William Bauer
William 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 examines the history of Indigenous People, work, oral history and sovereignty in the American West. Bauer is the author of We Are the Land: A Native History of California, with Damon Akins, (2021), California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (2016), and “We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here”: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (2009) as well as peer-reviewed articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West and Labor. Bauer has served on OAH's African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American (ALANA) Historians and Histories committee and the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians as well as the councils of the Western Historical Association and the American Society of Ethnohistory.
FEATURED LECTURE
People of the Rivers: Indigenous Sovereignty, Mobility and Treaty Making in California
OAH Lectures by William Bauer
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States incarcerated American Indians on reservations and circumscribed tribal sovereignty. These actions produced catastrophic population decline, poverty, and political impotence. Using the history of the Wright family on California’s Round Valley Reservation, this lecture examines the ability of one family to navigate life on a reservation.
Beginning with the Great Depression, the state California transformed from a largely rural and agricultural state into an urban and industrial one. In part, California’s growth depended on extracting land, timber, and water from Indigenous People’s reservation lands and from their unceded lands. This lecture examines how and why Indigenous People in California both participated in and then resisted natural resource industries in the state.
This lecture centers Indigenous People in the treaty making process in California. Indigenous People shaped treaty making by following their own protocol and performing much of the work that made the treaties possible.