Siena Hinshelwood

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 distin-

1 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.

into Mexican communities, making any record keeping and perhaps cultural transmission more difficult, even if it enabled survival. As such, in this paper I strive to balance the archival violence and my own positionality as a person still benefiting from settler colonialism to illuminate some of the history of this still very vibrant region. After surviving through the Spanish and Mexican mission periods, Indigenous Californians were again targeted by discriminatory laws, dehumanizing legislation, and campaigns for genocide once the U.S. gained control in 1848. The Muwekma Ohlone survived in what Les Field, Alan Leventhal, Dolores Sanchez, and Rosemary Cambra describe as “The Ranchería Period (1860-1914).”7 As Hispanic socio-cultural practices declined and Anglo-Americans consolidated their power, Native peoples faced “economic degradation” and were pushed out of the U.S. labor landscape.8 However, Rancherias, or Native settlements, became sites of safe “withdrawal into hinterlands” for a time, and several of them emerged as sites of Indigenous revitalization.9 The most prominent rancheria was at Alisal in the East Bay (present-day Pleasanton). The Alisal rancheria “constitutes the first post-conquest Indian revitalization in the Bay Area” where many dance rituals were revived, and Field, Leventhal, Sanchez, and Cambra state that this “strongly implies that other arts and kinds of knowledge, about ceremonial regalia, songs, sacred language, and crafts also experienced a resurgence.”10 Beyond the Bay Area Indigenous peoples, Field et al. write that the “available evidence depicts a constant ebb and flow of people, of surviving Indians from all over the Bay Area and central California moving into and out of Alisal.”11 Thus, while early U.S. California was “often openly hostile” to Indigenous peoples, the Muwekma Ohlone revitalized and maintained their community through their rancherías. 12 It was a regional hub for indigenous life. Another group of people native to the San Francisco Bay Area is the Ramaytush Ohlone, who lived and live on the Peninsula (roughly San Francisco and San Mateo counties). This grouping encompasses various communities who spoke the Ramaytush dialect of San Francisco Bay Costanoan, including the Chiguan who lived where I

7 Field, et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 424. 8 Alan Leventhal et al, “The Ohlone: Back from Extinction,” in The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region, ed. Lowell John Bean (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1994), 308-9. 9 Ibid.

10 Field, et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 425. 11 Ibid. currently live.13 “Ramaytush” means “people of the west” in Chochenyo.14 The founders of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, a non-profit for their community, contend that there is only one known lineage from which all current Ramaytush peoples are descended. This lineage is from Leandra Ventura Ramos, whose ancestry included the Timigtac village head of the Aramai tribe (in present-day Pacifica).15 A report by Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area provides more information about early statehood on the Peninsula. This report addresses the whole Peninsula and includes archival records about the many Indigenous peoples who intermarried with groups all around Central California. The report states that, like in the East Bay, there were a few hubs of Indigenous residence and work on the Peninsula. After the secularization of the Mexican missions, some Native people stayed in Mission Dolores, although as San Francisco was a booming city, it eventually came to have a more pan-Californian Indian character rather than an Ohlone population.16 The other hub was Rancho San Mateo, about 20 miles south of the mission. The community there worked with the neighboring land-owning Sanchez family and “continued to cultivate the land at San Mateo … after the American takeover of California.”17 However, in 1848 the wealthy Anglo-American businessmen William Howard and Henry Mellus bought the property from Cayetano Arenas, the secretary of former Governor Pico. Around 1851, Howard forced the ex-mission Indians to leave the land, which “was a clear example of the new North American residents’ disregard for native people.”18 As Anglo-Americans bought up more land and dominated the economy, imposing “a new economic and class system,” Indigenous peoples had fewer and fewer places to retreat.19 To the numerous white people entering California, “any landless brown people who spoke Spanish were Mexicans,” and so, the ex-mission Ohlone peoples were rendered invisible.20 This assimilation allowed some of them to survive and the Ramaytush

13 Jonathan Cordero, “Who are the original peoples of San Francisco and of the San Francisco Peninsula?,” About, Ramaytush Ohlone, accessed May 13, 2021, https://www.ramaytush.com/original-peoples-of-san-francisco.html; Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today,” National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, June 2009, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=hornbeck_ind_1, 87. 14 Cordero, “Who are the original peoples?,” https://www.ramaytush.com/ original-peoples-of-san-francisco.html. Interestingly, there are very few academic sources that I could find about these peoples specifically, probably because of their small population. 15 “The Ramaytush Ohlone,” About, Ramaytush Ohlone, accessed May 13, 2021, https://www.ramaytush.com/ramaytush-ohlone.html. 16 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 188-9. 17 Ibid., 184. 18 Ibid., 185. 19 Ibid.

Ohlone still live on the Peninsula. At the founding of the United States, marriage was seen as a critical piece of the political structure of the state. As Nancy Cott asserts, the founders of the U.S. viewed marriage as a part of republican government: “as a voluntary union based on consent, marriage paralleled the new government. This thinking propelled the analogy between the two forms of consensual union into the republican nation’s self-understanding and identity.”21 Thus, marriage both confirmed the values of the new republic and instilled those same values into the home. The home was an important site of state-building too, since “marriages and the families following from them brought a predictable order to society.”22 Patricia Hill Collins describes how families are fundamental sites for the constructions of hierarchies. The U.S./Western normative family, she argues, “is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born into it.”23 In this state-recognized unit, the families “socialize their members into an appropriate set of ‘family values’ that simultaneously reinforce the hierarchy within the assumed unity of interests symbolized by the family and lay the foundation for many social hierarchies.”24 Marriage functioned to create social and political order and became a building block of the new nation. Heterosexual, monogamous marriage, as conceived by the early United States, was so naturalized that to live otherwise was to be deviant, and so U.S. colonization necessarily included forcing groups of Indigenous peoples into that same form of marriage. Native groups had many ways of organizing romantic and sexual relationships, as well as gender and domesticity, but these ways were seldom compatible with white settler colonialism. Cott states, “For if monogamy founded the social and political order, then groups practicing other marital systems on American soil might threaten the polity’s soundness.”25 If proper marriages were foundational to the state, then the state had to compel everyone to adhere to them, both for political security and for the security of cultural self-conceptions. While these values also affected white people, they were particularly destructive to Native peoples. To force Native people to conform to the U.S. model, Cott explains that “the removal of Indians from their traditional location by violence or by treaty was usually accompanied by the government’s offer of individual property and U.S. citizenship to heads of household who were willing to forgo tribal affiliations.”26

21 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10. 22 Ibid., 18. 23 Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 63. 24 Ibid., 64. 25 Cott, Public Vows, 25. 26 Ibid., 27. Thus, to possibly maintain some kind of sovereignty and control over their lives, Native people accepted land at the cost of a forced change to the organziation of their community. The household was changed, as only “heads of household” could receive land, and those heads were “expected to be male.”27 Traditional gender roles were disrupted and then reconstructed in the colonial pattern.28 To U.S. state-builders, then, civilizing meant controlling Native sexuality and gender organization just as much as it was about instituting white values of property. In the Bay Area, one of the more diverse areas, some of this so-called civilizing work had already been done by Spanish and Mexican missionaries. Through her analysis of mission records, Quincy D. Newell describes some of the pre-colonial marriage patterns. By examining the three Bay Area missions—Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose—with more recent anthropological data, she contends that “what the missionaries saw as the sexual immorality of Catholic Indians, the Central Californians themselves likely interpreted as legitimate sexual behavior.”29 Central Californian Natives highly valued marriage; there “Societies organized around kinship … used marriage as a primary means of creating kinship bonds.”30 These bonds were diplomatic and economic in nature.31 Thus, marriage was deeply important to the organization of communities and would not change easily, even in missions. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra state that “inter-marriage [between Central Californian groups] and strong relations of kinship continued in the setting of the mission, albeit under circumstances Indian peoples found harsh and alien.”32 Newell describes that the persistence of gift giving, the complaints of priests about the prevalence of polygyny, and the high rate of “fornication” outside mission-recognized marriages could indicate continued precolonial practices. She asserts, “absent specific evidence to the contrary, the most logical assumption is that deeply ingrained cultural practices” persisted and that “many of the Native Americans’ marriage and sexual practices corresponded to traditional norms.”33 Marriage for many Indigenous peoples in the San Francisco Bay Area was different from the European priests’ norms, but was important to societal functioning and like-

27 Ibid.

28 See Maria Lugones for a thorough and nuanced review of how the colonial/ modern gender system is constituting and constitutive of coloniality. 29 Newell, “Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices,” 61. 30 Central California is not how all scholars refer to the San Francisco Bay Area, which today is popularly considered part of Northern California. However, in several of the works I am using, this region is referred to as Central California (including both Monterey and inland) and as west-central California. This also differentiates it from further north in California, which did not have missions and thus has a different history of Anglo-American and Native relations.; Ibid., 65. 31 Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 172. 32 Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 424. 33 Newell, “Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices,” 70, 81.

ly persisted into and beyond the mission period. After the Mexican-American War, however, the relationship between European, or Anglo-American, men and Native women, and Native populations in general, changed profoundly. The U.S. government’s harmful relationship with Native peoples in California during early statehood was compounded by the centuries-long presence of the Spanish and then Mexicans. The Gold Rush only complicated an already difficult political situation. The federal government was far from the events in California. Part of the California government’s solution to white demands for land for mining, ranching, or other uses was to exterminate Native peoples on that land, viewing them as inhuman savages. Brendan C. Lindsay argues that the state government and the white population carried out a conscious and deliberate genocide against the Indigenous peoples of California. Albert Hurtado concurs with Lindsay that “the state of California exerted a great deal of autonomous control over Indian affairs.”34 Hurtado notes that the federal government failed to ratify any treaties with Native Californians, and this, along with other federal shortcomings, meant that “at points of state and federal friction, Indian problems were resolved in favor of the state … The majority of Indians had to survive outside reservations and beyond the reach of any shadow of federal protection.”35 While federal protection did not guarantee security, Native peoples were formally under federal authority and the government presumably had responsibilities to Native peoples as sovereign nations at the time of California statehood. State control rather than federal was a threat because the state government directly responded to warped perceptions of democracy; the constituents of state representatives demanded that officials, especially the governor, uphold the rights of white citizens, not Native peoples. Lindsay argues that “individual Americans possessed of notions of democracy, ultra-individualism, and the pioneer spirit wanted to engage democracy to bring about their collective will to eliminate Native Americans as obstacles to landholding and general conceptions of wealth and security.”36 In the face of the (white) democratic will for genocide, Natives in the Bay Area had to move or adapt. Mark Hylkema, California State Parks archeologist and Cultural Resources Programs supervisor for the Santa Cruz district, stated that the Native people who had been part of the missions in the Bay Area had become “invisible” and were lumped into Hispanic society, surviving the targeted genocide.37 Pilulaw Khus, a Chumash elder and spiritual leader, suggests that this strategy, found throughout formerly Mexican California, was purposeful: “Later, when

34 Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 29. 35 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 148. 36 Lindsay, Murder State, 22. 37 Peninsula Open Space Trust – POST, “Indigenous History in the Bay Area, Part 1: Overview - Mark Hylkema and POST,” June 12, 2020, YouTube video, 00:52:13-00:52:41, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp-mGJJ9yLs. the Americans came, the Native people realized that if they called themselves ‘Mexican’ they could do a little bit better than if they called themselves ‘Indian.’ At least there wasn’t a bounty on their heads.”38 In areas with prominent Hispanic communities, ex-mission Indigenous peoples could work and maintain families, which Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz explain “gave them access to western ways, including education and cultural knowledge that made it possible to ‘pass’ as white, thereby gaining the privileges of citizenship and the economic, educational, and cultural advancement that white Californians enjoyed.”39 Native people moved and adapted, but that largely depended on them hiding their indigeneity. The state still killed many Native peoples and directly or purposefully deprived them of their ability to survive. As such, the state built its legitimacy on violence against Indigenous peoples. The strength of the state rested on its ability to exterminate Native peoples. Life for Native people in Gold Rush and early statehood California was incredibly dangerous and difficult. Facing a dramatic increase in the Anglo-American population and the appropriation and environmental devastation of land, Native people were vulnerable to the whims of white settlers. Native women were particularly targeted. This was especially acute because of women’s significant position within Native communities. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra write that “[e]vidence suggests that the Ohlone heritage at Alisal was passed most strongly through the female line.” This might have continued pre-contact Ohlone traditions, since what the authors call mayen, the “strong, independent female leaders,” were also mentioned in early Spanish sources. Women were critical to the persistence of Native peoples in the Bay Area, so their selection by white men was devastating. In Rosalía Vallejo’s testimonio about the Bear Flag rebellion of 1846 in Sonoma, she recalls, “one of my servants was a young Indian girl who was about seventeen years old. I swear that John C. Frémont ordered me to send that girl to the officers’ barracks many times. However, by resorting to tricks, I was able to save that poor girl from falling into the hands of that lawless band of thugs who had imprisoned my husband.”40 Vallejo highlights the sexual predation of Native women by U.S. soldiers, while not expressing the same fear for herself, a Californiana

38 Yolanda Broyles-González and Pilulaw Khus, Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 65, quoted in Erika Pérez, Colonial Intimacies: Interethnic Kinship, Sexuality, and Marriage in Southern California, 1769-1885, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 219. Bounty is meant here literally. See Lindsay chapter 5, “Democratic Death Squads of Northern California.”

39 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 180. 40 Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848 (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2006), 29.

woman.41 This would become a pattern of U.S. occupation. Albert L. Hurtado argues “All Indians were at risk during the tumultuous 1850s, but women’s chances for survival were measurably worse than men’s. Brutal assaults, deadly diseases, and general privation killed women and left their communities’ reproductive potential in doubt.”42 Many Native women were raped by white men, without consequence for the perpetrators, and the kidnapping and rape of women was one of the most common causes of retaliatory attacks from Native people.43 Deviating from the Spanish and Mexican California practice of having “reciprocal dependent relationships” between Hispanic landowners and ex-mission communities as laborers and with ritual god-parentage, Anglo-Americans generally colonized by creating “almost impermeable boundaries between white settlements and native populations, or simply removed native peoples from areas reserved for white settlement.”44 This geographic and mental distinction meant that Anglo-American men did not consider Native women as life partners, but rather as sexually open women who “offered their favors to white men.”45 Few white men officially married Native women even if they did form longer relationships with them, and Hurtado comments that “most probably thought of their liaisons with Indians as an expedient that would not be needed once there were enough white women in the state.”46 Anglo-American racial and sexual values at the time opposed miscegenation. White men, then, usually did not consider Native women as legitimate partners. This devaluation of and subsequent violence against Native women was intimately tied to white men’s sense of entitlement to California. The sexual violence Native women experienced in California during its early years of statehood was an expression of the claim white men made on California and their exclusion of Native people. As Hurtado describes, many white people settling California “believed that Indians were their enemies and that the country had to be wrested from them by every available means,” despite the rarity of actual unprovoked aggression from Native peoples.47 One expression of that determination for dominance was sexual violence, and so rape “may be fused with racial, class,

41 She does express concern for thievery and comments that, “The women did not dare go out for a walk unless escorted by their husbands or their brothers,” Ibid. This difference could also be a product of class, of the predation on a servant versus the wife of an elite local politician, but Vallejo’s own emphasis on the girl’s race likely indicates the intersectionality of race and class and the resulting sexual vulnerability. 42 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 188. 43 Lindsay, Murder State, 206. See also 219. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 182. 44 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortic, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 177; Leventhal et al., “Ohlone: Back from Extinction,” 309; 307. 45 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 172. 46 Ibid., 175 & 178. 47 Ibid., 185. religious, or national chauvinism,”48 thus supporting “the conquest of California Indians.”49 Hurtado concludes, “Indian women became objects through which violent men could express deep anxieties inherent in the frontier experience.”50 Being patriotic, in this sense, involved violating Native women to show their right to be in the new state. Sexual violence was also a form of aggression that disrupted and disrespected Native community. As well as emotional and physical trauma, sexually tranmitted disease, and decreasing birth rates, the sexual violence was in itself a denial of Native peoples’ ability to become part of the U.S. state (whether or not they wanted to).51 White men’s treatment of Native women showed that even if Native people conformed to U.S. ideals of heteronormative, monogamous marriage in their own communities, they still were not fit to be citizens of the state. Kidnapping, rape, and killing or indenturing whole communities hardly represent valuing the family. Women, in this view, would always be sexual objects to exploit and men savages to kill or make laborers. The refusal to intermarry, furthermore, compounded and complicated this exclusion from U.S. society. For example, Lindsay describes the hated “squaw men”: “these were single men who kept Native American women or girls in their homes, and were believed to be engaged in either forced or consensual sexual relations with them.”52 Other white people saw these likely forced, if possibly consensual, unions as contagious “Indian savagery” that degraded white men.53 One newspaper warned these men to desist or be viewed and acted upon “as nothing better than Indians themselves.”54 Lindsay argues that this action would be murder. However, Hurtado describes that some men did seek a formal relationship with Native women, and explains that even so far from accepted norms, “the few men who established long-term relationships with Indians honored the monogamous, nuclear family model. In that sense, they conformed to accepted standards of sexual behavior.”55 Similarly, archeologist Robert Heizer describes in his research examples of acceptable unions. A Fresno County article from 1858 stated that “Indian women … have been married to white men in numerous instances … They are said to make excellent wives; are neat, and tidy, and industrious, and soon learn to discharge domestic duties properly and

48 Julia R. Schwendinger and Herman Schwendinger, Rape and Inequality (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), 202-04, quoted in Hurtado, Indian Survival, 185.

49 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 186. 50 Ibid.

51 Lindsay, Murder State, 221-22. 52 Ibid., 297. 53 Ibid.

creditably.”56 This demonstrates that Native women could adapt to white ideals of matrimony and become part of that fundamental unit of society in the way the republic demanded. The violent disapprobation that faced interracial couples and the small number of formal unions reveals that white people did not want Native people to join their society. Sexual violence was a rejection of the humanity of Native women. Violence against women, therefore, contibruted to cementing white power in California during its earliest days as a state, demonstrating the white colonizers’ beliefs that Native women, and communities more generally, were incapable of integration into white settler society. As United States settlers flooded into California, occupying it at a scale much larger than before, the treatment of Native peoples was different than in other areas of the U.S. Instead of using marriage to regulate and assimilate Native sexuality to American models, it was now a tool of exclusion. By largely refusing to marry Native women, white men rendered them unable to be incorporated into the state. All the privileges of citizens and married couples were denied to Native peoples. The persistent sexual violence further cemented Native peoples as less than human to U.S. Californians, and so genocide could continue unobstructed. In the face of this, Indigenous peoples adapted, hid, and resisted. While marriage to white men following white ideals of sexuality was the most legitimate in the eyes of the state, white men did not solely control the practice. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra describe the period after rancherías as “The Families Period (1914 to the Present). In this time, “Ohlone existence passed out of the public eye and into the private domain” and families “adopted a quiet and discrete profile.”57 Adapting Hispanic culture for survival and moving the practice of their heritage to the private sphere allowed the Ohlone to maintain their communities on their own terms and avoid genocidal lawmakers. Women continued as important cultural bearers and community was maintained through family ties. A Muwekma member commented on her mother’s role in her identity formation and cultural awareness: “We always knew; our mother told us,’ recalled Julia Lopez, council member of the Muwekma tribe. ‘She used to say to us ‘you are Ohlone Indians.’” In the Families Period, Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra state: “it seems that it was enough during those years to spend time with the members of the extended family, to feel the warmth and security of the ingathering at Christmas, or at weddings, births, and funerals, and quietly to know about and share their identity.”58 These Ohlone women chose marriage and family not to constitute a state, but to protect their own freedom and well-being. Their success is proven, both for the Muwekma and other Ohlone peoples: “The time of

56 Robert Fleming Heizer, The Destruction of California Indians (Lincoln, Neb: Bison Books, 1993), 284. 57 Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 427. 58 Ibid., 429.