Talk:Ohlone

Editors. I have just removed a sentence that was sitting at the end of the list of Ohlone divisions because the statement, a quote, does not exactly address the problem that it intends to address. Here it is. "According to Milliken, "Language group designations are spelled as commonly found in English language publications... however many tribal, village and personal names which are not commonly found in literature present a problem. They were written by Spanish settlers who were trying to capture the sounds of languages foreign to them."^[1]" This was originally written by Milliken to explain how "he" was going to spell the names of the divisions. But as it was being used here in Wikipedia, it seems to be trying to explain how "anyone" came to spell the names. And amazingly enough, the problem is resolved by referring to "English language publications." Does that not seem circular to you? Anyway, I say we do not even address the issue, just leave this quote out of the article.Middle Fork (talk) 18:12, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

However, I liked the quote, it explains a lot (I think) of how our understanding of the native vocabulary came to be, and shaded and developed through a Spanish vocabulary and what sounds they'd hear versus not hear... would it make sense to let the quote stay in, without trying to prove anything before or after it? Goldenrowley (talk) 20:45, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

The quote just does not pertain to exactly the situation you are trying to explain. I am substituting in with: "The above division designations, mostly derived from selected local tribe names found in mission records, were first offered in 1974 by Heizer (citing Richard Levy) as direct substitutes for Kroeber’s earlier designations based upon the names of local Spanish missions. The spellings are anglized forms of group names that were were first written down by Spanish missionaries and soldiers who were trying to capture the sounds of languages foreign to them. (cite Heizer 1974:3, Milliken 1995:xiv)" Fix or remove as you wish, since it is something you are trying to communicate. The whole thing is a nightmare. Most of the names Heizer (actually Levy) introduced were local tribe names that they elevated to represent a division (Chalon, Rumsen, Mutsun, Tamyen, Karkin), thus globalizing the local tribe in question to include other local tribes within the given mission catchment. The other three had their own unique histories: Chochenyo=slang for José-eño, Ramaytush=obscure Chochenyo reference for SF Peninsula and its people (courtesy of unpublished Harrington notes), Awaswas="northerners" in most of the Costanoan languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Middle Fork (talk • contribs) 21:29, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I am fine with the new info you used to replace it with. Goldenrowley (talk) 01:07, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

To All Editors and Commentators. I have taken the liberty to move a sentence that was just added to the culture section here for purposes of its contemplation. The sentence was just added by editor Plumpurple (glad to know you), hard upon the existing material on plant use:

The Ohlone also practiced sophisticed use of plant extracts for non-food use; for example, tribes extracted a substance from the Coastal woodfern Dryopteris arguta that they used as a hair shampoo.

My number one problem is the lack of citation for this statement (which Plumpurple can probably quickly fix.) My number two problem is, "What is this special interest in wood fern?" The paragraph on plant use is currently nicely presented without enumerating the scores of plant uses documented for central California Indians. Adding it in opens up criticism as to why soapplant, for instance, was not mentioned, or why the three species used to make bowstrings have not been listed here. Does Wikipedia have a page for "Native Plant Uses in California?" Perhaps a link could be made to such a page, or perhaps someone could start such a page.Middle Fork (talk) 03:51, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

• Well, i am somewhat open as to the best way to proceed. i can add the citation for shampoo use, but you have raised some important fundamental questions. yes, we certainly should have other (non food) plant use examples, which i shall add as i find them. yes we should have an article on Native plant uses in California, but that page would be enormous. it seems like in the best spirit of a wiki we should accumulate breadth on native plant use within each tribe article, until we have enough information in each such specific article. this is clearly an area where wikipedia lacks depth. what do you think? Plumpurple (talk) 04:25, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

• • You and I agree that a good encyclopedia would give information about plant uses of Native Americans. But an encyclopedia must also consider space, even an ever-expanding Wikipedia. We already have an administrator complaint that the Ohlone article is getting pretty long. But there is another problem. Most plant use enumerations for the Ohlone found in secondary sources are actually extrapolations from studies of Pomo and Sierra Miwok plant uses. The "specifics" of contact-period Ohlone culture, including plant use, are poorly documented (see Harrington's 1942 "Central California Coast" CED study in Anthropological Records vol. 7). Most specific Ohlone plant-use information comes from Mutsun decendant Ascencion Solarsano in the 1930s, 130 years after her people had become Mission Indians. Thus, any long list of Ohlone plant use would merely be an educated projection of information from surrounding areas. For such a detailed presentation of contact-period California Indian plant uses, I think we would be better off to have a dedicated article on the entire California Culture Area. I do not know how to start a "stub" for such an article, but contributor Goldenrowley does. Maybe Goldenrowley can help out here.Middle Fork (talk) 15:13, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I like the idea of non-food plants but gave my Ohlone books back to the library last year. To start a new stub I will leave it to one of you as the one who wants it most should do it :-) to get the credit and/or the comments. First check there is no article already at the California state level. type in the name of the desired article into the "search" field at left. Wikipedia will send you a message the article does not exist yet and ask if you want to create one. Chose "yes" and you'll be into edit mode with an entirely blank page. Goldenrowley (talk) 00:41, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Also I think its fine to add non-food use plants to the Culture section of Native American Articles as long as its important: i.e. using the local vegetation to build rafts seems much more important than shampoo, and shampoo is minor compared to staple foods for survival.Goldenrowley (talk) 01:46, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

The population section includes this text: "Later researchers such as Richard Levy estimated "10,000 or more" Ohlone." The source in the reference section: (Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area) also reads "Over 10,000 people lived in the coastal area between Point Sur and the San Francisco Bay.", and further says, "Before the coming of the Spaniards, Central California had the densest Indian population anywhere north of Mexico." That sounds like an interesting claim, are there any other sources that support this? Should this note be added to the population section? Kaitymh (talk) 23:56, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

 Done

"The highest estimate comes from Sherburne F. Cook, who in later life concluded there were 26,000" yet later we say, he didn't give a number. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 14:10, 12 April 2014 (UTC).

OK this figure was "including Salinans". All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 14:20, 12 April 2014 (UTC).

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I removed the following uncited, POV, and dubious claims:

The Emeryville Shellmound is known to be the capital of the Chechenyan people. The Chechenyans are a division of the Ohlone people and are known to be the most advanced.

To begin with, the Ohlone/Costanoan peoples were never centralized polities with any kind of "capital", but simply loose villages with no authority beyond the village level, only a loose tribal identity related to what dialect of Ohlone the group spoke. How the Chechenyans were the most "advanced" of the Ohlone peoples is neither stated nor sourced, and is an entirely dubious claim. The various Ohlone peoples and neighboring non-Ohlone natives all existed at a more or less equal technological and political level.

I've kept a single sentence describing the Emeryville Shellmound, with a "cite needed" note. Peter G Werner (talk) 22:52, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Ohlone/CommentsTalk:Ohlone/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Last edited at 01:43, 1 January 2012 (UTC). Substituted at 01:45, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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There is a non-sequitur in two sentences in the Introduction section that hint at potential improvement with a brief but important clarification:

Prior to the Gold Rush, the northern California region was one of the most densely populated regions north of Mexico.[3] However, in the years 1769 to 1833, the Spanish missions in California had a negative effect on Ohlone culture, and the Ohlone population declined steeply during this period.

Is there a cause-effect relationship here? The second sentence changes topic from demographics ("densely populated") to anthropology ("negative effect on Ohlone culture"): they don't fit. However, with proper documentation and citations, the first sentence could move beyond implication to state that Spanish missions introduced Eurasian diseases (typical impact across the Americas), which had more than just a "negative effect" on Ohlone culture: very likely, the Spanish missions decimated the population of the peninsula, which in turn could have led to loss of culture... Is there an expert who could flesh this out briefly but accurately? (I did not find details to this effect in the article below.) --Aboudaqn (talk) 21:01, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

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Someone added two (2) paragraphs under #Etymology. The writting was a subjective entry. I deleted it. Please help the person adding this material. They may be well intentioned, but you CANNOT write an entry as an opinion, as this person did.

Thanks meatclerk (talk) 04:58, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Need to update these subsections with information with 2011 victories for the indigenous peoples. (Making a note for myself when I have some time) Bastique ^{☎ call me!} 16:46, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

links [Victory at Sogorea Te/Glen Cove https://sacredland.org/victory-at-sogorea-teglen-cove/] [Ohlone's Struggle to Save Sacred Site May Be Succeeding in Santa Cruz http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/774/7/] and more. Bastique ^{☎ call me!} 16:48, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Ramaytush are the only remaining Ohlone who lived on the SF peninsula but they indicate that another group, I believe Yelamu, lived in what is now SF. Are Yelamu part of a larger Ramaytush grouping as indicated on Wikipedia, or are they distinct but also effectively extinct? The sources here are from 1995. I suggest using recent Ohlone sources.

This new article may be of relevance to this article. 173.88.246.138 (talk) 02:20, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

The main source is: Severson, Alissa L.; Byrd, Brian F.; Mallott, Elizabeth K.; Owings, Amanda C.; DeGiorgio, Michael; de Flamingh, Alida; Nijmeh, Charlene; Arellano, Monica V.; Leventhal, Alan; Rosenberg, Noah A.; Malhi, Ripan S. (2022-03-29). "Ancient and modern genomics of the Ohlone Indigenous population of California". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (13): –2111533119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2111533119. Retrieved 2022-03-22. --Erp (talk) 02:36, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I tried putting a more specific source for this claim, but couldn't find anything. I see plenty of sources for mass deaths from disease, forced labor, systematic suppression of culture, etc., so still definitely ethnocide/genocide regardless, but the sources on this page and the California genocide page don't list any massacres (closest is a source for population decline of Costanoans). Does anyone know of a source for one of the state massacres including Ohlone people? If so, we should not only cite it, but include details in the history section (if not, we should use a more careful wording). Tga (talk) 20:59, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure there are deliberate massacres of Ohlone though I could be wrong. There well could have been individual killings with little attempt at justice and the many deaths due to unhealthy living conditions in the missions and later forced labor under American rule plus the deaths due to introduced diseases. Madley's book (Madley, Benjamin (2016). An American genocide: the United States and the California Indian catastrophe, 1846-1873. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-18136-4.) has details including an appendix listing some of the massacres with numbers (a brief search doesn't show Ohlone or Costanoan listed there). It also reports that Native Americans under mission control often received corporal punishment (and specifically mentions a report that in San Francisco one had been whipped because he wept for his wife and child who had died [this was amidst a list of other reasons Native Americans in SF had been badly treated leading to them running away]). Note we have the mission period where Native Americans were held in legal servitude. Mexico independence period where Native Californians were seen as potential citizens and could become free and enfranchised (to the point that a few received land grants). Then the American period which doubled down on the servitude; however, the Ohlone had already been reduced and somewhat assimilated. I suspect some Ohlone, those who escaped the mission system and fled to areas of California where they could be free and their descendants, may have been massacred with the groups they had taken refuge though this is speculation on my part and not something we can include. Erp (talk) 01:16, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, I see the problem! I reverted you previously, but that was my mistake; the source used doesn't specify Ohlone. Having looked into it, all the sources I can find speak of California Indians in general, and I can't really find any high quality (i.e., non-blog) sources that mention the Ohlone in this context.

The closest I can find is the following:

• Laverty, Philip. "The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey, California: Dispossession, Federal Neglect, and the Bitter Irony of the Federal Acknowledgment Process." Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 2003, pp. 41–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1409537. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

This mentions "genocide" several times but in the general context of "Indians". There's no mention of "massacres". One can only infer a connection from the paper's focus and title, so I don't think that's enough.

Given that this is currently unsourced, I would suggest removing it from the lede and not just tagging it. If it's in the body as well, it should be tagged there. Lede-worthy info should be well sourced, I think. We can always add it back in if we find sources later on. What do you think? Lewisguile (talk) 09:24, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Removed. I note the history section could be expanded. The article should cover what happened after Mexican independence and American acquisition. Erp (talk) 15:05, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. Lewisguile (talk) 19:02, 16 December 2024 (UTC)