We Are the Land: A History of Native California

Abstract

We Are the Land produces a seismic shift in its insistence that the history of California is the Indigenous history of California. Grafting Indigenous history onto previous narratives of California fails in these authors’ eyes. Keeping the two as distinct enterprises also fails. We Are the Land insists on seeing California as a brief moment in the history of Indigenous people, for whom California is but an episode: “People misunderstood the settler invasion of Indigenous California as California history rather than as an unsustainable and disruptive episode in it.” Instead of minimizing the American contribution to that disruption, much of the book takes place after the Gold Rush, serving to highlight America's contribution to genocide.Comprising ten chapters, this delivers an avalanche of facts, details, and nuance. The authors begin with Indigenous history prior to contact with Europeans, centering Indigenous knowledge, origin stories, and a holistic view of this time period in California. Looking at what has been called the “age of exploration,” the authors begin with beaches, riverbanks, and hillsides to see the moments of first encounter as an engagement of trade and movement into others’ tribal territories well before missionization. With the arrival of Spanish missions and missionaries, Indigenous people in California struggled to cope with disease and the domesticated livestock brought by Europeans which changed the Indigenous landscape, both of which presented a number of risks and opportunities for Indigenous people.Considering the Mexican period of 1811–1849, the authors suggest that Indigenous Californians leveraged their power, especially their labor power, during this period with Russian fur traders, American merchants, and Franciscan missionaries. For the American period of 1846–1873, the authors suggest using genocide as the only way to understand American relations with Indigenous people, but they also look closely at how Indigenous people of California used their power to resist and survive American genocide. From California statehood in 1859 through 1904, Indigenous people focused on creative ways of holding onto communal land in response to the definitively Anglo state's interest in acquiring access and title to all lands of California. From 1905–1928, the authors suggest that Native people in southern California fought allotment as a way of maintaining their communal land bases, while many northern California Indigenous communities embraced the policy to further their land claims, all of which constitutes a distinctive Indigenous legal and political activism.Identity acts as the central force in the period from 1928 through 1954, where the authors see a causality at work in legal and political activism leading to a cultivated Indigenous identity as California Indigenous people, coming together to sue the federal government for land theft. The period of 1953–1985 begins with the federal policy of termination and ends with the assertion of tribal self-determination among California Indigenous people. The authors include California tribes in their analysis here as well as the multi-tribal and multi-national protestors at Alcatraz. Both groups fought for land claims, prevention of dams, and the establishment of bingo halls. The book closes with the period of 1985 to the present, the authors document the fight among tribes, the state of California, the federal government, and private business groups to bring tribal gaming to tribal lands in California. Although it took two decades of struggle for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians to secure the right to gaming, many other tribes followed suit, bringing in a huge revenue stream. Access to gaming funds has given tribal citizens the opportunity to reconnect and even relocate to tribal lands, and tribes gained the economic power to engage in land legislation, buy back tribal lands, and reassert tribal land rights.The authors provide vignettes of Indigenous viewpoints on spaces within California but also Europe. In an unusual move, they also provide extensive sources at the end of each chapter rather than a collection at the end of the book. Creating their own maps of California tribal lands and reservations of today and insisting on centering their stories on Indigenous knowledge and activism, We Are the Land makes a massive intervention in the field of Native history. This book is a powerful history of what is known as the state of California, giving scholars what they have needed for decades.