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19th Century California Indian Population

The transformation of California from an unsettled frontier to a beacon of migration and social organization was in significant part a response to the famous Gold Rush. Hurtado's book is chiefly concerned with how the rapid changes in the social environment of the California frontier in the mid-nineteenth century made a negative impact on a population that had already been made vulnerable owing to the influx, social preferences, and deeply felt prejudices of white settlers. In sheer numbers, the population of indigenous peoples declined drastically. However, in the records of those who survived the wholesale mutation of their life experience can be discerned not only the systematic and often brutal domination of indigenous culture by alien values and power but also the (often pathetic) character of (often ineffectual) coping and adaptation strategies of indigenous peoples. In general, Hurtado describes the manner in which Indians were deprived of cultural identity owing to the incursion of white Americans migrants whose attachment to values of dominant culture, irrespective of idiosyncratic deviations from the norm, was highly uniform and whose character can properly be described as capitalistic, bourgeois, patriarchal, and exploitative. The moral and cultural presumptions implicit in this social configuration are difficult to overstate. But Hurtado makes his points in a more or less personal way, "through the lens of Indian-white relations . . . a meeting ground for competing frontiers[] amid numerous and diverse Indian communities" (Hurtado 13). The focus on relations is decisive, inasmuch as it tends to emphasize the fact that the experience of large-scale demographic change actually took place at an individual human level.

Like Indians elsewhere in North America, those in California underwent what Hurtado essentially describes as a sad and squalid demographic change as a result of the great numbers of white settlers who came to ...

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19th Century California Indian Population. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:50, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711956.html