We Are the Land: A History of Native California

“A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White’s California Exposures.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous.

Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.

ISBN-13: 9780520280496

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: University of California Press

Publication Date: 04-20-2021

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

William J. Bauer, Jr. is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.Damon B. Akins is Professor of History at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a former high school teacher in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Openings

1. A People of the Land, a Land for the People
Native Spaces: Yuma

2. Beach Encounters: Indigenous People and the Age of Exploration, 1540–1769
Native Spaces: San Diego 

3. "Our Country before the Fernandino Arrived Was a Forest": Native Towns and Spanish Missions in Colonial California, 1769–1810
Native Spaces: Rome 

4. Working the Land: Entrepreneurial Indians and the Markets of Power, 1811–1849
Native Spaces: Sacramento

5. "The White Man Would Spoil Everything": Indigenous People and the California Gold Rush, 1846–1873
Native Spaces: Ukiah

6. Working for Land: Rancherias, Reservations, and Labor, 1870–1904
Native Spaces: Ishi Wilderness

7. Friends and Enemies: Reframing Progress, and Fighting for Sovereignty, 1905–1928
Native Spaces: Riverside

8. Becoming the Indians of California: Reorganization and Justice, 1928–1954
Native Spaces: Los Angeles

9. Reoccupying California: Resistance and Reclaiming the Land, 1953–1985
Native Spaces: Berkeley and the East Bay

10. Returning to the Land: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Revitalization since 1985

Conclusion: Returns 
Index Show More