Miwok Erotic

Miwok is less one people than a set of related ones, and the name is their own word for person. Their country was a broad wedge of what is now Northern California: Coast Miwok on the Marin peninsula and into southern Sonoma, Lake Miwok near Clear Lake, Bay Miwok east of the hills toward the Delta, and the Plains and Sierra Miwok running from the Sacramento and San Joaquin floodplain up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada into oak and pine country. They spoke closely related but separate languages of the Miwokan branch of Utian, a family they share with no one but the Ohlone to the south. Everyone else on their borders, Pomo, Patwin, Maidu, Yokuts, Washoe, spoke something unrelated.

The staple was the acorn, black oak acorns above all, pounded in bedrock mortars, leached of tannin in sand basins, cooked into mush or bread. The mortar holes are still there. At Chaw'se in Amador County more than a thousand of them are worn into a single limestone outcrop, beside a rebuilt roundhouse where a Big Time is still held each fall. The roundhouse is the center of ceremonial life, historically the home of the Kuksu tradition of masked dancers and initiation that the Miwok shared with several neighboring peoples. Sierra Miwok society was also cut into two halves, land and water, and you married into the opposite one. Personal names carried the mark of your side, usually a reference to an animal or plant that belonged to it.

Contact arrived in two waves and both went badly. Coastal groups were pulled into the Spanish missions at San Rafael and Sonoma. The interior held out longer, until 1849 dropped the gold rush directly onto the Sierra Miwok homeland, which was the Mother Lode. The Mariposa Battalion's 1851 campaign against Tenaya's band ended with armed men riding into Yosemite Valley. Eighteen treaties signed with California tribes in 1851 and 1852 promised reserved land in exchange for the rest; the Senate declined to ratify them and kept them sealed for half a century.

Recovery has been as much legal as cultural. Federal termination in the 1950s stripped several rancherias of their status, litigation in the 1980s restored many of them, and Congress restored Graton Rancheria in 2000. Roughly ten federally recognized tribes now carry Miwok, Me-Wuk or Miwuk in their names, several of them funding language work out of casino revenue, on languages with very few fluent speakers left.