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Hello! I just wanted to see if there are any other Eastern Siouan people who might also currently live in Northern California? I currently live in Mokelumne Hill, CA. It is located in Calaveras county and was a old Gold Rush town. I decend from the Evans and Collins line. My family carried the “Blackfoot” identity. It would great to find other Native people here from the same background. I think we all need to start coming together as a people, even though some of us are miles away from our ancestrial home lands.
DStrait;36862 wrote: Hello! I just wanted to see if there are any other Eastern Siouan people who might also currently live in Northern California? I currently live in Mokelumne Hill, CA. It is located in Calaveras county and was a old Gold Rush town. I decend from the Evans and Collins line. My family carried the “Blackfoot” identity. It would great to find other Native people here from the same background. I think we all need to start coming together as a people, even though some of us are miles away from our ancestrial home lands.
How close are you to Kensington, near Cal Berkeley? My cousins are there and are very interested in our family blackfoot research. Maybe you guys could hook up at a local pow wow.
Syd, I live about 2 1/2 hours away from Kensington. I even think there is a Pow Wow at UC Davis either this month or next. That would be a half way point for all of us. I will get my phone number to you and your Cousins could call me. It is looking like there are more and more Blackfoot Saponi in CA!
Interesting…I have Saponi out of VA and NC, but my Nisenan is from the area between Folsom Lake and Mokelumne Hill. Theres an old Indian graveyard there.
I’m going to Bear Dance next week out of Susanville…its open to the public. People from many tribes attend, and we usually sit around at night sharing songs. I’ve attempted to belt out a few Saponi ones…if anything my singing keeps the real bears away!
Hi Spilleddi! Thank you for responding! I know that area well. Do you also live here in NO CA? My Saponi family too descends from the VA/NC area. I am just trying to find other Saponi who might live out here. We are scattered all over the place! I have never been to the Susanville POW WOW, but am trying to attend some others in NO CA. I would like to talk to you further if that would be OK?
DStrait;36862 wrote: Hello! I just wanted to see if there are any other Eastern Siouan people who might also currently live in Northern California? I currently live in Mokelumne Hill, CA. It is located in Calaveras county and was a old Gold Rush town. I decend from the Evans and Collins line. My family carried the “Blackfoot” identity. It would great to find other Native people here from the same background. I think we all need to start coming together as a people, even though some of us are miles away from our ancestrial home lands.
Hello, I noticed the words Gold Rush and had to share what I found out. If you log into the Deer Clan Cherokee info site they have an article that shows cool stuff. The Gold Rush drew alot of mixed blood Indian/other race people to the West in search for getting rich. My people ran out of money and food in the Missouri/Arkansas regions and settled on what was then the Louisiana Purchase lands. These were peoples that had claimed to be white to escape the great roundup to oklahoma. The whole beauty of this was that they still settled on the area they were trying to avoid, with a few of them actually making it to California. These were called the Deer Clan.
Hi! Thank you for the information. I forgot about the mass explosion of different people who came to the Gold Rush. There were so many different ethnic groups who came here and settled. The thought of other Indians coming here never occurred to me. Many of the non-white miners, which actually included the Irish, were treated very bad. My family didn’t come to CA until the 1950’s and that was from Ohio.
From the first mixing at contact along the VA/NC coast, mixed bloods, former slaves and former indentured servants were at the forefront of migration to lands that were being opened up for settlement….. many times arriving well before the official opening of an area. All of my mother’s lines migrated from the coast of VA to what would become Granville Co,NC 60 years before Lord Granville would start handing out land grants in the area…. indeed, before Lord Granville was born! The reason is obvious…. the colonial laws were not just to FPCs so they sought the freedom of the wilderness.
This migration continued for 4 or 5 generations. Not wanting to subdivide their landholding to miniscule amounts among maybe 12 children, many of the children had to go elsewhere when they came of age and married. Many times the family farm would go to the youngest child while all his older brothers and sisters have migrated to the next frontier.
This is true in my family as well. My maternal grandfather’s line was in Westmoreland County PA twenty years before it was a county. They were then in the Northwest Territory in the 1790s twenty years before it became the state of Indiana. A state whose name means ‘land of the Indians’. Unjust government was and is a problem. In the 1940s this branch of my family was kicked off their land to build Camp Atterbury near Edinburgh IN.
Another reason for my family moving was to stay close to the earth. The wilderness will ‘talk’ to you and teach you if you remain quiet and listen long enough. This belief seems to be the main thing that drew my Quaker and Blackfoot lines together. So much so that there is no distinguishing between what came from which side. Or maybe mixed is just it’s own thing different than both original cultures.
The trend continued when my mother moved to Ontario. We moved to a dead-end dirt road on a 26-acre lot bordering a wilderness area. That was in the 1970s, now there are more houses and the wilderness area has become a provincial park. I left there and went to CA and later NM where I met my partner. Once you learn your history you can see how you are ‘re-living’ it. The expression ‘those who don’t learn their history are doomed to repeat it’ is very true.
My mother’s tribal families were dispersed by the building of Camp Butner in 1941. Part of the land was returned after the war but much of it became the city of Butner and the surrounding National Guard lands and several prisons and mental institutions. My grandfather’s farm was 600 acres. After the war, we got back 300 acres but had to accept another 300 acres about 3 miles away from the original property. In addition, my great grandparents are buried at their farm which is now an artillery range. The graves are lost.
Many of our “tribe” were offered monetary settlement instead of land thus assuring the dispersal of the tribal community.
Jog de log DStrait! My apologies for a late response…June/July is such a busy time of year, I’m out of internet range for extended periods.
I’m in Pendleton Oregon, the Susanville area event was a Mt Maidu bear dance, not a powwow. Powwows aren’t generally embraced by Ca Indians. Google the Honey Lake Maidu for a description of the event at Roxie Peconum campground. Always held the 2nd full weekend of June. I’ll be back in No Ca for Nisenan heritage day, Grass Valley on Sept 6th. The public is welcome to this event and I would be glad to meet you there. Feel free to message me offline.
I have Saponi, Powhatan, Lumbee, Creek, Cherokee, Delaware…the list goes on. But my maternal grandfather from Atlanta Ga, his grandfather lived in Cherokee NC, spoke Cherokee, and we thought he was Cherokee and black, although I kept hearing strange stories of him being Mexican or from the South Pacific. Turns out he was Nisenan Maidu and Hawaiian from California. My Hawaiian ancestors traveled to Ca in 1838 when it was still Mexico, married Nisenan women from Salmon Falls, now under Folsom Lake…the Salmon Falls peoples were displaced to Mokelumne Hill, were they eventually died out, leaving nothing but a graveyard and 3 known surviving mixed blood lineages, my own small family included. My Nisenan/Hawaiian ancestor was stolen as a child…most stolen children are lost to history, it’s extremely rare to find living descendants of stolen native Ca children today.
When the gold rush occurred, the Nisenan went from living as they had for 10,000 years one year to their entire territory covered with foreigners the next…with no way to find food, they were force to steal to survive and were shot on site, families disintegrated and children were no longer born. The genocide was almost complete, there are very few Nisenan descendants today and no full bloods left.
Gold rush…yes, Indians came to Ca from all over during the gold rush, including Cherokee, hence the town of Cherokee above Oroville Ca. But Indians were considered vermin during the gold rush, the genocide was so bad that Federal troops were brought in to protect NDNs from the populace. Orphans (children whose parents were murdered by slavers), were taken as slaves and sold to miners and others as servants…my own Nisenan/Hawaiian ancestor was a stolen child, taken by miners and eventually brought back to their home in North Carolina, where he grew up to enjoy a short life of crime..that legacy of abuse and criminal activity lives with that portion my lineage today, and only now are we starting to heal from that trauma.
Cherokee and Indians from other tribes who couldn’t “pass” as white joined native California communities, usually the only place they could exist was under the protection of a white owned ranch as workers…Bidwell Rand not only had local Maidu NDN’s, but NDNs from all over, as well as white, Hawaiian, and blacks who married in. A “white man” by the name of Calvin Nuckells married in. Nuckells is a name that is associated with Saponi ancestry in certain parts of Va and Ohio. The descendants of the Bidwell Ranch NDNs are known as the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria.
Now it is me late to reply! I would be interested in attending the Nisenan Heritage Day in September. I will contact you offline regarding that. When you said the Nisenan Maidu were in the Mokelumne Hill area, were they ever around the old Lombardi Ranch, which was just south of the town. I remember reading in a local history book, that many local NDNs buried their dead on the Lombardi Ranch. In later years, the old ranch was sold by their heirs and was subdivided. I own one of those parcels and live there. Was this the old NDN graveyard you were talking about? Or was there another one in the area? I have always felt spiritually connected to this land some how.
I have a lot of other questions, but won’t bother you with them at this time! So I will like I said contact you off line. Thank you and you have a wonderful day!
Dale
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