The Politics of Indenture and the Indian Island Massacre: Place, Labor, and Environment

On February 26, 1860, a group of colonial settlers murdered nearly two hundred Wiyot Indians on California’s northwest coast with axes and hatchets. The Indian Island massacre, as it is now known, was in part motivated by debates surrounding California law that promoted the enslavement of thousands of Native people. The massacre determined how inhabitants—Native or otherwise—imagined, labored, and lived upon the landscape of northwestern California.

The massacre at Indian Island is a window into a community plagued by contests over the meanings of place, but it is also an event in which national questions relating to race, labor, and land use came to a head. By examining how the physical landscape of Indian Island has changed overtime, this paper explores how the massacre fused Native and Anglo perceptions of place and engaged them in a contested dialectic throughout the late-1800s. Prior to the massacre the Wiyot used Indian Island to harvest shellfish, hold ceremonial dances, and bury their dead. Following the massacre, dairy farming and redwood logging altered the landscape of the island significantly. The lives of three individuals—an Anglo settler who led the massacre and two Wiyot men who survived the killings at Indian Island—show clearly that the massacre was the moment in which Anglos launched the northwest coast into a capitalist economy defined by wage labor.            

By placing the massacre in the context of the abolition of Indian slavery in California and the concomitant industrialization of the landscape, this paper offers the first national analysis of this relatively understudied event. The Indian Island massacre is a story in which individual lives and laws coalesced, dramatically remaking the landscape of northwestern California and highlighting the ways in which the meanings of race and labor ravaged the nation in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century.