We Are the Land: A History of Native California

By Damon B Akins

Book Overview

"A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White's California Exposures."--Kirkus Reviews

Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous.

Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood--paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today's casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520280504
• ISBN13: 9780520280502
• Release Date: March 2022
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

We are California Land!

This is a well researched documentary on the California Native Americans who had been here thousands of years, they survived after Christ, Columbus and Custer. They endured Spanish, English and America colonists and settlers especially in Manifest Destiny in killing, raping and cheating their land and gold. It is a long overdue comprehensive history in American chapter. They are still invisible in the main society, even they are remembered in different museums with one state in Sacramento and the different casinos . This is a sad and difficult story about the land of California which they belong and rely on for their life. It is a must read to enjoy and appreciate Native Americans who are remember every Thanksgiving.