I am enamored of this tightly edited volume that explores the experiences of natives and newcomers in colonial Alta California during the late 1700s and early 1800s—a time when the tidal wave of Spanish, Russian, and late-American interlopers tried to impose their imported beliefs, practices, and constraints on the indigenous communities already living there. Kathleen L. Hull and John G. Douglass have marshaled an impressive array of essays addressing (1) religious beliefs and practices, (2) economic and political ties played out during this period, and (3) “quotidian practices” in shared space (an expression that makes my teeth hurt). James F. Brooks tops off Forging Communities with a sterling epilogue, framing “proximal mirrors” to reflect both eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial experiences in Alta California with earlier encounters in post-Columbian New Mexico.
The skeptic might well ask: what can a six-decade time-slice—at most spanning two generations—tell us about community formation and de-formation in Alta California?
Forging Communities suggests the answer is plenty. These nine case studies address the smaller-scale hunting and gathering communities of practice, largely ignored in previous archaeological scholarship mostly geared toward sedentary, segmentary, or hierarchical societies. The quick-moving transformations of colonial community building—sometimes best monitored on a monthly rather than an annual scale—remain ill-defined in more conventional studies of foraging societies.
Kent G. Lightfoot, for instance, assesses the survival probabilities around Colony Ross, where Spanish, Mexican, and Russian newcomers tried to enforce new hierarchies of status and access. Indigenous communities re-formed through closer interactions among more distant neighborhoods as working families increasingly engaged in the new mercantile operation. This suggests to Lightfoot that native California communities best survived by expanding precolonial social connections beyond local kin groups and traditional village populations.
Similarly, Tsim Schneider's analysis of indigenous community formation in Marin County emphasizes how ritual or seasonal gatherings in the hinterlands (away from daily oversight by non-native newcomers) fostered places of refuge, maintaining native communities throughout the colonial era. To Schneider, the mobility practices among communities of the San Francisco Bay area stand in “stark opposition” to the conventional ethnohistorical tradition that positions California “tribelets” as hostages of localism and geographic isolation.
In paired chapters, Julienne Bernard, John R. Johnson, and David W. Robinson address the small contingent communities of interior Chumash living in a “region of refuge.” Johnson's study of mission marriage records shows that the Cuyama Chumash maintained relationships with more distant villages, reflecting the expansive trade networks that persisted, despite concerted colonial efforts to dismantle such traditional political and familial ties. These extra-village linkages had long-facilitated resource access beyond the Cuyama Valley, and these same interfamilial ties remained critical for indigenous neophytes choosing to leave behind their mission community and return to the homeland.
Paired studies by Stella D'Oro, John Ellison, Linda Hylkema, Lee M. Panich, Sarah Peelo, and Christiana Spellman explore the meaning of community and identity that persisted among the “multiscalar” native communities at Mission Santa Clara de Asís. Beyond the friar-assigned identity labels of Yokuts and Ohlone, the mission records demonstrate that this new mission space melded indigenous individuals from various landscapes, multiple languages, and formerly discrete societies, which crosscut long-term gender, status, and ethnolinguistic relationships. Community formation processes at Mission Santa Clara de Asís simultaneously privileged material ties to ancestral homelands, reflecting new colonial pressures (such as laboring as vaqueros) that segregated people into new neighborhoods and communities.
Similarly, the paired chapters by John Dietler, John G. Douglass, Heather Gibson, Kathleen L. Hull, Seetha N. Reddy, and Benjamin Vargas explore community creation in the colonial Los Angeles Basin. Although Spanish colonial officials tried to stamp out indigenous religious practices during the early mission period, the persistence of feasting, mourning ceremonies, and other communal rituals increasingly came to reflect a sense of community membership and social memory among neophytes only nominally bound by the Franciscan community at Mission San Gabriel.
Glenn Ferris focuses on the impacts of Mexican independence in 1821 (delayed a year in Alta California) and the arrival of American traders and merchants at the pueblo of San Diego, where a sizeable indigenous community lived among Spanish descendants after Mexico took over formal control. Centuries-old patterns of residential mobility and stability, seasonal transhumance, and periodic aggregations of indigenous people had long fostered multiscalar webs of interactions. In the multiethnic settler towns of San Diego, native domestic workers created new community ties with the households of Mexican and American merchants. Farris documents how everyday domestic routines within these newly formed communities involved both colonists and native Californians, who were exploring new ways to transform their own social status.
These and the other case studies in Forging Communities document the quick-paced, conditional decision-making that characterized these colonial communities during six pivotal decades. Native Californians and colonial newcomers alike evaluated their options and adopted practices on an ongoing, ad hoc basis. This led to the formation, re-formation, and/or persistence of what Panich calls “changing continuities” and what Lightfoot terms “communities of survival.” Analysis of such hybrid colonial communities expands and complements the vastly coarser-grained ethnographic and precontact archaeological records.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of Forging Communities is to underscore the importance of linking colonial pasts to the present to affirm the continuing survival and persistence of indigenous Californian communities in today's geopolitical landscape.
