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Kuksu Religion
Kuksu, was a religion in Northern California practiced by members within several Indigenous peoples of California before and during contact with the arriving European settlers. The religious belief system was held by several tribes in Central California and Northern California, from the Sacramento Valley west to the Pacific Ocean. The practice of Kuksu religion included elaborate narrative ceremonial dances and specific regalia. The men of the tribe practiced rituals to ensure good health, bountiful harvests, hunts, fertility, and good weather. Ceremonies included an annual mourning ceremony, rites of passage, and intervention with the spirit world. A male secret society met in underground dance rooms and danced in disguises at the public dances.Kroeber, Alfred L. ''The Religion of the Indians of California'', 1907. Among the Patwin and Maidu, Hesi developed as a subdivision of Kuksu distinguished by its female participation. Kuksu has been identified archaeologically by th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern California
Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area (anchored by the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland), the Greater Sacramento area (anchored by the state capital Sacramento), the Redding, California, area south of the Cascade Range, and the Metropolitan Fresno area (anchored by the city of Fresno). Northern California also contains redwood forests, along with most of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta (the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range after Mount Rainier in Washington), and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. The 48-county definition is not used for the Northern California Megaregion, one of the 11 megaregions of the United States. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medicine Man
A medicine man or medicine woman is a traditional healer and spiritual leader who serves a community of Indigenous people of the Americas. Individual cultures have their own names, in their respective languages, for spiritual healers and ceremonial leaders in their particular cultures. Cultural context In the ceremonial context of Indigenous North American communities, "medicine" usually refers to ''spiritual'' healing. Medicine men/women should not be confused with those who employ Native American ethnobotany, a practice that is very common in a large number of Native American and First Nations households.Alcoze, Dr Thomas M. Ethnobotany from a Native American Perspective: Restoring Our Relationship with the Earth" in ''Botanic Gardens Conservation International'' Volume 1 Number 19 - December 1999Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry,Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Sustaining Our Lives and the Natural World at ''United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Traditional Narratives (Native California)
The traditional narratives of Native California are the folklore and mythology of the native people of California. For many historic nations of California, there is only a fragmentary record of their traditions. Spanish missions in California from the 18th century Christianized many of these traditions, and the remaining groups were mostly assimilated to US culture by the early 20th century. While there are sparse records from the 18th century, most material was collected during the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Ethnolinguistically, most of the native peoples of California can be categorized into three large groups, Penutian, Hokan and Uto-Aztecan. Of these traditions, one of the best attested and most notable in US mainstream culture is Hopi mythology, the Hopi being a Pueblo people speaking a language of the Uto-Aztecan family. History of studies A few versions of Native California traditional narratives were written down by Franciscan missionaries, notably Jerónimo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Winslow Gifford
Edward Winslow Gifford (August 14, 1887 – May 16, 1959) devoted his life to studying California Indian ethnography as a professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Oakland, California, he became an assistant curator of ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences after graduating from high school; he never attended college. He joined the University of California's Museum of Anthropology in 1912 as an assistant curator. In the 1920s he was sent to Tonga with William C. McKern who was also from the University of California. These two and the botanist was Arthur J. Eames from Harvard University made up one of the four teams of the Bayard Dominick Expedition. Te Rangi Hiroa, Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Barrett
Samuel Alfred Barrett (1879 in Conway, Alaska – 1965) was an anthropologist and linguist who studied Native American peoples. Education Barrett received all three of his degrees from UC Berkeley—B.S. in 1905, M.S. in 1906, and a doctorate in Anthropology, Phonetics, and Ethno-geography 1908. Career Barrett's system of naming the languages of the Pomoan group included seven names based on geographical terms: Northern Pomo, Northeastern Pomo, Southern Pomo, Eastern Pomo, Central Pomo, Southeastern Pomo, and Southwest Pomo (now more commonly referred to as Kashaya). This nomenclature has been criticized for suggesting that the various Pomoan languages are dialects of a single language, when they are in fact mutually unintelligible and therefore distinct languages. Barrett became the director of the Milwaukee Public Museum in Milwaukee. The final major work of his life was to produce a series of films about the peoples of Northern California such as the Pomo The Po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yokuts
The Yokuts (previously known as MariposasPowell, 1891:90–91.) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. ''Yokuts'' is both plural and singular, ''Yokut'', while common, is erroneous. 'Yokut' should only be used when referring specifically to the Tachi Yokut Tribe of Lemoore, CA. Some of their descendants prefer to refer to themselves by their respective tribal names; they reject the term ''Yokuts,'' saying that it is an exonym invented by English-speaking settlers and historians. Conventional sub-groupings include the Foothill Yokuts, Northern Valley Yokuts, and Southern Valley Yokuts.Pritzker, 211 History Another name used to refer to the Yokuts was Mariposans. The word Yokuts itself means people; the Yokuts are a peaceful people. There are many stories, depending on the tribe, on how the yokut and their land came to be but most follow a similar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esselen
The Esselen are a Native American people belonging to a linguistic group in the hypothetical Hokan language family, who are indigenous to the Santa Lucia Mountains of a region south of the Big Sur River in Big Sur, Monterey County, California. Prior to Spanish colonization, they lived seasonally on the coast and inland, surviving off the plentiful seafood during the summer and acorns and wildlife during the rest of the year. During the mission period of California history, Esselen children were baptized by the priests when they left their villages and relocated as family units to live in the missions where they learned reading writing and various trades. The Esselen were required to labor at the three nearby missions, Mission San Carlos, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, and Mission San Antonio de Padua. Like many Native American populations, their members were decimated by starvation, forced labor, over work, torture, and diseases that they had no natural resistance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miwok
The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family. The word ''Miwok'' means ''people'' in the Miwok languages. Subgroups Anthropologists commonly divide the Miwok into four geographically and culturally diverse ethnic subgroups. These distinctions were not used among the Miwok before European contact. *''Plains and Sierra Miwok'': from the western slope and foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta *''Coast Miwok'': from present day location of Marin County and southern Sonoma County (includes the ''Bodega Bay Miwok'' and ''Marin Miwok'') *''Lake Miwok'': from Clear Lake basin of Lake County *''Bay Miwok'': from present-day location of Contra Costa County Federally recognized tribes The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salinan
The Salinan are a Native American tribe whose ancestral territory is in the southern Salinas Valley and the Santa Lucia Range in the Central Coast of California. Today, the Salinan governments are now working toward federal tribal recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There were two major divisions, the ''Miguelino'' in the south, on the upper course of the Salinas River (which flows south to north), and the ''Antoniano'' in the north, in the lower part of the Salinas Basin, corresponding to the two missions in the Salinas Valley (Mission San Antonio de Padua and Mission San Miguel Arcángel). There were also a ''Playano'' group on the Pacific Coast in the vicinity of what is now San Simeon and Lucia. Before European contact, Salinans lived by hunting and gathering and, like most other California tribes, were organized in small groups with little centralized political structure. Etymology The Salinan people were named after the Salinas River(1856) and John Powell (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ohlone
The Ohlone, formerly known as Costanoans (from Spanish meaning 'coast dweller'), are a Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. At that time they spoke a variety of related languages. The Ohlone languages make up a sub-family of the Utian language family. Older proposals place Utian within the Penutian language phylum, while newer proposals group it as Yok-Utian. In pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, and did not view themselves as a single unified group. They lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering, in the typical ethnographic California pattern. The members of these various bands interacted freely with one another. The Ohlone people practiced the Kuksu religion. Prior to the Gold Rush, the northern California region ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmogony
Cosmogony is any model concerning the origin of the cosmos or the universe. Overview Scientific theories In astronomy, cosmogony refers to the study of the origin of particular astrophysical objects or systems, and is most commonly used in reference to the origin of the universe, the Solar System, or the Earth–Moon system. The prevalent cosmological model of the early development of the universe is the Big Bang theory. Sean M. Carroll, who specializes in theoretical cosmology and field theory, explains two competing explanations for the origins of the singularity, which is the center of a space in which a characteristic is limitless. (One example of a singularity is the singularity of a black hole, where gravity becomes infinite.) It is generally accepted that the universe began at a point of singularity. When the singularity of the universe started to expand, the Big Bang occurred, which evidently began the universe. The other explanation, held by proponents such ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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