Salinan
Encyclopedia
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
lived in what is now the Central Coast of California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, in the Salinas Valley
Salinas Valley
The Salinas Valley lies south of San Francisco, California.The word "salina" is spanish for salt marsh, salt lake or salt pan.-Geography:The Salinas Valley runs approximately south-east from Salinas towards King City. The valley lends its name to the geologic province in which it's located, the...
. Said to have gone extinct by the Census of 1930, the Salinan Native Americans survived and are now in the process of applying for tribal recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Bureau of Indian Affairs
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency of the federal government of the United States within the US Department of the Interior. It is responsible for the administration and management of of land held in trust by the United States for Native Americans in the United States, Native American...
.
There were two major divisions, the San Miguel in the south, on the upper course of the Salinas River
Salinas River (California)
The Salinas River is the largest river of the central coast of California, running and draining 4,160 square miles. It flows north-northwest and drains the Salinas Valley that slices through the Coast Range south from Monterey Bay...
(which flows south to north), and the San Antonio in the north, in the lower part of the Salinas Basin, corresponding to the two missions
Spanish missions in California
The Spanish missions in California comprise a series of religious and military outposts established by Spanish Catholics of the Franciscan Order between 1769 and 1823 to spread the Christian faith among the local Native Americans. The missions represented the first major effort by Europeans to...
in the Salinas Valley (Mission San Antonio de Padua
Mission San Antonio de Padua
Mission San Antonio de Padua was founded on July 14, 1771, the third mission founded in Alta California by Father Presidente Junípero Serra, and site of the first Christian marriage and first use of fired-tile roofing in Upper California.-History:...
and Mission San Miguel Arcángel
Mission San Miguel Arcángel
Mission San Miguel Arcángel was founded on July 25, 1797 by the Franciscan order, on a site chosen specifically due to the large number of Salinan Indians that inhabited the area, whom the Spanish priests wanted to evangelize. It is located at 775 Mission Street, San Miguel, in San Luis Obispo...
). There were also a Playano group which lived on the Pacific Coast
Pacific Coast
A country's Pacific coast is the part of its coast bordering the Pacific Ocean.-The Americas:Countries on the western side of the Americas have a Pacific coast as their western border.* Geography of Canada* Geography of Chile* Geography of Colombia...
in the vicinity of what is now San Simeon
San Simeon, California
San Simeon is a census-designated place on the Pacific coast of San Luis Obispo County, California. Its position along State Route 1 is approximately halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, each of those cities being roughly 230 mi away...
and Lucia
Lucia, California
Lucia is an unincorporated community in Monterey County, California. It is located east of Lopez Point, at an elevation of 354 feet . Lucia is one of the three small settlements of restaurants, and motels located along State Route 1 on the Big Sur coast...
. The Salinans lived by hunting and gathering
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
and were organized in small groups with little centralized political structure.
Etymology
The Salinan people were named after the Salinas River by Robert LathamRobert Gordon Latham
Robert Gordon Latham FRS was an ethnologist and philologist.Born at Billingborough, Lincolnshire, Latham studied philology in Scandinavia. He graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 1833, becoming a Fellow of King's...
(1856) and John Powell
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell was a U.S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions...
(1891). The people's own name for themselves was never recorded. C. Hart Merriam called these people the En-'ne-sen on advice from one informant
Informant (linguistics)
An informant or consultant in linguistics is a native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant's role is that of a senior interpreter, who demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may...
; En-'ne-sen was the native word for the Salinan headquarters.
Language
The Salinan languageSalinan language
Salinan was the indigenous language of the Salinan people of the central coast of California. It has been extinct since the death of the last speaker in 1958....
, spoken until the 1950s is a language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
. It may be a part of the hypothetical Hokan
Hokan languages
The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California, Arizona and Mexico. In nearly a century since Edward Sapir first proposed the "Hokan" hypothesis, little additional evidence has been found that these families were related to each other...
stock. Sapir included it in a subfamily of Hokan, along with Chumash
Chumashan languages
Chumashan is a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people.From the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu), neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and canyons east to bordering the San Joaquin Valley; and on...
and Seri
Seri language
Seri is a language isolate spoken by the Seri people by between 716 and 900 people in two villages on the coast of Sonora, Mexico.-Classification:...
; this classification has found its way into more recent encyclopedias and presentations of language families, but serious supporting evidence has never been presented.
Population
Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. Alfred L. KroeberAlfred L. Kroeber
Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American anthropologist. He was the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through...
put the 1770 population of the Salinan as 3,000. Sherburne F. Cook
Sherburne F. Cook
Sherburne Friend Cook was a physiologist by training, and served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley...
similarly estimated that there were at least 3,000 Salinans.
See also
- Salinan traditional narrativesSalinan traditional narrativesSalinan traditional narratives include myths, legends, tales, and oral histories preserved by the Salinan people of the central California coast.Salinan oral literature, as documented primarily by J...
- Kuksu (religion)Kuksu (religion)Kuksu, also called the Kuksu Cult, was a shamanistic religion in Northern California practiced in different degrees by many Native American people before and during contact with the arriving European settlers...
- Painted Rock (San Luis Obispo County)
- ChalonChalonThe Chalon are one of eight divisions of the Ohlone people of Native Americans who lived in Northern California. Chalon is also the name of their spoken language, listed as one of the Ohlone languages of the Utian family...
- USS Salinan (ATF-161)USS Salinan (ATF-161)USS Salinan was an built for the United States Navy during World War II. Named after the Salinan peoples , she was the only U.S...