Customer Reviews

A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area 1769-1810 (Ballena Press Anthropological Papers)

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The author Randall Milliken has done some excellent research to provide some answers to the question "Why did the San Francisco Bay Indians abandon their villages and join the missions?" Using the mission records along with historical diaries and reports, he documents the patterns of inter-marriage, languages, and histories of the tribes.

For anyone interested in Bay Area Indian history, this book is a must-read. It's the only book I've found on the subject that looks comprehensively at the various tribelets in the Bay Area at the time of contact through the middle of the Mission period - very satisfying in its completeness. The one drawback is that the author's argument is not used to analyze a lot of the evidence. Most of the book is simply presented as facts, with only a few passages of analysis at the end of the chapters that tell you what the author makes of all the evidence. Otherwise it is a great read. I wish there more books like this one!

This book sets the standard for scholarly research on the Ohlone. Exceptionally well-documented. Fascinating reading. As an author of a book on the Ohlone myself, I cannot recommend it more highly. My only disappointment is that it ended at the point in time that it did. I hope that Milliken produces a second volume that goes beyond 1810.