In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Despite oppressive living and working conditions, they strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency.
In this groundbreaking work, historian Caitlin Keliiaa examines Native women’s lived experiences of federal policy and connects outing to the region’s longer history of coerced Native labor. Refusing Settler Domesticity 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.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Caitlin Keliiaa, author, historian, and Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz