The Indenture Act

In April eighteen fifty, four months before California was formally admitted to statehood, the California territorial legislature passed a law. Its name, let the record show, was the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.

What the law actually did was this. It allowed any white Californian to have a Native adult declared a vagrant by a local justice of the peace, and then indenture that person, meaning put them to forced labor, for an indefinite period, with no wage, and no legal recourse. Any attempt to leave constituted a crime. The law also explicitly permitted the indenture of Native children, nominally requiring parental consent, a provision that functioned in practice as authorization to kidnap. Some counties operated systems that amounted to organized trafficking: contractors obtained groups of children from compliant sheriffs and leased them to farms, ranches, and households throughout the Sacramento Valley and the Mother Lode foothills.

Historians have estimated that between ten thousand and twenty-seven thousand Native Californians were enslaved under this law, though the range is wide because systematic record-keeping of coerced Native labor was not something the state considered important to do. What the record does establish: the Nisenan of the Sacramento Valley, the Miwok of the Mother Lode, and the Maidu of the northern foothills were all targeted under it. The same year California was admitted to the Union as a free state, it passed a slave law for the people already living there.

The law remained on the books, in various amended forms, until nineteen thirty-seven.

Nineteen thirty-seven. Not eighteen ninety. Not nineteen hundred. Nineteen thirty-seven. The same decade in which the Golden Gate Bridge was completed and the first of the great Central Valley federal water projects was funded. Forced indigenous labor was legal in California within living memory.