By Dixie Reid - Bee Staff Writer

The idea was for them to tell their stories, prompted only by the personal photographs they themselves chose.

Those oral histories and prized images became the heart of “First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians” by L. Frank and Kim Hogeland (Heyday Books, 288 pages, $23.95).

“First Families” becomes a scrapbook, and more, of California’s native people. The extensive text details the history of 73 language groups (as tribes are distinguished from one another), from the Shasta and Modoc people at the Oregon border to the Kumeyaay and Quechan, also known as Yuma, alongside Mexico. The Sacramento Valley is the historic home of the Wintu, Nomlaki and Patwin.

The book tells how the Indians were pushed off their ancestral land and sent to live in rancherias established by the U.S. government, how California’s governor in 1852 called for their extermination (labeling them “a source of much annoyance”) and how Indian children were enslaved during the Gold Rush. And there are the stories of skilled basketmakers and the importance of acorns. And how some Indians married the Hawaiian workers John Sutter brought to California — and how, at one time, a “good wife” was thought to be one who could tote two railroad ties.

Among the 320 black-and-white photographs in the book are dozens of classic images from museum collections, but it’s the family photos that illustrate who modern-day Indians are and what is important to them.

Imagine a giggling Zandra Bietz as she turned a page in her family’s album to the snapshot of Elmer Stanley, a Northern Sierra Miwuk who was once considered “the best choke-setter in California’s logging industry.” His face is lined, his hair is white, and he is grinning.

She told Frank, who did the book’s field research, “Women would go, ‘Oh, Elmer is so wonderful. He’s so fabulous.’ And my mom would say, ‘Yeah, you go ahead and bring him home for three days, and I guarantee you’ll bring him back.’ ”

Also in the book is the undated, vintage portrait of Annie Bracisco, a Salinan, wearing a pretty dress and beribboned hat. She would die at the hands of a jealous boyfriend. Sharing the page with her is the studio portrait of Frank McCormack (Salinan), posing in his jaunty hat and a bow tie. He, too, would meet an untimely end, killed while building a road near King City.

“Most of the Bracisco-McCormack generation passed on before their time,” said Debra Utacia Krol, who offered up the two photographs.

The “First Families” undertaking was nothing if not daunting.

“A monster,” says publisher Malcolm Margolin. (The nonprofit Heyday Institute, of which Heyday Books is a part, has for 20 years published the quarterly magazine News From Native California, which is devoted to the indigenous culture.)

The book project got under way in 2002, at the behest of then-State Librarian Kevin Starr, who offered funding if Heyday Books would do the work.

“It’s the kind of thing that any state worth a damn should have an academy of sciences doing, not a small Berkeley publisher,” says Margolin. “This is a cultural treasure.”

Frank and friend Marina Drummer (who wrote the book’s foreword) hit the road five years ago, covering 50,000 miles in six months, in their attempt to speak with someone from each tribe in the state — and to get a look at their photo albums. They returned to Berkeley with dozens of taped interviews and 1,500 photos, some of which date back 100 years.

“These photographs were cherished,” says Frank (Ajachmem/ Tongva), a cultural activist and artist who lives in Santa Rosa. “Maybe they had no food and were indentured out to ranchers, but they had two cameras. Until color film hit, these people were amazing photographers. I don’t think the book shows that enough. You’d have to have a larger book.”

Many of the old photographs were made with Brownie cameras, she says, and those she liked best didn’t always end up in the book.

“It was sometimes grueling,” Frank says, laughing. “I would think, ‘Oh my God, look at that incredible photograph,’ but the ones they selected were the ones they wanted to talk about.”

Hogeland, who has a master’s degree in history from the University of California, Davis, came on board to write “First Families.”

“It became one of the greatest things I’ve been involved in,” she says.

It was her job to, among other things, transcribe the oral histories Frank had collected

Most books about California Indians tend to be academic, so you know about the persecution and the hardships native people faced with the Gold Rush and the mining boom, but to hear someone say, ‘My grandmother would talk about what it was like when white people came and how her mother died,’ it’s very tragic in a way, but this is not just a retinue of tragedies. They’re also saying, ‘Isn’t this a great picture from when I was a kid, when I went to L.A. to work in the big Lockheed plant during the war?’

“(The book) represents a world that is different and the same. Learning which grasses are right for making baskets is a very different world than I grew up in, yet everyone has pictures of kids dressed up as cowboys. Even though it’s a different culture, it’s not so far removed that there aren’t things we share, no matter who we are,” says Hogeland, who lives in Oakland.

The reason the book was done, says Margolin, was to capture the life experiences of people who “get left out of newspapers and are buried in family albums.” It gave some California Indians a chance to express themselves publicly and define their own history.

“They have been subjected to other people’s definitions of themselves for so long,” he says, “and (the Heyday Institute) provides a place where they can express themselves, talk about what they value in a way that means something to them, get away from clichés and racism, and give them the capacity to define their own culture. In family albums is what they want to be remembered for: graduating from high school, riding motorcycles, the family gatherings.

“It’s a sense of history that has evolved. These are not just people in dance regalia but people who have lived life and succeeded in a dominant culture.”

The Bee’s Dixie Reid can be reached at (916) 321-1134 or dreid@sacbee.com.
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee

Posted on October 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Book Review, Culture, History