Viola Martinez, California Paiute : Living in Two Worlds

by Bahr, Diana Meyers

• ISBN13: 9780806135144
• ISBN10: 080613514X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr

Summary

The life story of Viola Martinez, an Owens Valley Paiute Indian of eastern California, extends over nine decades of the twentieth century. Viola experienced forced assimilation in an Indian boarding school, overcame racial stereotypes to pursue a college degree, and spent several years working at a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Finding herself poised uncertainly between Indian and white worlds. Viola was determined to turn her marginalized existence into an opportunity for personal empowerment. In Viola Martinez, California Paiute, Diana Meyers Bahr recounts Viola's extraordinary life story and examines her strategies for dealing with acculturation. Bahr allows Viola to tell her story in her own words, beginning with her early years in Owens Valley, where she learned traditional lifeways, such as gathering pinons, from her aunt. In the summers, she traveled by horse and buggy into the High Sierras where her aunt traded with Basque sheepherders. Viola was sent to the Sherman Institute, a federal boarding school with a mandate to assimila

Author Biography

Diana Meyers Bahr is Project Associate for the Oral History Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	VII
Acknowledgments	IX
Introduction: The Marginal Person	3	(152)
Chapter 1 Facing the Sunrise: Owens Valley	17	(12)
Chapter 2 "A Mess of Uncles": Viola's Early Years	29	(22)
Chapter 3 Far from Home: Sherman Institute Boarding School	51	(16)
Chapter 4 The Creative Margin	67	(16)
Chapter 5 Return to Owens Valley	83	(10)
Chapter 6 Converging Paths: Native Americans,
Euro-Americans, and Japanese Americans
at Manzanar	93	(30)
Chapter 7 Expanded Margins: Urban Opportunities	105	(18)
Chapter 8 Education Advocate: Eighteen Years in
the Los Angeles Unified School District	123	(10)
Chapter 9 The Trip Home	133	(22)
Conclusion: Culturally Enlarged Elder	155	(4)
Literature Review	159	(12)
Afterword	171	(2)
Notes	173	(12)
Bibliography	185	(10)
Index	195