A Tale of Two Ranches: Owners, Workers, and the Centering of Whiteness in the Stories of California’s Channel Island Ranches

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Island, two islands in California's Channel Islands National Park, were the homes of ranching operations from the mid-nineteenth century through the close of the twentieth century. The Channel Islands were home to the Chumash and their ancestors for over 10,000 years, until Spain claimed them as part of Alta California in 1542. The ranching operations that followed the forcible removal of the Chumash are a microcosm of the American West: ownership was passed from white Euro-Americans to white Americans, while the land and animals were tended by Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous cowboys and vaqueros. In telling the stories of the ranches, most scholarship has focused on the owners and their families, rather than the workers who made the ranches run. Through recent archaeological fieldwork, this paper shifts the focus from the white owners to the non-white workers who lived and worked on the ranches.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53945