Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ways have it easy. The droughts and deluges of California's climate meant
food supplies could be inconsistent. To cope with this, some moved be-
tween winter and summer settlements; some used strategies such as burn-
ing fields, clearing wood, and spreading seeds to enhance certain types of
plant growth; and some smoked and dried food for storage.
Though individual families might claim specific oak trees, clam beds,
or fishing grounds as their own, the Native Americans hunted and gath-
ered food as communities, and they shared their harvests. “They hand-
crafted small-scale economies that were tailor-made to the specific en-
vironmental parameters of local places in order to weather El Niño
events, droughts, and periods of global warming and cooling,” write Kent
Lightfoot and Otis Parrish in their book
California Indians and Their En-
vironment
. “This emphasis on local, small-scale enterprises that are eco-
logically sensitive may be prudent for us to consider in . . . California
today.”
Around the bay proper lay communities that spoke mostly what have
come to be known as the Coastoan or Ohlone languages; up in the river
valleys people spoke Yokuts, Patwin, and Nisenan; and in the lower delta
and in modern-day Marin and Sonoma counties people communicated in
Miwok and Pomo languages.
The bay region's Native Americans built both permanent villages and
temporary camps where they lived while harvesting a particular kind of
food. Almost everywhere they lived around the bay, however, they left be-
hind evidence of their long residence. Shell mounds, some in piles almost
30 feet deep and a quarter-mile wide are testimony to “thousands of years
of feasting on shellfish,” according to Malcolm Margolin, author of
he
Ohlone Way
.
The bay provided the Ohlone with the two staples of their lives: shell-
fish to eat and tule reeds with which to build both homes and canoes, and
weave mats and baskets. They dug for mussels, oysters, and clams in the
mudflats at low tide using a special stick, sharpened and hardened at one
end with a flame. They also collected willow branches from creeksides—
another connection to the water—to create the structures of their dome-
shaped huts, weaving the tule reeds in between. To craft canoes, they made
three 10-foot-long bundles of tules and lashed them together with willow
branches. Each boat could carry four people out to gather bird eggs from
nearby islands, to hunt seals and sea lions, or to trade with other tribes
across the bay. “The extreme lightness of the tule gave it a fine buoyancy,”
according to Margolin.
Of course the bay offered the Ohlone much more than shellfish to eat.
The tribe waded with dip nets for smelt, lured ducks into traps with tule-
stuffed decoys, wooed whales to their beaches with songs sung by sha-
mans, and used whale blubber as a kind of butter. They poked at crabs and
