Ceremonies of the Pomo Indians

In 1892, a young anthropologist began living among the Pomo people of Northern California. By the time he sat down to write this book in 1917, the ceremonies he had witnessed were already gone. What remains is this meticulous record of a world on the edge of disappearance: the Ghost Ceremony and the Guksu, the intricate roles of village captains and fire-tenders and head singers, the organizational architecture of rituals that had no formal priesthood but instead relied on community participation. Barrett documented what he could observe in those final years, then spent years interviewing elders who remembered details fading from memory. Some ceremonies survived only as names. Some dances still appeared on the Fourth of July, though by then so stripped of meaning that Barrett deemed them 'virtually worthless to the student.' This is not a nostalgic account. It is an urgent record made while witnesses still lived, a window into practices that defined Pomo spiritual life before colonization, disease, and displacement erased them. For anyone seeking to understand the richness of California indigenous culture before the twentieth century, these pages are irreplaceable.