We Are the Land: A History of Native California

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.