Chief Marin: Leader, Rebel, and Legend

Cultural Writing. American History. Native American Studies. It's a little known fact that the San Francisco Bay Area's Marin County is named after a Coast Miwok chief who achieved notoriety for defying Spanish authority over his people. Anthropologist and archaeologist Betty Goerke has pieced together a portrait of the life of this Native American leader, using mission records, ethnographies, explorers' and missionaries' diaries and correspondence, and other material. Chief Marin became a leader of Native resistance to Spanish colonization at that critical time when, as the mission system collapsed, California would once again be transformed, this time by Americans. With marvelous detail, Goerke paints a picture of the California of Marin's time: the sights, smells, and sounds of the land; the traditions the Coast Miwok fought to preserve; and the colonial system against which Marin and other Native American leaders struggled to keep their way of life.