Historical Background
The terms Pomo and Pomoan refer to a family of seven related languages and to their speakers. The divergence among the seven languages is similar to that among the various Romance languages; at the extremes, the divergence is greater than that between English and German. At a more distant level, Pomoan is related to some languages classified as Hokan. The Pomo lived in an area stretching roughly from about fifty miles north of San Francisco northward for ninety miles, and from the Pacific Coast inland for fifty miles to include much of the shore of Clear Lake, with an o shoot to the northeast across the Inner Coast Range.
Estimates of the total population of the pre-Contact Pomo vary from eight thousand to twenty-one thousand. The Southern Pomo, who occupied the drainage system of the lower half of the Russian River, were
Aboriginally all the Pomo lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering plant foods. Acorns were the staple of their diet and required a great deal of preparation: gathering, drying, cracking, grinding, leaching (to remove the bitter tannic acid), and cooking. They clipped and ground clamshells into beads, which were strung and used as a store of wealth. Larger and much more valuable beads were made of magnesite (known as “Indian gold”). To keep account of the wealth represented by these beads, they developed a system for counting up into the thousands. However, the Pomo have been most famed for their basketry, which was woven with great skill in a wide variety of techniques. The women took pride in doing artistic work, often taking months to complete a fine, coiled six-inch basket. There has recently been a cultural renaissance, and a few younger women have learned to produce the fancy baskets.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century the Southern Pomo were disastrously affected by missionization, raids, disease, and settlement of their land by immigrants. By the early twentieth century, in the southernmost region, containing the present cities of Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, the surviving biological descendants of the Southern Pomo had lost their ancestral speech. Further to the north, two dialects survived, with, at mid-century, perhaps two dozen speakers each: Mihilakawna ‘West Stream’, spoken in the Dry Creek Valley (now filled with vineyards), and Makahmo ‘Salmonhole’, spoken in the area of the town of Cloverdale. By the early 1960s the number of speakers had dwindled to about a dozen for each of the two dialects. And by 1999, there was one speaker of each dialect. There are hundreds of descendants with some Southern Pomo blood, but they are much assimilated and racially mixed through intermarriage with other Indian groups, with Mexicans, and with white people. In the recent cultural revival many of the younger generations have learned their traditional songs and dances and perform them in public.