Bay Miwok people
Mount Diablo, is in the homeland of the
Bay Miwok, and figures in their legends and myths. |
|
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (1770: 1,700 1850: not known 1880: not known) |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| California: Contra Costa County | |
| Languages | |
| Utian: Bay Miwok (Saclan) | |
| Religion | |
|
Shamanism: Kuksu: Miwok mythology |
|
| Related ethnic groups | |
The Bay Miwok are a cultural and linguistic group of Miwok, a Native American people in Northern California who live in Contra Costa County. They joined the Franciscan mission system during the early nineteenth century, suffered a devastating population decline, and lost their language as they intermarried with other native California ethnic groups and learned the Spanish language.
The Bay Miwok were not recognized by modern anthropologists or linguists until the mid-twentieth century. In fact, Alfred L. Kroeber, father of California anthropology, who knew of one of their constituent local groups, the Saklan (Saclan), from nineteenth-century manuscript sources, presumed that they spoke an Ohlone (a.k.a. Costanoan) language.
In 1955 linguist Madison Beeler recognized an 1821 vocabulary taken from a Saclan man at Mission San Francisco as representative of a Miwok language. The language was named "Bay Miwok" and its territorial extent was rediscovered during the 1960s (see Landholding Groups or Local Tribes section below).
The Bay Miwok lived by hunting and gathering, and lived in small bands without centralized political authority. They spoke Bay Miwok also known as Saclan. They were skilled at basketry.
The original Bay Miwok people's world view was a form of Shamanism. As they were centrally located along an arc of Miwok-speaking groups across Central California, the Bay Miwok probably shared the Kuksu religion ceremonial motifs common to both the Coast Miwok to the west and Plains Miwok to the east. The Kuksu religion (dubbed the Kuksu Cult by early historians) included a cycle of elaborate dancing ceremonies, each with its own group of actors and distinctive feather-decorated regalia, an all-male society that met in subterranean dance rooms, puberty rites of passage, shamanic intervention with the spirit world, and, in some areas, an annual mourning ceremony. Varying forms of the Kuksu Cult were shared with other indigenous ethnic groups of Central California, such as their neighbors the northern Ohlone, Maidu, Patwin, Pomo, and Wappo. However Kroeber observed less "specialized cosmogony" in the Miwok, which he termed one of the "southern Kuksu-dancing groups", in comparison to the Maidu and other northern California tribes.
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