Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda Kevin Whalen (bio) Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS of Indigenous experiences in the early twentieth century remain somewhat few and far between. After a spate of as-told-to biographies written in the mid-twentieth century that often blurred the line between non-Native writers and their subjects, biography fell out of favor among historians and anthropologists. With Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian, anthropologist Terri A. Castaneda joins a growing group of scholars working to refresh the medium as she brings to vivid life the rich and varied life of a Mountain Maidu activist. While Potts became a prominent journalist, political activist, and cultural leader among California Native people in the decades after World War II, Castaneda begins her account by drawing a painstaking portrait of Potts's Big Meadow community of Mountain Maidu people in the mid-nineteenth century, effectively using settler colonial theory to underscore the changes brought by the arrival of non-Native gold miners, land speculators, and (later) settlers. Castaneda then explores Potts's experiences at the Greenville Boarding School, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and after returning home to northern California. The second section of the book details how Potts rose to political prominence through editing Smoke Signals, a news publication for California Native people, and by participating in the Federated Indians of California, a group that pushed for just compensation of California Indians under the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. Castaneda then analyzes Potts's rising importance as a cultural leader and collaborator with anthropologists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Finally, the book closes with respective explorations of Potts's roles within the National Congress of American Indians and the urban Indian community of Sacramento. Through it all, Potts left a voluminous paper trail, and Castaneda demonstrates thoughtfulness in incorporating these written sources, as well as interviews with descendants and Native community members in Sacramento. Driven by the careful pen of Castaneda, Marie Mason Potts adds depth and texture to what we know within many critical areas of California Indian history and Native American history more broadly. For example, Potts sought out the opportunity to attend Carlisle Indian School, and her experiences at [End Page 133] Carlisle and after returning home reflect agency and its limits among boarding school students, both at school and after returning home. Potts's leadership within the Native community in Sacramento adds a crucial knowledge of Indigenous urbanization in the decades before World War II. Additionally, Castaneda's analysis of Potts's participation in the Federated Indians of California and the National Congress of American Indians, and her long run as editor of the Smoke Signal, provides a crucial window into California Native communities during the upheavals of the Indian Claims Commission and termination. Moreover, Potts's political activism as limned by Castaneda demonstrates the critical ties between local experiences and national Indigenous politics during the first half of the twentieth century. The journey of Potts was long and rich with meaningful experiences; as relayed by Castaneda, these stories bring to life both the uniqueness and exceptionality of Potts's stories and their relationships to the broader challenges and opportunities faced by Native people in California and beyond. Analyzing a life as long and rich as Potts's presents some challenges. Potts's life touched many themes and subfields that are often approached in isolation from one another by academics. Boarding school experiences, wage labor, political activism, and the development of community-oriented anthropological methods—each of these topics fill separate shelves at university libraries. Relating the experiences and activism of Potts to the literatures of each of these fields requires considerable time and attention, and in lesser hands scholarly context might compete with the narrative arc of Potts's life. Castaneda handles this difficult work with aplomb. Marie Mason Potts is an exceptional book, and it offers renewed promise for the possibilities of biographical study as a lens into Indigenous experiences of the early twentieth century. [End Page 134] Kevin...