Pre-European Era
For nearly 8,000 years, the area currently known as Orange County was inhabited by a tribe known as the Kizh. They were a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe who lived on an area of nearly 4,000 acres. They lived sustainably off the native plant and animal life. The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits holds a 7,000 year old skeleton of a Kizh woman.
The Kizh had a rich language, culture, social structure,
and religion, involving song, dance, poetry, and handicrafts. Their religious beliefs viewed humanity not
as “the focus of creation” but rather a part in a larger web of life. The primary religious responsibility of people
was to act as caregivers of the earth.
Mission Era
Beginning in the 1700s, the Spanish Government began to
establish “Missions” in Kizh territory.
Mission San Gabriel was built in 1771.
Spanish soldiers and padres began calling the Kizh “Gabrielenos”
because of their proximity to the Mission.
Many Kizh were forced to abandon a way of life they had
practiced for millennia, into the Missions, where they were “converted” to
Christianity and compelled to work and live.
Native American scholar Edward D. Castillo writes, “Despite romantic
portraits of California missions they were essentially coersive labor camps
organized primarily to benefit the colonizers.”
Because of diseases and conflict with the Spanish colonizers, about
100,000 or nearly a third of the total Native American population of California
died as a direct result of the California missions.
Mexican Era
In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain, and
California became a Mexican territory.
In 1834, Governor Jose Figueroa issued an “Emancipation Proclamation”
which freed California Indians (including the Kizh) from the missions. Rather than returning the land to its native
inhabitants, however, the vast majority of mission lands were deeded to a few
wealthy and powerful California families.
Because of disease and the breakdown of traditional tribal
structures, many Kizh were compelled to work on these “ranchos” to
survive. Scholar Roseanne Welch compares
the post-mission rancho system to the post-Civil War sharecropping lien system
in the former Confederate states, which “kept the workers tied to their bosses,
in this case the ranch owners.”
On the eve of the American conquest of California, the
native American population of the region had declined by 50 percent.
United States Era
In 1848, after the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of
Guadelupe Hidalgo gave the United States ownership of California. In the early 1850s, U.S. Government Treaty
Commissioners appointed by President Fillmore signed what became known as the 18
“lost treaties” which set aside 8.5 million acres in California for Native
Americans, including the Kizh.
Unfortunately, because much of the land was thought to
contain gold, the U.S. Congress chose to not ratify the treaties and instead
place an injunction of secrecy on the documents, which disappeared from public
knowledge until 1905, when they were discovered in the Senate Archives.
The United States tried various programs to solve the “Indian
problem” including officially terminating 38 tribes in California in the 1950s
and 1960s. It was not until 1994 that
the Kizh achieved official California statewide recognition. Today, the Kizh tribe is still struggling
to revive their culture, which was almost completely decimated by 200 years of
colonization. To this day, the Kizh have yet to achieve federal recognition, which would give them benefits in
education and health care.
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| Painting by artist L.Frank |
