"That's history. That's truth": T'tc~tsa and the enslavement of California Native Americans

This event, part of the Legacies of Enslavement seminar series, featured Professor Jean Pfaelzer and examined the often-overlooked enslavement of California Native Americans, challenging not only the idea of the western states as ‘free’, but also that slavery in the United States ended with legal abolition.

Through multiple histories, including that of T’tc~tsa (Lucy Young), a Wailaki woman forcibly indentured under the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, the seminar demonstrated how systems of exploitation adapted and persisted in changing forms. 

The discussion was organised around four key eras, tracing these developments across time. Visual materials were central to the seminar. A small selection of these images are included here.

Spanish mission system

The first era examined the role of the mission system in what is now California during the Spanish conquest of the territory in the eighteenth century. Far from purely religious institutions, the missions operated as tightly controlled labour regimes that compelled Indigenous peoples to live and work under restricted movement and strict discipline. Indigenous resistance was also emphasised, with the 1775 revolt at Mission San Diego de Alcalá demonstrating how communities actively challenged colonial authority.

Enslavement of Alaska Natives
The second era focused on the enslavement of Alaska Natives and the role of the maritime fur trade. Russian fur traders systematically used forced labour by Alaska Natives to harvest sea otters during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

These exploitative networks extended beyond Alaska. Indigenous people were displaced, transported, and exploited across North American western seaboard, linking Alaska, California, and across the Ocean to East Asia. 

1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians
The third era focused on the United States’ 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. Despite its protective title, the Act effectively legalised the capture, indenture, and sale of Indigenous people by allowing their arrest on vague charges such as vagrancy and their leasing as labour to white settlers. 

T’tc~tsa (Lucy Young), a Wailaki woman whose words provide the title for this seminar was seized and forcibly indentured under the Act, illustrating the lived realities behind this legal framework.

Indian boarding schools and outing programmes
The final era examined Indian boarding schools and outing programmes as systems of unfree labour. Well into the twentieth-century Indigenous children were removed from their families and subjected to strict regimes that suppressed their languages and identities while training them for domestic and agricultural labour. Outing placements sent children to white households and farms, where they worked unpaid, extending these exploitative labour practices beyond the schools themselves.

Legacies and continuities
Prof Pfaelzer concluded by connecting these histories to the present day, highlighting ongoing inequalities affecting Indigenous communities, including contemporary forms of exploitation and continued violence against Indigenous women. 

However, Prof Pfaelzer opened and closed the talk by emphasising the agency and pride of descendant communities through the example of the reclaiming of the Klamath River by tribal committees. 

In 2025, following the world’s largest project of dam removal, teenagers from a range of tribal communities, mainly in California, reclaimed the river and celebrated its freedom by kayaking the 310 miles from its source to the Pacific Ocean. 

Documented in the film First Descent, this journey symbolises how the activism of descendant communities and their allies can begin to address exclusions and inequities inherited from centuries of oppression, and start a process of healing.

About the speaker
Jean Pfaelzer is Professor Emerita at the University of Delaware and a historian specialising in slavery, labour, migration, and Indigenous and Chinese histories in the United States. She is the author of California, A Slave State (2023) and Driven Out: the forgotten war against Chinese Americans, recognised as a New York Times Best Book.

She has contributed to major public history projects, including Smithsonian exhibitions and PBS documentaries. This session formed part of her Easter Term residency as a Senior Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College.

More information about Jean Pfaelzer, her publications, and current work can be found on her website.

Further resources

A selection of materials can be explored through the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center and the C. Hart Merriam Collection of Native American Photographs.