UKIAH 2/28/2017 — About 160 people came to the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah on Saturday afternoon to hear a lecture by a Native American historian who tells the history of California using only indigenous sources. Dr. William Bauer, who is Wailacki and Concow, grew up in Round Valley and teaches history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. His most recent book, “California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History” is based on oral histories told by Native elders, including Bauer’s own great-grandfather, as part of a State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA) project, during the Great Depression. University of California Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber was hired in 1935 to organize the SERA project upon which Bauer’s book is based. Bauer used the interviewers’ handwritten notebooks, rather than the anthropologist’s typewritten versions, because the final drafts were heavily edited.
Bauer noted several features shared by many of the stories he found in the Bancroft archives at the UC Berkeley campus, saying that “Oral histories and oral traditions are not historically worthless. They are different, with valuable ways of understanding the past.” Most importantly, he argued, the indigenous method of telling history prioritizes physical location, rather than a sequence of dates, as is the practice for most modern historians. He also offered his audience an example of a well-known story he believes was a contemporary social critique, and another that was used to communicate social norms. Both indicate an ongoing relationship with history, he asserted.
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