Terria Smith, editor and director of California Indian Publishing at Heyday, discusses We Are the Land with author William J. Bauer Jr. in an event hosted by Litquake.

FREE, pre-registration required, $5-10 suggested donation

Book Club of California, 312 Sutter St, San Francisco.

Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it.

Co-author William J. Bauer Jr. will read from the book and discuss his work with Terria Smith, editor of News from Native California and the recent anthology Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resistance.

William J. Bauer, Jr. is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California, and Professor of History at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches classes on American Indian history, the history of American Indian gaming, and the American West. He is also the author of California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press), and We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press).

Terria Smith is a tribal member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians. She is editor of News From Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to the vibrant cultures, art, languages, histories, social justice movements, and stories of California’s diverse Indian peoples. She is also director of California Indian Publishing at Heyday, which publishes books on California Native life. Among these publications is Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resitance (Heyday, 2023), an anthology edited by Smith. She is a member of the Native American Journalists Association and an alumna of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

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