We Are the Land: A History of Native California

**This event will be on Zoom. We will send you instructions 24 hours before the event on November 15th at 4PM. If you register after 4PM on November 15th, then the instructions will be emailed at 3PM the day of the event, an hour before the event starts. Please note all times are Pacific Standard Time.**

Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. Join the California State Library’s California History Section as professors Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr. discuss their latest book, We Are the Land: A History of Native California, and recount the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood and into the present.

We Are the Land: A History of Native California is the winner of the Western History Association’s 2022 John C. Ewers Award for the best published book on North American (including Mexico) Indian Ethnohistory.

Damon B. Akins is Professor of History at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he teaches Native American / American West / Environmental history. In what feels like another life, he was a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles.

William J. Bauer is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and a professor of American Indian history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research is focused on oral history, labor and California Indian history. Bauer is the author of We Are the Land: A Native History of California, with Damon Akins, (University of California Press, 2021), California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press, 2016),“We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here”: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) as well as articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West and Labor