Kent G. Lightfoot
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
1999-2000
California Frontiers: The Ethnogenesis
of a Pluralistic State
California provides a unique opportunity to look at two distinctly different
colonial systems: the Hispanic missions in the south, and the Russian mercantile
outposts in the north. In California Frontiers: The Ethnogenesis of a Pluralistic
State, resident scholar Kent Lightfoot and co-author William Simmons investigate
the implications and consequences of these differences that "resonate
in Indian communities to this day," says Lightfoot, "and are
critical for understanding the roots of contemporary multi-ethnic California."
While the Hispanic missions were concerned with converting
the Native peoples to Catholicism and integrating them into Spanish culture,
the Russian mercantile colonies, such as Ft. Ross, were focused primarily on
generating profit as long as the Native peoples remained peaceful and didn’t
disrupt labor practices, they were allowed to maintain their own cultures.
This essential contrast resulted in dramatically different
impacts on the many small hunter-gatherer tribes of coastal California, caught
between these two colonial systems: Groups such as the Kashaya Pomo, who interacted
with the Russian system, were generally able to retain their tribal identities;
most of the Southern California native groups, who encountered the Hispanic mission
system, became fragmented and underwent significant cultural change.
Unlike most histories of colonial California, California
Frontiers focuses explicitly on interactions between Natives and colonists, and
explores new ways of using multiple data sources such as ethnohistory, Native
oral traditions, and perhaps most significantly archaeology.
"Archaeologists view their field as a viable source
for examining the life ways and interactions of poorly documented peoples in
the past," Lightfoot explains. "If archaeology can truly ‘democratize’ the
past, then California is ripe with promise for rewriting history given the massive
amount of archaeology that has been undertaken in the state in the last twenty-five
years."
Affiliation at time of award: Professor of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley
Return to Resident Scholars
1999-2000.
