Before Europeans arrived, a third of Native Americans in today's US lived in California
Mild weather and abundant food once made California the most densely populated Native region north of Mexico, home to perhaps a third of all Native Americans in what is now the United States. They managed the land with deliberate, low-intensity fire, knowledge the state is now turning to again as it battles wildfires.
People have lived in California for at least 19,000 years. Sites such as Borax Lake and the Channel Islands show settlement between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, and the Arlington Springs Man, found on the Channel Islands, is about 10,000 years old. Shellfish from kelp forests turn up in island caves of similar age. Early Californians hunted and gathered, with seed collecting spreading around 9,000 BCE; southern traditions such as the La Jolla and Pauma complexes followed, regional variety grew from about 3000 BCE, and the traits of historic tribes had emerged by roughly 500 BCE.
Before contact there were around 500 distinct groups, each with between 50 and 500 members. Many practised forest gardening across woodland, grassland and wetland. By regularly burning underbrush they kept fires small, renewed patches of land, and produced fresh shoots that drew game, a rotating system of cultivation that looked wild to outsiders.
Contact came unevenly. Southern and central coastal peoples met European explorers in the mid-16th century; the Quechan met Spanish expeditions in the 1760s and 1770s; northwestern coastal tribes encountered Russian seafarers late in the 18th century; and some interior groups saw no outsiders until the mid-1800s. Spanish Franciscan missions brought enormous loss of life and the suppression of Native cultures. After statehood, a state-backed campaign of elimination, now called the California genocide, drove numbers to their lowest point in the early 20th century, while boarding schools pushed children to assimilate.
Tribal homelands never matched state lines neatly: the Kumeyaay nation straddles the border with Mexico, and some eastern and northern peoples are grouped with the Great Basin or Plateau. Today California has 109 federally recognised tribes, with more than forty other groups seeking recognition, and the 2020 census counted more Native Americans there than in any other state. Language revival efforts and the Land Back movement have gathered momentum this century.
Source: Indigenous peoples of California
