ABSTRACT
California’s 1850 Act for the Protection and Government of Indians legalized the kidnap, coerced transport, assault, involuntary labor, forced indenture, and sale of California Natives. In this unique Native American slave narrative, a young girl who survived the genocide insisted that her story be told to an anthropologist who was funded by the Works Project Administration in 1934. Her context and her telling are shaped by her Native American ways of knowing history and traditions of dream telling, of relations with survivors. Sold to a slave trader at Fort Seward during the Genocide, she was seized, sold, and escaped, again and again. Yet she presumes freedom. Unlike African American narratives that are shaped by abolitionist intentionality, T’tc~tsa tells a deeply personal history of a people inside an autobiography.
