Forced labor in California

[1] While Native Californians were treated with differing levels of respect from the padres who oversaw them, many of the Spanish soldiers in the area at the time, saw them solely as manpower to be exploited.

An example of this can be seen in September 1795, when over two hundred natives deserted San Francisco in droves, citing their poor treatment at the hands of Spanish soldiers and priests as their reason for abandoning the area.

Even natives who conducted nonviolent forms of resistance such as deserting missions were punished by being hunted down and forced to return to where they were attempting to flee from.

However, the same year, the Mexican National Congress passed the Colonization Act of 1824 which granted large sections of unoccupied land to individuals in an effort to promote agriculture and economic development in California.

In doing so, the Mexican government hoped to promote private enterprise and settlement throughout California, however, this would prove to be detrimental to the Native Californians who resided near or on these missions.

This significant population drop is widely attributed to increased contact with new diseases brought by settlers coming into California from other parts of the world.

As settlers began flooding into the state during the subsequent Gold Rush in 1849, Native Californians found themselves once again drastically impacted by the ensuing societal upheaval.

Under the reservation system, life for the indigenous population was harsh and labor was often a condition for receiving rations and other forms of support from the government.

[3] Despite being admitted to the Union as a free state on September 9, 1850, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians allowed for the indenture of Native Californians.

This act introduced a system of custodianship for indigenous children and established convict leasing as a form of forced labor.

[10] In an 1867 analysis done for the Secretary of War, it was noted that the rapid advancement of American settlements had greatly depleted sources of fish, wild fowl, game, nuts, and roots.

[13] In April 1863, after the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the California legislature abolished all forms of legal indenture and apprenticeship for Native Americans.

The end came due to the increase in European and Chinese immigrants that served as cheap laborers, and the massive reduction of California's indigenous population.

Once the Indians had entered into this servitude, the term limit was often ignored, thus resulting in slavery; this was what Californians used to "satisfy the states high demand for domestic servants and agricultural laborers".

The Act was created to maintain and prolong the established workforce of Native Americans that was previously being used during the years of the Mexican government's reign.

This led a majority of Natives to engage in different forms of labor were women and children, who were usually from neighboring or distant Californian counties.

[19] Their legal restrictions led towards intensive labor that would be based on child custody and apprenticeship provisions that were outlined in section 3 of the Indian Indenture Act.

[citation needed] Adjustments were made towards Section 3 of the act of 1860, which led to bound labor by transforming caretaker agreements for Native minors into a system on similar grounds to indentured servitude.

It included a shift to supervisory powers from township justice of the peace to higher levels of government and law, such as county and district court judges.

It was followed by an implementation that if individuals were indentured servants before reaching fourteen, their term of service would automatically be extended till the ages of twenty-five for males and twenty-one for females.

[21] So commonplace were these kidnappings that William H. Brewer a member conducting the California Geological Survey on behalf of the state credited that most of "The Indian wars now going on, and those which have been for the last three years in the counties of Klamath, Humboldt, and Mendocino, have most of their origin in this.

It has for years been a regular business to steal Indian children and bring them down to the civilized parts of the state, even to San Francisco, and sell them – not as slaves, but as servants to be kept as long as possible.

They essentially had complete control over the outcome of the trial and it is written in the act that no "white man" could be convicted due to testimony from an "Indian".

[23] These incidents were common through the Mission period leading to several altercations of Native Tribes and Spanish soldiers due to the assault of indigenous women.

[24] The assault on indigenous women worsened as greater autonomy over California was given to the loyalists during the Mexican independence movement, with large sums of authority and land given to Californios rather than returned to the tribes upon the mission's dissolution.

This phenomenon, which thrived during the 1850s and 1860s, predates the California Gold Rush in rural areas and has historical roots in Indigenous and Spanish-Mexican communities.

[24] Driven by the demand for labor because of the Gold Rush, specifically in the field of domestic work, Californio communities crept further and further into the state's interior to capture Native American women and girls.

These abducted individuals would go on to fulfill a variety of purposes, including sex, domestic labor, marriage, and even childbearing for their captors.

[25] By 1860, the involuntary market of captive Native American women and girls had become so widespread that it drew the attention of the Sacramento Daily Union, a newspaper with ties to the northern branch of the Democratic Party, which officially declared that a new form of slavery was occurring in California at the hands of the white men who dominated the trade by the mid-1850s and that it degraded the free-state status of the state.

[citation needed] Many of the women who were not concubines for wealthy merchants found themselves in Chinatown brothels, forced to service the men of San Francisco.