The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Two alumni of our PhD program have recently published their first scholarly monographs!

Caitlin Keliiaa, an assistant professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, has just published Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program. The book explores the unexpected story of Native women in the Bay Area, decades before Indian Relocation, illuminating the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today. This book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.

Olivia M. Chilcote, an associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University, has recently published Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgement and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians. The book examines the distinct crisis of tribal federal recognition in California, the state with the most non-federally recognized tribes in the country. Grounded in the experience of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, Unrecognized in California effectively demonstrates how unrecognized tribes assert their inherent legal powers to maintain community identity and rights to self-determination.