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California Native American Tribes Tolowa Tribe (California's Native American Tribes)

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The Tolowa tribe is but a microcosm of the destruction of the Native Americans as a people. I grew up on Tolowa land-out my back door was a large shell-dump and I assume that my house was built on the Tolowa village that made that dump. Also out my back door and across Lake Earl was slender Lake Talowa connecting the bigger lake to the Pacific Ocean.

I write this with great saddness in my heart having just read again on page 36 that 40 years ago there were only "... ten full-blooded Tolowans [that] could be found living there [Del Nort County] who could remember any useful history of old tribal living."

I feel terrible that I lived on the bones of a lost society but I realize my words could be repeated ad nauseam over virtually the entire American continent with the wonderful exception of the Inuit state in northern Canada.

The Tolowa were of no harm to anyone and yet, even as a kid I heard stories of unreported massacres on the Smith River perpetrated by the same kind of land-hungry unscupulous pioneers that were the norm throughout America.
My parents lived on Tolowa land long after the native Americans had been forced away and I'm glad I do not know the particulars of that "pioneering effort" when earlier white settlers forced the Tolowans from their lands.

In my saddness I thank you Mary Null Boule'for bringing the meager scraps of knowledge that still exists of these people to the attention of the general reader-a society with no chiefs nor desire to do more than live in what my father said was "God's country".

California Native American Tribes Tolowa Tribe (California's Native American Tribes) by Mary Null Boule

SINCE MY HUSBANDs GRANDMOTHER DIED WHEN HER CHILDREN WERE 2 & 4 YEARS OLD, SHE COULD NOT TELL THEM HOW HER MOTHER (A TOLOWA WOMAN) LIVED OR EVEN NAMES OF RELATIVES. READING THIS BOOK HELPS HIM UNDERSTAND PART OF HIS HERITAGE.