Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a scholarly religious congregation of the Catholic Church for men founded by Ignatius of Loyola and approved by Pope Paul III. The members are called Jesuits; the society is engaged in evangelization and apostolic ministry in 112 nations. Jesuits work in education, intellectual research, cultural pursuits. Jesuits give retreats, minister in hospitals and parishes, sponsor direct social ministries, promote ecumenical dialogue. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque nobleman from the Pyrenees area of northern Spain, founded the society after discerning his spiritual vocation while recovering from a wound sustained in the Battle of Pamplona, he composed the Spiritual Exercises to help others follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. In 1534, Ignatius and six other young men, including Francis Xavier and Peter Faber and professed vows of poverty and obedience, including a special vow of obedience to the Pope in matters of mission direction and assignment. Ignatius's plan of the order's organization was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540 by a bull containing the "Formula of the Institute".
Ignatius was a nobleman who had a military background, the members of the society were supposed to accept orders anywhere in the world, where they might be required to live in extreme conditions. Accordingly, the opening lines of the founding document declared that the society was founded for "whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God to strive for the defence and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine." Jesuits are thus sometimes referred to colloquially as "God's soldiers", "God's marines", or "the Company", which evolved from references to Ignatius' history as a soldier and the society's commitment to accepting orders anywhere and to endure any conditions. The society participated in the Counter-Reformation and in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council; the Society of Jesus is consecrated under the patronage of Madonna Della Strada, a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it is led by a Superior General. The headquarters of the society, its General Curia, is in Rome.
The historic curia of Ignatius is now part of the Collegio del Gesù attached to the Church of the Gesù, the Jesuit mother church. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Jesuit to be elected Pope, taking the name Pope Francis; as of 2012, the Jesuits formed the largest single religious order of priests and brothers in the Catholic Church. The Jesuits have experienced a decline in numbers in recent decades; as of 2017 the society had 16,088 members, 11,583 priests and 4,505 Jesuits in formation, which includes brothers and scholastics. This represents a 42.6 percent decline since 1977, when the society had a total membership of 28,038, of which 20,205 were priests. This decline is most pronounced in Europe and the Americas, with modest membership gains occurring in Asia and Africa. There seems to be no "Pope Francis effect" in counteracting the fall of vocations among the Jesuits; the society is divided into 83 provinces along with six independent regions and ten dependent regions. On 1 January 2007, members served in 112 nations on six continents with the largest number in India and the US.
Their average age was 57.3 years: 63.4 years for priests, 29.9 years for scholastics, 65.5 years for brothers. The current Superior General of the Jesuits is Arturo Sosa; the society is characterized by its ministries in the fields of missionary work, human rights, social justice and, most notably, higher education. It operates colleges and universities in various countries around the world and is active in the Philippines and India. In the United States the Jesuits have historical ties to 28 colleges and universities and 61 high schools; the degree to which the Jesuits are involved in the administration of each institution varies. As of September 2018, 15 of the 28 Jesuit universities in the US had non-Jesuit lay presidents. According to a 2014 article in The Atlantic, "the number of Jesuit priests who are active in everyday operations at the schools isn’t nearly as high as it once was". Worldwide it runs 172 colleges and universities. A typical conception of the mission of a Jesuit school will contain such concepts as proposing Christ as the model of human life, the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning, lifelong spiritual and intellectual growth, training men and women for others.
Ignatius laid out his original vision for the new order in the "Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus", "the fundamental charter of the order, of which all subsequent official documents were elaborations and to which they had to conform." He ensured that his formula was contained in two papal bulls signed by Pope Paul III in 1540 and by Pope Julius III in 1550. The formula expressed the nature, community life, apostolate of the new religious order, its famous opening statement echoed Ignatius' military background: Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the Name of Jesus, to serve the Lord alone and the Church, his spouse, under the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity and obedience, keep what follows in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive for the defence and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching and any other ministration whatsoever of the Word of God, further by means of ret
Spanish missions in California
The Spanish missions in California comprise a series of 21 religious outposts or missions established between 1769 and 1833 in today's U. S. State of California. Founded by Catholic priests of the Franciscan order to evangelize the Native Americans, the missions led to the creation of the New Spain province of Alta California and were part of the expansion of the Spanish Empire into the most northern and western parts of Spanish North America. Following long-term secular and religious policy of Spain in Spanish America, the missionaries forced the native Californians to live in settlements called reductions, disrupting their traditional way of life; the missionaries introduced European fruits, cattle, horses and technology. The missions have been accused by critics and now, of various abuses and oppression. In the end, the missions had mixed results in their objectives: to convert and transform the natives into Spanish colonial citizens. By 1810, Spain's king had been imprisoned by the French, financing for military payroll and missions in California ceased.
In 1821, Mexico achieved independence from Spain, although Mexico did not send a governor to California until 1824, only a portion of payroll was reinstated. The 21,000 Mission Indians produced hide and tallow and wool and textiles at this time, the leather products were exported to Boston, South America, Asia which sustained the colonial economy from 1810 until 1830, but tended to give British or New England merchant captains importance; the missions began to lose control over land in the 1820s, as unpaid military men unofficially encroached, but missions maintained authority over native neophytes and control of land holdings until the 1830s. At the peak of its development in 1832, the coastal mission system controlled an area equal to one-sixth of Alta California; the Alta California government secularized the missions after the passage of the Mexican secularization act of 1833. This divided the mission lands into land grants, in effect legitimizing and completing the transfer of Indian congregation lands to military commanders and their most loyal men.
The surviving mission buildings are the state's oldest structures and its most-visited historic monuments. They have become a symbol of California, appearing in many movies and television shows, are an inspiration for Mission Revival architecture; the oldest cities of California formed around or near Spanish missions, including the four largest: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco. Prior to 1754, grants of mission lands were made directly by the Spanish Crown. But, given the remote locations and the inherent difficulties in communicating with the territorial governments, power was transferred to the viceroys of New Spain to grant lands and establish missions in North America. Plans for the Alta California missions were laid out under the reign of King Charles III, came at least in part as a response to recent sightings of Russian fur traders along the California coast in the mid 1700s; the missions were to be interconnected by an overland route which became known as the Camino Real.
The detailed planning and direction of the missions was to be carried out by Friar Junípero Serra, O. F. M.. The Rev. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén took up Serra's work and established nine more mission sites, from 1786 through 1798. Work on the coastal mission chain was concluded in 1823, completed after Serra's death in 1784. Plans to build a twenty-second mission in Santa Rosa in 1827 were canceled; the Rev. Pedro Estévan Tápis proposed establishing a mission on one of the Channel Islands in the Pacific Ocean off San Pedro Harbor in 1784, with either Santa Catalina or Santa Cruz being the most locations, the reasoning being that an offshore mission might have attracted potential people to convert who were not living on the mainland, could have been an effective measure to restrict smuggling operations. Governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga approved the plan the following year, however an outbreak of sarampion killing some 200 Tongva people coupled with a scarcity of land for agriculture and potable water left the success of such a venture in doubt, so no effort to found an island mission was made.
In September 1821,the Rev. Mariano Payeras, "Comisario Prefecto" of the California missions, visited Cañada de Santa Ysabel east of Mission San Diego de Alcalá as part of a plan to establish an entire chain of inland missions; the Santa Ysabel Asistencia had been founded in 1818 as a "mother" mission, the plan's expanding beyond never came to fruition. In addition to the presidio and pueblo, the misión was one of the three major agencies employed by the Spanish sovereign to extend its borders and consolidate its colonial territories. Asistencias were small-scale missions that conducted Mass on days of obligation but lacked a resident priest; the Spanish Californians had never strayed from the coast. Each frontier station was forced to be self-supporting, as existing means of supply were inadequate to maintain a
Santa Clara County, California
Santa Clara County the County of Santa Clara, is California's 6th most populous county, with a population of 1,781,642, as of the 2010 census. The county seat and largest city is San Jose, the 10th most populous city in the United States and California's 3rd most populous city. Home to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County is an economic center for high technology and has the third highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution; the county's concentration of wealth due to the tech industry, has made it the most affluent county on the West Coast of the United States and one of the most affluent places in America. Santa Clara County is part of the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area as well as the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area. Located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara County is known as Silicon Valley. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California, is one of the most affluent counties in the United States.
Santa Clara County is named for Mission Santa Clara, established in 1777 and was in turn named for Saint Clare of Assisi. Santa Clara County was one of the original counties of California, formed in 1850 at the time of statehood; the original inhabitants included the Ohlone, residing on Calaveras Creek. Part of the county's territory was given to Alameda County in 1853. In 1882, Santa Clara County tried to levy taxes upon property of the Southern Pacific Railroad within county boundaries; the result was the U. S. Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U. S. 394, in which the Court extended Due Process rights to artificial legal entities. In the early 20th Century, the area was promoted as the "Valley of the Heart's Delight" due to its natural beauty, including a significant number of orchards; the first major technology company to be based in the area was Hewlett-Packard, founded in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939. IBM selected San Jose as its West Coast headquarters in 1943.
Varian Associates, Fairchild Semiconductor, other early innovators were located in the county by the late 1940s and 1950s. The U. S. Navy had a large presence in the area and began giving large contracts to Silicon Valley electronics companies; the term "Silicon Valley" was coined in 1971. The trend accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, agriculture has since been nearly eliminated from the northern part of the county. Today, Santa Clara County is the headquarters for 6500 high technology companies, including many of the largest tech companies in the world, among them hardware manufacturers AMD, Cisco Systems and Intel and consumer electronics companies Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, internet companies eBay and Yahoo!. Most of what is considered to be Silicon Valley is located within the county, although some adjoining tech regions in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties are considered a part of Silicon Valley. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 1,304 square miles, of which 1,290 square miles is land and 14 square miles is water.
Counties which border with Santa Clara County are, Santa Cruz County, San Mateo County, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and San Benito. Santa Clara County shared borders with Contra Costa, Monterey, Turlock counties until 1853, 1874, 1854 respectively; the San Andreas Fault runs along the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west of the county. Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge In 1978, California Department of Fish and Game warden Henry Coletto urged the department to choose the Mount Hamilton area as one of California's relocation sites under a new statewide effort to restore tule elk. While other ranchers refused, tech pioneers Bill Hewlett and David Packard allowed Coletto and state biologists to translocate 32 tule elk from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra onto the 28,000-acre San Felipe Ranch, which the families jointly own, in the hills east of Morgan Hill. From the three original 1978–1981 translocations to the Mount Hamilton region of the Diablo Range, there are multiple herds in different locations including the Isabel Valley, San Antonio Valley, Livermore area, San Felipe Ranch, Metcalf Canyon, Coyote Ridge, Anderson Lake, surrounding areas.
As of 2012, an estimated 400 tule elk roam 1,875 square kilometres in northeastern Santa Clara County and southeastern Alameda County. As of 2017 there are four herds in the Coyote Ridge area visible from U. S. Highway 101, according to Craige Edgerton retired executive director of the Silicon Valley Land Conservancy and local naturalist Michael Hundt; the Nature Conservancy "Mount Hamilton Project" has acquired or put under conservation easement 100,000 acres of land towards its 500,000 acres goal for habitat conservation within a 1,200,000 acres area encompassing much of eastern Santa Clara County as well as portions of southern Alameda County, western Merced and Stanislaus Counties, northern San Benito County. Acquisitions to date include the 1,756-acre Rancho Cañada de Pala, straddling the Alameda Creek and Coyote Creek watersheds for California tiger salamander habitat.
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University is a private Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California. It has 3,130 graduate students. Founded in 1851, Santa Clara University is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California and the west coast of the United States and has remained in its original location for 167 years; the university's campus surrounds the historic Mission Santa Clara de Asis which traces its founding to 1776. The campus mirrors the Mission's architectural style and provides a fine early example of Mission Revival architecture; the university is classified as a "Doctoral/Professional" university by Carnegie Classification. The university offers bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, doctoral degrees through its six colleges, the School of Arts and Sciences, School of Education and Counseling Psychology, Leavey School of Business, School of Engineering, Jesuit School of Theology, School of Law. Among Santa Clara's alumni are governors, mayors and presidential cabinet members. Santa Clara alumni founded Nvidia and Farmer's Insurance, created JavaScript.
Santa Clara's alumni have won a number of honors, including Pulitzer Prizes, the NBA MVP Award, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Santa Clara alumni have served as mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Washington, DC; the two most recent Governors of California attended Santa Clara. Santa Clara's sports teams are called the Broncos, their colors are white. The Broncos compete at the NCAA Division I levels as members of the West Coast Conference in 19 sports. Broncos have won NCAA championships in women's soccer. Santa Clara's student athletes include current or former 58 MLB, 40 NFL, 12 NBA players and 13 Olympic gold medalists; the first two colleges in California were founded at the height of the Gold Rush in 1851, both in the small agricultural town of Santa Clara. Less than a year after California was granted statehood, Santa Clara College, forerunner of Santa Clara University, was the first to open its doors to students and thus is considered the state's oldest operating institution of higher education.
Shortly after Santa Clara began instruction, the Methodist-run California Wesleyan College received a charter from the State Superior Court on July 10, 1851—the first granted in California—and it began enrolling students in May of the following year. Santa Clara's Jesuit founders lacked the $20,000 endowment required for a charter, accumulated and a charter granted on April 28, 1855. Santa Clara bears the distinction of awarding California's first bachelor's degree, bestowed upon Thomas I. Bergin in 1857, as well as its first graduate degree granted two years later. Inheriting the grounds of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, Santa Clara University's campus, library holdings, art collection, many of its defining traditions date back to 1777 75 years before its founding. In January of that year, Saint Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan friar, established Mission Santa Clara as the eighth of 21 Alta California missions. Fray Tomás de la Peña chose a site along the Guadalupe River for the future church, erecting a cross and celebrating the first Mass a few days later.
Natural disasters forced early priests to relocate and rebuild the church on several occasions, moving it westward and away from the river. Built of wood, the first permanent structure flooded and was replaced by a larger adobe building in 1784; this building suffered heavy damage in an 1818 earthquake and was replaced six years by a new adobe edifice. The mission flourished for more than 50 years despite these setbacks. Beginning in the 1830s, the mission lands were repossessed in conjunction with government policy implemented via the Mexico's secularization, church buildings fell into disrepair; the Bishop of Monterey, Dominican Joseph Sadoc Alemany, offered the site to Italian Jesuits John Nobili and Michael Accolti in 1851 on condition that they found a college for California's growing Catholic population when it became part of the United States following the Mexican–American War. In 1912 Santa Clara College became the University of Santa Clara, with the addition of the School of Engineering and School of Law.
In 1925 the Leavey School of Business was founded. Women were first admitted in 1961 to. In 2012, Santa Clara University celebrated 50 years of having women attend Santa Clara University; this step made Santa Clara University the first Catholic university in California to admit both men and women. In 1985, in part to avoid confusion with the University of Southern California, the University of Santa Clara, as it had been known since 1912, changed its name to Santa Clara University. Diplomas were printed with the new name beginning in 1986. In 2001 the School of Education and Counseling Psychology was formed to offer Master's level and other credential programs; the university is situated in Santa Clara, adjacent to the city of San Jose in Santa Clara County at the southern part of the Bay Area. Over the last century and a half, the Santa Clara University campus has expanded to more than 106 acres. In the 1950s, after the university constructed Walsh Hall and the de Saisset Museum on two of the last remaining open spaces on the old college campus, Santa Clara began purchasing and annexing land from the surrounding community.
The first addition, which occurred earlier, brought space for football and baseball playing fields. Thereafter in the 1960s when women were admitted to the school, more land was acquired for residence halls and other new buildings and facilities. In 1989 the Santa
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 116,468 as of the 2010 United States Census, making it the ninth-most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, the city was founded in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, the eighth of 21 California missions; the city was incorporated in 1852. The mission, the city, the county are all named for Saint Clare of Assisi. Santa Clara is located in the center of Silicon Valley and is home to the headquarters of several high-tech companies such as Intel, it is home to Santa Clara University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of California, built around Mission Santa Clara de Asís. Levi's Stadium, the home of the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers, is located in the city. Santa Clara is bordered by San Jose and Cupertino; the first European to visit the valley was José Francisco Ortega in 1769. He found the area inhabited by Native Americans, whom the Spanish called the Costanos, "coast people" known as the Ohlone.
The Spanish began to colonize California with 21 missions and the Mission Santa Clara de Asis was founded in 1777. In 1846, the American flag was raised over Monterey and symbolized the transfer of the sovereignty of the California Republic over to the United States. In 1851, Santa Clara College was established on the grounds of the original Mission. In 1852, Santa Clara was incorporated as a town. For the next century the economy centered on agriculture since orchards and vegetables were thriving in the fertile soil. By the beginning of the 20th century, the population had reached 5,000 and stayed about the same for many years. In 1905, the first public high-altitude flights by humans were made over Santa Clara in gliders designed by John J. Montgomery; the semiconductor industry, which sprouted around 1960, changed the city and surrounding Valley of Heart's Delight. Santa Clara's first medical hospital was built in 1963; this structure, on Kiely Boulevard, was replaced in 2007 with the new Kaiser Permanente medical center located on Lawrence Expressway at Homestead Road.
Santa Clara was home to a major mental health facility, Agnews State Hospital. According to the National Park Service, more than 100 persons were killed at this site in the 1906 earthquake; the site is the former home to Sun Microsystems and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Downtown Santa Clara: the 1963 City Council voted to knock down the 8 block grid of downtown area next to Santa Clara University bordered by Lafayette, Benton and Homestead to receive federal funding from Urban Renewal in USA. In 2018 there is a parking lot and Franklin Mall on Washington St with the one state historical building is, Santa Clara Post Office, apartment building, county courthouse, strip mall. Santa Clara is drained by three seasonal creeks, all of which empty into the southern portion of San Francisco Bay. There are some significant biological resources within the city including habitat for the burrowing owl, a species of special concern in California due to reduction in habitat from urban development during the latter 20th century.
This owl uses burrows created by ground squirrels and prefers level grasslands and disturbed areas. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city covers an area of 18.4 square miles, all of it land. Despite being located only 45 miles from San Francisco, Santa Clara's climate is rather distinct—particularly during the summer, when it is warm and sunny, as opposed to the foggy and cool conditions one finds in San Francisco; the average daily temperatures in July range from 82 °F to 53 °F. Winters are mild, with the mean daily temperatures in January ranging from 58 °F to 38 °F. Most of the annual rainfall comes in the winter months; the 2010 United States Census reported that Santa Clara had a population of 116,468. The population density was 6,327.3 people per square mile. The ethnic makeup of Santa Clara was 52,359 White, 3,154 African American, 579 Native American, 43,889 Asian, 651 Pacific Islander, 9,624 from other races, 6,212 from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 22,589 persons.
The Census reported that 113,272 people lived in households, 2,860 lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, 336 were institutionalized. There were 43,021 households, out of which 14,477 had children under the age of 18 living in them, 21,817 were opposite-sex married couples living together, 4,081 had a female householder with no husband present, 2,038 had a male householder with no wife present. There were 2,146 unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, 312 same-sex married couples or partnerships. 10,906 households were made up of individuals and 2,945 had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.63. There were 27,936 families; the age distribution of the population was as follows: 24,774 people were under the age of 18, 12,511 people aged 18 to 24, 41,876 people aged 25 to 44, 25,628 people aged 45 to 64, 11,679 people who w
Yokuts
The Yokuts are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages; some of their descendants prefer to refer to themselves by their respective tribal names and reject the name Yokuts with the claim that it is an exonym invented by English speaking settlers and historians. Conventional sub-groupings include the Foothill Yokuts, Northern Valley Yokuts, Southern Valley Yokuts. Yokuts tribes populated the San Joaquin Valley, from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta south to Bakersfield and the adjacent foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which lies to the east. In the northern half of the Yokuts region, there were some tribes inhabiting the foothills of the Coast Range, which lies to the west. There is evidence of Yokuts inhabiting the Carrizo Plain and creating rock art in the Painted Rock area. Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially.
Alfred L. Kroeber in 1925 put the 1770 population of the Yokut at 18,000. Several subsequent investigators suggested that the total should be higher. Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser 1980 suggested that the Yokut had numbered about 70,000, they had one of the highest regional population densities in pre-contact North America. The numbers of Foothill Yokut were reduced by around 93% between 1850 and 1900. A few Valley Yokut remain, the most prominent tribe among them being the Tachi. Kroeber estimated the population of the Yokut in 1910 as 600. Today there are about 2000 enrolled Yokut in the federally recognized tribe and 600 more Yokut belonging to unrecognized tribes. According to San Diego State University, the Yokutsan languages are members of the Penutian language family. Casson Choinumni Chukchansi Lakisamni Tachi tribe Wukchumni Chowchilla Santa Rosa Rancheria Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians Table Mountain Rancheria Tejon Indian Tribe of California Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation Tuolumne RancheriaThe contemporary Wukchumni and Choinumni communities do not yet have federal recognition.
Yokuts are known to have engaged in trading with other California tribes of Native Americans including coastal peoples such as the Chumash of the Central California coast, with whom they are thought to have traded plant and animal products. On 5 April 2015, it was reported that members of the Chukchansi tribe near Yosemite have been disenrolling other members from the tribe for decades, so that the tribe's casino profits go to fewer people. In the autumn of 2014, several disenrolled Chukchansi tribe members arrived at the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino armed with guns, violence ensued; as a result, a federal judge ordered. Estanislao Every tribe has a Head Chief, a Village Chief. -Researched by Mary Ann Brensel Yokuts traditional narratives Thomas Jefferson Mayfield Kroeber, A. L. 1910. On the Evidences of Occupation of Certain Regions by the Miwok Tribes, University of California Press, Vol. 6 No. 3 p. 370 Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78.
Washington, D. C. Pritzker, Barry M. 2000. A Native American Encyclopedia: History and Peoples. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-513877-1. Heizer, R. F. and A. B. Elsasser 1980; the Natural World of the California Indians, University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-03895-9. Tachi Yokut Tribal website Info About Yokuts, by the Minnesota State University Culture and History, by Native Languages of the Americas Baumhoff, Martin A. 1963."Ecological Determinants of Aboriginal California Populations". University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 49:155–236. Cook, Sherburne F. 1955. "The Aboriginal Population of the San Joaquin Valley, California". Anthropological Records 16:31–80. University of California, Berkeley. Cummins, Marjorie W.. The Tache-Yokuts, Indians of the San Joaquin Valley. Pioneer Publishing Company. ISBN 0-914330-24-1. Heizer, Robert F. and Albert B. Elsasser. 1980. The Natural World of the California Indians. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Powell, John Wesley 1891. Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico, Government Printing Office, pages 90–91. Wallace, William J. 1978. "Southern Valley Yokuts". In California, edited by Robert F. Heizer, pp. 448–469. Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, general editor, vol. 8. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Webb, Frederick 1910.'Tachi' and'Tammukan', in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Government Printing Office
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans known as American Indians, Indigenous Americans and other terms, are the indigenous peoples of the United States, except Hawaii. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes within the US, about half of which are associated with Indian reservations; the term "American Indian" excludes Native Hawaiians and some Alaska Natives, while Native Americans are American Indians, plus Alaska Natives of all ethnicities. Native Hawaiians are not counted as Native Americans by the US Census, instead being included in the Census grouping of "Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander"; the ancestors of modern Native Americans arrived in what is now the United States at least 15,000 years ago much earlier, from Asia via Beringia. A vast variety of peoples and cultures subsequently developed. Native Americans were affected by the European colonization of the Americas, which began in 1492, their population declined precipitously due to introduced diseases as well as warfare, territorial confiscation and slavery.
After the founding of the United States, many Native American peoples were subjected to warfare and one-sided treaties, they continued to suffer from discriminatory government policies into the 20th century. Since the 1960s, Native American self-determination movements have resulted in changes to the lives of Native Americans, though there are still many contemporary issues faced by Native Americans. Today, there are over five million Native Americans in the United States, 78% of whom live outside reservations; when the United States was created, established Native American tribes were considered semi-independent nations, as they lived in communities separate from British settlers. The federal government signed treaties at a government-to-government level until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of independent native nations, started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to federal law; this law did preserve the rights and privileges agreed to under the treaties, including a large degree of tribal sovereignty.
For this reason, many Native American reservations are still independent of state law and actions of tribal citizens on these reservations are subject only to tribal courts and federal law. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U. S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. This emptied the "Indians not taxed" category established by the United States Constitution, allowed natives to vote in state and federal elections, extended the Fourteenth Amendment protections granted to people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. However, some states continued to deny Native Americans voting rights for several decades. Bill of Rights protections do not apply to tribal governments, except for those mandated by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of Europeans to the Americas has led to centuries of population and agricultural transfer and adjustment between Old and New World societies, a process known as the Columbian exchange.
As most Native American groups had preserved their histories by oral traditions and artwork, the first written sources of the conflict were written by Europeans. Ethnographers classify the indigenous peoples of North America into ten geographical regions with shared cultural traits, called cultural areas; some scholars combine the Plateau and Great Basin regions into the Intermontane West, some separate Prairie peoples from Great Plains peoples, while some separate Great Lakes tribes from the Northeastern Woodlands. The ten cultural areas are as follows: Arctic, including Aleut and Yupik peoples Subarctic Northeastern Woodlands Southeastern Woodlands Great Plains Great Basin Northwest Plateau Northwest Coast California Southwest At the time of the first contact, the indigenous cultures were quite different from those of the proto-industrial and Christian immigrants; some Northeastern and Southwestern cultures, in particular, were matrilineal and operated on a more collective basis than that with which Europeans were familiar.
The majority of Indigenous American tribes maintained their hunting grounds and agricultural lands for use of the entire tribe. Europeans at that time had patriarchal cultures and had developed concepts of individual property rights with respect to land that were different; the differences in cultures between the established Native Americans and immigrant Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations in times of war, caused extensive political tension, ethnic violence, social disruption. Before the European settlement of what is now the United States, Native Americans suffered high fatalities from contact with new European diseases, to which they had not yet acquired immunity. Smallpox epidemics are thought to have caused the greatest loss of life for indigenous populations. William M Denevan, noted author and Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on this subject in his essay "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492".
Old World diseases were the primary killer. In many regions the tropical lowlands, populations fell by 90 percent or more in the first century after the contact. "Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of what today constitutes the U. S. vary ranging from William M Denevan's 3.8 million in his 1992 w
