Primary Title Marriage, Violence, and Family Ties Native Women in the San Francisco Bay Area during Early California Statehood Siena Hinshelwood Scripps College, Class of 2022
The ideal relationship between citizen and government was infused with and strengthened by the idea of consensual marriages. Regulating the normativity of marriage was part of the U.S. government’s agenda to “civilize” and colonize Indigenous peoples, disrupting and reconstituting Native communities and their gender norms. At the same time, in California, the state government, enabled by federal inaction, was engaging in a genocide against Native peoples in a way that particularly targeted Native women. By committing sexual violence against Native women, white men in California, and the democratic systems that enabled them, ideologically and materially excluded Native women from the possibility of inclusion in the state. Excluding Native women from respectable marriages that would be governmentally recognized as well as continually disrupting the relationships Native women had with Native men constructed a perception of Native peoples as fundamentally incapable of being United States citizens. Thus, these actions perpetuated colonialism and permitted genocide. This strengthened the power of the settler government and further marginalized Native peoples in California. Prior to European arrival and colonization, many communities occupied what is now known as the San Francisco Bay Area, speaking dialects of as many as five distinct languages.1 These communities are collectively called the Ohlone people. Ohlone is a more modern term that refers to all the descendants of the people that lived in the Bay Area and down the coast through Monterey.2 One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Bay Area today is the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, which added “Muwekma” (meaning “the People” in the Tamien and Chochenyo languages) to distin1 Quincy D. Newell, “‘The Indians Generally Love Their Wives and Children’: Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices in Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San José,” Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 1 (January 2005): 61. 2 Les Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement: A Perspective from the Muwekma Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area,” California History 71, no. 3 (September 1992): 414; Alisha Marie Ragland, “Resisting Erasure: The History, Heritage, and Legacy of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area,” (Master’s thesis, San José State University, 2018), 70.
guish themselves from other Ohlone bands.3 The Muwekma Ohlone are the descendants of the Verona Band of Ohlone, which were once a federally recognized tribe.4 During Spanish colonization, three missions were established in the Bay Area and continued to operate under the Mexican government. Russian settlers moved down from Canada to north of the Bay Area, and Anglo-American traders and businessmen arrived in Alta California every year with more frequency. After the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), California quickly became flooded by Anglo-Americans as the Gold Rush attracted prospectors and other settlers. The Bay Area, though not a mining area itself, was a hub in the state. Despite now being one of the most populated regions of California, studies on Native women in the Bay Area during early California statehood are not plentiful. This article seeks to compile some of the information based on my interest as a person who grew up in the Bay Area, and investigate the process of genocide in the region. Archives and documentation generally reflect contemporary European and Anglo-American perspectives towards Indigenous peoples or excluded them all together. As the new territory was being shaped by the government, documentation changed, further complicating archival sources on Indigenous populations. For example, San Mateo County, where I live, did not exist yet for the 1852 state census, and in the 1860 United States census, there were only 52 “civilized Indians” in this new county.5 There were only 381 “civilized Indians” in San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Mateo counties total, with the most in Santa Clara, followed by Alameda.6 The arrival of the U.S. in California, then, was after major demographic collapse and change. The Ohlone people, following population loss in the missions, moved or adapted. For safety, many Indigenous peoples blended 3 Field et al., 414. 4 Ragland, “Resisting Erasure,” 23, 73. 5 J.D. B. DeBow, Statistical Review of the United States (Washington, 1854), 394; Joseph G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864), 27, 596. 6 Kennedy, Population of the US, 27. The East Bay seems to be a geographic focus in current Indigenous revitalization movements.
