Session Abstract

This panel explores how the lives of California Indians give insight into national developments central to Reconstruction, shifting modes of labor, and American citizenship. By focusing upon particular individuals, Stacey Smith, Michael Karp, and Damon Akins show that California Indians primarily encountered the abstractions of state and federal law through labor and issues regarding land. Considering these two places in which Indians confronted the law, this panel points toward the often-amorphous extent of federal power in relation to Native people between 1850 and 1924. In doing so, the papers demonstrate that California was integral to the politics of national emancipation, the spread of industrial capitalism, and definitions of citizenship and sovereignty.

Stacey Smith’s paper elucidates the ways in which California’s Indian slave trade became a vital source of contention in U.S. national politics. In 1850, California passed an “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” a piece of legislation that allowed Anglo settlers to capture and apprentice Native Californians as servants. The legislation simultaneously promoted an illicit slave trade in Indian women and children. By the 1860s, Indian apprenticeship and the illegal slave trade it engendered were widespread. When the Lincoln administration adopted a national program of emancipation, Republicans sought to eliminate the enslavement of Native people in an ostensibly free state. Although California Republicans successfully overturned Indian apprenticeship on the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, Smith shows that Indians were still subject to coercive labor and California’s transition from bound to free labor remained, much like the post-bellum South, uncertain and incomplete.

As Indian slavery influenced the course of national politics, Michael Karp shows that political debates over Indian apprenticeship motivated the Indian Island massacre, in which a group of Anglos killed nearly two hundred Indian women and children with axes and hatchets. While situating the killings at Indian Island in this national perspective, Karp also looks to the ways in which the massacre marked a discernable transition in the ecological history of northwestern California. Focusing upon conceptions of place, systems of labor, and dramatic environmental change demonstrates that the Indian Island massacre was the event in which the northwest coast became enmeshed in a global and capitalist economy. Indeed, it was through wage labor that even the survivors of the massacre purchased land and began rebuilding their culture.

Indian people in Southern California found themselves in similar situations. Between the abolition of slavery in California and the 1924 Snyder Act, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, Indian citizenship and sovereignty were ill defined. Damon Akins’ detailed analysis of two Indian men residing in the San Luis Rey Valley illuminates how Native people negotiated their legal statuses as citizens and members of sovereign Indian nations. By delineating the ways in which these men navigated and resisted assimilationist policies and worked out their relationship with the federal government, Akins’ paper, like Smith and Karp’s, tells stories of individual lives that place California as fundamental to the development and course of United States history.