Miwok

Subgroups

Anthropologists commonly divide the Miwok into four geographically and culturally diverse ethnic subgroups. These distinctions were not used among the Miwok before European contact.

• Plains and Sierra Miwok: from the western slope and foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
• Coast Miwok: from present-day location of Marin County and southern Sonoma County (includes the Bodega Bay Miwok and Marin Miwok)
• Lake Miwok: from Clear Lake basin of Lake County
• Bay Miwok: from present-day location of Contra Costa County

Federally recognized tribes

The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs officially recognizes eleven tribes of Miwok descent in California. They are as follows:

• Buena Vista Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians of California
• California Valley Miwok Tribe, formerly known as the Sheep Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians
• Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians
• Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok
• Ione Band of Miwok Indians of California
• Jackson Band of Miwuk Indians, previously known as Jackson Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians of California
• Middletown Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California, (members of this tribe are of Pomo, Lake Miwok, and Wintun descent)
• Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Shingle Springs Rancheria (Verona Tract)
• Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians of the Tuolumne Rancheria of California
• United Auburn Indian Community of Auburn Rancheria of California
• Wilton Rancheria

Non-federally recognized tribes

• Miwok Tribe of the El Dorado Rancheria
• Nashville-Eldorado Miwok Tribe
• Colfax-Todds Valley Consolidated Tribe of the Colfax Rancheria
• Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation
• Calaveras Band of Mi-Wuk Indians
• Miwok of Buena Vista Rancheria
• River Valley Miwok Indians, formally known as Historical Families of Wilton Rancheria

History

The predominant theory regarding the settlement of the Americas dates the original migrations from Asia to around 20,000 years ago across the Bering Strait land bridge, but anthropologist Otto von Sadovszky claims that the Miwok and some other northern California tribes descend from Siberians who arrived in California by sea around 3,000 years ago.

Culture

The Miwok lived in small bands without centralized political authority before contact with European Americans in 1769. They had domesticated dogs and cultivated tobacco, but were otherwise complex hunter-gatherers.

Cuisine

The Sierra Miwok harvested acorns from the California Black Oak. In fact, the modern-day extent of the California Black Oak forests in some areas of Yosemite National Park is partially due to cultivation by Miwok tribes. They burned understory vegetation to reduce the fraction of Ponderosa Pine. Nearly every other kind of edible vegetable matter was used as a food source, including bulbs, seeds, and fungi. Animals were hunted with arrows, clubs or snares, depending on the species and the situation. Grasshoppers were a highly prized food source, as were mussels for those groups adjacent to the Stanislaus River. Coastal Miwok were known to have predominantly relied on food gathered from the inland side of the Marin peninsula (modern San Pablo bay, lakes, and land based foods), but to have also engaged in diving for abalone in the Pacific Ocean.

The Miwok ate meals according to appetite rather than at regular times. They stored food for later consumption, primarily in flat-bottomed baskets.

Religion

The Miwok creation story and narratives tend to be similar to those of other natives of Northern California. Miwok had totem animals, identified with one of two moieties, which were in turn associated respectively with land and water. These totem animals were not thought of as literal ancestors of humans, but rather as predecessors.

Languages

Main article: Miwok languages

Sports

Miwok people played mixed-gender games, with both men and women in each team, on a 110 yard playing field called poscoi a we'a. Similarly to soccer, the object of the game was to kick or carry an elk hide ball to the opposing team's goalpost, but the rules varied by gender. Women could handle the ball in any way they chose, using any part of their bodies to control it, including kicking the ball or picking it up and running with it. In contrast, men were only allowed to kick the ball. However, a man could pick up a woman who was holding the ball and run to the goal with her.

Population

History professors from California estimate the Miwok population was at least 25,000 people in 1769.

The 1910 Census reported a total of 671 Miwok, while the 1930 Census noted 491. See history of each Miwok group for more information. By the 2000 Census, the total number of Miwok had risen to approximately 3,500.

Influences on popular culture

The Star Wars films feature a fictional species of forest-dwelling creatures known as Ewoks, who are ostensibly named after the Miwok.

The Miwok people are encountered in Kim Stanley Robinson's book The Years of Rice and Salt. In an alternate history scenario depicted in the book, they are the first group of Native Americans encountered by the first Chinese to discover the continent.

Miwok culture is also mentioned in the 2025 Netflix series "Untamed".

Notes

References

• Access Genealogy: Indian Tribal records, Miwok Indian Tribe. Retrieved on 2006-08-01. Main source of "authenticated village" names and locations.
• Barrett, S.A. and Gifford, E.W. Miwok Material Culture: Indian Life of the Yosemite Region. Yosemite Association, Yosemite National Park, California, 1933.
• Cook, Sherburne. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1976. .
• Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. (Chapter 30, The Miwok); available at Yosemite Online Library.
• Silliman, Stephen. Lost Laborers in Colonial California, Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004. .
• Miwok Bibliography

References

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