Indigenous in the
Mojave Desert contains about 100,000
petroglyphs. Evidence of human occupation of California dates from at least 19,000 years ago. Archeological sites with dates that support human settlement in period 12,000–7,000 ybp are:
Borax Lake, the Cross Creek Site,
Santa Barbara Channel Islands, Santa Barbara Coast's Sudden Flats, and
the Scotts Valley site, CA-SCR-177. The
Arlington Springs Man is an excavation of 10,000-year-old human remains in the Channel Islands. Marine shellfish remains associated with Kelp Forests were recovered in the Channel Island sites and at other sites such as Daisy Cave and Cardwell Bluffs dated between 12,000 and 9000 cal BP. Prior to European contact, Indigenous Californians had 500 distinct sub-tribes or groups, each consisting of 50 to 500 individual members. The size of California tribes today are small compared to tribes in other regions of the United States. Prior to contact with Europeans, the California region contained the highest Native American population density north of what is now
Mexico. Because of the temperate climate and easy access to food sources, approximately one-third of all
Native Americans in the United States were living in the area of California. Early Native Californians were
hunter-gatherers, with seed collection becoming widespread around 9,000 BCE. Two early southern California cultural traditions include the
La Jolla complex and the
Pauma Complex, both dating from c. 6050–1000 BCE. From 3000 to 2000 BCE, regional diversity developed, with the peoples making fine-tuned adaptations to local environments. Traits recognizable to historic tribes were developed by approximately 500 BCE.
plank house. The Indigenous people practiced various forms of sophisticated
forest gardening in the forests, grasslands, mixed woodlands, and wetlands to ensure availability of food and medicine plants. They
controlled fire on a regional scale to create a low-intensity
fire ecology; this prevented larger, catastrophic fires and
sustained a low-density "wild" agriculture in loose rotation. By burning underbrush and grass, the Native people revitalized patches of land and provided fresh shoots to attract food animals. A form of
fire-stick farming was used to clear areas of old growth to encourage new in a repeated cycle; a
permaculture. In remote interior regions, some tribes did not meet non-Native people until the mid-19th century.
Late 18th century: Missions and decline with
Tongva dwellings in the foreground. The mission recorded 7,854 baptisms and 5,656 deaths. A clerk of
Jedidiah Smith described the conditions of Native people as "they are complete slaves in every sense of the word."|225x225px At the time of the establishment of the first Spanish Mission in 1769, the most widely accepted estimates say that California's Indigenous population was around 340,000 people and possibly more. The Indigenous peoples of California were extremely diverse and made up of ten different linguistic families with at least 78 distinct languages. These are further broken down into many dialects, while the people were organized into sedentary and semi-sedentary villages of 400–500 micro-tribes. The Spanish began their long-term occupation in California in 1769 with the founding of
Mission San Diego de Alcalá in
San Diego. The Spanish built 20 additional missions in California, most of which were constructed in the late 18th century. From 1769 to 1832, an estimated total of 87,787 baptisms and 24,529 marriages had been conducted at the missions. In that same period, 63,789 deaths at the missions were recorded, indicating
the immense death rate. This massive drop in population has been attributed to the introduction of diseases, which rapidly spread while Native people were forced into close quarters at the missions, as well as torture, overworking, and malnourishment at the missions. The missions also introduced European
invasive plant species as well as
cattle grazing practices that significantly transformed the California landscape, altering Native people's relationship to the land as well as key plant and animal species that had been integral to their ways of life and worldviews for thousands of years. The missions further perpetuated
cultural genocide against Native people through enforced
conversion to Christianity and the prohibition of numerous cultural practices under threat of violence and torture, which were commonplace at the missions.
19th century: genocide The
population of Native California was reduced by 90% during the 19th century—from more than 200,000 in the early 19th century to approximately 15,000 at the end of the century. The majority of this population decline occurred in the latter half of the century, under
United States occupation. While in 1848, the population of Native people was about 150,000, by 1870 it fell to 30,000, and fell further to 16,000 by the end of the century. The mass decline in population has been attributed to disease and epidemics that swept through Spanish missions in the early part of the century, such as an 1833 malaria epidemic, among other factors including state-enabled massacres that accelerated under
Anglo-American rule. The Mexican government did not return the lands to tribes, but made land grants to settlers of at least partial European ancestry, transforming the remaining parts of mission land into large land grants or
ranchos. Secularization provided Native people with the opportunity to leave the mission system,
American settler colonialism (1848–) (1864) Following the
Mexican–American War,
Peter Hardenman Burnett was elected as the first governor of the state of California in 1848. As American settlers came in control of California with the signing of the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, its administrators honored some Mexican land grant titles, but did not honor
aboriginal land titles. With this shift in power, the American settlers embraced a policy of elimination toward Indigenous people in California. In his second state address in 1851, Burnett framed an eliminatory outlook toward Native people as one of defense for the property of
white settlers:The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property; and after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate, and resolve upon a war of extermination. This is a common feeling among our people who have lived upon the Indian frontier ... That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert. In this period, 303 volunteer militia groups of 35,000 men were formed by the settlers. Volunteer militia groups were also indirectly
subsidized by the U.S. federal government, who reimbursed money to the state for the militias. Most of inland California including
California deserts and the
Central Valley was in possession of Native people until the acquisition of
Alta California by the United States. The discovery of gold at
Sutter's Mill in 1848 inspired a mass migration of
Anglo-American settlers into areas where Native people had avoided sustained encounters with invaders. The
California Gold Rush involved a series of massacres and conflicts between settlers and the Indigenous peoples of California lasting from about 1846 to 1873 that is generally referred to as the
California genocide. Sexual violence against Native women and young girls was a normal part of white settler life, who were often forced into prostitution or
sex slavery. Kidnappings and rape of Native women and girls was reported as occurring "daily and nightly." This
violence against women often provoked attacks on white settlers by Native men.Raids on Native villages were common, where adults and children were threatened with fatal consequence for refusing what was essentially
slavery. Although this was in legal terms
illegal, the law was established not to help protect Indigenous people, so there were rarely interventions to stop
kidnappings and the circulation of stolen children into the market by law enforcement. A central location for auctions was
Los Angeles, where an 1850 city ordinance passed by the
Los Angeles City Council allowed prisoners to be "auctioned off to the highest bidder for private service." Historian
Robert Heizer referred to this as "a thinly disguised substitute for slavery." in an attempt to ensure the future of their peoples amid encroaching
settler colonialism.
Anglo-American settlers in California responded with dissatisfaction and contempt at the treaties, believing Native people were being reserved too much land. Despite making agreements, the U.S. government sided with the settlers and tabled the treaties without informing the signees. They remained shelved and were never ratified.
California genocide (1846–1873) of
Modoc fighters at
Captain Jack's Stronghold. The
California genocide continued after the
California Gold Rush period. By the late 1850s, Anglo-American militias were invading the homelands of Native people in the northern and mountainous areas of the state, which had avoided some earlier waves of violence due to their more remote locations. Near the end of the period associated with the California genocide, the final stage of the
Modoc Campaign was triggered when Modoc men led by Kintpuash (AKA Captain Jack) murdered
General Canby at the peace tent in 1873. However, it's not widely known that between 1851 and 1872 the Modoc population decreased by 75 to 88% as a result of seven anti-Modoc campaigns started by the whites. There is evidence that the first massacre of the Modocs by non-Native people took place as early as 1840. According to the story told by a chief of the
Achumawi tribe (neighboring to Modocs), a group of trappers from the north stopped by the
Tule lake around the year 1840 and invited the Modocs to a feast. As they sat down to eat, the cannon was fired and many Indians were killed. The father of Captain Jack was among the survivors of that attack. Since then the Modocs resisted the intruders notoriously. Additionally, when in 1846 the
Applegate Trail cut through the
Modoc territory, the migrants and their livestock damaged and depleted the ecosystem that the Modoc depended on to survive.
20th century: Forced assimilation By 1900, the population of Native people who survived the eliminatory policies and acts carried out in the 19th century was estimated at 16,000 people.
Indian removal in California (1903) (1903) Although the American
policy of Indian removal to force Indigenous peoples off of their homelands had begun much earlier in the United States in 1813, it was still being implemented as late as 1903 in Southern California. The last Native removal in U.S. history occurred in what has been referred to as the
Cupeño trail of tears, when the people were forced off of their homeland by white settlers, who sought ownership of what is now
Warner Springs. The people were forced to move 75 miles from their home village of Cupa to
Pala, California. The forced removal under threat of violence also included
Luiseño and
Kumeyaay villages in the area. New students were customarily bathed in
kerosene and their hair was cut upon arrival. It was not until 1978 that Native people won the legal right to prevent
familial separation that was integral to Native children being brought to the boarding schools. In 1944 and in 1946, Native peoples brought claims for reimbursements asking for compensations for the lands affected by treaties and Mexican land grants. They won $17.5 million and $46 million, respectively. Yet, the land agreed to in the treaties was not returned. In 1988, ''
Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Ass'n'' the
U.S. Supreme Court sided with the U.S. Forest Service to build a road through a forest used for religious purposes by three nearby tribal nations in northwestern California. This was despite the recommendations of the expert witness on the matter, who stated that the construction of the road would destroy the religions of the three tribes. However, no protection was provided through the Religious Freedom Act. This population grew by 15% between 2000 and 2010, much less than the nationwide growth rate of 27%, but higher than the population growth rate for all races, which was about 10% in California over that decade. Over 50,000 Indigenous people live in Los Angeles alone. However, the majority of Indigenous people in California today do not identify with the tribes indigenous to the state, rather they are of
Indigenous Mexican or Central American ancestry, or of tribes from other parts of the United States, such as the
Cherokee or
Navajo. Of the state's 934,970 Indigenous people who specified a
Native American tribe, 297,708 identified as "
Mexican American Indian", 125,344 identified as
"Central American Indian", and 125,019 identified as Cherokee. 108,319 identified with "all other tribes," which includes all of the Indigenous Californian tribes except for the
Yuman/Quechan, who numbered 2,759 in the state. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are currently over one hundred
federally recognized Native groups or tribes in California including those that spread to several states. Federal recognition officially grants the Indian tribes access to services and funding from the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Federal and State funding for
Tribal TANF/CalWORKs programs.
Recognition as genocide (2019) 's apology to California Native people (2019) The
California genocide was not acknowledged as a genocide by non-Native people for over a century in California. In the 2010s, denial among politicians, academics, historians, and institutions such as public schools was commonplace. This has been credited to a lingering unwillingness of settler descendants who are "beneficiaries of genocidal policies (similar to throughout the United States generally)." This meant that the genocide was largely dismissed, distorted, and denied, Of this history, Newsom stated: "Genocide. No other way to describe it, and that's the way it needs to be described in the history books." This was a significant event in reducing the dismissal of the California genocide. Some languages with the most success are
Chumash,
Kumeyaay,
Tolowa Dee-niʼ,
Yurok, and
Hoopa. Some Native people identify the modern
prison-industrial complex as another reproduction of the "punishing institutions" that have been imposed onto them and built on their homelands since the arrival of European settlers, including military forts, ranchos, Spanish missions, Indian reservations, boarding schools, and prisons, each of which exploited Native people as a source of labor for the economic interests of settlers.
Prison labor in California has also been compared to
California's history of forced labor of Indigenous people.
Burial sites, remains, and cultural items (2011), a
Chochenyo and
Karkin woman who advocates to stop the destruction of the site of the
West Berkeley Shellmound. In 1990, federally recognized tribes gained some rights to ancestral remains with the
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This protection to ancestral remains does not prevent development on Indigenous burial grounds, just a temporary consultation and return of remains or artifacts found. In 1982, the California court case
Wana the Bear v. Community Construction sided with developers in the destruction of a
Miwok burial ground in
Stockton, California. Over 600 burial remains were removed for a residential development and the Miwok had no power to stop development or to the remains of their ancestors, since Native American burial grounds were not legally considered cemeteries. The has been referred to as
ethnocentrism in
settler colonial law. The paved site of the
West Berkeley Shellmound continues to be threatened by housing developments and has become a significant site of contention in the San Francisco Bay Area. Numerous
Tongva village sites and burial grounds continue to be desecrated from developments in the
greater Los Angeles area, such as the unearthing of 400 burials at
Guashna for a development in
Playa Vista in 2004. The
Acjachemen sacred village site of
Putiidhem was desecrated and buried underneath
JSerra Catholic High School in 2003 despite protests from the people. A recurring issue that biological archaeologists face is, during the prehistoric/historic period and late period, Malibu was a common burial site for Indigenous Californians. This makes it nearly impossible to separate the remains of individuals who lived during the historic period and those who were buried before the Europeans arrived.
Land Back movement and
Unangax̂ artist
Nicholas Galanin in
Palm Springs (2021) The
Land Back movement in California has gained visibility and action in various places throughout the state.
Tuluwat Island was the site of the
1860 Wiyot massacre. The return began in 2000 with a purchase by the
Wiyot tribe for of the site, which was contaminated and abandoned as a
shipyard. In 2015, the
Eureka City Council voted to return the island. An article for CNN stated that this return is perhaps "the first time that a US municipality repatriated land to an Indigenous tribe without strings attached." The official transfer occurred in 2019. Tribes excluded from
federal recognition do not have a land base, which makes tribal identity more invisible. Land back movements have formed to return land to these tribes. This includes the
Sogorea Te' Land Trust and the
Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, which established the Shuumi Land Tax and the ''kuuyam nahwá'a'' ("guest exchange") respectively as a way for people living on their traditional homelands to pay a form of contribution for living on the land. In 2024, 2,820 acres of ancestral homeland were returned to the Shasta Indian Nation by
California governor Gavin Newsom. This included tribally significant lands that were drowned by the construction of the
Copco I dam in 1922. ==Material culture==