Winner of the 2025 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, American Society for Ethnohistory
Honorable Mention for the 2025 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
Honorable Mention for the 2025 Pacific Coast Branch Award, American Historical Association
Traces young Native women’s lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workersIn 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.
In this groundbreaking work, 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. Refusing Settler Domesticity explores the unexpected story of Native women in the Bay Area, decades before Indian Relocation, illuminating the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today. This book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.
About the Author :
Caitlin Keliiaa is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Review :
"Keliiaa describes her work as a 'love letter to Native women in the Bay Area.' This passion is apparent as the book fits into the sweet spot of being scholarly yet personal and accessible. . . . The narratives and other historical details are fascinating glimpses in time that tug on the emotions in every direction and remind us of the spirit of resistance and the ongoing fight for equality."
"While this would make an important study in its own right, what Refusing Settler Domesticity does best is to reveal the astounding continuity in Native women's lives as exploited domestic laborers over the first half of the twentieth century."
"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."
"[O]ffers readers an intimate window into the lives of Native women who worked as domestic servants in the Bay Area in the early twentieth century. . . . The book has many strengths, foremost among them is the window Keliiaa gives us into the specific experiences of individual women. Given the difficulty uncovering the lives of Native people through federal records, this is an impressive feat."
