Description: "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. Outing removed Native people from their communities and transferred them to white homes, farms, and businesses to work as menial laborers. 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. 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. The book illuminates the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today"--
Brief description: Caitlin (Katie) Keliiaa is assistant professor in the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2019. This would be her first book.
Review Quotes:
"Caitlin Keliiaa's Refusing Settler Domesticity not only provides a necessary additive to the historiography of Indian boarding schools but also offers a unique approach to the longer history of Indigenous labor exploitation in California."
-- "Labor: Studies in Working Class History"