-
10. Northfork Mono Women's Agricultural Work, "Productive Coexistence," and Social Well-Being in the San Joaquin Valley, California, circa 1850–1950
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter 10 Northfork Mono Women’s Agricultural Work, “Productive Coexistence,” and Social Well-Being in the San Joaquin Valley, California, circa 1850–1950 Heather A. Howard Introduction This chapter examines Native women’s agency in the transformation of economic life in Central California over the century that followed the establishment of American jurisdiction in 1848. I focus on Northfork Mono women’s seasonal migratory labor patterns in relation to their efforts to sustain family and community physical and social well-being under the complex circumstances of land dispossession particular to California.1 Native societies in California survived and persisted, despite overwhelming odds posed by land dispossession, in great part as a result of women’s resourceful efforts to maintain the kinship structures, and to continue aspects of cultural life tied to traditional subsistence activities as they also took on roles in the non-Native economy as agricultural workers. Market economy resource-exploitation and production arrived in California rapidly, and violently. There is no doubt that the mid-nineteenth-century influx of gold-seekers, millions of livestock, settlers, and massive irrigation projects tragically devastated Native peoples’ capacity to subsist from the land. By 1900, 90 percent of the population had been devastated by disease and state-sanctioned slavery and massacre (Cook 1955). These circumstances curtailed treaty-making and largely prevented Native peoples from reserving for themselves land and rights to resources. Answering Colleen O’Neill’s invitation to consider the recovery of Indigenous communities through their “creative engagement with the market” (2005: 156), I examine how women’s work lives illustrate an integration of wagelabor activities into ongoing systems of Native economic life. Rather than viewing non-Native economic life as replacing Native practices, I highlight women’s agency in cultural survival, social well-being, and “productive coexistence.” This latter term was coined by the leadership of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, for whom I originally conducted this research, and is significant to understanding broader land claims and disputes in contemporary California. I initially discuss the Indigenous socioeconomic complex, structured by kinship relations of rights and responsibilities, which fostered intertribal marriage and the exchange of objects and ideas. This complex operated throughout the region and it influenced the strategies adopted by the earliest non-Native gold-seekers in the area and provided the context of dispossession and gendering of labor roles generated by the invasion and occupation of California at mid–nineteenth century. Subsequently, the ethnohistorical record of Northfork Mono women’s experiences is examined in relation to the Fresno River Reservation, which operated in the northern San Joaquin Valley between 1851 and 1859. Its closure represents one of several failures of the early California reservation system. Not only could Native people not rely upon resources promised at this reservation, their off-reservation labor in the harvest of their natural resources was crucial to their own survival as well as to non-Native workers, agents, and traders who occupied their lands. The labor patterns established with the Fresno River Reservation were the basis of agricultural practice in California’s Central Valley, eventually a major supplier of the food consumed within the United States (Izumi 2009). After the closure of the reservation, Northfork Mono women continued to supply their labor to the changing agricultural industries occupying the San Joaquin Valley. They did so in a pattern that consciously incorporated all available resources for the survival and social well-being of their families, and in connection with their ongoing situation of landlessness and intrusions of the settler population. Lastly, I describe their work into the mid–twentieth century in terms of a continuous seasonal round by which they adapted wage labor alongside other non-Native resource activity with migratory subsistence patterns. Today, Northfork Mono women’s labor is key to the tribe’s effort to build community and affirmations of cultural and political sovereignty. Gendered Labor and Status Relations Indigenous peoples of the San Joaquin Valley and adjacent foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains operated within a complex requiring mobility, social and economic interaction, and intermarriage. This economy depended upon kinship to create and maintain important sociopolitical connections and to foster trade of all kinds: material, intellectual, ceremonial. The Northfork Mono held a unique standing in this complex; their dominance in the foothills positioned them as controllers of the trans-Sierra trade route connecting peoples on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains with those in the San Joaquin Valley. Affinal ties were fundamental to this integrated and interdependent system...