Wintu

Wintu basket at Cleveland Museum of Art, from Wikipedia

The Wintu people, of what’s now northern California, were traditionally sedentary foragers who lived in networks of egalitarian villages. They made decisions by consensus with the facilitation of a headman or headwoman. They lived mainly at peace with neighboring peoples including Hokan speakers such as the Yana. The Wintu among other indigenous groups of northern California provided inspiration for the Kesh in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.

Culture

World-systems analysts Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly Mann have described precolonial Wintu society as free from “social classes or complicated hierarchies.” Despite the existence of chiefs or headmen, “differences between headmen and others were minimal. There was not much in the way of age-grading or gender inequality and lineages were not very important.” Citing their research, anthropologist David Graeber concurred the precolonial Wintu were “extremely egalitarian.”

The Wintu lived in villages ranging from 20 to 250 people. Every two or three villages confederated into a tribelet, and the headman usually lived in the largest one. Despite the culture’s general commitment to monogamy, a headman hard work was rewarded with permission to marry multiple people. It “was typical for a third or fourth wife to be from relatively distant tribelets.”

A gendered division of labor saw women gathering and men hunting and fishing. However, as Chase-Dunn and Mann explain, there was no gender-based hierarchy:

“All of the Northern California linguistic groups had similar institutional structures of  relations, including dramatic-role differentiation. In all groups, men’s work and women’s work were separated by strong taboos, and all groups had special huts where women retreated during menstruation. Yet this  differentiation did not correspond with a radical difference in power between men and women (hierarchy). Women were important contributors to village decision making, and they occasionally served as heads. In all groups a large proportion of spiritual doctors were women.”

Children enjoyed immense freedom. Anthropologist Dorothy Lee found that when Wintu children asked adults “may I?,” they simply sought clarification on social customs and taboos.

Lee also found Wintu egalitarianism reflected in the language’s avoidance of hierarchical and possessive language. The chief did not “rule” his people but “stood with” them. One did not “have” a sister” or possess tools, but rather was “sistered” and “lived with” a bow and arrows.

A married couple lived in either the husband’s or wife’s home village. They rarely lived with either spouse’s parents.

The Wintu, along with almost all precolonial peoples of what's now California (the Yurok being an exception) entirely rejected slavery.

Decisions

Wintu tribelets made decisions by consensus, facilitated by the headman. They occasionally had a headwoman instead of a headman.

Economy

The Wintu subsisted on gathered food, mainly acorns, and on fishing and hunting. The only crop they traditionally planted was tobacco. They stored dried salmon and dried venison to eat during the winter, and they made tools from stone, bone, and wood. The Wintu traded with neighbors in roughly a 250-kilometer area.

When a tribelet had a surplus of food, a headman sent runners to invite other tribelets to a celebration. Often lasting several days, it included feasts, dances, and ceremonies. Guests brought goods such as shell beads and went home with extra food.

The Database for Indigenous Cultural Evolution (DICE) describes traditional Wintu division of labor by gender:

The men were more known for hunting, and the women were more known for cleaning and distributing the kill once it was brought back to camp. For the most part, women were primarily in charge of gathering the carbohydrate resources, while the men were in charge of hunting the protein resources (2, pg. 23). However, gathering certain resources required both genders. Men would climb the acorn trees to shake the acorns down, while the women gathered the acorns below. The women would remove the tops of the acorns with their teeth on site and then everyone in the village would gather together to help shell the acorns at night (2, pg. 18). Women were also responsible for bringing water back to camp, as well as gathering the fuel. The Witnu often collaborated in efforts. To build homes, the men would fell the large logs and the women would gather the smaller and lighter logs and then carried away the unwanted debris.

Environment

The Wintu eschewed cutting down trees and only used dead wood for fuel. A female Wintu elder told Dorothy Lee, “The White people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them.”

Crime

DICE notes that “ingroup violence was rare.” When one member of the tribelet occasionally killed another member, relatives of the deceased would avenge the victim. There “was rarely outgroup violent death,” though retaliation followed theft and murder.

When someone from one tribelet trespassed on or committed another crime against another tribelet, the offended headman sought payment from the transgressor’s headman. If the payment wasn’t made, there was usually a line war. Warriors from each tribelet met, and the two headmen negotiated to see if they could call off the fight. If not, the two sides would shoot at each other until someone got injured. Then the headmen negotiated again to try to call off the battle. If fighting resumed, the headmen would negotiated again after the next injury.

Neighboring Societies

War “was not waged by large numbers, nor were more than a few individuals killed.” Warfare “was not a frequent or specialized practice.”

Chase-Dunn and Mann concluded that the precolonial Wintu “were part of a relatively egalitarian network of intersocial relations.”

Since the Wintu possessed salmon powder, a more storable source of protein than neighboring societies had, they enjoyed an edge in trading. Over time, the Wintu gradually expanded their territory into the territory of neighboring groups such as the Yana and other Hokan speakers. Chase-Dunn and Mann argued the expansion was so gradual that “it can only be considered a very mild kind of core/periphery hierarchy.”

From 1846 to 1873, white settlers conducted a government-sanctioned genocide and “California’s Indigenous population plunged perhaps from 150,000 people to just 30,000 survivors between 1846 and 1870.” As many as three-fifths of the Wintu were killed.

In the 1930s through 1940s, the construction of the Shasta Dam flooded Wintu burial sites, displaced Wintu families, and blocked salmon runs. Wintu communities consider the dam an unhealed scar on ancestral territories and have been active in struggles against its proposed expansion. In 2023, the Winnemem Wintu purchased 1,080 acres of ancestral lands where they planned to build “an eco-village, which will marry Indigenous living traditions with future-forward land management practices.”