![ACLU of Southern California summer reading list 2023](http://cdn.libro.fm/assets/website-images/playlist-default.jpg)
![We Are the Land by Damon B. Akins & William J. Bauer, Jr.](http://covers.libro.fm/9798765057063_1120.jpg)
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account![Phone showing make the switch message](http://cdn.libro.fm/assets/website-images/switch-2024.png)
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up today![Libro.fm app with gift bow](http://cdn.libro.fm/assets/website-images/app-gift-2024-q3.png)
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingWe Are the Land
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreSummary
Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, this book recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today's casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.