Digger Indians, Yosemite Valley

Digger Indians, Yosemite Valley

Indigenous Californians
gold rush
white settlers
California
slavery
Yosemite Valley
land

This is a wet-plate processed photograph of a group of Indigenous people in Yosemite Valley, California. The appearance of the four subjects is muddy, with soil streaks on their faces and clothes. The title is actually a derogative term used by white settlers, for the Maidu tribe of northern California. This tribe kept a diet of acorns, clover, worms and edible roots and therefore they had to dig in the soil to find their required food.
The land captured in the photograph looks overcrowded, linking to settler colonialism and the stealing of Indian land which occurred during the nineteenth-century. White settlers often kidnapped, murdered and sold Native Indians into bonded labour during the Gold Rush, drastically depleting populations and forcing Indians onto reservations, destroying their way of living.

John P. Soule, 199 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

https://www.loc.gov/item/2006678880/

1870

Leah Guy

Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/

English

Visual - photograph

19th century California