American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Anthropologists C. Hart Merriam and Samuel A. Barrett photo documented the Northern Sierra Mewuk village of Hechenu in the first decade of the twentieth century. More than half a century after Euro-American miners played havoc with the hills and the traditional lifeways of the native people, these photographs record the extraordinary tenacity of the Mewuk culture. Although Hechenu no longer exists, these images and the memories they evoke in the people who once saw the village leave a record of this important, sparsely studied period of Northern Sierra Mewuk culture history. The village of Hechenu is one of twenty-two Northern Sierra Mewuk ethnographic localities identified in the anthropological literature and field notes. Sierra Mewuk territory has been linguistically divided into three groups: Northern, Central, and Southern (figure 1). Northern Mewuk territory included portions of the Cosumnes, Mokelumne, and Calaveras river drainages.