Native California: An Introductory Guide to the Original Peoples from Earliest to Modern Times

By Dolan H. Eargle Jr. and Jr. Eargle, Dolan H.

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0937401110
• ISBN13: 9780937401118
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Trees Co Pr
• Length: 333 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.3" x 0.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

California's Natives: Then and Now

If you've read Merriam, Kroeber, Sapir, et al., and wonder what has become of the Native Californians they described a hundred years ago, then Dolan H. Eargle's book is your answer. Eargle's knowledge on this subject is encyclopedic. His original opus "The Earth is Our Mother," published in 1986, opened the door, and has appeared in numerous subsequent editions. The latest, however, is a vastly handsomer and more voluminous contribution. Eargle's writings reflect personal travels and conversations with many of the contemporary occupants of the 100-plus California reservations and rancherias. Happily, the new book's text preserves Eargle's charming, idiosyncratic, conversational style, giving it a pleasant travel-guide feel, as well as supplying a compendium of scholarly data. The illustrations are now as likely to be in rich color as black and white, and on pages of high-quality paper. Eargle's attention to the multitude of tongues represented among California's natives again supplies a central organizing principle for understanding the cultural complexities spread across the state's varied terrain. A wealth of historical images and explanatory background is combined with contemporary information about annual festivals and celebrations of tribal rites. The latter aspect of the volume includes, as well, all one needs to know if the goal is what California Indians offer by way of modern gambling emporia. Today it is Kroeber's "salvage anthropology," not Native California, that has disappeared. On the other hand, tribal "dis-enrollment" spurred by competing claims to shares from casino revenues raises a new threat (discussed, p. 89). One's Indian-ness, as the saying goes, "may turn on a card."