We Are the Land: A History of Native California (University of California Press, 2021), co-written by Guilford College Professor of History Damon Akins and UNLV Professor William J. Bauer Jr., was recently awarded the John C. Ewers Book Award, given annually by the Western History Association for the best book on North American Indian Ethnohistory.
The award committee praised the “originality [of the book], its scope, and its significant contribution to the field of North American Indian Ethnohistory.” The award will be presented at this year's annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, on Saturday, Oct. 14.
Additionally, in early September, the book received an honorable mention for this year’s Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, given annually by the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) for the “best book-length contribution to ethnohistory.” The ASE committee praised the fact that the book “reminds readers that California is a place that has been shaped by the long presence of Indigenous lives even through the imposition of multiple iterations of colonial-inflected ideas of 'California.' "
Damon and William trace Indigenous experiences in European colonization, attempted genocide, and statehood, highlighting Indigenous activism throughout, and ending with the sovereignty of today’s casino economy.
Countering the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the present day, the authors skillfully bring crucial academic interventions of Native American and Indigenous Studies to this decidedly public-facing work, which stands to transform how history is constructed in California and how ethnohistorians engage in that increasingly important work.
Through Indigenous oral histories, elegant place-based vignettes, and accounts of Indigenous geopolitical ingenuity, the authors chart their central argument: "that the many Indigenous nations who lived in and adjacent to what would later become called California were always and still are the People of particular Places.”