"Kathleen Hull’s Pestilence and Persistence: Yosemite Indian Demography and Culture in Colonial California, above all, is a timely book, if not a necessary book. Timely in that current relations between Yosemite Indians and the park administration are showing signs of mutual accommodate after decades of mistrust. In fact, the Yosemite Valley’s cultural landscape will shortly have in place a new Ceremonial Roundhouse near Camp 4 designed by the American Indian Council of Mariposa County and endorsed by the National Park Service.

Perhaps this is what Ms. Hull means by persistent, that a history of survival by California Indians so rigorously pursued by former and current scholars, like Albert Hurtado in his path breaking book Indian Survival on the California Frontier, represents a generational shift in the way we think about the perverse “vanishing peoples” narrative.

But unlike some historians, even unlike some of her anthropological colleagues, Ms. Hull’s vested interest in the Yosemite Indian transcends the murky world of narrative, where scholars have shown a tendency to overstate their conclusions. Her scholarship, moreover, is based firmly in painstaking fieldwork, and her conclusions hardly sway from the material evidence procured over decades of careful study. To do this and then write a coherent book, despite its rich anthropological nomenclature, is testament to her skill as a scientist and writer."

Get the Story:
Jeff Pappas: Pestilence and Persistence: Yosemite Indian Demography and Culture in Colonial California (National Parks Traveler 10/10)