Maidu Erotic

The name is their own word for person, and that plainness is a clue: the Maidu never assembled into one nation with one council. They were villages, each with a headman and a stretch of river, sorted by outsiders into three groups along a geographic gradient. The Mountain Maidu hold the high valleys of what is now Plumas County. The Konkow live below them in the Feather River canyons and along the valley edge near Chico. The Nisenan, the largest of the three, held the Yuba, Bear, and American River drainages to the south. Their three languages make up the small Maiduan family, related closely enough to be obviously kin and separated enough that speakers could not simply switch between them. The country runs uphill, from the floor of the Sacramento Valley through blue oak and gray pine into Sierra conifer, and Maidu subsistence read that gradient closely: salmon on the spring and fall runs, black oak acorns leached in sand and cooked into soup and bread, deer and seed crops higher up, and meadows and oak groves kept open by deliberate burning.

Ceremonial life turns on the roundhouse, a semi-subterranean earth-covered structure that remains the center of gravity in Maidu communities, and on the dance societies anthropologists file under the name Kuksu. The Mountain Maidu Bear Dance, held in spring when the bears come out of the ground, is still danced; participants brush themselves with wormwood to sweep off the sickness and grievances of the year past. The break in that continuity has a date. Gold turned up at Sutter's Mill in January 1848, on the American River, in Nisenan country, and the Nisenan took the first and heaviest blow of the rush: burned villages, militia raids, epidemic disease, a population collapse inside two decades. Treaties negotiated with California tribes in 1851 and 1852 were never ratified and sat sealed in the Senate for fifty years. In 1863 several hundred Konkow were marched under guard from Chico to the Round Valley Reservation in Mendocino County, and a large share died on the road; descendants call it the Konkow trail of tears. Maidu people today are organized into rancherias and bands, some federally recognized and some not: the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan lost recognition under the termination policy of the 1950s and are still working to regain it. In 2019 Humbug Valley, Tásmam Koyom, returned to Maidu hands after more than a century, and the languages, down to a handful of speakers, are being taught again from recordings and archives.