The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region (Ballena Press Anthropological Papers)

This book remedies a long-standing wrong the neglect of the Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area in the published anthropological literature, and especially the all-too-common statement in that literature to the effect that the Ohlone (or Costanoans) have long been extinct. Here we have the living descendants of the people found here by the Spanish missionaries and explorers in the 1770s telling us how very much present they are in the 1990s, and what has been happening to them and their families through the two hundred and twenty some years since Fages and Crespi led their party up through the Santa Clara Valley to what are now Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The book begins with an account of that Fages/Crespi trip, with a map to show just where each encounter of Spaniards and Native Americans took place. Following that, archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, and Native Americans present papers bearing on the prehistory, culture, history, and present situation of the Ohlones of the San Francisco Bay region. Most of these papers were presented at the Ohlone Conference at California State University, Hayward in 1992.