Recommended Reading – Involuntary Servitude, Apprenticeship, and Slavery of Native Americans

August 2023

Bauer, William J., Jr. California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

Castillo, Elias. A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions. Fresno: Craven Street Books, 2015.

Calloway, Colin G. and Neal Salisbury, eds. Reinterpreting New England: Indians and the Colonial Experience. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States – For Young People. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese.  Teachers’ Guide: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States – For Young People here.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne and Dina Gilio-Whitaker. “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 other Myths about Native Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016.

Gallay, Alan, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Johnston-Dodds, Kimberly. Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians.  Sacramento: California Research Bureau, September 2002.

Lindsay, Brendan C. Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Lorimer, Michelle M. Resurrecting the Past: The California Mission Myth. Pechanga: Great Oaks Press, 2016.

Middleton Manning, Beth Rose and Steven Gayle. “Enslaved in a Free Country: Legalized Exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans in Early California and the Post-Emancipation South,” Journal of Law and Political Economy 3, no. 2 (2022): online access.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Rawls, James J. Indians of California: The Changing Image. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.

Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Rizzo-Martinez, Martin. We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022.

Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker and Scott Manning Stevens, eds. Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Smith, Stacey L. “Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush California.” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 1 (February 2011): 28-63.