California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History

By William J. Bauer Jr.

Book Overview

Bauer tells California history strictly through Native perspectives.

Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California. Combining these oral histories with creation myths and other oral traditions, he demonstrates the importance of sacred landscapes and animals and other nonhuman actors to the formation of place and identity. He also examines tribal stories of ancestors who prophesied the coming of white settlers and uses their recollections of the California Indian Wars to push back against popular narratives that seek to downplay Native resistance. The result both challenges the "California story" and enriches it with new voices and important points of view, serving as a model for understanding Native historical perspectives in other regions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295998350
• ISBN13: 9780295998350
• Release Date: June 2016
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

California Native alternative history

It is a well research and logical argument against white settlers from the victimized California Native Americans. It was brutal and horrible and they survive after two hundred years of the Manifest Destiny with the Hearts buried in Wounded Knees. They suffered from Federal and State regulations in being pushed around as the lower level of humanity. They resisted and revenged by fighting back. Page 24 documented that the Doctrine of Discovery, an international principle that granted European nations and US economic and legal rights to North America, held that American Indians possessed only a use righto the land, not fee title. In California the federal government denied any kind of Indigenous land rights. It looks the guest overpowered the original occupants and dictated and forced the terms. White settlers tried hard to erase Natives geography names to displace the social, political, and cultural circumstances histories with US colonialism. Page 90 documented a case of mixing strychnine with flour and sugar to Native. Page 89 documented in 1893, US Army marched more than 20,000 Cherokees on way to Reservation across States in cold winter with five thousand deaths, historically known as Trail of Tears, The six chapter book covers, creation, naming, discovery, fighting, cleansing and persisting with Native American perspective – they bury their heart and body in California and come back. This is their story from ashes.