The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area

by Malcolm Margolin

Two hundred years ago, herds of elk and antelope dotted the hills of the San Francisco–Monterey Bay area. Grizzly bears lumbered down to the creeks to fish for silver salmon and steelhead trout. From vast marshlands geese, ducks, and other birds rose in thick clouds “with a sound like that of a hurricane.” This land of “inexpressible fertility,” as one early explorer described it, supported one of the densest Indian populations in all of North America.

One of the most ground-breaking and highly-acclaimed titles that Heyday has published, The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans. Recently included in the San Francisco Chronicle's Top 100 Western Non-Fiction list, The Ohlone Way has been described by critic Pat Holt as a “mini-classic.”

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Nature, Indigenous, Native American, Native Americans

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Ken-ichi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is probably a decent introduction to learning about the native peoples of the Bay Area, but the form is seriously flawed. More than half the book is written in a narrative style, describing possible scenes from an Ohlone village. It's engaging and memorable, but I found it almost impossible to trust any of the factual details included because of the fictional style and the author's obvious belief in the moral superiority of the Ohlone. Look how in harmony with nature they are! Look how tolerant they are! They had no problem with homosexuality! Even if these things were true, harping on them just makes Margolin seems biased, and since there are absolutely NO citations, it's impossible to verify most of the claims without simply reading through his entire bibliography.

If we take Margolin at his word, though, there are some pretty interesting nuggets. One detail that was so strange I have difficulty believing the author didn't make it up was that Ohlone mothers used to shape the pliable skulls of their infants so they would have a particular facial structure. That just seems amazing to me.

Now I really want to go visit the Coyote Hills Regional Park, which has some Ohlone archaeological sites and some exhibits on them.

[Joyce]

A hippie-era classic that needs to be read in a specific historical context. I was educated as a small child in the California school system before this book was published in 1978, and I can tell you that the attitude towards the native Californians was condescending in the extreme. They were collectively called "Diggers" and described as a "Stone Age" people subsisting largely on insects and grubs.

Margolin argued for a view of the Ohlone as a sophisticated culture of plenty that also happened to be peaceful, spiritual, and relatively egalitarian. Hmmm, major hippie values! Coincidence? I think not... but that doesn't diminish this book as a major step forward in sympathetic understanding of extremely pre-capitalist lifestyles.

Basically the author's argument is that in an environment of plenty there is little incentive, economically or socially, to make big changes. Your mama's hand-woven baskets and rabbitskin blankets and recipe for acorn bread were going to sustain you in fine style... so why not enjoy your free time instead of trying harder to accumulate more? It's a question that I think made this book seem pretty revolutionary when it came out, because it NEVER judges the Ohlone for their lack of material accumulation; and it's probably relevant today as we confront the idea of machine-made abundance.

[Julie Mickens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pro: engaging, thoughtful, very accessible and enjoyable. It's a very digestible introduction to what's known of the pre-contact lifestyle & culture of the Ohlone tribes of the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead of writing in a scholarly format or as standard nonfiction, the author presents his material as historical-fiction vignettes, as if in a novel, interlaced with factual exposition and some of his own interpretations. The advantage to this presentation is the possibility of reaching a wide audience at a variety of reading and interest levels. In fact, no one living in the Bay Area and its surrounding regions has any excuse for NOT reading this fascinating, short-ish, and broadly informative book.

Which brings me to my main caveat: Because of the writing style, and the lack of footnotes, it's impossible to say which assertions embedded in the narrative are indeed fully attested, which might be borrowed from what's known about other California tribes or other hunter-gatherer-harvester peoples, and which might even be the author speculating to fill in the gaps or even unconsciously bringing forward his own cultural assumptions, e.g. regarding gender. There is a decent bibliography for the time of the book's writing, but it's impossible to readily link details to specific sources.

Still, if this had been written in an academically correct style at the time it appeared in 1978, it surely would not have had such a broad impact in shifting mainstream attitudes about the Bay Area Indians -- and a change was sorely needed at the time. The Ohlone were then presumed totally extinct (which was not and is not true), and because they hadn't left a showy material culture, they had been viewed with contempt or at best pity, as backwards, as another reviewer explained of the societal attitudes before this book's publication. Some of this context is addressed by the author in a very good 2003 afterward.

In fact, the need for a broadly accessible introduction to the Ohlone & the pre-contact Bay Area persists, as even today the few scholarly books on the subject are $25 and paper-format only, while my copy of The Ohlone Way was an instantly available $8 Kindle format. I will probably try to get those other books via interlibrary loan, but may not have made that effort if The Ohlone Way hadn't gotten me hooked.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book to read while you fantasize about quitting your job, burning your bus pass, and spending your days idling around eating seeds and nuts with naked people. Although the author promises not to idealize the Ohlone as noble savages, he is clearly infatuated with their lifestyle; in the post script calls our society "spiritually more backward" than theirs (apparently he prefers quack shamans to quack televangelists).

There is a lot of food for thought here; if you ever wondered whether man took a wrong turn with agriculture and metalworking, this book will assure you that low-tech hunting and gathering was once an attractive alternative -- at least in the rich San Francisco and Monterey Bay area (and perhaps will be attractive again once bio-technologists produce a race of Shmoo). Their "gift culture", in which wealth is measured by generosity rather than accumulation, may challenge some people's assumptions about "basic limitations" of "human nature".

The author gets somewhat tedious as he extols the magnificent artistry of their basket weaving, fawning over "the wholesome, satisfying roundness of the basket shape". It may be true they were "among the most accomplished basketry artists the world has ever seen -- or most likely will ever see again", but that's partly because WHO GIVES A DAMN ABOUT BASKETS. Serious history this ain't, as evidenced by his complete lack of footnotes. He seems loathe to dwell on any topic which would show the Ohlone in an unfavorable light; although he briefly mentions all-out inter-tribal genocidal warfare, he offers no details and instead gives an extensive example of ritualized, mostly non-lethal combat.

One mystery for me is, in an environment with plenty of food and few predators, how did the Ohlone avoid overpopulation -- with the attendant problems of starvation, disease, and violence? The author suggests that population was controlled by extensive sexual taboos (no sex before hunting, for two years after childbirth, etc). If so, this is worth exploring in more scientific detail. Perhaps their extreme exogamy also discouraged new members from joining a village whose resources were already stretched. I certainly feel the need to get another angle on this fascinating story, and plan to look for "The Ohlone Past and Present" (Bean) as a complement.

[Marit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margolin's book has become a quasi-classic in the Bay Area and surrounding region but should definitely be read in context of both the time in which it was written and the author himself. Decades after its first publication, Margolin wrote an introduction which acknowledges the limitations of his viewpoint, the biases he held without awareness, and the privilege he had as a White author writing about Native American societies. Margolin was a journalist, not an anthropologist, and as such, he took his journalistic research and stretched it with his own imagination. Thus this book is a cross between history and historical fiction (from an outsider viewpoint) which frankly makes it more enjoyable to learn as 'history' comes alive through story. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of Ohlone peoples' society, from politics to food to family life, punctuating the research (mainly from Spanish writings) with flights into imagined individuals' moments of life. As a Bay Area resident, I really enjoyed imagining what the land and water looked like before colonization through Margolin's research and flights of narrative and can easily imagine the sheer abundance of life in this diverse landscape.
A toe dip into learning about Ohlone peoples, to be paired with other books written by Ohlone scholars.

[amparo · Rating 5 out of 5]

written in the 70s, some elements feel clearly dated, but overall, an essential read for those of us from the Bay Area

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margolin offers a somewhat romanticized reconstruction. Given the limits of that genre, it’s well done.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ohlone Way by Malcolm Margolin

This Ohlone Way was written in 1978 by Malcolm Margolin. It is an ethnography on Indian tribes in the Bay area and written for the popular reading public. It is often cited as a groundbreaking book covering the American West because it dispensed with many myths about Native American tribes in what would become California. The big myth is that California tribes were monolithic. In fact, before the arrival of the Europeans, there were more 10,000 Native Americans spread across more than forty tribes in the greater Bay area alone. Many modern day Californians are surprised to learn that there were historically even any Native Americans in the Bay area. Many do not know that the vast majority of tribes were wiped out due to disease but also due to early American policies that bordered on genocide.

In this book the specific focus is on the Ohlone tribe. The author however chose to write a narrative in each chapter that highlighted a day in the life of a nameless and generic Ohlone man and woman. This makes the reading vocabulary at a school grade level which irritated me. To whit, in my e-book copy, I conducted a word search and counted over 900 uses of he and she pronouns. Finally the narrative was also written in the present tense which made for an odd way to present history.

In short a big thumbs up for the level of research and for bringing the importance of Native American diversity to the forefront and even helping Americans recognize that tribe members are living in the area today. But the book could have been written with a higher information content and a much more advanced vocabulary.

3.5 stars

[Mel Gillman]

I probably would not recommend this book. It’s written by a non-Ohlone writer and much of the book reads more as historical fiction from an outsider’s perspective than as research.

[Rachel Ginn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so interesting and I loved learning about the people who lived where I live. It put things into perspective in a crazy way, especially about how they lived here for so so so so long and the landscape and their ways of living remained unchanged the whole time, and then europeans came so very recently and everything changed so insanely quickly.

[Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opened my eyes to the beautiful world of the Ohlone. Written majestically.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wonderful. I loved reading about the lives of the native people and the nature of the Bay Area before the arrival of white people, this place would have been truly magical. I would recommend this book to anyone living in the bay, on Ohlone land. I'm thankful to the author for writing this book as it has spiked a lot of research into the lives of the native people, both past and present. I wish for the native people to once again live and prosper in California, and I hope for the rest of us to learn from them.

[Aneesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly fascinating. I wanted to read the whole thing aloud to my family. 7yo was quite interested. Especially that the Ohlone played sardines and cat's cradle.

This book is partly written in narrative vignettes. I can understand criticism from academics (there are no footnotes), but the style was perfect for me, who came to the subject just as uninformed as the author was when he started his research. As the afterward states, this book will open doors. And the afterward, which touches on, among other things, humility, is critical.

[Ben Clemens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, especially for anyone who knows the Bay Area.
It will haunt your imagination ever after.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wee folk were once beaten by iron-using people, which made them detest this powerful metal, and the people who used it. Consequently, when the Iron People conquered Europe, they were very careful to protect themselves. They sewed bits of iron into their children’s clothing, and hung horseshoes on their doors. They used the dark energy of forged iron to repel the bright spirits.

Malcolm Margolin’s book, The Ohlone Way, is a magnificent collection of bright knowledge that is powerfully repellent to the dark energy of misanthropes — those cynics who insist that all humans everywhere have always been self-centered, materialistic, and aggressively warlike by nature — fatally flawed, and rotten to the core. If you carefully absorb the knowledge in this book, misanthropes will skedaddle whenever they see you coming. Bye-bye!

Humans simply aren’t the problem. The problem is crazy cultures. It is cleansing and healing to comprehend this important distinction. It implies no quick or easy remedies, but it negates the notion that the only effective solution to the Earth Crisis is human extinction. We possess adequate intelligence to do what needs to be done, but whether we will ever do so remains a potent and prickly mystery.

The Ohlone were an assortment of tribes that lived in the region around San Francisco Bay for thousands of years prior to European conquest. Margolin does a lovely job of describing the various aspects of their way of life, and Michael Harney’s drawings are intriguing — many show skies darkened with millions of seabirds. The Ohlone were blessed to inhabit a land that provided an abundance of plant and animal foods.

It’s so hard for us to imagine what a magical treasure this planet was prior to farmers. Ohlone country, like much of the western region, was lucky to have a climate that was poorly suited for growing corn, so the tribes were able to avoid that dangerous and highly unstable way of life. They didn’t farm, nor did they enslave animals, yet they were able to enjoy a complex culture and a stable way of life.

Occasional armed conflicts were usually low-intensity ritual warfare, good for blowing off steam. Sometimes conflicts were intense, wiping out whole villages. But this was not a war-oriented culture. There were no wooden palisades surrounding villages. The men did not have shields, war clubs, tomahawks, or body armor. The culture did not enshrine heroic war chiefs, nor did it create a sprawling empire. They were really into dancing.

The Ohlone lost few people to disease, famine, or war. But their culture was successful at maintaining a stable population. Taboos and restrictions on sex kept a leash on the birth rate. Sex was forbidden during the two years that a mother was nursing, as it was prior to hunts, or during menstruation. Deformed babies and twins were not kept. Women understood how to terminate unwanted pregnancies. They were careful to avoid the horrors of population growth. Smart!

Stability was the core of their success, and time-proven wisdom was carefully preserved. “To be different was to be wrong, the best ways were the old ways.” Innovators and rebels were scorned, as were freedom and individualism. The Ohlone valued belonging — having strong social bonds to family, clan, and tribe. A man without his family was nothing. It was a society built on a foundation of cooperation, sharing, and generosity. Greedy and aggressive people were banished, because they toxic. Respectable people learned well, and then passed the ancient knowledge on to the next generation.

Stability is hard for us to comprehend. The Ohlone could live in the same place for a thousand years and not destroy the soils or forests. The hills were still filled with antelope, elk, and deer. The rivers were still thrashing with salmon. The nut trees continued producing sacred acorns. Stability did not diminish the seals, sea lions, sea birds, or shellfish. Fast forward a thousand years into the future, and it’s the same culture, the same stories, songs, and dances.

They did not live like a hurricane. They lived like reverend guests in a sacred land. “Everything was alive, everything had character, power, and magic, and consequently everything had to be dealt with properly.” “It was a world in which thousands of living, feeling, magical things, all operating in dream logic, carried out their individual actions.” “Power was everywhere, in everything, and therefore every act was religious.”

All of us have wild ancestors who enjoyed a similar manner of living. The Ohlone were not fascinating freaks. Five hundred years ago, the tribes of western North America were among the most stable, successful, and sustainable human societies on the planet. The secret of their success was that their cultures were, in almost every way, the direct opposite of our own. Sadly, the Iron People arrived in 1770, and hurricanes of progress and ecocide soon followed.

Margolin worked on this book for three years, and he often dreamed about the Ohlone. “It produced in me a sense of victory to know that such a way of life is part of the human potential, part of the human history.”

Yes, indeed! The daily news in our world regularly fills us with awe and amazement at the stunning achievements of human foolishness. It’s difficult not to feel like inmates at an insane asylum because, in many ways, we are. On the bright side, we all have front row seats as our insane civilization crumbles before our eyes, creating thrilling opportunities for new experiments in living. And Margolin reminds us of the important fact that our genes are not diseased, just our culture. Victory over civilization is not impossible, it’s a matter of time and love and healing.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who didn't learn a lot on Indian culture outside of snippets of information on the Sioux people (thanks, dad.), I found this book not only valuable but incredibly interesting. The bay area consisted of ~40 tribelets, with ~10 different languages, all with their own customs and ways of life. "Ohlone", I learned, is actually a made up name - one to easily categorize these tribelets into a people. The landscape, and practices of maintaining it, wildly differs from what we see today. It was eye opening to envision another way of life in my current surroundings and also very sad to read in more detail the atrocities that happened to this peaceful and sustainable group of people.

[Märt-matis Lill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, empathetic and a poetical evocation of a people of long ago, focusing on their worldview and on their relationship with their enviroment and each other.

[Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting dive into a specific Native American culture. Whets the appetite for more books about the diversity of cultures predating European expansion. Will look for more. Would recommend.

[Erik Jensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, just not what I thought it was going to be.

[Jeremy Kitchen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting to read about the Ohlone and try to picture what the place I live looked like back then. Definitely worth a read especially if you live in the Bay Area.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It gave me a great introduction to Bay Area indians and explained how the entire California native culture is so enigmatic and strikingly different from the native populations on the rest of the continent. The descriptions from early explorers about the richness of the pre-European Bay Area was amazing; I had no idea.

It seems that the only critique others really have with this book is that it ventures into historical fiction at times. I personally don't see that as a problem because those portions of the book are clearly delineated and there is no mistaking them. I also enjoy the fiction elements because, in a sense, the facts cannot fully speak for themselves. The point of this book is not just to give you an arsenal of cold-hard facts, but also to help you build empathy with these natives and to see the facts through their eyes.

It's not written as an academic text so it's up to the reader to chase down the references (provided in the back of the book) if you want to confirm any given piece of information. If you are an actual researcher, you could probably just email the guy and ask him for specific references. I really don't see this as something to complain about, given the scope of this particular book.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

original review from July 2011: "This 1978 edition is a good, basic elementary level overview of what Ohlone life may have been like. Each topic is covered in small chapters. "

Feb 2014: The chapters, or segments really, are very small.. a couple pages at a time covering various topics such as fishing, basket-making, hunting, the sweat-house, marriage, childbirth, etc.. A very in depth look, even fanciful stories illustrating what life may have been like.. and a sensitive, empathetic, respectful, but objective historical examination. I read this 2nd (and 3rd as I reviewed my notes) time for a class, and found it interesting but not as amazing or insightful on multiple reads.

[Ryan Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a little dated due to the fact it was written in the 70’s. However it is a really great asset to understanding the practices, beliefs, and history of the people who were native to the Bay Area. It’s absolutely mind boggling to realise that in a little over 200 years the entire ecology of the bay was changed by human hands. Not to mention that it took around 60 years for Ohlone traditions to be destroyed in the name of Christianity. 10/10 recommend

[Rebecca Rolnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book from the Nature Center at Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve while visiting Monterey Bay, California. I had done enough research before the trip to know the name Ohlone, but I wanted to learn more about the people indigenous to this area. The book was originally published in 1978, with an added afterward from 2003 and a preface from 2014.
I found the book to be an interesting overview of Ohlone customs and culture and an enjoyable read. I learned that there is not really one "Ohlone" culture or nation, as there is a Haudenosaunee Confederacy and culture--rather, it is a name for the interrelated "tribelets," that lived in the Monterey Bay area before contact with Spanish missionaries in 1776. No one is sure where the word Ohlone came from, so it is a bit of an artifice, but it is what is now used to describe this group of people.

I like how he gives a narrative of a "typical" scene or scenario of tribal life at the beginning of the chapters before going into a more objective, generalized description. This breaks from the tradition of anthropology being more of an objective and dry, academic science of an outsider collecting facts--Margolin really wants to tell the story of these people and make it come alive.

That being said, it did annoy me that he often wasn't clear about where he got the source for each piece of information (except for direct quotes and accounts from explorers/missionaries). He says in the beginning that he sometimes fills in holes in the knowledge about Ohlone culture with what we know about similar, nearby groups, but it is not clear which parts are definitively Ohlone and which are inferences. There was a bibliography in the back, but I probably would have preferred something more academic in that sense; something that analyzed the rhetoric and historical context of each source and took those things into account to explore /how/ we know what we do, how much we can trust each source, and which facts need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, one fact I'm particularly suspicious of is how he says that Ohlone mothers stretched out their infant's faces to form it into the proper shape. Based on other things I've read, such as the book Nature's Body, during the age of colonization and during the 1800s, Europeans made many accounts of non-Europeans throughout the world (and especially Africa) doing this. It went along with the "science" of using skull shape and skeletons to define race. Nowadays we obviously know this science to be false, but it was a part of the racial ideology used to set Europeans as the ideal race. So all in all there are definitely many benefits to the storytelling style approach Margolin took, but I thought it was also a bit simplistic and ever so slightly romanticized. That's still a big improvement from the previously dominant idea that looked down on their culture as primitive and dirty, however. Another thing I would have liked is if the book talked more about contemporary issues in the Ohlone today.

What really impressed me the most about this book is the humility of the author. Especially in the updated preface and afterward, he is open and honest, willing to admit that there was a lot he did not know when he wrote this book and excited about how much he has learned since then. Writing about Native American peoples is a sensitive area, and I think he does a great job. Since 1987 he has been a publisher for the magazine he was part of starting, News from Native California. He has helped to further the communities of Native American anthropology and cultural revival, and made the way for other, especially Native, voices to be heard and published. He writes,
"When /The Ohlone Way/ was first published in 1978....this was the only book [on the subject] that existed. Blessedly, that uniqueness is gone. There are not only other books on Ohlone life, but there is a thriving community of people engaged in promoting an understanding of it as well. I admit to feeling somewhat outdated and replaced. I couldn't be happier."

[cardulelia carduelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book written by a young scholar, new to the Bay Area, who wanted to get to know the culture of the seemingly vanished native population that was displaced only a couple of hundred years before.
And what he found consumed rest of his life. He spent 3 years in the University of California Berkeley's anthropology library and speaking to locals. With that knowledge he crafted this book and a publishing house intent on giving a voice to native authors and scholars alike.
So yes, this is a book written by a white American about the native Bay Area people but it is an excellent springboard for the topic and reads as joyful. All this to say, for a book from the 70's it had its heart in the right place.

The Ohlone Way starts with an overview of the ecological eden that was the San Francisco Bay before the draining and the fills that changed it forever. It was fascinating to learn that the Ohlone never developed agriculture not through any lack of agency or interest but because the natural world provided for them in such abundance.
The book then touches on the people themselves, starting with an intimate look at daily life and branching into focused sections on the spiritual world, inter-tribal relations such as warfare and marriage, and ultimately in the crude and brutal destruction of their world by the Missions in the 18th and 19th century.
The narrative moves between a more detached description of the people to a fictionalized first or third person account of a particular scene. Margolin explains using this storytelling technique to help humanize the, often dry, anthropological texts he'd sourced the material from and help a modern audience empathise with a lifestyle so different to their own.
As a reader I found there to be a good balance between these fictionalized accounts and the more scholarly text.

The book is rich with interesting facts, a few that stuck out to me:
- A Quail is a good spiritual helper of a little boy
- The California natives innovated a two-piece arrow with a main-shaft that contained a hollow recess in which lay a shorter fore-shaft that helped the reusability of the inner shaft and helped ensure the arrow penetrated deep into an animal.
- Chopped soaproot bulbs or mashed buckeyes, when tossed into a damned creek would stun the fish therein, causing them to rise to the surface and be easily caught.
- "To be wealthy was not to have, to be wealthy was to give."
- The Emeryville Shellmound that lay between Oakland and Berkeley was 270 feet in diameter. That's almost as wide as the statue of liberty is tall.
- The linguistic richness of tribes in such proximity and over such a small area as the Bay's means the people must have lived relatively undisturbed for 3000 to 5000 years.
- Speaking of the dead, remembering the times outside of the immediate present, had a strong taboo. So there is little to no oral history passed down about the Ohlone people to themselves. However their rich spiritual life means that the time between the Sacred Time in which the gods walked among them and the current time was vastly shortened.

I really enjoyed reading this book and it's inspired a bunch of other texts to be added to my to-read list.
Highly recommended, especially if living in the Bay Area.


Linda Yamane is a local Ohlone basket weaver seeking to bring this sacred art back. Watch this cool video about how she works here.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an eye opening look at the past two hundred fifty years in the SF Bay Area. I literally could not put it down for the fist half. It was a really good read, full of daily life details and novelistic descriptions of the types of encounters early tribes might have had.
*** SPOILERS ****



The excerpts of journal entries from European explorers that first arrived on our shores were FASCINATING. It was a little pedantic towards the later half, but also to be honest, very sad. It was sad to read how full of wildlife and natural beauty the area used to be, filled with simple people, that lived very harmoniously with their surroundings. Of course there were skirmishes between tribes, as well as trades. But because the area was so abundant, the tribes lived in relative isolation and peace. They did not have to fight for limited resources.
Sad that in less than 200 years, European men slaughtered all of the indigenous people, who had lived here for maybe more than a thousand years, ended their way of life and forever changed the bay area. I love living here, but so sad it came at such a price. I will not read this book again, but I found its content a loving and wonderful tribute to the way of life here before it became Silicon Valley. Malcolm Margolin is a scholar who truly appreciated his subject.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In describing the Ohlone (in reality a great variation of triblets, over 40 distinct cultures, speaking over 18 distinct languages), Margolin does an incredible job painting a picture of the rich human biodiversity present in the Bay Area just a little over 250 years ago. Margolin combines tens of writings on Ohlone life - first hand accounts by Spanish explorers, brought to life with academic studies on native ways - to paint a picture of the general customs, beliefs, and values Ohlone tribelets staunchly lived by. Furthermore, and what I especially appreciated, he does not attempt to paint native life as a utopian, ideal society. Both to start and end the book, he emphasizes that the lifestyle he describes in "The Ohlone Way" is firmly rooted in a context that no longer exists.

Following this read, I researched Margolin more to discover that in his love for California's natural ecosystems, he also founded Bay Nature, a magazine devoted to the natural history of the SF Bay Area, and Heyday Books, an independent publisher devoted to elevating native Californian voices.

For both this particular read and the treasures I discovered as a result of it, I give this book a 5 star rating.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting! I love local history, and this was an excellent portrait of what life was (probably/quite possibly) like for the Native peoples of the Bay Area. Well-written and engrossing. It was so cool to get a glimpse of what our local environment was like before it was taken over and exploited by white people, and to learn the customs of the Ohlone people who lived and thrived in that environment.

One caveat (and the reason I gave it four stars, not five): this book is by definition problematic, in that it was written by a white guy, based on the ethnographic information of other white guys (Catholic missionaries, European explorers, and anthropologists who were also white guys)...but I do think Malcom Margolin did his research thoroughly, and that he treats the subject with a lot of respect and care. I would be interested to find out what the current Native view is of this book, and, of course, to read any local history by Ohlone authors.

But, having said that, I learned so much, and this very interesting book really deepened my respect, understanding, and knowledge of the Native people of the Bay Area. I recommend it!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was both well written and informative. It is divided into categories around daily living such as dancing or shaman or birth. I really admire writers like Margolin who are able to do such extensive research but then write such an approachable text. He creates narrative scenes based on his research (which is really amazing—using many primary texts). And, he acknowledges that there is some speculation drawn from information from other tribes. And, I appreciate his explanation of how he did his research and his attempt to adhere to what was known while still weaving a picture rather than a list of facts. He was also clearly a thoughtful and respectful author. It’s hard to be too critical of the Ohlone given how small their footprint was on the Earth. When you read the ending about the Catholic missions, it is appalling. I do want to read more about this because I had no idea that Native Americans were locked in the missions and not allowed to leave. My ignorance.


The ending was so depressing, but Margolin does say he’s hopeful.

[Lance Mellon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good book with interesting illustrations abounding throughout. It illustrates the people as they were perceived by the white man: uncivilized and needing to be "educated about civilization." Not at all understood by whites. They did not seem civilized because they were without modern European "conveniences", religion, as well as written language—basically, the Stone Age. But of course, the paradox is that the Oholone did not need any of those "modern conveniences" because they had a beautiful life with no war to speak of, no shortage of food, and they had an abundance of crops from the land and sea. So why fight for the already at their fingertips a bountiful, happy life? Then, whitey came, and so they were easy picking. Since they did not have gold, they took them as slaves. White man's diseases made it an easy task in an already easy task to plunder and exploit. The rape of the CA Indians was brutal, even more so than the other exploitations of native Americans all across the continent. An exciting start and depressing ending. Must read for all.