Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, California.
The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band currently has an enrolled membership of nearly 600 BIA documented Indians. These are the Previously Recognized Tribal group listed by the Indian Service Bureau (now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs) as the “San Juan Band.” All lineages comprising the “Amah Mutsun Tribal Band” are the direct descendants of the aboriginal Tribal groups whose villages and territories fell under the sphere of influence of Missions San Juan Bautista (Mutsun) and Santa Cruz (Awaswas) during the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Amah Mutsun Tribe had an extensive history of communal activity, shared cultural understanding and collective rituals and beliefs. The Amah Mutsun occupied the San Juan Valley for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived in the late 1700’s.
The Amah Mutsun community was originally made up of approximately 20 to 30 contiguous villages stretched across the Pajaro River Basin and surrounding region. Members of these different villages were united by shared cultural practices and tribal traditions. Their mutual religious practices, method of fishing and hunting, ceremonial dress, craftsmanship, and shelter set them apart from other tribes of California.
Most significantly, Amah villages were distinct from tribes outside their valley because of their unique language; no other Indian tribe spoke Mutsun. While the Costanoan/Ohlone language family was made up of eight separate languages, including Mutsun, each language was “as different from one another as Spanish is from French” in the Romance language group. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the Mutsun language had been spoken in the San Juan Valley for thousands of years, indeed it was one of the first American Indian languages extensively studied in North America.
The Amah Mutsun Tribe had been drawn to the triangle of land formed by the Monterrey Bay and the Pajaro and San Benito rivers due to the abundance of water and fish. The Tribe was geographically isolated from its neighbors due to the physiography of the San Juan Valley (Tratrah). However, these abundant lands later attracted other settlers who would drastically change the lives of the Amah Mutsun.
Some Tribal ways of life for the Mutsun were that Chiefs were responsible for feeding visitors; providing for the impoverished; directing ceremonial activities, and directing hunting, fishing, gathering and warfare expeditions. Warfare was not uncommon for the Mutsun. Infringement of territorial rights was the most frequent cause of war. Because the territory of the Mutsun was so valuable in terms of food supply, it was coveted by many others. The Mutsun insured a sustained yield of plant and animal foods by careful management of the lands. Controlled burning of extensive areas of land was carried out each fall to promote the growth of seed bearing annuals. The Mutsun diet consisted of acorns, hazelnuts, blackberries, elderberries, strawberries, gooseberries, madrone berries, wild grapes, wild onions, cattail roots chuchupate (herb), wild carrots, deer, elk, antelope, bear, rabbit, raccoon, squirrel, rat, mouse, sea lion, whale, duck, geese and a variety of birds. Also eaten were salmon, steelhead, sardine, shark, swordfish, trout, lampreys, mussels, abalone, octopus, grasshoppers, caterpillars and most varieties of reptiles. The Mutsun never ate eagles, owls, raven, buzzards, frogs or toads.
Family dwellings were domed structure thatched with tule, grass, ferns, etc. A small sweat house was constructed by digging a pit in the bank of a stream and building the remainder of the structure against the bank. Dance enclosures were constructed in the middle of the village and were circular or oval in shape and consisted of a woven fence of brush or laurel branches about four and one-half feet high. There was a single doorway and a small opening opposite it. Tule boats (balsas) were used by the Mutsun for transportation, fishing and hunting. Bow and arrows, spears, nets and basket traps were used for hunting and fishing. Fish poisoning and fishhooks were also used. Tools were made of bone, wood, rocks and minerals. Baskets were used in the collection, preparation, and storage of food.
In 1848, the Amah Mutsun were disturbed again when Anglo settlers came to the region. A story within the Amah Mutsun Tribe is that when the Indians heard that the Americans were coming to California they gathered together in the corner of a room and cried because they were certain the Americans would kill them all. It wasn’t long before the rush for gold forcibly displaced the Tribe’s member’s from their new homes. They were rounded up like cattle and forced to work, and their children were kidnapped and enslaved. Many were simply killed.
The Anglos had no respect for the culture and traditional ways of the aboriginal people, nor for their rights to occupancy of the land. Anglos, furthermore, were afraid of the California Indians from the outset. Due to the Anglos’ experiences with the Plains Indians, the California Indians were treated with brutality.
In early 1850’s, both the Federal and the State governments concluded there was an “Indian problem.” To deal with this “problem” both governments developed their own solution. The federal government became alarmed by reports of violence against the aboriginal populations, and in 1852 it established special military reservations to remove some of the Indians from the general population. At these military compounds, the federal government conducted treaty negotiations with local Indians. Some of the San Juan Indians participated in the negotiations serving as interpreters between the Americans and Tribal Chiefs and were signatories to the treaties signed near Pleasanton. Immediately after the treaties were completed, a powerful California business and political lobby quashed all hopes of getting the treaties ratified in the Senate (see 1851-52; California’s response to Federal Treaties Negotiated with the Indians, page 23) The U.S. Senate placed the treaties in confidential files and ordered that they be sealed for 50 years. In 1905 the Senate voted to remove the injunction of secrecy but the proposed reservation land was now spoken for by the Anglo settlers. Because the treaties were never signed all California Indians not living on reservations, such as the Mutsun, became landless Indians.
The California solution to the Indian problem was that the Governor of California, Peter H. Burnett, signed an Executive Order to Exterminate all Indians (see Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians, Kimberly Johnson-Dodds, California State Library, California Research Bureau):
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.
Governor Peter H. Burnett, January 7, 1851.
http://amahmutsun.org/history
EB
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*Star Travelers' 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2015-2016.
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