| Main Feature Story - Friday, October 26, 2007
Feature: The quiet and the dead
Coast Miwok death ceremonies partly silenced by time...
by Joy Lanzendorfer
When a person died in a Coast Miwok village, everything went quiet. People spoke in whispers and moved gently, hushing their children and cringing at every dog bark. The village was flushed with silence, but the people were quiet out of more than just respect for the grieving family.
"They were afraid that if they made a noise, someone would come to poison them," Maria Copa, a Coast Miwok, explained in a 1931 interview.
The Miwoks feared that if you laughed or shouted while another family was mourning, they might be so offended, they would get a sorcerer to poison you.
"In the 18th century, it wasn't clearly understood what caused illness," says Betty Goerke, author of Chief Marin: Leader, Rebel, and Legend, published by Heyday Books earlier this year. "They believed there were sorcerers in the village that were paid to cause people to die, and they were fearful of bringing illness upon themselves. So they were cautious."
Miwoks had other kinds of silences surrounding death as well. After someone died, his possessions were destroyed and his name was never spoken again. His memory remained in the confines of people's heads, passing away completely with each generation.
The Miwok Mourning Ceremony
For thousands of years before the Russian and Spanish came here, the Coast Miwoks were essentially the only people in Marin County. Their tribe, which was broken into small villages of several hundred people at a time, extended from San Rafael up into Petaluma and Bodega. Today, their ancestors are part of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
What little is known about how the Miwoks viewed death comes from books like Interviews With Tom Smith and Maria Copa, a compilation of interviews from 1931 to 1932 with Coast Miwoks Copa and Smith that was published by the Miwok Archaeological Preserve in Novato. But even when experts piece together how the Miwoks behaved toward death, understanding why they acted the way they did has often been lost to time.
What is known for sure is that when a person died, the Miwoks began a mourning ritual that could last several days. Once death arrived, the mourners began keening—shrill cries to demonstrate their anguish. This practice, which is done by cultures all over the world, was a surprise to the Spanish priests, who evangelized the Miwoks and used their labor when establishing the missions.
"The priests unfortunately referred to it as yelling," says Goerke. "But it wasn't; it was keening, meaning they cried. Keening was the most important thing that was misinterpreted by the priests, who sneered at the Miwok religion."
In addition to keening, the Miwoks tore at their cheeks with fingernails and beat themselves in the chest, sometimes so hard that they died. The widow or other close relatives of the deceased painted her face black with ashes and cut her hair short, throwing it into the water to get rid of it. She also put on a shell necklace to indicate her status as a mourner.
Meanwhile, the body was washed by friends or other villagers and adorned with a clam-shell necklace, one of the most valuable shells, according to Smith.
"Fix him good; let him die good," he said.
The body was also painted with red ocher, which is found in abundance in Miwok graves and associated with death. Other funeral garb is unknown, although likely existed.
"As an archaeologist, I can tell you that in the graves there are lots of ash, little tiny bones, little pieces of shell," says Goerke. "If the people were buried with feather coats or feather hats or weaving of some kind—that would have disappeared in our climate."
Most Miwok funerals were described as cremation, although some evidence suggests that Miwoks may have originally buried their dead and moved to cremation later on. In any case, by the time European records existed, the bodies were cremated at the village's burning ground, called wuki-yomi, or fire-home. The remains were then buried.
Along with the body, the Miwoks burned all the person's possessions, which were broken and then thrown on the fire. This included everything the person owned—money, too—according to Smith. In the case of a man, even his house was destroyed.
In 1906, ethnographer C. Hart Merriam witnessed a Miwok mourning ceremony, which he later wrote about. He described four days of dancing led by the chief of the village. The dances lasted hours and people collapsed in exhaustion at the end of them.
Afterwards, the name of the dead person was never spoken again. If the person was referred to, he or she was referred to by familial relationships—brother, sister, and so on. Once a Miwok died, he or she was effectively erased from the village.
"I can't give an honest answer as to why they did that," says Goerke. "It may have been thought to bring bad luck to the family. But it's impossible for us to say now. Maybe they didn't know it either."
Fooling the Ghosts
Like many California Indians, the Coast Miwoks believed in ghosts. The spirits of the dead were supposed to go to the home of the creator-god Coyote, who lived some place out west of Pt. Reyes. But the spirits didn't always make it to Coyote's home, apparently, because there are many accounts of ghosts interacting with the living.
The Miwoks saw ghosts as complicated figures, at once loved family members and otherworldly dangers. One myth describes a man who was cremated coming back as a ghost and talking to his grandmother and son. Soon after, the grandmother died and the son burst into flames. Smith himself reported a time that his sister-in-law's ghost descended through the ceiling to talk to him. She was wearing a dress with abalone shells at the bottom, and she wanted to tell him about another family member. She terrified Smith.
The key to why the Miwoks didn't say the name of the dead may lie with the Ohlone Indians, who lived in the East Bay. The Coast Miwoks interacted extensively with the Ohlones (as well as the Pomo Indians up north), and many of their customs and rituals were the same.
Like the Miwoks, the Ohlones did not speak the name of the dead and destroyed, or "killed," all the person's possessions. Like the Miwoks, they wailed, cut their hair, beat their breasts and tore at their faces to express anguish. And while the Ohlone believed that ghosts went to the Island of the Dead instead of the home of Coyote, they saw ghosts as a similar kind of dangerous presence.
In fact, according to The Ohlone Way by Malcolm Margolin, the Ohlone Indians performed many rituals so that the ghost couldn't recognize them. If a man died, for example, his wife changed her appearance by cutting her hair and blackening her face, his possessions were destroyed and no one said his name anymore. If, in spirit form, he was looking for friends and family, everything would seem different to him and he would likely go where he was supposed to.
Whether the Miwoks believed this or not is unclear. In addition to not recording their history, much of their culture disappeared with the arrival of the Europeans. By the time the Gold Rush took place in 1849, less than 10 percent of the Coast Miwoks were still alive, according to Sylvia Thalman, who runs the Miwok Archaeological Preserve and is an honorary tribal elder at the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
"When the missions came in, they were a devastating force to the California Indians because the Indians caught European diseases," she says. "They died by the thousands. In 1810, there's a record of 1,000 children under 10 who had died. By 1840, they were 90 percent decimated."
With the Gold Rush, racism against the Indians only mounted and they were often driven out of their homes. Those who were sent to Indian schools had their hair cut, were given European clothes and told not to speak the Indian language or think about their culture.
The Indians, in turn, passed this attitude down from generation to generation.
"So the present day coast Indians are much more separated from their past than we are," says Thalman.
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