We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here

by Bauer, William J., Jr.

• ISBN13: 9780807833384
• ISBN10: 080783338X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

The federally recognized Round Valley Indian Tribes are a small, confederated people whose members today come from twelve indigenous California tribes. In 1849, during the California gold rush, people from several of these tribes were relocated to a reservation farm in northern Mendocino County. Fusing Native American history and labor history, William Bauer Jr. chronicles the evolution of work, community, and tribal identity among the Round Valley Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that enabled their survival and resistance to assimilation. Drawing on oral history interviews, Bauer brings Round Valley Indian voices to the forefront in a narrative that traces their adaptations to shifting social and economic realities, first within unfree labor systems, including outright slavery and debt peonage, and later as wage laborers within the agricultural workforce. Despite the allotment of the reservation, federal land policies, and the Great Depression, Round Valley Indians innovatively used work and economic change to their advantage in order to survive and persist in the twentieth century.We Were All Like Migrant Workers Hererelates their history for the first time.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Making the World in a Basket	p. 13
Work, Labor, and Community in Ancient Time California
They, White People, Made Slaves of Indians	p. 30
Forced Labor in the Nome Cult Valley, 1850-1865
They Were Kept Busy at All Times	p. 58
Mobility, Cash Wages, and the Reconstruction of Labor Relations in Round Valley, 1865-1880
It Give Everybody a Job	p. 80
Round Valley Indians and Mendocino Country's Hop Industry, 1875-1929
From Farm Workers to ...Farm Workers	p. 106
Land, Labor, and the Allotment of the Round Valley Reservation, 1880-1900
They Gave All They were Going to Give to the Indians	p. 130
Round Valley Indian Work, Labor, and Community, 1900-1917
Who Good to Feed Them Children?	p. 156
Family labor, and Community in War and Peace, 1917-1929
Building Bridges and Telling Stories	p. 176
Labor, Economy, and Community during the Great Depression
Conclusion	p. 204
Notes	p. 217
Bibliography	p. 251
Index	p. 273
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