Part I
Back to the Beginning

The Indigenous People

    The Coastal Miwok people inhabited western Marin and southwestern Sonoma counties for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the European missionaries, explorers, and adventurers.  They had dozens of villages scattered throughout this area, each established near a creek.  The cycle of the seasons and nature’s corresponding bounties were the organizing principle of their lives, and nature supplied them well. 
    Acorns (umba) were the Coast Miwok’s main staple and fall was the time of the acorn harvest.  Boys and men climbed the trees or used long harvesting poles to help shake the acorns loose from the several varieties of oak trees (black, coast live, tanbark, and valley) that are indigenous to the area.  The women, assisted by boys and girls, collected the acorns in baskets and then stored them in granaries.  Acorns were cracked, hulled, stored, ground into meal with mortar and pestle, sifted, and leached of their bitter tannin.  The meal, mixed with water and cooked in tightly woven baskets by adding hot rocks and continually stirring, was made into mush (ulki).  Acorn mush was also used as an offering to moluk, the condor.  It was poured into a big fire, in order that moluk not go hungry, in which case people would become ill.  In addition to providing their daily acorn mush, the ground meal was used to make acorn bread.  It was also used ceremonially, sprinkled on the fresh skin of a pelican, around the dance house for luck during the Pelican dance, and into the fire during the wilani dance as a food offering to the dead.
    The Coast Miwok were semi nomadic in that they had permanent villages but they also followed the bounties of nature according to their seasons, moving to temporary settlements, called kennekono, near each food source.  Dwellings in permanent villages, called kotchas, were made of redwood bark slabs that were lashed together into a tipi shape.  The sweat hut and round house in permanent villages were dug partially underground with a system of lashed poles supporting the sod roofs.  Shade structures in permanent villages, as well as all dwellings in temporary settlements, were made from lashed bundles of tule reeds tied to a bent willow framework.
    In the fall they harvested acorns.  The Miwok settlement in Nicasio Valley, on what is now known as Halleck Creek, was called etca-tamal, meaning behind the mountain.  These earliest Nicasio inhabitants collected acorns from Petaluma Valley according to Coast Miwok Maria Copa Frias (Kelly, 1996, p.119) who was born at etcha-tamalin approximately the 1860’s.
    In winter the coho salmon (kasi) and steelhead (olom-elewe) ran up the creeks in great numbers.  The men caught them with spears and nets.  They were cooked by the women or air dried (not smoked) by the men and stored in baskets inside their redwood bark houses (kotcha) for future consumption.  Mudhens (along Tomales Bay) and geese were also caught in winter by the men using nets and spears.  For fishing and transportation on bays Coast Miwok men fashioned small, light-weight boats by tying together several lashed bundles of tule reeds.    
    In the spring the Coast Miwok harvested strawberries, huckleberries, clover, onions, marsh checker bloom leaves, and soaproot.  Soaproot, known as haka, was collected everyday for a month, according to Maria Copa, and was juicy like bananas when cooked in ashes or the earth oven. 
    In summer the grass seeds, berries (blackberries, elderberries, currants, coffee berries, manzanita berries, gooseberries, thimble berries and more), hazelnuts and many greens (leaves and stalks) were collected.  Each harvest was accompanied by prayer and celebration, rituals and dances.   
    Armed with home-made bow and arrows Coast Miwok hunters availed themselves of the black-tail deer which were available as a food source all year long.  Abalone, crab, oysters, clams, mussels, and even octopus were taken year round from Tomales Bay and Bodega Head.  Although the food sources offered by nature were plentiful each in its season, the Coast Miwok, as all hunters and gatherers, experienced periods of both abundance and scarcity.
    The Coast Miwok were a friendly and peaceful people.  In between times of collecting and preparing food, the women were occupied with basket weaving. Their baskets are acclaimed to be among the most finely woven in the world. The men occupied themselves with weapon and tool making.  Both genders avidly enjoyed various gambling games and everyone, men, women and children participated in the ceremonies, dances and storytelling, which generally took place in the round or dance house. 
    In addition to learning the traditional songs, dances, and stories of their people, Coast Miwok boys and girls received instruction strictly according to gender.  Girls learned the necessary skills for food gathering and preparation, basket weaving, and both regular and ceremonial clothing making.  Boys were trained in hunting skills, weapon and tool making, hunting basket and cradle basket making, and clamshell bead making.  Both genders learned by carefully listening to and watching the adults in this Coast Miwok society, where oral tradition was powerful.  Much of a boy’s instruction took place in the sweathouse, a sort of hunter’s social club, where men sweated for spiritual purification and cleanliness and told stories of the hunt.  In addition, boys learned other important skills including weapon and tool making, accuracy of aim, and infant basket and burden basket making.  This was the schooling that the children of Nicasio received prior to the arrival of the white settlers.
    Tribes traded with neighboring tribes.  The Coast Miwok would trade clamshell beads and other coastal products with the Lake Miwok (Lake County) for obsidian, which they used for knives, spearheads and arrowheads.  The various Coast Miwok groups also traded and visited with each other.  Although the Tomales Coast Miwoks were said not to like the Nicasio people, they “used to come to Nicasio and marry.” (Kelly, 1996, p. 353)