Testimonies of affect: Native American women’s histories of violence on California’s Pacific North Coast

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the 1850s and into the 1880s, the Native American nations of the Pacific northwestern coast of California had been wracked by violence perpetrated by settler vigilantes and military forces. Girls and young women, sought for both sexual and domestic labour, were disproportionately represented among the survivors. Decades later, during the 1920s and 1930s, some of those now elderly women delivered their testimonies. Their accounts continue to reverberate in the present day, even as they remain on the periphery of historical consciousness. This article considers the gendered nature of these deeply affective and traumatic accounts, that continues to shape their silencing and their re-telling. It focuses on the transmission of these accounts to, and through, white women. Such consideration suggests that in persisting in recounting these histories of settler atrocities to settler women, Native American women survivors mobilised the politics of affect to advocate for contemporary Native American rights; and asserted their agency as history makers and truth tellers in their own right.