We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California's Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941

we were all like migrant workers here

we were all like migrant workers here

WORK, COMMUNITY, AND MEMORY ON CALIFORNIA’S ROUND VALLEY RESERVATION. 1850–1941

WILLIAM J. BAUER JR.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

Set in Whitman by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission

in revised form from "Working for Identity: Race, Ethnicity,

and the Market Economy in Northern California, 1875–1936,"

in Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic

Development, edited by Brian Hosmer and Colleen O’Neill

(Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 2004), and "‘We Were

All Migrant Workers Here’: Round Valley Indian Labor in

Northern California, 1850–1929," Western Historical Quarterly

37 (Spring 2006): 43–63, © Western History Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bauer, William J., Jr.

We were all like migrant workers here : work, community, and

memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 /

William J. Bauer, Jr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3338-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—California—Round Valley Indian

Reservation—Social conditions. 2. Indians, Treatment of—

California—Round Valley Indian Reservation. 3. Round Valley

Indian Reservation (Calif.)—Social conditions. I. Title.

E78. C15B323 2009

979.4’15—dc22 2009024326

13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

FOR KENDRA, who deserves more than this book

contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. MAKING THE WORLD IN A BASKET

Work, Labor, and Community in Ancient Time California

2. THEY, WHITE PEOPLE, MADE SLAVES OF INDIANS

Forced Labor in the Nome Cult Valley, 1850–1865

3. THEY WERE KEPT BUSY AT ALL TIMES

Mobility, Cash Wages, and the Reconstruction of Labor Relations in Round Valley, 1865–1880

4. IT GIVE EVERYBODY A JOB

Round Valley Indians and Mendocino County’s Hop Industry, 1875–1929

5. FROM FARM WORKERS TO ... FARM WORKERS

Land, Labor, and the Allotment of the Round Valley Reservation, 1880–1900

6. THEY GAVE ALL THEY WERE GOING TO GIVE TO THE INDIANS

Round Valley Indian Work, Labor, and Community, 1900–1917

7. WHO GOOD TO FEED THEM CHILDREN?

Family Labor and Community in War and Peace, 1917–1929

8. BUILDING BRIDGES AND TELLING STORIES

Labor, Economy, and Community during the Great Depression

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

maps and illustrations

MAPS

Tribal Territories and Location of the Round Valley Reservation 4

Round Valley Reservation, ca. 1880 108

ILLUSTRATIONS

Indian workers on the Nome Cult Farm in the 1850s 42

The last remnants of the wood fence built by Round Valley Indian workers in the mid-nineteenth century 48

Nomlacki Jim McGetric, who turned to sheepshearing in order to earn cash wages 67

Pomo woman holds a child in a hop camp near Ukiah 85

Pomo boy separates hop flowers from stems in a hop field near Ukiah 86

Round Valley Indian men and their teams working on a ditch and road project in 1907 134

Yuki Ralph Moore was an active member of Round Valley’s labor community 167

Wailacki June Russ Britton hoeing her garden in the 4-H program established during the Great Depression 181

Two girls standing in front of Yuki/Wailacki Filmore Duncan’s house in the 1930s 182

Indians working on the Nashmead Bridge 193

preface

The story of Ishi casts a looming shadow over California Indian history. In 1911, Ishi wandered into a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. He had never had any apparent contact with California settlers. After spending a night in the local jail, Ishi went to San Francisco and spent five years working with the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Ishi was the ideal informant for Kroeber’s salvage anthropology because he had spent his entire life away from the influences of American culture. In 1916, Ishi passed away from tuberculosis. He died the last wild Indian in North America. The story of Ishi portrayed California Indians as imprisoned in the nineteenth century and culturally degraded in the twentieth century. Indeed, Ishi’s death in the city of San Francisco confirmed that California Indians could not adapt to modern America. However, other narratives of California Indians await investigation. This book is such an effort.

Using a rich body of oral history interviews and archival sources, this book explores the experiences of Indians from northern California’s Round Valley Reservation in California’s agricultural workforce. Rather than being victims of economic change, Round Valley Indians used wage labor to create and maintain a sense of community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, Round Valley Indians used wage labor to ensure family economic survival, forge social connections with other Native people in northern California, and maintain close connections with the land.

Before contact with Euroamericans, California Indians created social bonds in their households and villages by hunting and harvesting food sources. However, the California gold rush disrupted indigenous community and labor relations. Systems of unfree labor, squatter settlement, and removal to the reservation divorced California Indians from their families and the land. Beginning in the 1860s, however, Round Valley Indians rebuilt community on the reservation. By picking hops, shearing sheep, and performing other agricultural jobs, Round Valley Indians carved out their own economic and social space. These efforts continued in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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.

This book is built upon a large collection of oral interviews. For those interviews that I conducted I use the first name of the person in this book rather than the last name. I do so because of the relationship that the interview created between me and the person I interviewed. Students of oral history agree that the interview process is not a detached research experience, like reading primary documents in archives. Instead, it is a profoundly social experience that creates ties between the interviewer and interviewee. Since I already knew some of the people I interviewed (indeed I am related to some of them) and they all made efforts to make personal connections with me in the interview process (through stories about me or my relatives), I find it appropriate to refer to them in the first person.

I have attempted as faithfully as possible to provide the tribal identities of the Round Valley Indian population. In the case of a bi- or tri-tribal ethnicity, I use a hyphen to combine the tribal heritages of that person. However, it was difficult to always do so. Early twentieth-century censuses from Round Valley lumped together certain tribal groups. For instance, the Pit River and Nomlacki and the Yuki and Wailacki were listed on the same census, making an accurate identification of their ethnicity problematic. Thus, I have designated the uncertain tribal heritage with a slash. Finally, careful readers will note that I use alternative spellings of some tribal names in this book. I use the spellings from the tribal seals of the Round Valley Indian Tribes (for example, Nomlacki rather than Nomlaki, Wailacki rather than Wailaki, and Concow rather than Konkow) in order to produce a book that will be understood by the Round Valley Indian Community.

acknowledgments

As I bring this book to completion, I find that it is true that work does not exist without a strong community. James Bequette, a teacher, friend, and colleague, cultivated my interest in writing. I hope that this finished product reflects his hard work. Nancy Fischer offered me a place to study during frequent trips home. At the University of Notre Dame, Thomas Blantz, Gregory Dowd, and Thomas Pierce sparked my curiosity in history and helped me get into graduate school. At the University of Oklahoma, Robert Griswold, Paul Gilje, R. Warren Metcalf, and Terry Rugeley taught me so much about being a historian and a teacher. I also thank my graduate student colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, especially S. Matthew Despain, Linda English, Brian Frehner, Sarah Janda, and David Loving. Brad Raley was among the first people I met at the University of Oklahoma. I genuinely thank him for his friendship at the university, for the morning coffee, and for his support when I left Oklahoma. I worry about his taste in football teams, and I really did not appreciate his mocking tone when Laramie’s annual September snowstorm arrived. But he has been a fantastic friend and colleague. At the University of Wyoming, Judith Antell, Adrian Bantjes, Michael Brose, Marianne Kamp, David Messenger, Mark Potter, Philip Roberts, Ronald Schultz, and Kristine Utterback made the History Department and the American Indian studies program hospitable places to work. Thanks also to Leif Cawley, Douglas Johnson, and Becky Riley for managing the History Department. I have also had the opportunity to think about and discuss American Indian history with the following graduate students: Brandi Hilton-Hagemann, Catherine Lucignani, Matthew McIntosh, Karl Snyder, Julie Stidolph, and Skott Vigil. It has been my joy as a teacher to watch my students develop as scholars and friends. I thank Jeff Means for reading this manuscript and offering excellent advice. Peg Garner provided extremely helpful editorial advice and was an enthusiastic audience for the book. Thanks to Edward Janak and Cheryl Wells for making Laramie a livable place and this book a better product.

Several institutions provided financial support: the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Grant, the American Philosophical Society, the Western History Association’s Sara Jackson Award, the Southwest Oral History Association, the Historical Society of Southern California, and the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the Study of the American West at the Newberry Library. The Department of History and the Graduate College at the University of Oklahoma were strong supporters of graduate student research. At the University of Wyoming, the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences provided essential financial support.

Many other institutions provided time for me to write this book. The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program funded a year away from Laramie. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the University of California, Davis, and thank Steven Crum for his support and mentorship during my year in California. I also thank Louis Warren for coffee and for offering me excellent advice on publishing. The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the American West provided a summer to complete a round of revisions in lovely Stanford, California.

I have traveled to several archives across the country while researching this book. Georgina Wright at the Round Valley Public Library permitted me access to the Round Valley Oral History Project and the library’s sole computer with Internet access. The staff at the Held-Poage Research Library helped immensely in finding research materials. Sylvia and Russ Bartley at the Mendocino County Museum helped me identify research and photograph collections for this book. Sherrie Smith-Ferri at the Grace Hudson Museum opened the doors of its archives during a last-minute research trip. I am indebted to Lisa Miller, John Hedger, and Deborah Osterburg of the Pacific Sierra Branch of the National Archives in San Bruno, who recommended collections that were extremely helpful. I could not have completed this book without their suggestions and guidance. Lisa Gezelter at the Laguna Niguel branch of the National Archives painstakingly spent a week looking through the student case files for the Sherman Indian Institute. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Bancroft Library, the California State Archives, the William L. Clements Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for their help and for offering a place to do research.

Several people have commented on this book in one form or another, whether at conferences or by graciously agreeing to read my book chapters. I thank Mark Barringer, Steven Crum, Corie Delashaw, Patricia Dixon, Clyde Ellis, Lisa Emmerich, Brian Hosmer, Michael Magliari, Stella Mancillas, Delores McBroome, Kathryn Molohon, Colleen O’Neill, Charles Roberts, and Sherry Smith. I have presented some forms of this book to the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis, and to the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. I appreciate all the comments and criticisms of this work.

I sincerely thank June Britton, Francis Crabtree, Aloya Frazier, Arvella Freeman, Claude Hoaglen, Lorraine McLaine, Joe Russ, Barbara Pina, and Norman Whipple for trusting me with their life histories. Kathy Cook offered significant interpretive guidance for this book. Indeed, the title bears her mark. My grandmother, Anita Rome, has offered her home, Mountain Dew, and wonderful guidance at all stages of this project.

At the University of North Carolina Press, Mark Simpson-Vos has offered unflagging support for this project. He has provided excellent advice and helped me navigate the murky waters of publishing. I thank him for not giving up on this project and for helping to shape it into its current form. I could not have completed the book without his assistance. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, who rigorously read this book and made it a much better product.

A sincere and genuine thanks goes to my mentor and adviser, Albert Hurtado. For a California Indian researching and writing California Indian history, I could not have asked for a better adviser, mentor, and friend. I think fondly of that e-mail from several years ago: We’re going to Oklahoma! I appreciate all the assistance Albert has given me over the past ten years. I probably do not say it enough, but I am extremely grateful for all his support. I hope he is as proud of this book as I am.

Last, but not least, my family deserves the most thanks and credit for this book. My father, William, taught me how to work. My mother, Deborah, has offered unflinching support and love. These are things that I can never pay back. My brother Earl offered me a place to stay when I conducted the interviews that are at the core of this book. Temerity Chlolake arrived in my life when I finished the dissertation, and Scout Walade arrived in my life when I finished the book. Kendra Gage has stuck with me through thick and thin—she even moved to Laramie with me. For that, and for all her love, this book is small compensation and only a token of my gratitude.

introduction

On a cold and foggy January morning in 2002, Concow–Little Lake Kathy Cook shared her memories of living on the Round Valley Reservation, located in a remote part of northern California. Approximately 180 miles north of the San Francisco Bay area, Round Valley is accessible only by braving the most excruciatingly twisty mountain roads. Born in 1925, Kathy had certainly seen a tremendous amount of historical change in her life. With curly black hair (although she now dons fashionable bandanas) and large glasses that accentuate her friendly and soft face, Kathy described her more than thirty-year tenure in tribal politics and life experiences with her usual good humor and argumentative nature. Kathy’s firsthand knowledge about tribal government was fascinating, but her response to a question about whether or not she picked hops as a youth revealed even more about Round Valley Reservation life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Oh yeah, I picked hops, she stated, a little surprised that I should ask such a question and that I might not know the answer. Everybody used to go down [to the Hop Ranch] and work. It give everybody a job. Although it had been several decades since Kathy had last plucked hops—small, flowering buds that resemble pinecones—from their sharp and sticky vines, she vividly recalled that the workday began before the sun rose over the blue-green mountains that surround the reservation. I hated to get up in the morning, she stated emphatically, as she tends to do. In the predawn hours, Kathy’s employers, the Winters family, which operated the Hop Ranch on the south end of the Valley, sent a truck to pick her up, along with other Indian workers. She then spent the better part of the day picking hops. Kathy’s wages were small—workers made only one cent per pound of hops picked. The days were long and hot and often miserably uncomfortable—the vines irritated the skin. Hop picking provided important sources of income for Kathy’s family, but it was the way in which she described work as creating a common experience for Round Valley Indians that made a profound impact on our conversation. We were all like migrant workers here, Kathy said, probably because people worked on the ranches here: Rohrbough Ranch, White Ranch, Hop Ranch.¹ Kathy’s statements lead us to a story in which work and labor were fundamental to the way in which Round Valley Indians formed their communities and survived as indigenous people in nineteenth- and twentieth-century California.

The Round Valley Reservation is located in the center of the indigenous homeland of the Yuki, a linguistically unique group native to California, located in present-day Mendocino County. In 1856, the federal government created the Nome Cult Indian Farm (later renamed the Round Valley Reservation) on the Yuki’s native soil and subsequently removed several other California Indian tribes to the area, including, but not limited to, the Concows, the Pit Rivers, the Nomlackis, the Nisenans, the Wailackis, and the Pomos. The era of the California gold rush and the Civil War left California Indian communities battered, bruised, and on the verge of disintegration. Systems of unfree labor, squatter settlement, and the removal to the reservation dislocated families and divorced Native Californians from place. After 1865, however, indigenous and removed Round Valley Indians used agricultural wage work to create and maintain community in the face of threats posed by the persistence of white squatters and the maturation of federal Indian policy. Picking hops, shearing sheep, and performing other agricultural jobs produced a shared experience for all reservation residents. These jobs and work sites permitted Round Valley Indians to work with Indians from other California tribal nations and enabled them to retain tribal ties and identities. Additionally, Round Valley Indians participated in a number of nonwork activities attached to work sites in Mendocino County. Grass game (a traditional gambling game), roundhouse ceremonies, and social drinking brought Round Valley Indians together after the workday concluded. Thus, wage work provided not only much-needed income to Round Valley Indian families but also the opportunity to interact with other California Indians. Round Valley Indians continued to use agricultural and migrant wage labor to maintain community during and after the implementation of allotment, World War I, and the Great Depression. By World War II, the formation of an Indian Reorganization Act tribal government, new religious organizations, and the transition from migrant agricultural to extractive industrial work changed the parameters within which Round Valley Indians made their community.

This book straddles the fields of American labor history and American Indian history. Since the 1960s, labor history has undergone a significant revolution. Influenced by the work of economist John Commons, early twentieth-century labor histories emphasized the importance of the trade union. Beginning in the 1960s, American labor historians Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and others, influenced by British historian E. P. Thompson, sought working people’s perceptions, beliefs, and experiences in the industrial workforce. At their best, these scholars traced workers’ transition from a preindustrial or agrarian lifestyle to the industrial factory. Once in the factory, scholars turned their attention toward the ways in which factory workers attempted to determine conditions inside and outside of the workplace.² More recently, historians have shifted their attention toward agricultural workers, thus diversifying the types of workers included in America’s working class.³

Until recently, scholars have rarely included American Indians in studies of American labor history. Partly, this results from the view that the American Indian story has been one of unemployment (not employment). Current news stories about Indian Country frequently cite startling unemployment statistics, usually more than 50 percent on reservations. Additionally, many people view American Indians as antimodern and as victims of historical and economic change.⁴ However, including American Indian workers, like those on the Round Valley Reservation, in accounts of labor history enriches it. This book studies how a group of workers entered the capitalist workforce and looks at their ability to shape that system for their own purposes. Additionally, it considers both the work sites and the home lives of workers. However, this book investigates labor history in newer ways. Rather than considering factories or company towns, I emphasize nonindustrial work,

labor, and community sites, such as hop fields, sheep ranches, and reservations. I assist other scholars in including migrant agricultural workers as part of the American working class. I seek to explain how and why Round Valley Indians organized their labor, participated in recreational activities, and formed their community. In order to include Round Valley Indian agricultural workers in American labor history, this book engages a set of historically contested terms in both American Indian and American labor history: community, work, and labor.

Community formation is a central aspect of Round Valley Indian work and labor history. Much like in the case of labor history, how scholars define community has undergone significant revision. Early social theorists, anthropologists, and historians adopted the view that community is in a constant state of declension. In particular, the processes of urbanization, mobility, and capitalism have eroded community. Rejecting the idea that community is in a constant state of decline, this work builds on the idea that community is a set of historically occurring social relations within a given locality. Round Valley Indians, operating in a face-to-face environment, held similar beliefs, created a sense of shared space, maintained reciprocal ties of mutuality, and crafted emotional bonds, which united them into a community. Round Valley Indians constantly re-created the social links with other people and the meanings invested in community under changing social, cultural, and economic circumstances.⁵ American Indian and American labor scholars have made community formation central to their inquiries. American workers, for instance, resisted the atomizing forces of industrial capitalism by living in and sustaining ethnic neighborhoods, practicing mutualism on the shop floor, and participating in recreational events that brought them together at specific moments of the year.⁶ For American Indians, colonial-era towns and nineteenth- and twentieth-century reservations served as the center of community formation. In these places, American Indians practiced communal economies, participated in important social gatherings, and retained crucial relationships with sacred landscapes.⁷ Not all people, however, create their communities under conditions of their choosing. Although we may evoke nostalgic views of community as egalitarian, isolated, and homogeneous, communities possessed their own power relations based on class, gender, or racial conflict. These divisions placed continual strain on community relationships and required people to re-form the ties that connected people to one another into a community.⁸

For Round Valley Indians, community developed over thousands of years through relationships with tribal members, with other Native people in northern California, and with sacred places. Yuki and Concow creation narratives imbued the landscape with sacred and specific meanings, and economic exchanges cemented social relations among people in towns and villages in ancient time California. After contact with American government officials and squatters, the Nome Cult Indian Farm, the Round Valley Reservation, and migrant agricultural work sites provided Round Valley Indians with the social and economic space necessary to forge relationships with other Native Californians and the land. Yet Round Valley Indians encountered many difficulties in creating relationships with one another and with their places. Federal Indian policy and economic change constrained the circumstances under which Round Valley Indians created their communities. These changing, often asymmetrical, power relations produced conflict between Round Valley Indians and non-Indian intruders and, over time, among Round Valley Indians themselves about the meanings of and ways to create community.

It was precisely in the domain of work and labor that Round Valley Indians participated in and forged the social relations so necessary to the establishment of the Round Valley Indian community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Work activities on the Round Valley Reservation included migrant or agricultural wage work and unpaid forms of work, such as hunting, harvesting, and everyday household chores.⁹ In fact, it makes little sense to differentiate between paid and unpaid work in Round Valley because both contributed to the communal and household nature of the Round Valley Indian economy. Both paid and unpaid work enabled Round Valley Indians to maintain one foot in the growing market economy and one foot in an older subsistence economy and to create community.

Labor, alternatively, is a social relationship.¹⁰ The family and household was the basis of labor relationships in Round Valley and northern California. The work Round Valley Indians performed, whether in the hop fields as described by Kathy, on the reservation, or elsewhere in California, was social abor because Round Valley Indians mobilized families to work in the fields, where they interacted with other California Indians. Men and women, young and old, worked in order to sustain families and communities in Round Valley. The social interactions continued once the workday concluded. After work, Round Valley Indians participated in big times, a California Indian term for feasts or celebrations, at their workplaces.¹¹ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, big times associated with workplaces featured roundhouse celebrations, grass game, and social drinking. These activities were essential to the creation of community in Round Valley and Mendocino County.

Work and labor activities also forged relationships between Round Valley Indians and the places around them. Hunting, fishing, and harvesting practices brought Native peoples into a conversation with their environments. Hunters and fishers needed to understand the precise movements of animals and their seasonal activities. Furthermore, harvesters needed to make the land productive for the cultivation of food and basketry materials. These relationships persisted after the creation of a reservation in the 1850s. Round Valley Indians traveled across the landscape and invested new meanings in old and new places. Although often ignored in the California scenery, Round Valley Indians and other migrant workers helped create California’s distinctive landscape and invested their own meanings in the land. This process concomitantly allowed Indians removed to Round Valley to maintain ties to their homelands.¹²

Mobility and seasonal migration thus occupied a vital component of Round Valley Indian work, labor, and community. The Round Valley Reservation is home to several California Indian tribal nations relocated from other parts of the state, and these Native Californians re-created community on the reservation. They associated with other reservation Indians while working and engaging in nonwork activities, thus making Round Valley their homeland. Removed Indians also reestablished ties with those tribal members who lived off the reservation. By traveling well-worn migrant worker paths, relocated Indians reconnected with family and friends who lived off the reservation and with their sacred places. In this way, the Round Valley Reservation served as the hub for economic and community strategies that permitted Round Valley Indians to deflect the centrifugal effects of modernization.¹³ Leaving the reservation to work and play permitted Round Valley Indians to form a community that, although centered on the reservation, included Native peoples from other parts of California.

Fusing American Indian and American labor history addresses the ways in which Native peoples have survived in nineteenth-and twentieth-century America. The persistence of indigenous Americans was not foreordained. In the nineteenth century, many Americans believed that Native Americans were a vanishing race. By 1900, the American Indian population reached its nadir (250,000) at the same time that the federal policy promised to totally assimilate American Indian people. Academics used several events to foretell the demise of Native peoples, including removal and the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. In California, scholars saw the death of Ishi in 1916 as the passing of the last wild Indian of North America. Yet, in the last two decades, scholars have been writing that by the year 2000 the American Indian population had increased to 4 million, engaged in cultural renewal, and created its own nations within the boundaries of the United States. For many American Indians, the reservation has served as the location for many of these twentieth-century developments. Reservation and national histories have explored the abilities of American Indian family life, religions, and political leadership to adapt to changing circumstances and persist into the twenty-first century. In Round Valley, Native peoples have used everyday work and nonwork practices to forge group cohesion and maintain and create new identities, cultural practices, and communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the process, they have defied the myth of the vanishing Indian by persisting as a political unit to the present day.¹⁴

Recently, scholars have demonstrated how wage work and economic change have assisted in Native peoples’ survival in the twentieth century. Menominees, Metlakatlans, Dinés, and Tohono O’odhams, to name a few, adapted cultural practices to nineteenth-and twentieth-century wage work. American Indian labor historians stress the importance of social networks, usually family and kinship groupings, but also including village or tribal ties, and stress that wage work was part of a range of economic choices rather than the only economic activity of Native peoples. Rather than viewing Round Valley Indians as victims of economic change, work and labor become examples of Round Valley Indian agency, cultural adaptation, and survival.¹⁵

Perhaps no other place in the United States is better suited for examining indigenous survival and wage work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than California. For many years, the story of California Indians emphasized population loss and cultural decay. In the late eighteenth century, there were perhaps more than 300,000 Native people living within the state’s current boundaries. By the eve of the California gold rush, that number had fallen to 150,000, with the worst still to come. By 1860, only 30,000 California Indians had survived the flood of immigrants to the state. The population continued to decline throughout the nineteenth century, bottoming out at about 22,000 people in 1900. Although they were integrated into California’s market economy, the gold rush left California Indian families and communities on the verge of disintegration. Studies of demographic collapse, cultural loss, and the corrupting influences of modern American society abound in Round Valley historiography. Anthropologists and historians have depicted Round Valley Indians as a vanishing and culturally degraded people, and recent scholarship specific to northern California, in general, and Round Valley, in particular, still contains the words destruction, killing, and genocide in titles.¹⁶

Rather than continuing to view California Indians as a people who disappeared from the California landscape or as victims of American expansion, historian Albert Hurtado urges scholars to ask different questions using these oft-cited statistics. The same numbers, Hurtado writes, that illustrate the destruction of native populations also show where and how some Indians survived in a land that was starkly different than the one their grandparents had known. I contribute to these stories of Indian survival in California by exploring Round Valley Indian efforts to use work and labor to persist into the twentieth century. By emphasizing Round Valley Indians’ adaptation to economic change in northern California and their re-creation of community through wage work, this book documents efforts of California Indians to survive in the state. Rather than disappearing from California’s agricultural workforce, Round Valley Indians remained important participants in Mendocino County’s workforce. Round Valley Indians who worked in Mendocino County ensured that California Indian culture and people survived into the twenty-first century and contributed to California’s economic growth.¹⁷

An important area in which we can see the ability of Round Valley Indians to adapt to economic change and integrate into the wage work market is through the use of oral histories and traditions. For at least fifty years, scholars have attempted to understand American Indian and American labor history from the perspective of the people. Ethnohistorians, for instance, have struggled to present cultural encounters from the perspective of American Indians. The so-called new Indian history strove to make American Indians the central actors in historical narratives and to understand their rationale for action. Oral history is an important way to understand and interpret history from the perspective of the Round Valley Indian workers themselves. Between 1930 and 2003, historians, anthropologists, and archivists interviewed and recorded the oral narratives of Round Valley and Mendocino County Indians. Oral history and ethnographic projects from the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s included statements about and memories of the migrant labor experience, and every person I interviewed for this study remembered picking hops and performing other agricultural jobs. Round Valley Indians described their jobs with more detail than found in archival sources, which assists in telling this story from a Round Valley Indian perspective.¹⁸

Oral histories and traditions also offered interpretive guidance for this book. Scholars of oral history, tradition, and memory argue that these sources are created, often in a dialogue with contemporary events.¹⁹ Relying on oral sources allows Round Valley Indians to produce interpretations of historical events. As is true for those of the Dakota and indigenous people in the Yukon Territory, Round Valley and Mendocino County oral narratives about work and labor conveyed a sense of belonging under periods of economic and social change. Narratives about work and labor become crucial to maintaining community and identity in the twentieth century.²⁰ Oral histories and traditions also foregrounded the social labor that maintained community in Mendocino County. Round Valley Indians expressed their memories of work in the plural, using words like we to describe the process and mentioning the people with whom they worked. In this way, these memories conveyed a collective memory for Round Valley. Hop picking and other forms of agricultural labor created a collective experience in Round Valley and Mendocino County, akin to attending off-reservation boarding schools, in which Round Valley and Mendocino County Indians share histories and life experiences that cut across lines of reservation and rancheria (lands purchased for homeless Indians in California). Oral histories also linked people and history to specific places. Not only did Round Valley Indians describe the people with whom they worked, but they also remembered where they worked. These memories forged essential relationships with the land around the reservation as well as with the places to which Round Valley Indians workers traveled for work. Finally, oral narratives offered an alternative historiography for California Indian history, western history, and California history. They established what labor meant to the Round Valley community, which differed from what outsiders perceived, and challenged historical narratives that erased them from the agricultural workplace and the California landscape.

It is the goal of this book to make the following story recognizable to the Round Valley Indian community.