Koleeu

Koleeu recalls the ko'lew, or Kiliwa, of northern Baja California. Their historical country reached from the coast around San Felipe and Ometepec into the San Pedro Mártir mountains and neighbouring valleys. Small family bands followed seasonal rounds of gathering, hunting and fishing, sharing particular territories with other bands of the same clan.

Mission expansion challenged this pattern of life in the late eighteenth century. The Dominicans founded Santa Catalina in 1797, building an adobe chapel and stone irrigation channels, growing wheat and maize and raising livestock. Kiliwa communities east of the mission resisted the pressure to enter mission settlements. Alongside neighbouring Indigenous peoples, they repeatedly opposed missionary control. By the early nineteenth century the country around the sierras remained a contested meeting ground between mobile communities and religious establishments seeking to concentrate people, labour and production.