California's earliest European colonists--Russian merchants and Spanish missionaries--depended heavily on Native Americans for labor to build and maintain their colonies, but they did so in very different ways. This richly detailed book brings together disparate skeins of the past--including little-known oral histories, native texts, ethnohistory, and archaeological excavations--to present a vivid new view of how native cultures fared under these two colonial systems. Kent Lightfoot's innovative work, which incorporates the holistic methods of historical anthropology, explores the surprising...