Chief Marin: Leader, Rebel, and Legend

by Betty Goerke

A rare biography of a California Indian leader that weaves together the story of a legendary figure It's a little known fact that the San Francisco Bay Area's Marin County is named after a Coast Miwok chief who achieved notoriety for defying Spanish authority over his people. Anthropologist and archaeologist Betty Goerke has pieced together a portrait of the life of this Native American leader, using mission records, ethnographies, explorers' and missionaries' diaries and correspondence, and other material.

Genres: Indigenous, History, Biography, Nonfiction

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some good nuggets in this book, and the descriptions of how terribly native people were treated by the Spanish and later by the Americans were heartbreaking. But it could really have used an editor.

[Jericha]

DNF, sadly. It's a fact about me that I often struggle to finish nonfiction, and biographies in particular tend to be the most challenging for me. It's a shame, because Goerke's work is absolutely as meticulously-researched as the blurb claims it is and the story she's telling is a vital one I badly wanted to read. But the timeline jumps around so much in each chapter that I simply couldn't follow it, and when it came time to return it to the library (after three renewals!) I was only halfway through.

I would likely have had an easier time if the book had been organized more purely chronologically; as it was, years were leaped between sentences, then revisited chapters later with a different array of details, so that I quickly lost track of what happened when and how the various narrative threads were stitched together. I feel very regretful about this, because what I *could* follow drew an incredibly important and vital portrait of Native life in Marin County, where I now live and which badly needs to give more space to its Native voices and history (and reckon with its own violent anti-Indigenous past).

This is, therefore, a worthwhile, necessary and important book, if perhaps not the most well-organized, and I encourage others to read it even if I couldn't manage it.

[Gray Dougherty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being someone who grew up in California and lives in Marin, there was interesting information about the Coast Miwok and the mission system, especially the last few chapters about secularization and the transition from Spanish to US occupation.

However, it was SOOOOOO dry. It felt like a book for historian academics with an esoteric interest in the Bay Area. I’ve read a few Erik Larson books and was hoping this would be similar, while more geographically relatable. It was not.

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good scholarship, good writing, occasionally long-winded, but overall a fine study of Indian life in the mission period. Marino was a member of the native elites that arose in every mission among the survivors - not only holding hereditary clout in their tribal groups but also adept at working the mission system, fluent in Spanish and possessed of high-value skills that the padres couldn't live without - in Marino's case, a master boatman who knew the Bay like nobody's business. Interesting stuff.

[Sarah]

okay okay. I didn't read the whole thing, but I liked what I did read and maybe someday I'll try it again.