Ohlone

The Ohlone, formerly called Costanoans (coast dwellers), are the Native people of the northern California coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. They never saw themselves as one nation: more than fifty distinct landholding groups spoke related Utian languages and lived by hunting, fishing and gathering in the classic California pattern, trading freely among villages. Acorn mush, salmon, shellfish, basketry and the Kuksu religion, with its big-headed ceremonial dancers, ordered their year. Before the Gold Rush their country was among the most densely populated lands north of Mexico. Spanish missions from the late 18th century drew the Ohlone into forced labour and epidemic death, collapsing the village world within two generations; Mexican ranchos and American settlement finished the dispossession. Ohlone descendants, federally unrecognised but culturally resurgent, are rematriating shellmounds, reviving Chochenyo and Mutsun languages, and defending sacred sites across the Bay Area today, where their ancestors once lived in more than fifty interacting groups.