Sweat Lodge 1997


Description:
Ohlone sweat lodge or "Temescal," Coyote Hills Regional Park, Fremont, Calif. The word "temescal," derived from the Nahuatl language of Mexico, was brought north to the Bay Area by Spanish colonists as they extended the system of missions into upper California. Native peoples throughout the Americas built sweat lodges, or sweat houses, for hygiene, healing, and spiritual purposes. In California they commonly were erected adjacent to creeks. Legend has it that Temescal Creek was named because of a sweat lodge observed on its bank.

Date of Document:
1997

Document Author:
Jeff Norman

Geographic Location:
Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street, Oakland, Calif.

Context:
For more than 2,500 years before the Spanish missionaries first arrived to the Bay Area in the 1770s, dozens of small, politically independent native tribelets inhabited the region. Each tribal territory, which covered about ten square miles and generally corresponded to natural drainages, was home to between 200 and 400 persons dispersed among small villages. Of these Bay Area tribelets, 40 or so belonged to the Ohlone language group (which encompassed many dialects) whose region extended from Monterey to the Carquinez Straits. Exact tribelet boundaries might possibly never be known, but based on analyses of mission records by anthropologist Randall Milliken, the Temescal Creek watershed fell within the ancestral lands of the Ohlone tribelet known as the Huchiun. The Huchiun lived successfully on the natural resources of the bay, Temescal Creek, and the surrounding area. [Source: A Time of Little Choice by Randall Milliken]





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