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David K
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Have you seen his blogs on Father Serra and more?
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elbeau
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| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
Have you seen his blogs on Father Serra and more? |
No I haven't so maybe I was off-base in my response. Can you provide a link?
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SFandH
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| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
In his defense, I think sargentodiaz was using 1700's European terminology to bring awareness to how the natives may have been thought of by some,
back then. |
If so, then my apologies, but I still don't see the sarcasm that you're seeing in his post. |
There is no sarcasm in his words. I read and interpreted it just as you did, as though the words express what the writer thinks.
Is there a guess about how many people lived on the peninsula just before the Spanish arrived?
[Edited on 8-14-2014 by SFandH]
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danaeb
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| Quote: | Originally posted by sargentodiaz
The main person of authority was not a tribal chieftain in our understanding but a "healer" claiming superiority by being "touched" and able to tell
them how to survive. As for the use of the many medicinal herbs available in the area, I can find nothing that says they knew of or how to use them.
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Really? I'll help you out. Google "medicinal herbs in baja indigenous people". There hundreds of links to scholarly articles on the subject.
Experience enables you to recognize a mistake every time you repeat it.
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David K
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| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
Have you seen his blogs on Father Serra and more? |
No I haven't so maybe I was off-base in my response. Can you provide a link? |
The link is in his signature, at the bottom of his posts... here it is: Father Serra's Legacy @ http://msgdaleday.blogspot.com a History of California and the Franciscan missions.
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David K
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| Quote: | Originally posted by SFandH
Is there a guess about how many people lived on the peninsula just before the Spanish arrived?
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The Spanish began arriving in 1533-1534, but only for brief periods or to collect pearls until the first permanent mission (Loreto) was founded in
1697.
The Indian population before Loreto was founded was estimated at 50,000 (south of the San Pedro Martir mountain range). [from Dave Werschkul's 2003
book 'Saint's and Demons in a Desert Wilderness'].
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rts551
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could it be that many of these writers are protecting the history and views of Catholicism?
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David K
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Sure, it would be only natural for the padres to see their work as one of good and doing the king's bidding. It is pretty obvious the feelings of the
Dominicans were more harsh than some of the Jesuits, who recognized the tribes on California as nations and endeavored to learn their languages. Yet,
even some Jesuits wrote of the primitive style of living of the Californians. Having the writings of people who were alive during those years is still
the best look into the past we have.
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rts551
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| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
Sure, it would be only natural for the padres to see their work as one of good and doing the king's bidding. It is pretty obvious the feelings of the
Dominicans were more harsh than some of the Jesuits, who recognized the tribes on California as nations and endeavored to learn their languages. Yet,
even some Jesuits wrote of the primitive style of living of the Californians. Having the writings of people who were alive during those years is still
the best look into the past we have. |
Best look......Including the writing and other clues that the original inhabitants left (at least those that were not destroyed while doing the
King's bidding)
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David K
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The original inhabitants did not have a written language... Also, the cave art was done by a race of people from long before the time of the natives
the Spanish met. History goes back a long time... hard for some to imagine.
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sargentodiaz
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| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by sargentodiaz
...the Stone Age natives of the California peninsula lived almost like the animals around them... |
I'm always on the lookout for new information about Baja so maybe you can enlighten me:
Which "animals around them" built balsas and canoes and safely navigated them miles out into the open ocean?
Which "animals around them" were experts in carving fish hooks and crafting atlatl-propelled harpoons?
Which "animals around them" mined and crafted obsidian to an extent unparalleled in the North American southwest? (Valle de Azufre)
Which "animals around them" utilized weapons and tools like the bow, the arrow, the quiver, the atlatl and dart, the javelin, the wooden
scimitar, or the ornate knives that they created from shark teeth embedded in wood and secured there by strong glues?
Which "animals around them" possessed bull-roarers for long-distance communication?
Which "animals around them" kept a written history by carefully inscribing symbols of that history into impressively-prepared wooden tablets?
Which "animals around them" would carefully carve and inscribe figures into mother-of-pearl to be worn as decoration.
Which "animals around them" skillfully carved intricate religious idols of human figures wrapped with a snake?
Which "animals around them" carried on two distinct cultural patterns, one being a coastal pattern and the other inland with vastly different
modes of subsistence?
Which "animals around them" engaged in trade across distances so large that those at the tip of the peninsula had their own word for "maize" and
recognized it as a food product that could be obtained from other tribes hundreds of miles to the North.
Which "animals around them" crafted intricate silk-like nets for decoration and utility?
Which "animals around them" created stone structures to trap fish with the outgoing tides?
Which "animals around them" placed foundation stones in the ground for their dwellings or ceremonies with specially placed stone pointers in
each of the cardinal directions?
Which "animals around them" worked as a community to build special roads and resting places for their religious leaders?
Which "animals around them" had a language system that encompassed "every sound" used by Europeans, making it easy for them to learn Spanish?
Which "animals around them" had specially carved hooks for harvesting fruit from high overhead?
Which "animals around them" utilized wooden tools to harvest roots effectively?
Which "animals around them" used manos and metates to grind legume seeds, cactus seeds, and a wide variety of grains?
Which "animals around them" developed tools specifically for weaving fine linens?
Which "animals around them" kept dogs and caged birds as pets?
Which "animals around them" created well-woven blankets in an artistic pattern and kept clean and which "could have been used anywhere as a fine
coverlet or rug"?
Which "animals around them" crafted musical instruments?
Which "animals around them" dug wells for water?
Which "animals around them" crafted ladders in order to harvest palm fruits?
Which "animals around them" would organize large gatherings in order to practice religious ceremonies, to trade with each other, and to compete
in sporting events.
Which "animals around them" utilized a large case to carry their items and which they would attach to their ear-piercings, leaving their hands
free for hunting and warfare?
Which "animals around them" were capable of weaving bowls that, without any sealant, were watertight and which could be used to roast seeds.
Which "animals around them" invented their own way of popping seeds to create a food similar to popcorn?
Which "animals around them" mixed and prepared cement grave markers so strong that modern archaeologists still have trouble breaking it 2,000
years later?
There are plenty of other things to list, but we'll let that suffice for now. The point is that you are trying to simplify complex prehistoric
cultures into zippy one-liners that give you some perverted sense of moral superiority.
Your pretended understanding of the life of Baja natives is short-sighted and pretentious. You try to paint the world in black-and-white terms where
anyone who disagrees with your European-superiority world view is automatically stereotyped as being believers of the "idyllic lifestyle" of the
"noble savage".
Your closed-mindedness prevents you from seeing the world as it is and leads to many prejudices. Even before they became physically extinct, the
natives of the peninsula went through a systematic, forced, cultural extinction. The Spanish had to continually use military force to keep the Baja
natives from deserting the missions and going back to their old habits. But, of course, you "don't see any of their descendants - anywhere in the
Americas - regressing to that life!".
Your view of other cultures is closed-minded and petty. You're so shocked by things like the nakedness and eating habits and warfare of the Indians
that you can't even begin to look at those things as cultural traits rather than as barbarisms and then you add to your ignorance by proclaiming some
kind of moral superiority upon the noble, peace-loving Europeans as if they brought peace to the Indians. They brought cultural and physical
extinction to the Indians.
I guess there is an upside though, now that they are all dead they no longer "cover themselves in tattoos and paint, or live day-to-day with death
always on their mind".
Thank you for your priceless gems of wisdom. |
Wow! You really laid into me, didn't you?
I was simply trying to point out how the natives lived a day-t0-day life with the simplest of means to survive. That they survived at all is credit to
their intelligence and grit.
At the same time, they were completely helpless against the whims of nature. No rain - no food. Disease - no defense.
Yes, they adapted extremely well to their environment. But they could not go beyond the most basic of existence.
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sargentodiaz
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| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
In his defense, I think sargentodiaz was using 1700's European terminology to bring awareness to how the natives may have been thought of by some,
back then. |
If so, then my apologies, but I still don't see the sarcasm that you're seeing in his post. |
I meant no sarcasm whatsoever. Had the Jesuits never arrived in Baja, I'm certain they would still be living in their Stone Age manner until other
Europeans of lesser good will, would have wiped them out and taken their land away from them.
The same held true for the natives of Upper California. They lived okay in a land that should have provided them a far better living if they had been
better equipped to deal with it.
As the Franciscans discovered, they simply did not have the discipline to live an agrarian lifestyle.
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rts551
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| Quote: | Originally posted by sargentodiaz
| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
In his defense, I think sargentodiaz was using 1700's European terminology to bring awareness to how the natives may have been thought of by some,
back then. |
If so, then my apologies, but I still don't see the sarcasm that you're seeing in his post. |
I meant no sarcasm whatsoever. Had the Jesuits never arrived in Baja, I'm certain they would still be living in their Stone Age manner until other
Europeans of lesser good will, would have wiped them out and taken their land away from them.
The same held true for the natives of Upper California. They lived okay in a land that should have provided them a far better living if they had been
better equipped to deal with it.
As the Franciscans discovered, they simply did not have the discipline to live an agrarian lifestyle. |
Awfully nice of them to help them along
"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, mostly due to disease." wikipedia
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mtgoat666
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| Quote: | Originally posted by sargentodiaz
| Quote: | Originally posted by elbeau
| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
In his defense, I think sargentodiaz was using 1700's European terminology to bring awareness to how the natives may have been thought of by some,
back then. |
If so, then my apologies, but I still don't see the sarcasm that you're seeing in his post. |
I meant no sarcasm whatsoever. Had the Jesuits never arrived in Baja, I'm certain they would still be living in their Stone Age manner until other
Europeans of lesser good will, would have wiped them out and taken their land away from them.
The same held true for the natives of Upper California. They lived okay in a land that should have provided them a far better living if they had been
better equipped to deal with it.
As the Franciscans discovered, they simply did not have the discipline to live an agrarian lifestyle. |
We will never know what their society and culture was like, because the population was quickly decimated by disease after arrival of Europeans, and
the only recorded history is that of biased Jesuits.
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rts551
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Indigenous languages were prohibited and any written language destroyed in favor of European language.
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rts551
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Hey maybe they are making a comeback...we got some people in Arizona run around naked, painted skin, skin piercing, hallucinogenic drugs, breeding
out of wedlock... skin is a little bleached though.
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elbeau
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| Quote: | Originally posted by David K
The Indian population before Loreto was founded was estimated at 50,000 (south of the San Pedro Martir mountain range). [from Dave Werschkul's 2003
book 'Saint's and Demons in a Desert Wilderness']. |
An estimate of 40,000 to 50,000 was originally given Baegert and was recognized by Cook (1937) and by Homer Aschmann (1959) (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822012237509;vie...).
Aschmann's treatment of the subject for the central part of the peninsula is by far the most thorough. His numbers generally agree with Baegert's
estimate but he points out that one of the biggest problems with any estimates like his own stem from the fact that there was cultural contact which
likely included the spreading of diseases between the Europeans and the Baja natives for roughly 150 years before the Jesuits arrived. He also points
out that even the Jesuits did not provide much useful demographic data during the early years of missionization. There is currently no way of knowing
how drastic the population shift in the peninsula was between 1533 and the founding of the peninsular missions.
One example that is cited by Aschmann is the Jesuit account of their first encounter with the inhabitants of Cedros Island. The island had been
visited by ships stopping for water for two centuries before 1732 when the Jesuits decided to find their way to the island and bring the population to
San Ignacio for missionization. When they arrived they found that a full three-quarters of the island's population had recently died of Smallpox,
even without being taken to the missions.
It is important to understand that we have almost no substantial descriptions of any of Baja's native cultures until after they had been exposed to
one and one-half centuries worth of European diseases.
As DK points out, the natives did not have any written language to preserve their culture through periods of transformation. We don't know all of the
details about how they passed on their stories and mythologies, but one thing worth noting is John Harrington's description of how tribal knowledge
was passed on from one generation to the next among the Yuman tribes just north of the peninsula.
Through many interviews he found that the way that history was passed from one generation to another was through dreams. Now, this initially sounds
like a horrible way to preserve history, but there was more to it than just going to sleep, seeing your history, then waking up and telling it. They
would be taught about the details of their history from certain elders who had been dreaming such dreams for most or all of their lives. This means
that a person dreaming an historical dream would know what they were supposed to see and experience in the dream beforehand. They would then
purposefully try to have that particular dream and if they thought that they were successful, they would need to describe every detail that they could
remember from the dream to their tribe's elder 'dreamers', almost like reporting it to a committee of people who were each already considered to be an
expert in that particular dream.
The new dreamer would receive criticism and correction from these tribal elders which they were expected to fix the next time that they dreamed the
dream.
In contrast to this, when we read books or hear stories, our minds imagine the people and places that are being described, but we rely on the written
words themselves to be accurate enough to give us the right 'picture' in our minds of what it is describing.
Oral traditions among the Yuman tribes are not comparable to our modern style of storytelling. The sights, sounds, smells, and feel of the world that
they saw in their dreams was subject to scrutiny and correction until a person could actually experience exactly the same dreams as each other. They
got to each experience the exact dreams that their elders had learned from the elders before them and then they would spend the rest of their lives
working with others to make sure that the next generation could see their history as perfectly as they could.
I find this whole concept quite fascinating because in our society, each of us can consider the written evidence about a primitive culture and then,
just like you see in this forum thread, we can come to very different conclusions about it. One person may view the written history and decide that
Native Americans were cruel and warlike while another person may conclude that they were 'noble savages' that were just misunderstood...but no matter
how hard we study all of our written evidence, none of us can see or touch or hear or smell a scene from that history in the way that a Yuman dreamer
could.
Why do I bring this up in relation to a question about the prehistoric population estimate of Baja? Please ask yourself what must have happened to
the history of cultures like the Yumans when the vast majority of their elders got wiped out in an epidemic. It would have been completely
catastrophic to their cultures. The descriptions of the Jesuits, however well-intentioned (or not) that they might have been, were descriptions of
cultures that were probably already in a state of significant decline.
We know that epidemics wiped out the cultures under missionization, but we have no idea what happened to those cultures in the 150 years beforehand.
We tend to pass on the descriptions that the Jesuits gave us rather than look at the picture of those cultures that continues to emerge based on
ongoing archaeology and discovery. Remember, Baja was called the 'forgotten peninsula' because of the sparcity of archaeological work performed there
in the past. Let's let the picture develop a little before we pass judgement too harshly upon its original people.
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David K
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Thank you Elbeau for the added data... I appreciate it!
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Mexitron
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Elbeau---elegantly stated. My first thought is of the Australian Aborigines and their dreamtime.
I had never heard of this method of passing down history but it speaks to the capabilities of aspects of the human mind which modern human society
have let wither away. No wonder we thought the Indians were savages, we didn't understand them! This method of passing down history somewhat
promotes the idea of the larger human unconscious (Jung et al) and points to Rupert Sheldrake's ideas of morphic resonance as well (in that the
particular tribes would have their own collective unconscious, a smaller subset of probably a quasi-multigroup collection of tribes...and so on to the
entire set of humanity and so on).
I find the mythologies of the America's Indians to be quite rich. While we can experience our wilderness, say poetic things about it, take nice
pictures of, the native Americans were this place and their mythologies eloquently point in that direction. It does sound like most observations of
the Baja natives were of a civilization on its way out...it would have been interesting to have more enlightened denizen inquiring about their
existence when we first encountered them.
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elbeau
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Mexitron
...it speaks to the capabilities of aspects of the human mind which modern human society have let wither away... |
I think that in a way, we went through several centuries where scientific, written descriptions of our world and its history replaced almost all other
methods of learning, but the pendulum is swinging back very quickly.
For example, I can go read the journal of a WWII soldier and develop a picture in my mind of what the Normandy invasion must have been like, but what
I would probably actually do is go home and grab my Roku remote and rent "Saving Private Ryan" and experience the sights and sounds of the invasion
myself. Of course, I'm not actually watching D-Day, I'm experiencing exactly what the producer of a movie thinks the beaches of Normandy looked like
to a soldier that morning. Our audio-visual systems are very effective ways of giving us group experiences. Much more so than just reading words
from historians.
...of course, the accuracy of our audio-visual experiences are dependent on the accuracy of the scriptwriters, producers, and actors...much like the
Yuman elders who would teach their dreams to the next generation. There is room for error, but the richness of the experience is undeniable.
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