Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West

4. “Everybody Worked Back Then”: Oral History, Memory, and Indian Economies in Northern California - William Bauer

61 4 “Everybody Worked Back Then” Oral History, Memory, and Indian Economies in Northern California william bauer Historian William Bauer shows the diversity of western labor history when he discusses Native American work in California. His essay shows three values of oral history in better understanding the West. First, few western histories have documented Native American views. Second, until recently most researchers have looked at the experiences of Native Americans only through European American sources. Bauer’s interviews with the Native Americans break down the stereotype of lazy Indians and shows how they were very involved in agriculture . Finally he uses oral history to negotiate a middle ground that addresses indigenous scholars’ criticism of the new Indian history. for more than sixty years, a contentious issue in American Indian history and studies has involved the use of sources. The discipline of history requires scholars to spend countless hours in archives, where we sift through box after box of documents produced usually by non-Indian people. This method has created several problems for understanding American Indian history. American Indian studies scholar Jack Forbes once noted that the reliance on non- 62 william bauer Indian sources created “single-sided approach[es]” to Western Indian history, “In their writings the Indian may be raised to the level of a human being—and some of them may even express sympathy for the ‘poor Indian’—but he is still somehow non-American. The very term ‘American’ is used in United States history as to exclude the Indian, and historians may be said to have approached Western history with little objectivity in this regard.”1 Such criticisms led to the development of ethnohistory—fusing historical and anthropological approaches to understand both sides of cultural contacts— and the “new Indian history,” now several years old, which placed American Indians at the center of the narrative and emphasized American Indian political history and ethnic survival.2 The study of American Indian history now appears to be at a crossroads. Critics of ethnohistory and the new Indian history argue that American Indians remain marginal to American history.3 Meanwhile, Indigenous scholars point out that written records are biased and incomplete when it concerns American Indian history. Rather than producing “rounder” histories, ethnohistory and the new Indian history have created “non-Indian perceptions of American Indian history.”4 This essay uses oral histories from northern California’s Round Valley Reservation to examine California labor history and strike a middle ground between these two criticisms. This work is built on oral interviews I conducted with reservation residents in 2003. Rather than merely mentioning Indian work, oral histories function as both descriptive and interpretive historical sources. Oral histories described past working experiences and the conditions under which Round Valley Indians worked. Considering that there is a prevailing belief that American Indian people are either perpetually unemployed or “lazy,” this contribution alone is certainly important and noteworthy.5 Additionally, oral narratives emphasized that migrant labor was a social experience, connecting California Indian families and communities. These interpretations clashed with some interpretations of migrant labor in the American West, which depict the migrant western workforce as male and atomized. Finally , oral histories provide opportunities for California Indians to interpret and define economic and historical change. They, not non-Indian anthropologists or government officials, define pov- “Everybody Worked Back Then” 63 erty, inequitable working conditions, and the everyday importance of labor.6 Oral histories can help to answer many of the criticisms of the new Indian history and ethnohistory. Oral histories help produce “Indian perceptions of American Indian history.” This essay pays attention to the ways Round Valley Indians described and interpreted their experiences at migrant workers in California. Additionally, this essay compares Round Valley Indian work and labor to other working people’s experiences in the American West. This chapter brings Native perceptions into conversation with other labor histories in the American West and asks scholars to take seriously the role that employment, not unemployment, has played in American Indian history. Since first contact, European and American observers have remarked on the apparent lack of work in American Indian communities . At the founding of the Jamestown colony, English colonists commented on the inability of Powhatan men to work. In 1621, John Smith noted, “The men bestowe their times in fishing, hunting , wars, and such man-like exercises, scorning to be seen in any woman like exercise, which is the cause that the...