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""Abalone Tales" is a fine example of collaborative ethnography. It adds immeasurably to ongoing conversations among anthropologists and other social scientists about the still-emergent possibilities for producing dialogic, collaborative, and ethically responsible ethnographies."--Luke Eric Lassiter, Marshall University Graduate College

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Abalone Tales

Duke University Press

Contents

ABOUT THE SERIES.....................................................................................................................viiACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Why Abalone? The Making of a Collaborative Research Project.............................................................11 The Old Abalone Necklaces and the Possibility of a Muwekma Ohlone Cultural Patrimony...............................................192 Abalone Woman Attends the Wiyot Reawakening........................................................................................503 Florence Silva and the Legacy of John Boston: Responsibility at the Intersection of Friendship and Ethnography.....................624 Reflections on the Iridescent One..................................................................................................845 Cultural Revivification in the Hoopa Valley........................................................................................1096 Extinction Narratives and Pristine Moments: Evaluating the Decline of Abalone......................................................137CONCLUSION Horizons of Collaborative Research........................................................................................161NOTES................................................................................................................................73REFERENCES...........................................................................................................................179INDEX................................................................................................................................193

Chapter One

In this chapter, I discuss the identity of the Muwekma Ohlone, an unrecognized tribe, from the perspective of the erasure of the tribe's cultural patrimony. I begin the chapter by elaborating two events that permit me to unfold current conditions among the Muwekma and the kind of work I have done with them. First, I describe an Abalone Feast that took place in 2000, the first of its kind in decades, which created an opportunity to consider the Ohlone relationship with abalone. Next, I describe an archaeological excavation that took place in 1992, in which many abalone artifacts were uncovered, stimulating my involvement and interest in the importance of such artifacts in Ohlone cultural history and identity. This leads to the heart of the chapter, an extensive discussion of several nineteenth-century abalone necklaces I went to European museums to inspect and an analysis of how to understand the putative relationship between these artifacts and Ohlone cultural history. I then explore the conceptual limits bounding any discussion of such artifacts, using materials from research elsewhere in California. The argument guiding these explorations is that research about Ohlone cultural patrimony-indeed, about Ohlone identity-hinges on the reestablishment of Ohlone sovereignty. This is significant because the process of achieving federal recognition actually assumes the reverse.

An Ohlone Abalone Feast

Alfred Kroeber, central figure in the establishment of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the anthropologist whose life intertwined so deeply and importantly with the life of the man called Ishi, published the Handbook of the Indians of California in 1925. This massive and encyclopedic summation of California Indian societies and cultures casts a long, long shadow over the identities of tribes and individuals in this state's Indian country. There are no Indian people for whom this is more true than the peoples Kroeber declared extinct in the tome. In addition to suffering the onus of an anthropological extinction sentence, such peoples have also suffered from official erasure, since none of them were accorded federal or state recognition. Between the work of anthropologists and the machinery of the state, California's unrecognized tribes have endured many decades of collective social and cultural invisibility. Among the peoples declared extinct by Kroeber and lacking federal acknowledgment are the Ohlonean-speaking peoples. The contemporary reorganized tribal entity of these peoples is called the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe are members of multiple lineages whose ancestors inhabited the five county region on the San Francisco peninsula and the South and East Bay, as well as interior regions around modern-day Stockton and farther inland. Most of these ancestors spoke mutually unintelligible languages in the Ohlonean sub-family of the Penutian family, although the inland ancestors also spoke Yokutsan and Miwokan languages. The ancestral peoples were all incorporated into the mission-presidio system instituted by the Spanish Empire in the late 1700s, a system that maintained control over the area until Mexican independence in 1821. That system incarcerated Native peoples in barracks-style living, instituted massive changes in diet and daily life, and initiated ecological transformations in floral and faunal communities across the landscape. The result for missionized Native peoples like the ancestors of the Muwekma Ohlone was a demographic collapse and profound hemorrhaging of their cultural, linguistic, social, and economic structures and systems. That hemorrhaging is also evident in the dearth of surviving material culture and knowledge about daily lifeways, including, diet among Ohlonean-speaking peoples during the initial contact period and in the decades immediately following missionization.

The older people among the Muwekma remember eating abalone until the 1970s, and so do older members of the of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation, the contemporary reorganized entity of the Esselen-speaking people of the Monterey region, another Native people declared extinct by Kroeber. Rudy Rosales, Esselen chair during the late 1990s, on several occasions reminisced with me about eating abalone. "When there was nothing in the house, Mama would tell us to go down to the pier [at Pacific Grove] and get some abalone." Rudy and his brother would use crowbars to pry the abalone o the big wood pylons of the pier. There was no need to get nostalgic about it, he told me. "It was poor people's food, not some delicacy like now." But Rudy did miss eating abalone: It was a taste from childhood.

I asked Rosemary Cambra, the Muwekma chair, whether the tribe would want to have an Abalone Feast. She was in favor and arranged to hold such a feast at the completion of the third of three leadership-training seminars the tribe was holding at Alameda in the East Bay. As part of their efforts to become a federally recognized tribe-a Herculean and tremendously expensive process that had already been going on for two decades-the tribal council had been holding events to bring about increased interaction among the members and especially between the elders and the younger generations. The leadership seminars...