colonizers) in order to bring to life the often ignored and belittled native in-habitants of California, this fine book is and will long continue to be a model. The Archaeology of CA-MNO-2122, A Study of Pre-Contact and Post-Contact Lifeways Among the Mono Basin Paiute. Brooke S. Arkush. University of California Anthropological Rec-ords, Vol. 31, 1995, X -b 199 pp., 75 figs., 41 tables, 4 appendices, $40.00 (paper). Reviewed by: KELLY R. MCGUIRE Far Westem Anthropological Research Group, Inc., P.O. Box 413, Davis, CA 95617. This recent contribution to the University of California Anthropological Records series details the results of Brooke Arkush's mid-1980s field investigations at CA-MNO-2122, a remarkable prehistoric, protohistoric, and historic site complex located on the eastern shore of Mono Lake, California. Documented within the ap-proximately 3,000,000 m.- confines of CA-MNO-2122 were three prehistoric pronghorn traps, one historic mustang trap, and 31 feature/ artifact concentrations of various functions and ages. The latter include a number of base camps—some represented by the remains of wickiups, windbreaks, and other features—as well as temporary field camps, and one historic corral. Given the size and complexity of the site, field procedures focused mainly on map-ping, recording, and feature documentation, with a more judicious and targeted approach to col-lection and excavation. Such a welter of temporally and funcdonally distinct loci pose certain organizational chal-lenges with respect to research approach and re-port format to which Arkush responds with dis-finction. Most of the background information, data, and inferences presented in this volume revolve around two major research themes: (1) patterns of aboriginal pronghorn procurement, particularly diose employing large game drive traps and odier facilities; and (2) Native American culture continuity and change in re-sponse to Anglo colonization of the Mono Basin. 

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Milliken: A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810

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Milliken: A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810

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