CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

Winter 2026 Keynote

Thursday March 12th, 5 - 7 PM

Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women's Labor Histories 

In her award-winning book, Refusing Settler Domesticity, historian Caitlin Keliiaa traces the lives of Native women in the early 20th-century. For this book talk, Keliiaa delves into the largely untold history of the Bay Area Outing Program, which 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. 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. Keliiaa shows how, despite their 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. Refusing Settler Domesticity serves as an indictment of the Indian boarding school system and illuminates the history of urban Indians, California, and the West.

 

TIME: 5-7pm

LOCATION: Trienens Forum, KRESGE 1515

Reception at 6:15pm in hallway

 

 

CNAIR Winter Quarter Brown Bag

Tuesday, February 24th, 12-1 PM

Speaker: Mere Taito, inaugural 2025-27 Postdoctoral Scholar, CNAIR

In this presentation, Mere Taito will consider the overlapping, multi-functional roles of walking in everyday life and argue that these layered functions enact an Indigenous feminist understanding of intersectionality.

WHEN: Tuesday, February 24th, 12-1 PM
WHERE: Wildcat Room, Norris University Center