A Coalition of Lineages: The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians is a tribal history that demonstrates the perseverance of a people and is intended to justify federal recognition claims. Legal scholars Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg worked closely with contemporary tribal members to help trace the lineages of families that persist in traditional Tataviam homelands today. For Indigenous Californian communities that endured the devastation of the Spanish Franciscan mission system, reconstructing and identifying evidence of uninterrupted and continuous political organization has proven to be an immense obstacle in achieving federal recognition. Champagne and Goldberg build a compelling case that “despite the dispossessions and the missionaries’ concerted campaign of conversion and assimilation, the lineages brought to San Fernando Mission never forgot who they were, their patterns of leadership, and their interwoven connections to other lineage groups” (242).
As the title makes clear, the authors center their study around a “coalition...
University of California Press