Social Science Native American Studies
Refusing Settler Domesticity
Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program
- Publisher
- University of Washington Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2024
- Category
- Native American Studies, 20th Century, Women's Studies
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780295753003
- Publish Date
- Oct 2024
- List Price
- $40.00
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780295752983
- Publish Date
- Oct 2024
- List Price
- $142.00
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Description
Traces young Native women's lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workers
In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. Outing removed Native people from their communities and transferred them to white homes, farms, and businesses to work as menial laborers. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Despite oppressive living and working conditions, they strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency.
In this groundbreaking work, historian Caitlin Keliiaa examines Native women's lived experiences of federal policy and connects outing to the region's longer history of coerced Native labor. Refusing Settler Domesticity explores the unexpected story of Native women in the Bay Area, decades before Indian Relocation, illuminating the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today. This book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.
About the authors
Caitlin (Katie) Keliiaa is assistant professor in the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2019. This would be her first book.
Caitlin Keliiaa's profile page
Charlotte Coté is a professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (University of Washington Press, 2010).
Coll Thrush is professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of two books: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (University of Washington Press, 2007), and Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale, 2016). He is also the coeditor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). He serves as a series editor for the University of Washington Press's Indigenous Confluences series.
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Other titles by
Native Alienation
Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions
Unrecognized in California
Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians
Settler Cannabis
From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California
We Are Dancing for You
Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies
Power in the Telling
Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and Intertribal Relations in the Casino Era
Native Seattle
Histories from the Crossing-Over Place