Digger: The Tragic Fate of the California Indians from the Missions to the Gold Rush
Grade 7 Up.  This attempt to tell the story of California's Native people falls short of its goal. The text is divided into three parts: Indian life before white contact, the Mission period of Spanish colonization, and the Gold Rush when hordes of American adventurers overran the fledgling state. This book tells children what most school texts gloss over, that the Missions were essentially slave-labor camps and that the new state government tried to exterminate Native Californians by encouraging massacres of whole tribes. Quotes from contemporary writers express the violence and racism of the times, while the voices of those whites who objected give depth to this story of exploitation and genocide. Unfortunately, the section on traditional Indian life suffers from factual inaccuracies and condescending descriptions of what is a rich, varied, and highly structured Native culture. Tribes are misplaced geographically, generalizations abound, and Indian life is mischaracterized this way: "Mostly they ate, slept, gambled, played, and made love." Thoughts and feelings are attributed without basis in historical fact. The origin of the term "digger Indian" is explained, but not the fact that this is a highly offensive racial epithet. Even the cover is a stereotype, a scowling "Indian" face in red and black. These shortcomings may be explained by the bibliography and acknowledgments; the author failed to consult the people whose history he tried to write. Clifford Trafzer's California's Indians and the Gold Rush (Sierra Oaks, 1990) is far more limited in scope, but integrates cultural perspectives and shows Indians not as romanticized victims, but as people responding to profound social change.?Carolyn Lehman, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CACopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.