Editor’s note: Originally published in The Madera Tribune on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2006.
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The North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians has proposed a large casino north of the City of Madera on state Route 99. The tribe has worked with the county to develop a comprehensive memorandum of understanding to mitigate any impact the casino may cause. Tribal officials feel they have identified an environmentally and economically viable location within their historic lands.
To prove the tribe’s history in Madera, the Tribal Council of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians has been working for nearly two years to put together the ethnohistory of the tribe.
This has not been an easy task. Records have been lost, details are complex and span from aboriginal times to today. There were no clear-cut boundaries for tribes and the Western Mono people crossed over lands used by the Yokut and other tribal affiliations.
When the Spanish arrived in California, kidnapping and fatal diseases decimated many tribes. Making definite statements of “aboriginal territory” is difficult. Modern concepts of land ownership did not apply to California’s natives so the term “use and occupancy” is more accurately reflected by their relationship to the land and each other.
We will present a summary of the findings of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians in a five-part series. These are excerpts from those findings.
Establishing Madera link
The link between the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians and Madera County has a long history.
When the first explorers and traders arrived in the early 1800s, they found Native groups that interacted with one another, traded, hunted, enjoyed sharing ceremonies and even intermarried. The tribal historical study shows that even similarities in language could make it difficult to discern differences in the local tribes.
Most of the relationships between tribal ancestors and settlers in Madera County were typically friendly. The Tribe appears to have tried to adapt to change. That interaction continued when the tribe lived on a reservation operated by the federal government near the present-day city of Madera during the 1850s. When the government broke up the reservation, tribal ancestors continued to work with settlers on their ranches and farms throughout the Madera area and up into the foothills.
Determining boundaries
Determining tribal boundaries is difficult, according to the report, use and occupancy of land only reflects the relationship indigenous peoples had with the land. California’s natives did not look at land ownership in the same manner that we do today.
Despite their ability to adapt to a wide range of situations, the indigenous peoples of California lost nearly 75 percent of their population after California was discovered by the Spaniards.
Warfare, massacre, forced conversion, starvation and exposure took a tremendous toll, but the epidemics of the 1830s were most devastating.
American and French Canadian trappers ventured into the Valley to hunt and trap along the rivers. One man, Ewing Young, explored the Valley from Sacramento to the Tejon Pass. He first visited the area in 1832 but on his return in 1833, what he saw was complete devastation of the Indian population.
Ewing wrote:
“On our return, late in the summer of 1833, we found the Valley depopulated. From the head of the Sacramento, to the great bend and slough of the San Joaquin (near Madera), we did not see more than six or eight live Indians, while large numbers of their skulls and dead bodies were to be seen under almost every shade tree, near water, where the uninhabited and deserted villages had been converted into graveyards; and on the San Joaquin River, in the immediate neighborhood of a larger class of villages, we found not only many graves, but the vestiges of a funeral pyre.”
Some Indians who had been kidnapped to use as a labor force on coastal missions, escaped only to learn their communities had been wiped out by disease. Many of these went into the mountains and took up residence with groups other than their own.
Tribes throughout the area worked, hunted, and celebrated together, and even intermarried.
All of these events make it difficult to establish boundaries, but they also show connection to lands throughout Madera County for the North Fork Mono and all tribes in the area.
Mono ancestors traveled
Nutrition was a driving force of the North Fork Mono, according to findings in the historical study.
The weather conditions of the San Joaquin Valley were different from what we find today. The Valley was prone to severe heat, drought and flooding in the winters. It was not very welcoming to full-time inhabitants. But, the Valley was an important food source. The Valley was home to large game such as elk and antelope. Fishing was excellent in the Valley, especially when salmon were running.
The weather conditions were more hospitable in the foothills, making it a better location for permanent residence. Besides better weather conditions, the foothills also provided acorns from Black Oak trees. The acorns from Black Oak made better flour than those from oak trees found closer to the Valley and that flour was a staple for the North Fork Mono.
The North Fork Mono were not the only tribe to use the Valley floor for hunting and fishing, the Yokut and Miwok also traveled from the foothills to hunt and gather in the Valley. tribes would gather to hunt and fish, and the North Fork Mono were at the center of a migratory circuit shared by tribes and the center of ceremonial and social life. The travels from foothills to Valley allowed tribes to hunt and gather a variety of foodstuffs during different seasons.
This use of the land near what is now Madera extended from before the first Spanish settlers to modern times.
When the federal government established an Indian reservation in the 1850s, near what is now the City of Madera, the Monos evolved into farmers. What’s interesting is the Tribe’s name, the North Fork Mono Indians or the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians. According to the Tribe’s studies, the name was a result of their ancestors staying around the town of North Fork because of the non-native encroachment of their historical lands.
In 1916, records show, the federal government purchased 80 acres outside the community of North Fork. The purchase was made to provide a camping area for family members to stay when they visited their children attending the Presbyterian mission boarding school near North Fork.