Tony Platt Grave Matters Legacies of Genocide in California

Grave Matters: Legacies of Genocide in California
Tony Platt
Thursdays, 24 pm
Oct 1-Nov 19, 2009 (No class on Nov 5 and 12)

Some 300,000 Native Americans lived in California before the Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers arrived, but violence and disease reduced this population to 15,000 survivors by the 1900s. We will examine how and why this happened; how this bloody period has been forgotten and remembered; why salvage anthropology depended so much on human remains and artifacts excavated from graves; and how repatriation became a central political demand of the American Indian movement in the late 1900s. Recommended reading: Ishis Brain: In Search of Americas Last Wild Indian by Orin Starn.

• Category

  • Education

• License

  • Standard YouTube License