What is Indian Canyon?
Out of the entire San Francisco Bay Area (8 counties - around the size of
Kuwait), about 275 acres has ever been acknowledged as Indian Land (other
than in the incredible 18
treaties) by the United States Government. This is Indian Canyon (a
real canyon), site of two Individual Indian Trust
Allotments (1). One, in 1911,
by President Taft to Sebastian Garcia and another, in 1988, to his great
- grandaughter Ann Marie Sayers . 
Located in San Benito
County, the canyon offered a remote refuge
for Costanoan (Mutsun and other) Indians who loved
freedom then and seek justice now more than the Mission Life
[sic] at San Juan Bautista (Page) and other
European settlements. ( Santa Cruz Mission Pages)
This area became much more significant after the United States illegally
and fraudulently siezed Indigenous Land and extermination [of Indigenous
Californians] became practice and the de facto policy. The struggle against
vestiges of this are alive today.
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Indian Canyon today
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| By moving around these pages and utilizing the links we have made, you
can find out why acknowledgment and recognition is so important yet difficult
for California's non-federally recognized tribes. Is this an "unfortunate
accident" or is this genocide by
denial at work? Make up your own mind. Visit our graph of the "success"
rate for the 36 California Indian tribes with applications stalled in the
ridiculous BAR acknowledgment process.
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(68 k GIF) A colored map of the lands that California Indians negotiated
with the United States and signed treaties
by Native Californians as part of legal ceding of land in 1851-1852. |
| These were to assure the legal status (in
American and International Law) of
American settlements in California and to delineate reservation lands and
to outline supplies and services guaranteed by the United States in payment
for some 90% of the state becoming available for American citizen settlers.
These treaties were,
of course all ignored by the United States (which also ignored the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo's provisions for respect of Mexican and Native land
rights), delayed and then hidden by the United States which proceeds as
if they had been ratified. Thousands and thousands of us were liquidated
and perished from disease in an American Holocaust. In the 40 years between
1852 and the 1890's, the population of California Indians fell from about
175,000-300,000 (2) to 15,283.
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ACTION WE CAN TAKE
Please be aware that there are many possible threads existing in the historical
and contemporary information available here and that the ones we choose
to impliment will hopefully lead to a clear (but by no means exclusive)
picture of the reality of the state of California's Indians and what it
tells us about truth in history, and more
importantly, how California Indians face the same issues today as parents
and grandparents faced-i.e. the misconception that they are "extinct", that
the dominant culture can blithely ignore their existence and that we can
afford to deny history as human beings in touch with and responsible for
generations in the future and the past.You may find yourself reading text
from a document from the mid 1800's and then hyper -jumping to information
from 5 months ago and strangely hearing the same words spoken, the same
themes repeated. We hope we help you to learn all you can about Costanoan
people and the issues important to them. |
| We are moving ahead with the entry of the 1928 Indian Census (we have
received numerous requests for census information from indigenous Californians
seeking information on relatives alive in 1928 - this is one of our most
important projects) If you care to help with this by spending a day of data
entry at Indian Canyon, contact us by e-mail on our
index page and we will make arrangements to get you there. |
- Learn all you can about the difference between "official" history
and what indigenous people think about it. Why is this important? Why
is this is good practice no matter what your concerns? Why is this especially
important in the United States?
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(grayscale image, 24k .gif)
The Virtual Lodge
- (come in, with a thought for all your relations, and visit.
This interface is under construction-so watch your head). We are grateful
to Tom Nason, Esselen Tribe of Carmel valley, who provided the opportunity
to present photographs of their Roundhouse. |
| notes: (1) Individual Indian Allotment INDIAN
COUNTRY held in trust by the Federal Government . Definition
and background. (2) Estimates of California pre-contact
Indian population vary, from 100,000 to 750,000. Kroeber (see California
Indians and Public Pursuasion in Noso-n , 4 part serial; Rawls, James
J., Indians of California: The Changing Image. Univ. of Oklahoma
press, 1986.; Leventhal, Field, Alvarez and Cambra. The Ohlone Back From
Extinction "The Ohlone Past And Present" Lowell Bean, Ed. Menlo Park,
Ballena Press, 1994.) |
| Thank you for accessing the Costanoan-Ohlone Indian Canyon Resource.
Go Back to the top of this page. |
