HUNTING, GATHERING, AND HARVESTING THE NATIVE AMERICAN FIELDS IN

CALIFORNIA: AN APPRECIATION OF ROBERT HEIZER'S CONTRIBUTIONS

TO ETHNOHISTORY
Lowell John Bean

The scholarly career of Robert Heizer connects us with the significant beginnings
of California anthropology that were catalyzed by his mentor, Alfred Kroeber, in the

early part of this century. Kroeber, not unlike his protege, Robert Heizer, was a man
who collected data from many sources and developed ambitious, long range goals. He
carried them out by using whatever resources he was able to acquire. Robert Heizer

carried on much of the tradition of his mentor and expanded it in many ways. Although

he is primarily noted for his contributions in archaeological theory, methods, techniques,
and field research, he was keenly interested in California linguistics, California history,
ethnography, and utilization of archival and published ethnographic materials for the
better understanding of the nature of culture, culture change, and cultural continuity

among California Native Americans. In this article- I will discuss his contributions as

represented by his Ballena Press Publications in Archaeology, Ethnology, and History.

Dr. Polly Bickel is addressing Heizer's contributions to ethnohistory published elsewhere.

The Ballena Press series, begun in 1974, provided students of Native California
history with 14 volumes of data regarding Native California. These fell into the following
categories:

1) Documents and archival works previously unpublished, edited and

commented upon by Heizer;

2) Published scholarly works by other authors that were difficult

of access;

3) Archival work by other anthropologists, presented to the public

for the first time; and

4) Studies in archaeology, focusing upon material culture.

In 1974, when Ballena Press Publications in Archaeology, Ethnology, and

History began to be published, Heizer was producing an enormous amount of material,
and publishing it in various formats. Although still editing and producing prodigiously

for other vehicles, he was producing so much that he could in fact begin this monograph
series focused on Native Americans. It began at the behest of Ballena Press publisher
Gerry O'Neal. Fourteen volumes were published before Heizer's death, and two
volumes are now in press.

Volume One of the series set the tone for much of what was to follow. For the

first volume in this series, he chose the title, They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of
Articles from California Newspapers 1851 - 1866 on Indian and White Relations (1974a).

The title suggests, for the first time to anyone not familiar with the vast body of Heizer's
work, that he had become expilicitly advocative in his concerns for California Indians.
However, in his book with Alan Almquist (Heizer and Almquist 1971) he had already

24

specifically stated his concerns for the effects of racial prejudice among California's
ethnic groups. In that book he commented upon Black Americans, Asian Americans,
and Native Americans.

The material for They Were Only Diggers was assembled and edited by Heizer.

The fact that he used the term "digger," an extraordinarily derogatory term -- used even
today in some areas of California as a term for Native Californians -- indicates to the
reader the deep personal offense that he felt because of the unfairness and inappropri-
ateness of the term and the horrendous treatment that had so grievously damaged the
Native American's culture and personality.

In Volume One he ordered the documents under the following subject headings:

Kidnapping, Selling, and the Indenturing of Indians; Reservation Conditions and Affairs;
Indian/White Conflict; Indian Social Events; Indians in Town; Editorial and Public
Observations on the Indian Problem; Indian vs. Chinese; and Condition of Indians.

The volume might aptly be termed a sampler of cultural reality. The materials assem-
bled from California newspapers provided a sampling of the "happenings" between

Indians and others throughout the State, incidents often ignored in the traditional histor-
ical literature -- something that bothered Heizer considerably. The volume was not

directed to anthropologists perse, but at the public, which was uninformed about many
facts of California history. He did not attempt to analyze these materials, noting that
they told ". .. the story of what really happened to California Indians during the twenty
bloody years following the discovery of gold" (1974a: v). The result was a horrendous
accounting of slavery, of a lack of proper protection for a helpless and stigmatized

group, of genocide, and of extraordinary ambivalence toward the American Indian --

seeing them in a positive way, simultaneously seeing them in a negative way -- a cruel
example of the result of the concept of Manifest Destiny in American history.

Heizer notes that the Native Americans were negatively valued, and that only by
adapting to many white ways were they able to remove themselves from a "little bit of
criticism. " By changing themselves radically and quickly, they were able to reduce

some of the frictions that occurred between them and others. He says, "But when they
made these efforts they were often laughed at as 'a bunch of savages putting on airs,'

and were treated as comics. Indians were rejected, alienated, and dehumanized, and
they were continually faced with the risk that anything they did would be interpreted as
a challenge. So long as they stayed out of sight, and allowed anything to be done to
them without protest, Indians were permitted to live. All of this, and more, is the
message of the newspaper reports concerning Indians which constitutes this volume"
(1974a: vii).

Other themes of the volume, useful to the anthropologist, as well as the his-
torian, are comments and descriptions of persistence of ceremonial life, which was

not interfered with as much as other aspects of California life (in part because it was

kept secret); the complex means by which Indians developed survival methods, develop-
ing a diversified economic base; and the attempts of Native American leaders to

25

become involved in protests against the Federal Government and against the inequities

of their condition. Native American leaders at this time were already developing skill-
fully effective political strategies of survival, e. g., using the public press to help them.
It should not be forgotten that there were sympathetic non-Indian who attempted, not
always with great success, to plead for the Native Californian.

The inequities of indentured servitude are forcefully brought to mind by these
documents. Heizer said, "We see that the Indian was given no consideration, and to
my mind this was small thanks to the Indians during their 10, 000-year occupancy of

California for not having burned off all the forests, killed off all the game, mined all of
the gold in the Motherlode, etc., etc ..." (1974a: viii). After 1865 there was less

"bloodletting' as the Native American was brought more into control by the dominant
culture, and as he bitterly puts it, there was "a greatly reduced number of human

targets. " He points out that we must remember that to most Americans it was incon-
ceivable that Native Americans by right of occupancy maintain possession of lands that
belonged to the United States. The fact that this is not a unique experience to Native

Americans bothered Heizer. He said, "The worldwide disappearance of tribal societies
proved this to be true, but one cannot put away the thought that American Indians,

people who did in fact own the land by right of ancient and undisputed occupance, should
have been relieved of their tenure by other methods than were employed by the American
Whites" (1974a: ix).

Heizer is also concerned in this volume about the inequities that one oppressed
group places upon another. The documents concerning the relationship between

Chinese and Indians revealed conditions that bothered him very much, and the fact that
newspaper reporters found it amusing rather than sad or horrible that there were in-

stances of Chinese/Indian conflicts disturbed him. He said, "It is rather like Chekhov,
and it is sad and demeaning to us that it seemed so amusing -- but not far different

from the great days of our Indochina war when a general would appear on CBS or NBC
television as he 'zapped' 'Charlie' from his helicopter gunship. We have obviously

learned to live with what we did to the California Indians, and we will doubtless continue
to live with the moral responsibility of what we have done in the last decade to Indo-
china and the Indochinese people. But it is possible that a people can become so

accustomed to the killing of others, and that they can become so brutalized, that they
abrogate their humanity. It is partly with this belief that I have taken the time to

assemble these documents, since they may serve as a reminder that our brutality and
inhumanity has roots that reach back through the generations" (1974a: ix-x).

In a final section of this volume, he provides documents which indicate the

impoverished living conditions of the Native Americans, the disadvantages of not being
protected by the law, examples of the exploitation of women, of the Indian as a comic
character, the effect of liquor, and perhaps more positively, the persistence of

portions of the aboriginal way. Although these events occurred a century ago, the

continuity of intolerance and brutality continues in American society up to the present
day. He says, "Since each successive generation learns from the preceding one, but

26

feels a moral responsibility only for its own actions, the past as a parent of the present
tends to be dismissed as something other people are responsible for" (1974a: x). He
suggests that if we forget what has happened in the past, we simply rationalize the

things that have been done, or that are allowed to be done, because we have learned to
do so in order not to break the continuity of our legacy. He says, "it is partly, I think,
that the breakdown of the family structure and 'youth revolt' of today are correlated

with the deep objection against the longest war which America has ever engaged in --

a war which was against 'non-persons' analogous to the California Indians in 1850-1870.
If the generation gap is really that, and by this I mean that the new generation is not

simply accepting the values of the one which produced it, then there is some hope for
the future. It is with this thought that this collection of California newspaper articles
has been assembled, since it shows (disregarding time, place and manner) how much
we are like our grandfathers to whom we may owe something, but that something is
not admiration and respect for their humanitarian views and actions" (1974a: x-xi).

This is the most poignant of the introductory essays of this entire series. It
is a style of writing not common to Heizer and unfamiliar to many who know his work,
but it states loudly and clearly much of what he was about.

Volume Two of this series is entitled Great Basin Atlatl Studies, edited by

T. R. Hester, M. P. Mildner, and L. Spencer (1974). The authors survey and indicate
the distribution of the atlatl in the Great Basin area. Since it is not directly concerned
with ethnohistory, we will not comment further on it.

Volume Three in this series is a re-publication by James T. Davis, entitled
Trade Routes and Economic Exchange Among the Indians of California, originally

printed in University of California Archaeological Survey Reports series, Number 54.
This volume, out of print for nearly twenty years, is a much used volume, having

supplemented an earlier work by Sample (1950); it is one of the most frequently quoted
sources in California ethnography and archaeology. Data are assembled on tribes

throughout California relevant to trade between various tribal groups. Those working
on economic relations and political relations between tribes find this article useful to
indicate the extensive economic and social interchanges that occurred between tribes
throughout Native California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest.

In Volume Four of this series, Heizer expresses his continuing concern for
bibliographical resources. The volume, edited by Heizer, Nissen, and Castillo, has

since been superceded by a volume edited by Heizer and Elsasser (1977), A Bibliography
of California Indians. The volume is arranged so that materials in particular subject

areas can be found readily, unlike some other bibliographical guides which concentrate
on tribal groups. Thus, one can readily find materials on subsistence patterns, or
socio-political relationships. Although neither this guide nor the one by Heizer and

Elsasser is complete, both are invaluable reference tools to any scholar working with
Native American materials.

27

In Volume Five, Heizer presents a narrative of the adventure and suffering
of John R. Jewett while held as a captive of the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island,

1803 to 1805. It is edited and annotated by Heizer. He once again performs his role
as an annotator of valuable ethnohistorical documents. It is like one of his primary
contributions to California studies, The Indians of Los Angeles County by Hugo Reid
(Heizer 1968) in which he provides valuable esoteric data to the student of Native
Californians.

Volume Six is entitled, Some Last Century Accounts of the Indians of

Southern California: Seventeen long out of print articles or federal reports published
between 1857 and 1907 on the Luiseno, Diegueno, and Cahuilla tribes of Southern

California (1976a). In his introduction he says that he wants to present a selection of
little known, out of print, and difficult of access descriptive accounts of Southern

California mission Indians and their culture. Most of these articles were not written
by trained ethnologists, but they are first hand observations of Native California

Indians by people who observed very carefully. Heizer refers to this period of anthro-
pological study in California and these persons as "pre-professional. " The accounts
contain information which does not appear in later works. These should be published,
he says, because they provide additional insight into the nature of the Native American
culture and society of the times (1976a: i). They provide dataon Indian activities that
ethnographers often failed to, or couldn't, observe or perceive. Since the authors

were writing from a rather naive point of view, they expressed their points of view and
attitudes clearly, unconcerned about criticism from others. Their negative attitudes
are clearly expressed, as are their sympathies. Consequently one is better able to

assess Indian-White relationships from these than from most ethnographic or historical
accounts. A significant contribution in this volume is that of J. H. Gilmore, a news-

paper reporter who worked for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1890s -- his obser-
vations of Cahuilla political relations and the conflicts between the Cahuilla and the
Bureau of Indian Affairs are very clearly expressed, although from a somewhat

jaundiced and cynical point of view. There is also a most sensitive description in this
same volume by J. J. Warner, the original owner of Warner's Ranch, upon which the

Cupeno Indians lived and from which they were later removed. This document gives us
a very special picture of J. J. Warner. He was an accurate and sensitive observer of
an Indian ritual. It stands in significant contrast to observations made by many other
Native American advocates, as well as critics of Native American culture, because of
its accuracy and sensitivity to the Native culture. It is interesting to note that later on
in one of the volumes in this same series, J. J. Warner emerges again as an especially
rational and knowledgeable commentator on Indian affairs when he argued that the
treaties of 1851-1855 with Native Californians be ratified (Anderson, Ellison and
Heizer 1978: 42-44). They were not.

There are also articles in this series by advocate-ethnographer-novelist
Constance Goddard DuBois who contributed significantly to our understanding of

Luiseno and Diegueno culture at thie turn of the century. There are contemporary

accounts of Indian leaders and how they dealt with Native America;ns: Chiefs Cabazon,

28

Cota, and Manuel Largo are described. We see in these reports the various proposals
presented by government officials and others for "handling of Native Americans by the
federal government." Rituals are described in considerable detail, providing valuable
ethnographical detail about fiestas, the eagle ceremony, and girls's puberty cere-

monies. There is a considerable balance of data presented here, representing severe
critics of Native Americans, advocates of Native Americans, and objective reporters.
They range from the cynical to the romantic to the objective. There are reports

written by Indian agents, professional reporters, land owners, employers of Indians,
and various government officials. One sees in these reports, as one sees in later

volumes of this series, the intensity between Native Americans and Whites, those day-
to-day details of this interaction which only rarely occur in ethnographic accounts.
Heizer recognizes that this is an area of behavior about which we know very little.

In Volume Seven, A Collection of Ethnographical Articles on the California
Indians, Heizer presents a sampling of some of the very earliest attempts by pro-

fessional anthropologists and others to describe Native Californian culture. Heizer
provides accounts of California Indians and their cultural practices in order to serve

students of today who do not have access to libraries containing the variety of journals

held by the University Library at Berkeley. These articles are presented as they were

originally written with no editing except an occasional omission of illustrated materials.
They are organized geographically: the northwest coast, central California and southern
California. The accounts, gathered from a number of sources, include the Journal of
American Folklore and American Anthropologist, and more obscure journals such as
the American Naturalist, Out West, Field and Stream, The Californian, Proceedings

of the California Academy of Sciences, Sierra Club Bulletin, Sherman Institute Bulletin,
the Smithsonian Annual Reports, and the California Medical Journals, dating from

1874 to 1917. This volume demonstrates that there are accounts of Native Californians
in journals often overlooked by students of California Indians and in sources which to
date still have not been thoroughly indexed or used. The articles include data on

material culture, medicine, politics, subsistence patterns, descriptions of contemporary
conditions, folklore, legal problems, and sociology. Among the many tribal groups
included are the Yumas and the Mohaves on the Colorado River, the Luiseno and the

Cahuilla in southern California, the Yokuts, Mono, Miwok in central California, and the
Hupa and the Klamath Indians in northwestern California.

Volume Eight, entitled The Expedition of Capt. J. W. Davidson from Ft. Tejon
to the Owens Valley in 1859, is edited by Philip J. Wilke and Harry W. Lawton, and
presents the earliest detailed account of the Owens Valley of east central California

and its Paiute inhabitants (1976). The contribution is particularly significant because
the members of the expedition observed the practice of vege-culture in Owens Valley.

Their observation of irrigation ditches affords a glimpse of what may be a unique system
of agriculture in aboriginal Native America, according to the authors.

Volume Nine is entitled, Treaty Making and Treaty Rejection by the Federal
Government in California, 1850-1852 (Anderson, Ellison and Heizer 1978). Heizer

29

presents recent materials written by himself and George E. Anderson, and reprints ma-
terials of W. H. Ellison originally printed in 1925 in the magazine Grizzly Bear. Heizer

worked with George E. Anderson, then a graduate student in the Department of History, in
the late 1960s researching the background and circumstances of the eighteen treaties en-
tered into by the United States through three commissioners appointed by President

Millard Fillmore in September 1850. This is a period of California history to which

Heizer contributed a significant amount of material, much of it in this series. He and
Anderson present a valuable essay describing the history of treaty-making between the
United States Government and Native Americans in general and the beginnings of

Indian agents's involvement in California. They also describe the circumstances of the
treaty-making, recounting the places that treaty makers went and their interactions

with the various Native American tribes, until such time as the treaties were rejected.
In later volumes in this series, Heizer presents more material regarding the rejection
of the treaties. In Volume Nine he reprints the majority and minority reports of a

special committee to inquire into the treaties made by the United States commissioners
with the Indians of California. These are valuable because they provide the reader a
clear picture of where many Americans were "coming from" with regard to Native

Californians. The majority report indicates that many did not want Native Americans
to have exclusive access to any of the potentially valuable lands in California. Some

wanted them displaced from California entirely. On the other hand, the minority report
reflects views of such people as J. J. Warner, whose sympathetic accounts of Indians
have already been mentioned. It argued that the Native Americans do indeed have a

legal right to protection by Federal Government and should receive a land base so that
they could be of benefit to the American Government. Obviously the minority report

lost out, a fact which, in later years, led anthropologists and historians into a consid-
erable amount of ethnohistoric research in connection with the claims case. The

Senate debate regarding the appropriation of funds for aid to Indians of California pro-
vided by the three treaty commissioners is also included in this volume, and provides
more insight into how our governing bodies felt toward Indians, toward fiscal respon-
sibilities of the government, how it related to the Indians, and how Native Americans
might be a contribution or not to the general economy of the new state. In another

context, one outside this series, Heizer published the text of the treaties with brief

commentaries and identified the signatories of each of the tribes (1972). His intent in
this book was to provide materials useful to persons interested in the treaties. W. H.

Ellison's article is reprinted and entitled, "Rejection of California Indian Treaties: A
Study in Local Influence and National Policy." The article was first published in

several issues of the Grizzly Bear in 1925. It is one of the few articles written at this
time regarding history of California Indians and remains one of the better works on
this subject. Ellison reviews the committee debates concerning the treaties, the

means of approving funds for the treaty commissioners, the problems and conflicts
regarding them, and the concern that the Federal Government had that there be no

obligation to feed and support Native Americans now that the State was under new juris-

diction. Some members of the Federal Government were in a quandary at this time about
how to incorporate Indians in the Federal System. They wondered how to use Indians, -

30

what value they might be to the general economy, what the moral obligations to them
were, and what costs might be incurred by their presence. In these reports it is also
suggested that Mission Indians -- those Indians who had learned the arts and crafts of
the European culture from the Spanish -- should be retained in California and those

who had not should be placed in some other part of the Union, in areas with less valuable
resources. That is the majority report. The minority report, with which J. J. Warner
was intimately involved, provided a sympathetic defense of the Native Californian and
argued for the great value'they had for the economy of the new state. The federal

people were at this time not only concerned about saving monies, and not committing
themselves about monies, they were concerned that corruption of federal monies

should not be allowed. At this time in our history many cases of corruption in the

Bureau of Indian Affairs had been discovered and the many legislatures were concerned
that it not occur again, particularly in the California case.

The tenth volume in this series, Great Basin Projectile Points: Forms and
Chronology (1978), by Robert F. Heizer and Thomas R. Hester is not directly related
to ethnohistory, so I will not comment further on it here.

Volume Eleven of this series, entitled Selected Papers from the Fourteenth
Great Basin Anthropological Conference (1978), was edited by Donald R. Tuohy.

There were a number of papers regarding ethnohistory at this conference: out of 75

papers delivered, 21 were concerned with ethnohistory and Indian-White relationships.
Seven papers were selected for publication: two on archaeology, two on linguistics,
and three on ethnohistory. The latter three papers were "Cowboys and Indians: An

Ethnohistorical Portrait of Indian-White Relations on Ranches in Western Nevada,," by

Robert N. Lynch; "Pine Nuts, Cattle and the Ely Chain: Rip-Off Resource Replacement
versus Homeostatic Equilibrium," by Richard 0. Clemmer, and "The Western Shoshone
of Nevada and the U.S. Government, 1863-1950," by Omer C. Stewart.

Lynch argues for a point well represented by these volumes: that the nature

of Indian-White relationships has not been sufficiently addressed by anthropologists who
work with Indians, certainly not the compatible interactions that occurred with Indians
and Whites. It could be argued that while anthropologists rightfully take an advocative

position with Indians, they have often failed to focus upon the positive or ordinary inter-
actions between Whites and Indians. Lynch argues well for studying in more detail the
compatible nexus of Indian-White relations. The paper on pine nuts and the Ely Chain

discusses the nature of Native American uses of their environment, how these uses have

changed, and how they compare with land management practices of Federal bureaucracies
The final paper in this series, "The Western Shoshone of Nevada and the U. S.

Government, 1863-1950" by Omer C. Stewart, documents the history of Indian exploi-
tation by Americans in the Paiute area.

The next two volumes in this series, Volume Twelve and Thirteen, focus

upon the relationship of the California Indians to the Federal Government. Volume
Twelve is entitled, The Califoria Indian vs. the United States of America (HR4497)
(1978), prepared and edited by Robert Heizer. The subtitle is: Evidence Offered in

31

Support of Occupancy, Possession, and Use of Land in California by Ancestors of

Enrolled Indians in the United States. Heizer discusses his role and that of other anthro-
pologists as expert witnesses in preparing evidence to be presented on behalf of the

California Indians in docket 31/37, known as the Indian Claims Commission Act. In the

process of this work, he prepared an index of a portion of the plaintiffs exhibit materials
to be used as a guide to locating in the considerable mass of evidence certain key points
which supported the arguments of exclusive possession and permanence. He presents
these data because he feels it might be useful today to students searching for this kind

of information, who "do not have the time to read through a couple hundred monographs,
books, and articles" (1978: i). These data are followed by the findings of fact by the
Indian Claims Commission, which ruled in favor of the Native Americans. He points
out that one of the research goals of the anthropologists working on this case was to

establish evidences of ownership, including such things as owners's marks, seasonal

uses of tribal areas, sale or rent or transfer of titles of lands, permanency and conti-
nuity of occupation, as well as informants's memories of such things; early archaeo-
logical sites in their tribal areas, accounts of Native Americans who remembered

resource collections, conservation attitudes, rituals, and the like. Heizer tended to

think that much of these proceedings were a bit "silly." He argues that there was little
doubt in the minds of the commissioners, the lawyers, or anyone else that Native

Americans did indeed own California and that it had been taken from them without any

compensation. If anything was served in these cases it was but legal protocol. He argues
that by 1954 the bulk of our ethnographic knowledge about California was already well

in hand and implies that there probably wasn't much more to be done. As he put it, the

last major gathering together for professional reasons of California ethnographic experts
was now accomplished. One could argue that this is not the case; many ethnographers
and archaeologists today would, I think, argue that there is still a considerable amount
of ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to be collected directly from Native American

informants. There has recently been a resurgent stage of research on Native American
Indians, a most significant aspect of which is the efficient culling, searching, and

analyzing of previously unpublished materials such as those by C. Hart Merriam and J.
P. Harrington. A case in point is that there are perhaps a dozen or more monographs
now published or in press on the Chumash alone, and very likely hundreds of volumes
still forthcoming from one resource, the J. P. Harrington collection.

In this volume, Heizer continues to be somewhat cynical about Federal

Government-Native American relations. He says that "The Claims Case Chatauqua may
have been merely a smart move by the government to try to truncate, in some positive
way, what it could see was the rising Indian protest -- one which could only become

louder with time and therefore increasingly difficult to ignore. Or, it may have come
about through one of those federal acts to assuage a feeling of collective guilt, and of

which we have seen so many examples in the last 20 years" (1978: iii). He points out
that while these never seem to do much good, they seem to form a "catharsis of con-

science which a democracy seems to have to perform at intervals" (1978: iii), and sug-
gests that this is reminiscent of our behavior after the Civil War, the Marshall Planl
after World War II, and the reconstruction programs in the devastated and defoliated~
Viet Nam after the Indochina war.

32

In Volume Thirteen of this series, entitled Federal Concerns About Conditions
of California Indians 1853-1913: Eight Documents (1979), selected and edited by

Robert F. Heizer, he continues to place into perspective and focus the relationships
between the Native Americans and the Federal Government. This volume presents

documents written by concerned federal officials between 1852 to 1913. In his intro-

duction he describes briefly the four periods of military rule in California, the impact
of the flood of gold miners arriving in California beginning in 1849, which led to con-
siderable killings of Indians, and the constant conflict between resident Indians and

invading whites. The prevailing theme in these articles is the attempt of the federal

government to ameliorate the suffering of the California Indians who found themselves,
after the American seizure of California, lost persons in their own land. Here again

he makes a reference to contemporary times when he says, "The editor cannot refrain
from pointing out that Document VIII (Address of President Wilson to North American
Indians, 1913) affords a curious paraUlel to the Watergate tapes of recent notoriety to
the extent that it is nothing but pious dissimulations. The only element lacking is the
deleted expletives" (1979: ii).

These various articles concern such matters as federal assistance to Indians
as early as 1852; the establishment of military reservations a year or two later;

attempts by persons in the federal government to transfer Indian affairs to the State of

California in 1860, which were summarily dismissed since the State did not want to take
a fiscal or moral responsibility for Native Americans; and two very important reports,
"The Ames report on Mission Indians" and "The Jackson-Kinney Report," both of

which had a very significant impact to the establishment of reservations and the improve-
ment of Native American conditions on reservations. There is a memorial from the

Native Californian Association, an important Native American advocative group, "pray-
ing" that lands be allotted to landless Indians. This report, presented in 1904, did not
have significant results until the late 1920s and early 1930s, when many of the landless
Indians in California were provided with rancherias, some of which were removed

some twenty years later by the termination acts. In these reports Government officials
for the most part point out that the Indians are very valuable to the American economy
and that the skills that they had already acquired from the Spanish American should be
utilized for their own as well as the general good. Officials tended in these reports to
be protective towards the Native Americans and to recognize that the newly arrived

American citizens in California were indeed a very dangerous threat to Indians, dis-

placing them from their lands and frequently killing them. The massacre of Indians is
reported in one document, where a group of ubite men are "happy" to report that they

have killed some 300 Indians in a short period of time. When reservations were estab-
lished, reservations' boundaries had a tendency to float to the disadvantage of the

Indians. Many reports were made about this, and attempts were made to stabilize these
boundaries. However, this did not receive significant input until well into the 1890s.

These government reports also emphasized the need for general welfare assistance to
the devastated Indians. They needed blankets, clothing, hats, shoes, farming equip-

ment, and so forth. By 1883, Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney were a:ble to report
that things were not much better than a decade previously when an Indian agent report

33

recommended, in 1873, various reforms (1979: 76). Although the land was somewhat

stabilized in some areas, there were still many problems concerning it. Labor conditions
were very poor and Native Americans did not have proper legal representation. Schools

were not effective and their number should have been increased. There were many whites
living on reservations, exploiting Indian lands. And the Indians indeed needed to have

capital equipment distributed among them so they could increase their economic potential.
By the early 1890s, many of these reforms were still badly needed.

The final volume of this series, Volume Fourteen, was published in 1979, and
entitled Indian Names for Plants and Animals Among Californian and Other Western

North American Tribes, by C. Hart Merriam, assembled and annotated by Robert F.

Heizer. This volume contains a eulogy of Heizer by his friend and colleague, Albert B.
Elsasser, and continues Heizer's concern that C. Hart Merriam's materials be made
available to the public. Heizer discusses the career of C. Hart Merriam in objective

terms, pointing out his weaknesses as a nascent anthropologist, his conflicts with A. L.
Kroeber and others, but nevertheless recognizes the very significant contribution that
Merriam's material provides for anthropologists as well as Native Americans. His

introductory essay is a touching and objective tribute to Merriam, a significant man in
American science. Heizer was particularly interested in Merriam's material because

of his own long range interests in ethnobiology and ethnogeography, which were of course
Merriam's strong points. By presenting Merriam's work, he is following through in the
most valued tradition of his mentor, A. L. Kroeber, who actively pursued data collected
by others, professionally trained or not, and encouraged people who were careful

observers of Native American conditions and culture to make their material available to
the profession. This attitude of Kroeber's, carried on by many of his students, but

particularly Robert Heizer, is in itself a major contribution to the history of the Native
American in our time. He in effect is dedicating this book, and perhaps much of this

series as well, to the Native Californian, when he says this collection is an epitaph to the
original Californians and honors those many people who were "collecting and preserving
scraps" of data. In his introductory essay, Heizer demonstrates that he is able to see
how data collected a very long time ago and without direct relevance to contemporary
theory can be useful in a contemporary context. For example, he points out that

Blinman, in 1975, was able to use the Merriam data to help in an historical reconstruction
of the history of bird cults by looking at Merriam's vocabulary lists to see how various
birds had similar names in disparate groups. He also demonstrates that he was aware
of the new trends in ethno-linguistics when he notes the concept of semantic domains.

His essay also signals to us the degree to which he recognized the contributions of the
hundreds of students he met over the years. He credits the unpublished papers of

students in this essay. And finally in this volume, there is a selected bibliography of
California and studies in ethnobiology. For the student interested in acquiring a quick
grasp of that literature this is a useful document. This was the last volume of this
series under his editorship. Two more volumes are in press.

Robert Heizer contributed significantly to our knowledge of Native Californians,
perhaps only second to his mentor, A. L. Kroeber. His was a carefully articulated

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heritage, reflected well in this particular series. I worked with him only a short time.
He was helpful, objective, and supportive. I miss his energy and spirited ways, and
appreciate this opportunity to give credit where it is due.