Description
Coast Miwok people inhabited the area now known as west Marin County for at least 3,000 to 4,000 years before Spanish missionaries and settlers arrived. The Miwok, one of the most populous native groups in California, have a cultural heritage that includes shamanism and complex, elaborate languages. European explorers began incursions into Coast Miwok tribal lands in the 1500s. By the 1700s, the Spanish mission builders had forced many Coast Miwok natives into servitude. The land was taken over by Spanish and Mexican land grantees, and many Miwok tribespeople died from diseases introduced by the settlers. Coast Miwok inhabited the general area of modern Marin County and southern Sonoma County in Northern California, from the Golden Gate north to Duncans Point and eastward to Sonoma Creek. Coast Miwok included the Bodega Bay Miwok, or Olamentko (Olamentke), from authenticated Miwok villages around Bodega Bay, the Marin Miwok, or Hookooeko (Huukuiko), and Southern Sonoma Miwok, or Lekahtewutko (Lekatuit).
Language
Coast Miwok was one of the Miwok languages spoken in California, from San Francisco Bay to Bodega Bay. The Marin and Bodega varieties may have been separate languages. All of the population has shifted to English.
Culture
They lived by hunting and gathering, and lived in small bands without centralized political authority. In the springtime they would head to the coasts to hunt salmon and other seafood, including seaweed. Otherwise their staple foods were primarily acorns—particularly from black and tan oak–nuts and wild game, such as deer and cottontail rabbits and black-tailed deer, Odocoileus hemionus columbianus, a coastal subspecies of the California mule deer. When hunting deer, Miwok hunters traditionally used Brewer's angelica, to eliminate their own scent. Miwok did not typically hunt bears. Yerba buena tea leaves were used medicinally. Tattooing was a traditional practice among Coast Miwok, and they burned poison oak for a pigment. Their traditional houses, called "kotcha", were constructed with slabs of tule grass or redwood bark in a cone-shaped form.