Native Americans at Mission San Jose (Ballena Press Anthropological Papers)

With this volume, Randall Milliken the author of A Time of Little Choice (1997) and Inigo of Rancho Posolmi (1999) once again contributes an important and authoritative new work to the growing body of literature on the various Native American groups who were living in the area around San Francisco Bay when the Spanish first arrived in the early 1770s. Milliken identifies each of the small cultural entities whose members were eventually drawn to Mission San Jose during its period of active recruitment, discusses the myriad historical and social pressures that caused the indigenous population to join the mission system in the absence of coercive military force, and describes in detail the tumultuous events experienced by the native peoples living at that specific mission. Although it has been long thought that the native peoples who once lived in the Bay area vanished too early in time for anthropologists to adequately study and describe their lifeways, the efforts of Randall Milliken and other scholars are beginning to illuminate this forgotten chapter of California history in surprising detail, as this book conclusively demonstrates.