Native Knowledge 360°

The Dark History of California’s Gold Rush

ThorneLE — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:37:54 +0000

The Dark History of California’s Gold Rush

From Issue: Fall 2024 / Vol. 25 No. 3

by David Helvarg

In 1848, the news that gold was discovered on the American River at Sutter’s Mill, a sawmill near Coloma, California, set off a tidal wave of prospectors who mostly sailed from the East Coast of the United States around South America as well as from Australia, China, Britain, Mexico and Chile to find their fortunes. These miners became known as ‘49ers, named after the year 1849, when California's population of colonists skyrocketed from 7,500 to more than 300,000.

Lucy Young witnessed colonists massacring the men in her Wailaki village in 1862.

The Ban Library, University of California, Berkeley

In June 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom (third from left) acknowledged his state's role in promoting the attempted "genocide" of its Native inhabitants.

The Spanish colonized the territory of California from 1769 until 1821, when it became part of an independent Mexico before the United States seized it in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. The “gold rush” hastened California becoming a state of the union in 1850. The frenzy for quick riches also led to the massacre of thousands of Indigenous people in the area by colonists who wished to remove the inhabitants from their lands to build towns, farms and ranches—and dig for gold. The state government encouraged these land grabs, putting bounties on the heads and scalps of Native men, women and children. In 1851, California’s first Governor, Peter Burnett, addressed the state Legislature, declaring “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected.”

Still, the slaughter of Native people that resulted from the California gold rush is rarely mentioned nor rarely discussed in most history textbooks or classrooms. To help bridge this gap, the National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Knowledge 360º (NK360°) education program has created an in-depth look at “The Impact of the Gold Rush on Native Americans of California.” This online resource designed for 8th through 12th grade students poses the question, “Do American actions against California Native Americans during the gold rush meet the United Nations’ (UN) definition of genocide?” The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including killing members of that group and transferring its children to another group. An estimated 150,000 Native Americans lived in California in 1848. These culturally diverse peoples from as many as 500 self-governing tribal societies spoke more than 100 different languages. By 1900, fewer than 20,000 Indigenous people had survived the massacres, rapes, starvation, disease, child enslavement and displacement caused or carried out by California state officials, U.S. Army soldiers and various death squad militias.

In June 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged the state’s role in the atrocities in an executive order he announced at a gathering of the survivors' descendants. “That’s what it was, a genocide,” he said. “And so, I’m here to say the following: I’m sorry on behalf of the state of California.”

Christina Snider-Astari (Mhilikawna Makahmo), the governor’s tribal affairs secretary, is leading a statewide Truth and Healing Council created through that executive order to provide a platform for California’s Native people to clarify the historical record as part of the healing process. She said Newsom’s apology was “a highlight of my career, when the 40th governor of California takes steps to meet with the descendants of that genocide.”

The NK360° resource includes a video of Governor Newsom’s meeting with the descendants following testimonials from survivors of the massacres, historic illustrations, newspaper articles, transcriptions of speeches from former Governor Burnett and others, and maps of the state showing locations of California tribes and former gold mines. It also showcases Nisenan Maidu artist Harry Fonseca’s interpretation of the gold rush’s impacts as “an explosion on all levels. … The damage inflicted during that chaotic time was extensive. It injured the land and the living things that were there, Native Americans and other peoples.” His multimedia artworks are created with earth mica and splashes of gold and red paint.

In one of the lesson’s online sources, students can read the testimony of Lucy Young. She talks about how after she escaped forced labor under a white settler, she witnessed militiamen massacring 40 men from her Wailaki village in 1862. She recalled, “So they shoot. All our men. Then build fire with wood and brush Inyan [sic] men been cut for days, never know their own funeral fire they fix.”

“My tribe is dead center in the motherlode of the gold rush,” noted Taylor Pennewell (Tyme Maidu, Berry Creek Rancheria), executive director of the advocacy and education organization Redbud Resource Group. She is one of several California Native American reviewers of the online resource and helped lead the first in-person teacher training about it at Graton Rancheria. “I know with California’s genocide and Native studies in general there are lots of excuses on why it can’t be taught, so I wanted to make sure the lesson was ready to go. I was looking at acceptability of the material for different reading levels, from students with special needs to advanced accelerated students, and NK360° did a good job. It’s also important teachers learn the material from Native people who can say, we exist, this happened to my family.”

The educational resource received support from the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria, which is made up of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people in Marin and Sonoma Counties. The tribes once had some 20,000 people in the area. Today’s 1,537 Rancheria citizens can trace their ancestry back to one of just 14 women who survived the gold rush era as the wives or concubines of miners.

“When you talk about the gold rush, it was at the cost of the most diverse Indigenous people,” noted Greg Sarris, who serves as chair of the NMAI’s Board of Trustees and tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and is also an author and former literature professor. “I have a chip on my shoulder as a California Indian with so many language families represented and 110 federally recognized tribes in this state and yet there’s been this rich history that has really been overlooked.”

NMAI Education Product Developer and former middle-school teacher Catherine Mason Hammer said, “We saw this as a unique opportunity to partner with California Native communities and educators to build an educational resource with the potential to reach large numbers of teachers in California and across the nation.”

In his introductory essay to the lesson, Khal Schneider, a member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, quotes Pomo historian William Benson, who interviewed survivors of an 1850 massacre during the 1930s. Benson wrote, “After the attack, when one man realized that he was ‘not to see my mother and sister but to see their blood scattered over the ground like water,’ he was overwhelmed and ‘sat down under a tree and cryed [sic] all day.’”

“I think the challenge for this lesson for 8th to 12th graders is not to make people feel guilty or punish people but to say what are some of the bigger issues and lessons we can learn from this history when greed or blindness or ethnocentrism don’t let you see other people as people,” said Sarris. “I hope this is an opportunity to teach how we might have solutions and that Indian people have agency—and not just in telling our stories but also in overseeing how they are discussed and talked about in the world.”

Snider-Astari said this resource has “been a long time coming.” And, she added, “having it led by California Native Americans … means we’re centering our people in our narratives.”

Authors

David Helvarg

David Helvarg is an author, journalist and frequent contributor to American Indian magazine. His latest book is “Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp.”

A Closer Look at the Thanksgiving Tale

ColavecchioS — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Native Knowledge 360°

A Closer Look at the Thanksgiving Tale

From Issue: Fall 2025 / Vol. 26 No. 3

by Aaron Levin

When Paula Peters was in first grade, her teacher told her class about the “first Thanksgiving.” This version of the tale was similar to what teachers across the United States had been telling for decades: this was the first time Pilgrims, who had come to this country from England to seek religious freedom, shared a meal with friendly Indians. These Native Americans were the Wampanoag people, and Peters thought with pride: “Hey, that’s great. They’re talking about my ancestors.”

After much debate among the Wampanoag’s leaders, their highest leader, Ousamequin (center of bottom left panel), ultimately decided to sign a treaty with English colonists in 1621.

Art by Timothy Truman; Colors by Michael Sheyahshe (Caddo)/© Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian 2023

The Wampanoag hold harvest celebrations throughout the year, including the Aquinnah Wampanoag’s Cranberry Day festival in the fall.

Cranberry Day: Traditional Harvest Festivals/© Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian 2023

But then the teacher said, after their famous meal, “all the Indians died of a horrible plague.”

“Wait a second,” thought Peters, “we’re still here!” She knew from her family stories and cultural practices that Wampanoag people such as her were still living in her community of Mashpee as well as those of Aquinnah, Assonet, Chappaquiddick and Herring Pond in what is now Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island.

That teacher’s misconceptions were hardly unique. The “traditional” Thanksgiving tale taught in American schools and repeated annually over the remains of holiday turkeys goes something like this: Pious English Pilgrims sailed across the Atlantic in 1620 and landed at Plymouth Rock in December. The Pilgrims nearly starved, until they encountered American Indians who taught them how to grow corn, beans and squash. In the fall of 1621, the grateful Pilgrims invited the Indians to the first harvest celebration, which, thanks to President Abraham Lincoln’s attempt at national unity in 1863 amid the country’s Civil War, became known as the country’s Thanksgiving holiday.

Well, not exactly. Who is represented in written history often depends on who is writing it, and the standard story of the “first Thanksgiving” has generally been told by non-Indigenous peoples. The actual story of the Wampanoags’ encounter with the colonists is much more complex, with some devastating outcomes.

To help educators tell a more complete and accurate portrayal of this time in history, the National Museum of the American Indian’s education initiative, Native Knowledge 360° (NK360°), collaborated with members of the Wampanoag Nation to create an educational resource entitled “The ‘First Thanksgiving:’ How Can We Tell a Better Story?” Its lessons feature engaging illustrations and videos that include reflections from Wampanoag people about this historic event and how their views of it have been absent from the narrative.

They reveal, for example, that written accounts do not describe the colonists landing on a “Plymouth Rock” but rather coming ashore on a muddy Cape Cod. The Wampanoag people and neighboring Native nations were interacting with European explorers, traders and enslavers for nearly 100 years before English colonists settled at the Wampanoag village of Patuxet in 1620. After careful observations and negotiations, they did decide to help the English travelers. In the fall of 1621, after hearing shots from guns the English were firing in celebration of their harvest, about 90 Wampanoag men came to see what was happening. They then left and hunted for deer to contribute to the feast, to which, contrary to colonial paintings that portrayed Native women attending, only men were present.

“The event was more about diplomacy than a feast,” said Nichelle Garcia (Winnemem Wintu), an education specialist at the NMAI. The Wampanoag people were devastated from 1616 to 1619 by the “Great Dying,” a wave of infectious disease brought by earlier European traders and fishermen that killed approximately 90 percent of the Indigenous population along the Northeast Coast, including about 75 percent of the Wampanoag in the north and coastal villages. This left the Wampanoag people more vulnerable to attacks by the neighboring Narragansett Nation. When the colonists wanted to farm on Patuxet, the Wampanoag negotiated to allow them to use it. Only the English renamed the village “Plimoth” and claimed it as theirs.“The English were not sailors or traders,” said Garcia.“They were colonists, planning to stay.”

The Wampanoag Nation eventually signed a mutual protection treaty with the colonists, which the colonists saw as a guarantee the Wampanoag people would protect them while granting them more power. Even so, the treaty was short-lived and more colonists continued to move onto Wampanoag lands.

Linda Coombs, a knowledge keeper for the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe and the program director of its Cultural Center, served as a consultant for the NK360° resource.“Both the Wampanoag Nation and colonists held harvest celebrations,” said Coombs. “But the Wampanoag people had and still have a deep knowledge of tending to the land and a reciprocal relationship with all living beings.”

“They have daily and seasonal rituals of giving thanks, not one holiday,” added Garcia.“Expressing gratitude to the world that sustains you is a way of life.” The Wampanoag give thanks to the natural world from which they draw sustenance year-round as they hunt, fish or gather traditional foods such as the cranberries they celebrate during their fall Cranberry Day festival.

The museum’s free online resource about Thanksgiving is what “teachers were looking for,” said Peters. She and her son, Steven Peters, founded SmokeSygnals, a media and museum exhibit production company. She, a Wampanoag historian, helped review the online resource and he produced video for it. The resource was created for third to fifth grades but can be adapted for sixth to 12th grades. The resource is inquiry based, meaning the students are given a set of questions and the sources to research their answers. “The goal is asking students to think about what they’re studying and come to their own conclusions, not telling them what to think,” said teacher Susannah Remillard, who tested the lessons with sixth graders and teaches the “Earthkeepers” class at Nauset Middle School in Orleans, Massachusetts.

“Hearing and understanding American Indian history from Indigenous perspectives provides an important point of view to the discussion of history and cultures in the Americas,” said Remillard. The lessons reflect “a long, thoughtful and deliberate process by NMAI to make these materials accessible for teachers, and this gives us confidence for use in the classroom—that’s a real gift.”

These teaching resources “make it easier to teach the real history. It will also help us understand our own history,” said Peters. “It’s different now, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Authors

Aaron Levin

Aaron Levin is a freelance journalist based in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Bedrock of the Pamunkey People

EhrlichK — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 20:17:43 +0000

Native Knowledge 360°

The Bedrock of the Pamunkey People

From Issue: Spring 2023 / Vol. 24 No. 1

by Anne Bolen

About an hour east of Richmond, Virginia, lie the lands of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, cradled in an arm of a river that bears their name. This river has sustained Indigenous people in this region for millennia. They journeyed on this waterway to the Chesapeake Bay only a few miles away and then to other American Indian communities along the East Coast. For many Pamunkey people, this river is their foundation and what enables them to perpetuate their culture.

Allyson Gray (Pamunkey) smooths the side of one of her clay pots with shell before it is fired.

Photo by NMAI Staff

This fish pot made by Ada E. Bradby Bush during the 1930s or 1940s is one of the many artworks in the Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Ben Norman (Pamunkey, in back) remembers netting shad with his father and uncle in their river and has passed his love of fishing on to his young son, Theo (Pamunkey/Pawnee/Otoe/Arapaho).

Photo by Alana Norman (Pawnee/Otoe/Arapaho)

“It is the draw of this land and of the river that brings us here and keeps us here,” said Debra Martin, a Pamunkey pottery maker. “We get our clay from this river. It is our lifeblood.”

Established in 1646, the Pamunkey Indian Reservation is potentially the oldest in the United States. Today it sits on only about 1,200 acres. The Pamunkey were one of 33 Algonquian-speaking tribes in the region known as the Powhatan Chiefdom. When European colonists arrived in 1607, they took lands from these tribes. Disease and conflict broke out, and after three wars and the deaths of many Native peoples, a number of the Powhatan tribes signed a treaty with the British Crown in 1677. The Pamunkey leader at the time, a woman the English called Queen Cockacoeske, was among those who agreed to the pact. Every year, the Pamunkey people continue to honor this treaty by bringing Virginia’s governor gifts, including a deer. Yet not until 2016 did the U.S. government recognize the Pamunkey Indian Tribe as a sovereign Native nation.

Since the colonists arrived, much of the Chesapeake Bay watershed has changed. For generations, Pamunkey families passed down locations of choice river banks from which men and children could dig the clay women used to make pottery. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, about a dozen Pamunkey women formed a guild to teach pottery making as well as create and sell their works in a one-room school on their reservation. The great-grandmother of Allyson Gray, a Pamunkey council member and pottery maker, was among them. Gray said pottery making was a time when “the whole community came together.”

But storms and rising water levels have eroded the river’s banks, and finding prime clay locations is ever more difficult. “Now you can only get to it when there is a very low tide,” explained Martin.

While a few women in the community continue to make pottery, the school that once buzzed with voices is silent. Tools lie on the tables and shelves as if they had been dropped there yesterday. Only the fire pit outside is occasionally still in use.

Other local resources that are in jeopardy are Atlantic sturgeon and shad. Both fish were essential sources of food and income for the Pamunkey people. But capturing and riding the mammoth sturgeon—which could be up to 16 feet long and 800 pounds—was also a rite of passage for young men.

Commercial fishing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries nearly wiped out the Atlantic sturgeon and shad populations. Dams have also blocked their journeys from rivers to the ocean and back again to spawn. Soil and fertilizers from development and farms have run off into the rivers, making them murky. This sediment smothers not only water-filtering marine life such as clams and mussels but the eggs that sturgeon lay on bedrocks. “The river has filled up. It is not as deep. Fish nets now drag the bottom,” said 94-year-old Pamunkey fisherman John Henry Langston.

Despite these challenges, the Pamunkey culture still thrives. For the past five years, staff from the National Museum of the American Indian’s education program, Native Knowledge 360° (American Indian.si.edu/nk360), have been working with members of the tribe on a teacher resource to convey just that. “Life Along the River” is a digital storybook for elementary school students about the Pamunkey people’s history and living culture. NMAI Teacher Services Coordinator Renée Gokey (Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma) said the resource fills a gap in school curricula. “There just wasn’t a lot of accurate information about local tribes, and we were getting a lot of requests for this from teachers.”

This past October, NMAI and the tribe co-hosted a workshop for 20 teachers from Virginia and Maryland that began at its Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center on its reservation. The museum covers 12,000 years of Pamunkey history and features a range of traditional items, from pottery and clothing to fishing boats.

During the workshop, Gray and Martin demonstrated some pottery making techniques while fielding questions from the teachers. They also led the attendees on a short walk to the river, where the tribe’s hatchery stands across a pier from a handful of fishing cabins. The hatchery was established in 1918 to help replenish the local shad population. During a few weeks every spring, shad eggs would be hatched in tanks and the young fish, or fry, raised for a few days before being released into the river. But making sure the holding tanks were properly aerated was an around-the-clock job, and finding enough shad to provide and fertilize eggs is difficult, so it is currently closed. Langston, who managed the hatchery for a decade, commented that “I would like to see it operate again.”

Pamunkey citizen Kirk Moore initiated a project to research the local sturgeon population. With a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Christian Hager of Chesapeake Scientific and Jason Kahn of NOAA employed tribal citizens April Deacy and Desiree Nuckols from 2018 to 2020 to count the adult sturgeon population in the Pamunkey River. While they counted less than 500 adult spawning fish annually, they did begin to see more new, younger fish.

Deacy said she has participated in the sturgeon project because she wants to help restore her river. “Water is life,” she said. “You take care of it, and it will take care of you.” To do so, the tribe has also planted a “living shoreline” along part of the river that will help slow soil erosion.

The in-person workshop was a memorable experience for the attendees. “To hear from people from the community who are preserving the culture and the knowledge was transformative,” said fourth-grade teacher Katie Blomquist.

Gray said she welcomed the opportunity to work with the teachers. “Learning in a respectful way is also how you are going to teach in a respectful way,” she said.

During two online workshops prior to their visit, the teachers previewed the digital storybook to be released this year. Second-grade teacher Jennifer Hoffmann said she is looking forward to using it in her classroom as Indigenous cultures are “so infrequently mentioned in curricula, and always in the past. I shift that balance to include more present-day voices.”

For Martin, the most important concept students could learn is that the Pamunkey people are “still here,” she said. “We still carry on. Generations before us have, and we will also.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.