The Salinan are a Native American tribe whose ancestral territory is in the southern

Salinas Valley The Salinas Valley is one of the major valleys and most productive agricultural regions in California. It is located west of the San Joaquin Valley and south of San Francisco Bay and the Santa Clara Valley. The Salinas River, which geologically ...

and the

Santa Lucia Range The Santa Lucia Mountains (sæntə luˈsiːə) or Santa Lucia Range is a rugged mountain range in coastal central California, running from Carmel southeast for to the Cuyama River in San Luis Obispo County. The range is never more than from ...

in the Central Coast of

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. Today, the Salinan governments are now working toward federal tribal recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Salinan_map

There were two major divisions, the ''Miguelino'' in the south, on the upper course of the Salinas River (which flows south to north), and the ''Antoniano'' in the north, in the lower part of the Salinas Basin, corresponding to the two missions in the Salinas Valley (

Mission San Antonio de Padua Mission San Antonio de Padua is a Spanish mission established by the Franciscan order in present-day Monterey County, California, near the present-day town of Jolon. Founded on July 14, 1771, it was the third mission founded in Alta Californi ...

and

Mission San Miguel Arcángel Mission San Miguel Arcángel is a Spanish mission in San Miguel, California. It was established on July 25, 1797 by the Franciscan order, on a site chosen specifically due to the large number of Salinan Indians that inhabited the area, whom th ...

). There were also a ''Playano'' group on the Pacific Coast in the vicinity of what is now

San Simeon San Simeon (Spanish: ''San Simeón'', meaning "St. Simon") is a village and Census-designated place on the Pacific coast of San Luis Obispo County, California, United States. Its position along State Route 1 is about halfway between Los Angeles ...

and Lucia. Before European contact, Salinans lived by

hunting and gathering A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

and, like most other California tribes, were organized in small groups with little centralized political structure.

Etymology

The Salinan people were named after the Salinas River(1856) and John Powell (1891). The people's own name for themselves is the "Te'po'ta'ahl" or "People of the Oaks," according to current tribal leadership. C. Hart Merriam called these people the ''En-'ne-sen'' on advice from one

informant An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a “snitch”) is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informant ...

; ''En-'ne-sen'' was the native word for the Salinan headquarters.

Language

The

Salinan language Salinan was the indigenous language of the Salinan people of the central coast of California. It has been extinct since the death of the last speaker in 1958. The language is attested to some extent in colonial sources such as Sitjar (1860), b ...

, spoken until the 1950s is a language isolate. It may be a part of the

Hokan The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families that were spoken mainly in California, Arizona and Baja California. Etymology The name ''Hokan'' is loosely based on the word for "two" in the various Hokan ...

language family. Sapir included it in a subfamily of Hokan, along with

Chumash Chumash may refer to: *Chumash (Judaism), a Hebrew word for the Pentateuch, used in Judaism *Chumash people, a Native American people of southern California *Chumashan languages, indigenous languages of California See also *Chumash traditional n ...

and Seri; this classification has found its way into more recent encyclopedias and presentations of language families, but serious supporting evidence has never been presented.

Population

Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially.

Alfred L. Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

put the 1770 population of the Salinan as 3,000. Sherburne F. Cook similarly estimated that there were at least 700 Salinans. The

2000 United States Census The United States census of 2000, conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, to be 281,421,906, an increase of 13.2 percent over the 248,709,873 people enumerated during the 1990 cen ...

reported a total population of Salinan people as 681. The Wagon Cave rock formation about northwest of present-day Jolon is an archeological site that was used by the Salinan Antonianos subtribe who researchers believe occupied at least two villages in the area, an older site dating to approximately 450 A.D. and a later, protohistoric site with dates ranging from about 1450 to 1650 A.D. Archeologists have found a stemmed biface, lithic flakes, shell beads, and non-human bones, as well as shell, bone, flaked stone, fire-affected rock, charred seeds, and mortars at the cave site. The rock overhangs and caves have fire-scarred roofs that bear evidence of occupancy over hundreds of years. The Wagon Cave Research Natural Area of contains diverse stands of Valley Oaks of varying ages and densities and has been recommended as a Research Natural Areas within the Los Padres National Forest. In the late 1800s until the

Big Sur Coast Highway Big Sur Coast Highway is a section of California State Route 1 through the Big Sur region of California that is widely considered to be one of the most scenic driving routes in the United States, if not the world. It is both a National Scenic ...

was completed in 1937, homesteaders near Lucia and miners in the Los Burros Mining District used Wagon Cave as a resting point and overnight camp site when traveling to and from the coast. Travelers on horseback switched to wagons stored at the caves for the purpose of hauling items to market and provisions back from the railhead in Soledad.

Notes

References

* * Cook, Sherburne F. 1976. ''The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization''. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. * Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. ''Handbook of the Indians of California''. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. Washington, D.C. * Hester, Thomas R. 1978. ''Salinan'', in ''Handbook of North American Indians'', vol. 8 (California). William C. Sturtevant, and Robert F. Heizer, eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. / 0160045754, pages 500-504. * Marlett, Stephen A. 2008. The Seri-Salinan connection revisited. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 74.3:393-399. * Sapir, Edward. 1925. The Hokan affinity of Subtiaba in Nicaragua. ''American Anthropologist'' 27: (3).402-34, (4).491-527.
National Public Radio segment by Allison Herrera, December 13, 2017
{{authority control Native American tribes in California California Mission Indians Salinas River (California) Salinas Valley Santa Lucia Range History of Monterey County, California History of San Luis Obispo County, California People from Monterey County, California People from San Luis Obispo County, California