In The Ohlone Way, Malcolm Margolin describes in detail how 10-26,000 hunter-gatherers were residing in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay areas as far east as Mount Diablo for between 10 and 4,000 years without mass warfare, famine or major disease in extreme intimate knowledge and reciprocity with each other and massively bountiful natural resources right here. Want ecology? They knew how. Want “oneness with spiritual practice?” They did it. ALL THE TIME.
Were they “happy,” dancing and singing “to restore order and balance...repair the world?” A lot happier than we seem to be, and more often. Dancing “themselves toward the profound understanding of the universe that only a people can feel who have transcended the ordinary human condition and who find themselves moving in total synchronization with everything around them” (p. 153) (without the use of drugs or alcohol.) I’d say generally less “stressed out!”
Each chapter is a wonder to behold, reminiscent of our childhood biology of perception and a healing balm for heartsick humans lost in the wreckage of what Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons calls “crashing ecosystems,” what Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke calls “the collapse of capitalism.” “Power was everywhere, in everything, and therefore every act was religious.” (Margolin, p. 143)
That is, until “The Last Two Centuries” after “contact,” when Europeans completely obliterated populations of Native Ohlones; annihilated their holistic oral and practical traditions, profound belief, cultural heritage and clan systems with them; transforming a land filled with grasses, trees, wildlife, sea and avian creatures; more than decimating hundreds of square miles of “life on Earth” between the 1769 arrival of Spanish missionaries and the mostly Anglo Gold Rush 1848-55.
Missionaries brought disease, enslavement, internment and starvation; causing deaths of more than 80% of the natives in the first 50 years. Miners, cattlemen, bounty hunters and settlers wrought genocide and invasion; rape and pillage of a fecund landscape; brutally eclipsing almost every shred of Native balance with their natural surroundings, as well as the natives themselves.
When the Gold Rush happened, the governor put bounties on the heads of all “savages” in California such that all were massacred and murdered or assimilated except "Ishi," the last Yahi, who came out of hiding in 1911 and died of tuberculosis in 1916 under UC-Berkeley’s anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and UCSF's "protection."
“By 1852 the Ohlone population had shrunk to about 864–1,000, and was continuing to decline.” (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, “Ohlone”)
The past several years’ one-two punch of facing up to American/ Western greed, racism, genocide and slavery; with a poisonous ooze of systemic, misogynistic, anti-elder, anti-child patriarchy and environmental degradation gumming up thour authenticity as a species has been a rough wake-up call. Ooof. We are BAD. BAD for each other, and BAD for the Mother Earth.
I asked Creator to bring another flood and have Coyote start humans all over again with nothing but advice from Eagle and Hummingbird, or maybe have a Miiwok turtle go down and get something like muskrat’s paw full of mud and make Mother Earth come back again. I don’t care who does it, just make it right.
