In Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, behind the façade of luxurious homes, lie traces of a once thriving project of government assimilation. From 1918 to roughly 1942, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited thousands of Native women from U.S. Indian boarding schools to work as live-in housemaids in homes across the region.

My book, Refusing Settler Domesticity Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program, unpacks this far-reaching system that created an exploitative labor market. I ask the overarching question: Within the confines of domestic labor, how did Native women comply with, resist, and negotiate their circumstances?

Theoretically, I situate the program within California’s long history of colonial Indian labor exploitation and I center Native women’s resistance. In this way, I enrich this labor history with voices and perspectives that challenge the notion of Native women as passive subjects. Methodologically, I use qualitative data analysis software to examine more than 4,000 outing-related documents. At the heart of this study are Native women’s voices uncovered from the archive.

As an interdisciplinary historian, I employ a range of methods. I draw insight from the fields of history, ethnic studies, feminist studies, education, and settler colonial theory. ​