California Indians Dreamin': Formal and Aesthetic Innovations in Pacific Coast Native Literatures and Arts

Abstract

“California Indians Dreamin’” examines how a sustained study of Indigenous aesthetics and creative cultural production in what is now California affirms longstanding Indigenous presence within a space violently overwritten by multiple waves of settler colonialism. Three primary concerns drive this work: first, to study how multiple colonial situations in California created both limitations on and possibilities for Indigenous survivance and creative expressions of identity; second, to refute the pernicious assumption that there is no such thing as California Native literatures; and third, to amplify the many twentieth and twenty-first century California Native voices that have labored toward political, cultural, and creative sovereignty for their tribal nations. Following these concerns leads to evocative possibilities for understanding the role that California Native literary and artistic production plays in reimagining California histories, lands, and waters.