We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (review)

In the introduction to We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here, historian William J. Bauer, Jr., describes how he heard many stories of cultural and economic struggle while growing up on the Round Valley Reservation. However, Bauer experienced a profound shift in his understanding of these stories when he realized the layered and deeper meanings that were embedded within them. Bauer recalls, “Rather than telling a story of cultural declension and victimization, these people told one in which labor was both the site and foundation of Indian power, adaptation, and survival” (11). This insight set in motion a historical analysis based on California’s Round Valley Indian tribes that spans almost one-hundred years. Utilizing traditional historical methods supplemented by oral histories, Bauer describes transformations in land and labor during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that threatened the traditional social and cultural networks of Round Valley Indian communities. Bauer illustrates how Round Valley groups changed and adapted to circumstances of upheaval, often shaping these imposing conditions to suit their own purposes while continuing to preserve a strong sense of community.

The Native Californian’s ability to adapt is a theme carried throughout the book. Beginning in Chapter 1, “Making the World In A Basket,” Bauer describes how, for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Native Californians were interacting and adjusting to diverse landscapes and environmental conditions. Evidence for this exists in the economic and cultural practices of these early societies. California Indians organized their labor by gender, with men hunting and fishing while women harvested plants. Community members shared food sources and the concept of owning land was nonexistent. Culturally, Bauer observes how creation stories reflected a strong connection to the land and how these and other ancestral teachings, passed down through oral tradition, taught fundamental lessons in how to attain resources and survive in the environment. Additionally, these stories engendered and strengthened a solid sense of community among members of the tribe. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, Native Californian culture and traditional methods of surviving would be threatened by an influx of nonnative settlers in search of gold, land, and labor.

The discovery of gold in California not only degraded the ecological areas that Indians had occupied but this era also ushered in a new labor system that affected how California Indians could attain a livelihood. As white miners and ranchers flooded into the lush valleys of California, workers were needed to reap the bounty of the land. According to Bauer, this led American farmers to lobby for a means to induce California Indians to work for them. By 1850, vagrancy laws were in place and Indians who were accused of this crime were often hired out. While the vagrancy laws created problems for Native men, it became more commonplace for Native women and children to fear their surrounding landscape as abductions and enslavements by white settlers.

In the midst of these conditions, reservations were established in an effort to eradicate traditional practices through education with the goal of the eventual assimilation of Natives into mainstream society. One such reservation that was established was the Nome Cult Farm, which would later become the Round Valley Reservation. Bauer argues that government officials created a system of unfree labor on the reservation in order to farm the land and have personal house servants. Quite often, the produce harvested from the land was not enough to sustain Nome Cult families, yet as oral history narratives from the text indicate, Indians were often hunted down or brutalized if they attempted to leave the reservation or tried to supplement their diets by traditional means such as hunting and gathering. However, Bauer emphasizes that the Round Valley Indians were not passive victims of this brutality; there were many acts of resistance, all of which have become woven into...