I'd like to start this post off by saying that I actually really enjoyed this assignment and I'm pretty sure I will be doing these extra credit assignments every week, because I liked how one thing leads to another and you end up with a lot of cool information. Sorry if I wrote a little too much, but this assignment really sparked my interest. Anyways, let's jump into what I discovered on my "Wikipedia trail"...
Indigenous Peoples of California
I found my initial article by simply searching "Native Americans of California Wikipedia" into google. When going through this article, the first thing that caught my eye was this map, in which I noticed that the Native Americans from Contra Costa County were the Bay Miwok people. I then went through the article and learned some pretty cool things, like that in California there were over 500 different groups, many of these groups had various forms of sophisticated forest gardening techniques, and would even have controlled fires to burn various vegetation to prevent bad wildfires from rising up. I also learned that they would eat many different things, like acorns, corn, fish, deer, elk, and a bunch of different plants. After learning about California Native Americans, I decided to dive deeper by accessing the link to the Miwok specifically.
Miwok
In this article, I learned that there are four different subgroups of the Miwok people (whom all spoke the same language), The Plains and Sierra Miwok, The Coast Miwok, The Lake Miwok, and The Bay Miwok. I learned a lot in this article, but one thing that I found really interesting was the fact that they played an athletic game that was similar to soccer on a 110-yard playing field. The object of the game was to put an elk hide ball through the goalpost. Girls that played were allowed to anything, including kicking the ball and picking it up and running with it, while boys could only use their feet. If a girl did pick up the ball, however, the boy could pick her up and carry her toward his goal. I found this game really interesting, however, after reading this article, I decided to dive a little deeper into the Miwok tribe from Contra Costa County, the Bay Miwok.
Bay Miwok
When it comes to this article, I focused mainly on the section about their mythology. It was not well documented, but C. Hart Merriam published a creation story, The Birth of Wek-Wek and the Creation of Man, which was centered on Mount Diablo. Most people believe that the Bay Miwok shared many motifs of the closely related Coast Miwok and Sierra Miwok. All Miwoks believed in animal and human spirits. Coyote was viewed as their creator god, and believed that the world began at Mount Diablo. I found this really interesting since I have grown up hiking around Mount Diablo a lot. This led me to an article about Mount Diablo.
Mount Diablo
My final article was on Mount Diablo, and my favorite thing that I learned here was something that I had never thought of in all my years of hiking this beautiful national park: the origin of the name "Mount Diablo". As I stated earlier, this mountain was extremely important in the Bay Miwok culture, since it was where they believed the world originated from. The current name of the mountain derives from the 1805 escape of several Bay Miwoks from the Spanish. They escaped by running through a nearby willow thicket, where they seemed to disappear. The Spanish soldiers then gave that area the name of "Monte del Diablo", which means "Thicket of the Devil". The word monte was later misinterpreted by English speakers as mount or mountain, hence the name "Mount Diablo". This story was really interesting to me and I can't believe that my wikipedia trail led from a vague search of "Native Americans of California" to the origins of the name of a mountain I have walked around over a hundred times.
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