A Conversation with William F. Deverell, Damon B. Akins, and William J. Bauer Jr., about We Are the Land: A History of Native California

William F. Deverell is director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and professor of history at the University of Southern California. He recently published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy That Transfixed the Nation (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2021).

Damon B. Akins is a former social studies teacher at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles. He now teaches Native American history at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

William J. Bauer Jr. (Wailacki and Concow of the Round Valley Indian Tribes) is a professor of history and program director for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research is focused on oral history, labor, and California Indian history. He is coauthor, with Damon Akins, of We Are the Land: A Native History of California (2021), and author of California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (2016) and We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (2009). He has served on the councils of the Western History Association and the American Society for Ethnohistory, on the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians, and on the Organization of American Historians’ Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories.