Examining the Shifting Settlement Geography of California’s Native Peoples

Steven Hackel, University of California, Riverside
Erik Steiner, University of Oregon
Mary Casey, University of California, Riverside

For generations scholars have examined the expansion and collapse of the California missions, but they have almost always done so as isolated units taking each of the 21 missions as a singular entity. This project, “Examining the Shifting Settlement Geography of California’s Native Peoples,” seeks to map and visualize the growth of the California missions by tracking through time and space the movement of Native peoples from villages to missions between 1769 and 1835. This project draws heavily on a data set created by the author that contains information on the baptisms of nearly 90,000 California Natives in the Franciscan missions of California. Over the past several years, we have worked with historians, anthropologists and Native communities to map and geolocate the hundreds of Native villages between San Diego and San Francisco Bay Area. Our project shows for the first time how the colonization of California reshaped the settlement geography of California in dramatic ways over decades using real data on the movements of tens of thousands of Natives.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 136. Global Histories and Data: Building Maps & Linking Data Across Time and Place