Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California

Abstract

Indigenous negotiations of European colonialism in North America are more complex than models of domination and resistance reveal. Indigenous people—acting according to their own historically and culturally specific ways of knowing and being in the world—developed strategies for remaking their identities, material choices, and social configurations to survive one or multiple phases of colonization. Archaeologists are making strides in documenting the contingencies and consequences of these strategies, yet their focus is often skewed toward sites of contact and colonialism (e.g., missions and forts). This article examines places of refuge for native people navigating colonial programs in the San Francisco Bay area of California. I use a resistance-memory-refuge framework to reevaluate resistance to Spanish missions, including the possible reoccupation of landscapes by fugitive orfurloughed Indians. Commemorative trips to shellmounds and other refuges support the concept of an indigenous hinterland, or landscapes that, in time, provided contexts for continuity and adjustment among Indian communities making social, material, and economic choices in the wake ofmissionization. By viewing colonialism from the outside in, this reoriented approach can potentially enhance connections between archaeological and Native American communities.

Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology

“…Some may be sites of labor, where Native people worked for Euro-Americans and thus used primarily foreign objects, while others may be sites occupied by Native Americans who sought to use colonial material culture as a way of securing social position and autonomy (Silliman 2010; Watkins 2017; Yellowhorn 2015). Others may be sites where Native people intentionally eschewed the material trappings of colonialism (Heizer 1941; Schneider 2015b). To more fully account for the range of sites used by Native Americans after the arrival of Europeans, we suggest that archaeologists consider a wider variety of material that Native people may have created or consumed in particular contexts as well as chronometric dates that may reveal such sites even in the absence of foreign objects.…”

After Saint Serra: Unearthing indigenous histories at the California missions

“…These include autonomous native village sites (Gamble, 2008;Reddy, 2015), less visible places of refuge (Bernard et al, 2014;Schneider, 2015b), as well as important locales in the post-mission landscape (Silliman, 2004). This archaeological work is complemented by a similar spate of ethnohistorical research into the lives of native people in colonial California (e.g.…”

The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example From the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California

“…On one side, it acknowledges that the onslaught of settler colonialism in western North America was more horrific than any of the previous colonial programs. On the other side, it can play directly into terminal narratives or fatal impact models about the myth of the “vanishing Indian” due to cultural extinction, societal collapse, or the decimation of indigenous populations (Mitchell and Scheiber 2010:6; Panich 2013; Schneider 2015:708; Silliman 2012; Wilcox 2010). The underwhelming silence from the archaeological discipline about this phase of indigenous and US history is doing little to remedy the current situation.…”

“…Schneider has identified “indigenous hinterlands,” spaces situated away from colonial establishments, as significant landscapes where native people “upheld deep-seated traditions of mobility, affirmed a sense of place, and enacted creative responses to external threat as they had done long before the arrival of Europeans” (2015:705). It is argued elsewhere that the ability of the Kashaya to move back and forth between the colonial world and their indigenous homelands—which Kashaya oral histories refer to as the “forest depths”—may have been a crucial factor in the perseverance of their worldviews, values, and traditions during their encounters with the RAC (Lightfoot 2005:207).…”