Indigeneities (note the plural): Andrew Shaler, Mariposa and the Invasion of Ahwahnee: Indigenous Histories of Resistance, Resilience, and Migration in Gold Rush California, PhD Dissertation, UC Riverside, 2019 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigeneities (note the plural): Andrew Shaler, Mariposa and the Invasion of Ahwahnee: Indigenous Histories of Resistance, Resilience, and Migration in Gold Rush California, PhD Dissertation, UC Riverside, 2019

20Oct19

Abstract: The Sierra Nevada mountain range has been home to a diverse array of indigenous nations since time immemorial. Academic histories have often delegated the stories and experiences of these Miwok, Yokuts, Mono, and Paiute peoples to a peripheral place. This dissertation examines the rich and diverse indigenous histories of the southern Sierra Nevada, focusing especially on the ways tribal communities actively resisted, negotiated, adapted and endured in the face of colonial violence and encroachment. Throughout the nineteenth century, tribal nations of the southern Sierra regions took up armed resistance against violent settlers, actively negotiated with settler and government forces, and adapted their societies to better cope with the traumatic threats they faced. Many tribal peoples in this period, for example, engaged in gold mining while simultaneously maintaining their traditional economies of hunting, gathering, and fishing. In response to the increasingly violent actions of Gold Rush settlers, an intertribal movement of resistance gradually crystalized in and around the Yosemite region. This movement was ultimately met with the “Mariposa War,” a disproportionately violent settler response which, with state sanction, aimed to crush all indigenous resistance to white settlement through forced removal.

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