3 | After The Gold Rush

in the cotton fields surrounding the city. Here's Patrick. We picked all day along, from eight o'clock in morning till five o'clock in the six o'clock in unity. We picked cotton, you know, with the sax and everything. And that's how I spent my summers with Grandpa, you know, teaching me hard work. The days were long, but each night the brothers came home to a household full of what they loved most in the world. Music. Rampa was a famous guitar playerback in Mexico years ago when he was younger.

He said, when you're tiling and you can reach that guitar, you can have, you know, because that was just pride and Joey played all the time. So I stood on a chair and and you got on that evening. I was playing it, you know, and you gave it to me. So that's actually sounded on the guitar. M. When the brothers were in their early twenties, they moved to Los Angeles to pursue their dream of becoming professional musicians. They formed a band playing top forty hits. I'll be on

the one the guitar and Patrick on the base. Most of the popular clubs at the time were all the Suns that Strip in West Hollywood. Well, they quickly learned the performers with names like Vasquez Vega just weren't welcome. You know. It was a big thing at the time, getting hironing and white acts and and the strip. It was a specutty white We went to audition from Bill Gazari on don't see any guy, and Bill looked at it.

The said United Italian, said, you know when we can be You said, well right now, and you're gonna be Pat Vegas and you're gonna be Lolly Vegas. Pat and Lolly complied. They dropped the Vascas from their names and Vega became Vegas. All to become more possible as white I wanted to work. You could have called me anything, and I never played yet, so I don't give the carbe jack rabbit. I would regatten your giant for a while. They played alone, They hid their roots. They worked hard

to become as versatile as they could. They even did a stint playing surf music. They wanted classical music. We played some classically. They wanted to get Latin, Play Latin if they wanted the country with their country. I played a lot of country gigs railing for a lot of indigenous people at the time. That was the only choice. Assimilate, fit in, or be left behind. From Interval presents an awfully nice this is the last resort I'm scat episode

three after the gold Rush. For many Americans, the history of California begins with the gold Rush, the mass migration of prospectors into the region that started in Here's journalists Pat Morrison. So the gold Rush brought in people by the tens of thousands who thought this is the place eureka, the Greek word which is on the state flag of California, meaning I have found it. There was as far as the white gold rush settlers were concerned, nothing here before.

The truth is California has been inhabited for thousands of years. It's the ancestral homeland of more than a hundred native tribes. But then the colonists arrived. They came for different reasons, to spread Christianity or to make their fortune, but in the end they all needed one thing. Land. In this episode, we're going to tell you the story of how that land was taken, what it meant for the people who originally lived there, and how today those people are fighting

to get that land back. The California Dream, while it's been a dream for Europeans, it has been basically a nightmare for California Indians because it's been built off our backs and off our land. Calls and supporters often present an image of California as different from the rest of the United States as its own values and culture, and it rejects the conservative ideas embodied by people like Donald Trump.

But beneath the surface of the California Dream is a history that is a lot darker than most people know and calls it's going to have to choose to reckon with that dark history or repeat it. In the spring of a U. S military captain named John Fremont led an expedition into the wilderness of northern California, near the present day town of Reading. At the time, California was controlled by Mexico, but Fremont was a believer in manifest destiny, this idea that the United States was destined by God

to rule all of the land in North America. California would belong to the US soon enough. His stated mission was just to survey the land, but he had been armed by the U. S Department of War. Fremont got word that a band of Native people were camping nearby. Were they a threat? He didn't wait to find out. He and his men traveled to the Sacramento River. It surprised a group of wind to name Tives living along

the banks. Free Months men attacked, pinning the wind twos against the water, firing on them with rifles, and then butchering the survivors with axes. With nowhere to run, many desperate women and children fled into the river, where they drowned. Witnesses later estimated that as many as nine d people were murdered in a single afternoon. Free Months attack was the first recorded American massacre of California Natives, but it was just the beginning. Here's Jolie Proudfit, the chair of

American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos. The first two decades of the American occupation UM, the Native population of California plummeted by nine percent. Bounties were paid for the scalps of men, women, and children. None of this was done in secret. The first Governor of California, Peter Burnett, literally made genocide the state policy, saying, quote a war of extermination will continue to be waged between

the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct. And quote that wasn't some offhan comment, by the way, that was his State of the State address, delivered at the state Capitol in front of the California Congress. People are often familiar with the image of the angel pointing west. This notion of manifests destiny may have worked well for white settlers, but for um, the original inhabitants of this land,

this was outright brutality and outright murder. As for Captain John Freemont, the man responsible for the Sacramento River massacre, yeah, he was elected California's first Senator in eighteen fifty In eighteen fifty six, Fremont was nominated as the first presidential candidate of a new political party, the Republicans. The second Republican presidential kendidate, four years later was Abraham Lincoln. This history of genocide and land theft laid the foundation for

our entire country, including California. In the decades that followed. Most of the Natives who survived were sent to reservations, often poor, isolated lands far from population centers. The result was the indigenous people were increasingly invisible in the state. Without them in the way, California could grow as big

as it could dream. Here's Pat Morrison again. The demographic of California was Native American, and then the Spanish, and then the Mexican and finally then the Yankees, the white people who came to California and who molded and shaped the image and the message of California into what they wanted it to be at the expense of all of the people who had been here before, all of the

marginalized people. They were essentially disappeared in the service of this idea, this fantasy of California serve dudes with that dude that they bag move skyp and and thing of being mellow. The California gold Rush helps usher in a concept known as the California Dream, that California was a promised land where you could do and be anything. The California dream has always even before the gold Rush, I think conjured the notion of reinvention and self invention. This

is a place where your past didn't matter. Your future is what mattered, your aspirations and your abilities. That is the quintessential aspect of the American dream. And I think California crystallized so wonderful plate for me tonight to have heard and saying the Beach Boys and if you can hear in the background, the girls are still hollering for them. By the nineteen fifties and sixties, California's population was exploding, envied around the world for its beaches, it's lifestyle, and

it's optimism. It was an image made popular by surf rock groups like the Beach Boys, but more people meant that California needed more housing, more highways, more farms, more land, and the government they knew exactly where to find it. Here's Jolie Proudfit again. We talked about the American period with the gold Rush, with an influx of you know, people coming from all over the world to get rich

with gold. And then the second wave was in the nineteen fifties where people were moving from the Midwest to California. So what did they need? More land? How did they get it? Termination? In ninety three, Congress pass a new policy towards Native people. It was known as Termination. Termination did exactly what it said. It called for the end of all recognition of tribes and the full assimilation of Native people into American society. Reservations would be dissolved and

the land sold off. It was a different kind of genocide, a cultural one, and once again it was all about the land. The Termination Act terminated tribes from existing, so they were no longer tribal governments. They no longer had citizens, they know younger had tribal lands. These individual tribes no

longer were Native American. This was another period of time for the federal government to take more Indian lands through what they called liberating us through terminating our political legal status. This pattern of genocide, land theft, in erasure is woven throughout the story of California. Natives pushed off their reservations immediately ran into another problem, redlining racist policies that restricted

where non whites could live in Los Angeles. For example, if you weren't white, you couldn't live in up to the properties in the city. This didn't just impact Native people, of course. In l A, Black Americans were segregated into communities like Watts and Compton. Residents face underfunded schools, few job prospects, and an aggressive over policing of their communities.

On August eleven, the Beach Boys were in Hollywood recording pet Sounds, their most celebrated album, but twenty miles away in Watts, the tension between the police and the black community finally reached a breaking point. It began with the arrest by white officers of the California Highway Patrol of two young negroes, one on a charge of drunk driving, the other his brother, His passengers, their mother, who lives nearby, came to the scene. There was an argument, there was

a scuffle. By then a crowd of several hundred negroes had gathered. The story of police brutality quickly spread through the community. This was the Watts Uprising, sometimes referred to as the Watts Riots, six days of protest by black residents that were met. With the deployment of nearly sixteen thousand police in National Guard, all majority black neighborhoods in l A were put under curfew. By the time it was all over, nearly four thousand people had been arrested

in dozens had been killed, mostly shot by cops. Those were the ugly early hours of this morning, as control of a sort was finally imposed. This evening, Los Angeles remains hot, quiet, tense, and dangerous, and twenty eight people are dead. In the forties, Americans imagine California as this untapped wilderness rich with gold, and all you had to

do was get there and claim your share. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, California was sold as a land of endless summer, a place where you could get a great job, build the future, maybe even get famous. Call Exit today is selling a version of that same dream. That dream, the illusion of California is only possible because of the land that was taken and the violent histories

that are hidden. As a kid, Marcus perceived racism as something that happened somewhere else, and today he believes that many of the problems that afflict the US aren't actually California problems. We're just guilty by association. America is going downhill. America doesn't have your values. California values and American values are going to only increasingly diverge as time goes on, so better to have a separation. But just as California is surfing in hot rods, is also the wats uprising.

It's striking gold and its genocide. How you experience the California dream has a lot to do with who you are and what you look like. It's a dream that was only ever meant for some. It's certainly not for a guy like Patrick Vasquez Vega. You know, it's not. It's not. It's just kind of fund of dream thing Internet about me and the way it ships now and the way it's it's the way I have earned and

seen it. It's it's it's not established for me. Throughout the fifties and sixties, even after changing their name, the Vegas Brothers struggled to break through with their music. To get by, they found work as session musicians and songwriters, helping to create hits for other artists, and along the way they had to deal with all kinds of racist bullshit.

We were driving across Texas, you know, from gate to gate, you know, and we're pulling to this one restaurant, just sit down in the back and ording food, and all of a sudden there's two guys walks and white guys walking. They checked us out, and then they walked out, and then they're about twenty minutes later coming with about ten guys. They wanted to trouble. I couldn't afford to have one of the guys heard, so we slipped out the back. We jumped into cars and took off and they chased this,

you know. But but yeah, we had a lot of that. Nothing was going to change the fact that we were Native American that you know, we weren't twite, so so there was a lot of prejudice all through this time. Something was eating at Pat. He was tired, unfulfilled. So one day I told a lie and I said that said them through playing with I'm grateful people and and got clubs, and I'm just I'm just sick of it. I wasn't getting any and I wasn't getting any truth

out of it. I wasn't getting any satisfaction. I mean, I wasn't really doing anything for myself or doing anything for us, you know, we were doing it for everybody else, and and and I wasn't getting any joy out of it. At this point. The years of struggle were weighing on Pat. But one night on stage, he had a breakthrough. One day, I got up there and kind based when I thought up and I heard this guitar player and then just a chart point for I am playing the long stretched

notes and liud, I mean just crazy. And I turned my head and it was Jimmy. The musician who had joined Pat on stage was Jimmy Hendrix, debatably one of the greatest guitarists of all time, who also happened to be part Cherokee. He loved what we were doing, he loved how we played. He just loved the way I played Basement. He's the one that said, man, you guys need to explore your roots. Man, I'm party in jin he says. He said, I wish I could use mine,

And I said that's a good idea. And so we went on pursued that and just went skying with that. And so a short time later in the CBS records office, a new kind of band was formed. Yeah, So we were sitting at CBS Studios and secretary was headed fingers on them capriat and said, who's what's the name of the group. And I had this little piece of paper in my water and looking at my wine and unwrapped it like that root tank and I said red Bone And she's just red Bone. What is that? It's a

name for Native American who's part Native American. They're half breed, and they're calling him a half breed. You call him a red bone And she says, typed red that it now known as red Bone. Pot and Lolly didn't shy away from putting their background at the forefront of their music.

They released their first album in nineteen, followed by three more until in nineteen seventy three they dropped the song that would define their careers, Come and Get Your Love, was an international hit, and there was no mistaking Red Bones heritage. From their hairstyles to their wardrobe. Their true identities were finally on full display. Being Indigenous is the

only truth I knew. I wanted to be going to play from my roots, you know, and people are all going to the world accepted and appreciated because the honesty is there and you can hear it Come and Get Your Love has become a timeless classic, and it found new life when it was featured in the opening credits of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Red Bones success was

a game changer for Native representation in pop culture. Here's p J. Vegas, Pat's son and a musician in his own right, Come and Get Your Love man the amazing things. It was the first Native American rock band to reach top five and Billboard charts, And it's just something for our people to really identify ourselves too, and to kind of just show like we're here. Like you may think that we're not here, but look this is Come and Get Your Love. These are these are people. We didn't

see any of us on TV. We don't, you know, we never saw any of us in the music industry performing next to the great and everything called you know, spaghetti Westerns back in the day. And then we're huge in my father's era, and it was Italians playing Native Americans, so there wasn't really anyone that they could look to to have an example of what was possible. So when my father and my uncle did that, that's the biggest accolade. You know. What I mean is to Inspire. Pg's most

recent project is called Native State of Mind. His Dad plays based on most of it YEA. For centuries, Native people have lived as second class citizens in their own homelands. They were killed in the state sponsored genocide, they were enslaved and forced onto reservations, and finally they were pressured to assimilate. But by the nineteen sixties, a new movement was underway to fight back, to reclaim what was taken from Native people, our culture, our rights, and our land.

It's known as Red Power. Today that idea lives on in part through a movement called Land Back. They stole the land, but they couldn't take our spirit. They fear the end of their world, but they forget We are building a future that belongs to us all. We are the ones our ancestors prayed for. We are that we are the land. Here's Jolie proudfit again. So the land Back movement is really just putting front and center what Native people always have wanted. It's our ability to be

self determined on our own lands and our homelands. We lost millions of acres of land that we have not been able to get back, and we want to have our own political status, with our own language, with our own customs and tradition. This is restitution. There's never gonna be reconciliation without return of the land. Land Back offers us a vision of what the future for Native people could look like. This song was the first single off my last album. I wrote it in support of the movement.

They say where you from the capital with Marty places on the Constitution, with some bloody hands, fector business plan and saw people's Marcus and Lewis have pitched a new dream for California, a place that's more inclusive and just than the United States. But at the same time, it kind of just feels like a continuation of the system that brought so much misery in the first place. So

why would any Native Californian support the calas a cause? Well, so their credit, Marcus and Lewis have come up with a proposal, but they come straightfor they live with the place that we stand, so we're taking it take it out back. Well. The plan to break California off from the rest of the United States is back with an interesting new twist. The leaders of cal Exit have announced a new version of their scheme to create an independent California.

In this all federal lands in the state, which is about half of all of California, will be returned to American Indian tribes. Marcus Urrez Evans is co founder of cal Exit and always game enough to come on our show. We appreciate that he joins us tonightful Fristo, Marcus, thanks off. Come. Uh. You know, the best thing to do for Native American people would be to give them back all of the land and everybody who's not Native would leave and then

petition to become an immigrant. Obviously, that's not going to happen. So what we did at calex it was say, what's the best thing that we could do that's not going to fix genocide, isn't going to fix everything, not make it all perfect, but what's the biggest leap that we could make in the right direction. And we felt that giving over half of California and basically uh, the American control part to Native people who actually own the land would at least be a step in the right direction.

Here's an interesting fact about California. Almost of the land in the state is owned by the federal government. Under Marcus and Lewis's plan, after calls it, all of that land would be turned over entirely to Native people, meaning that calls it wouldn't just create a new California nation, it would also create other Native led countries at the same time. It's honestly a pretty radical proposal. Here's Marcus.

So when you talk to the indigenous tribes here, which we had before we announced that, we knew that they would love it because it was like, Hey, you were pushed off of your land and killed, You're gonna get it all back. So we knew we were going to pick up some allies to pick up some traction, and we also knew it was the right thing. And as far as do we really believe it, I wrote about it in my book in two thousand twelve, before we ever got famous, before I ever near Lewis. So I

always believed in this idea and that's documented. M So, what should native people think about Marcus and Lewis and calls It's offer pa Vegas for one kind of like the idea I didn't be wonderful. I think that would be a good gesture of of humanity and from America in California would be beautiful. On one hand, land return is something that we've dreamt of and fought for for decades. Here's Julie proudfit again. The largest landowner in the West

is still the federal government. So there are many lands that the federal guy from An owns that can be returned quite easily to the tribal nations um in those areas for them to manage for themselves, for their people, for their future. But on the other hand, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about collegs It's promises. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We've had progressive, liberal, good hearted people trying to tell American

Indians what's in our best interests. That hasn't worked out for us. Let's just say that Calleg's actually happened and Marcus and Lewis follow through on their promise to give the land back. How would it work. The federal lands in California aren't all connected. What do we have dozens or possibly hundreds of tiny countries scattered across the region. Second calls isn't giving back Beverly Hills or San Francisco.

The lands owned by the federal government are mostly undeveloped. Finally, a lot of the land calls is pledging to return is currently used by other people, some of whom are fighting their own battle for control. In fact, there's another secession movement in California besides CALEXY, and it's growing fast. But they're not trying to break away from the United States. They're trying to leave California itself. Here in the rural counties of northern California, some residents say it's time for

a new declaration of independence. They want to separate from California and create a fifty first state, the state of Jefferson. There's this big divide and it's not just COVID, and it's not just politics, and it's not just the State of Jefferson. It's just all mixed up. This is a complete, unequivocal overthrow of the government. I think they're looking for a civil war. I mean, I really do. I think they're looking for an excuse to start using weapons. That's

next time on the Last Resort. The Last Resort is an Interval Presents original production from Awfully Nice. From Interval Presents, the executive producers are Alan Coy and Jake Kleinberg. Executive producers from Awfully Nice are Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges. Written and produced by Jesse Burton and Dana Bulut. Associate producer is Suzanne Gaber. Project management by Kadi Kama Kat Editing, sound design and mix by Nick Sabriano and Keiana McClellan

of Bang Audio. Post original music by My Boy Mattaway, Yuki and Me, shoot Test Scott. Theme song by Me shoot Test Scott and Sweet. Sound fact checking by Lauren Vespoli. Script consultation by William Bauer. Operations lead is Sarah You, Business development lead is Cheffi a Lenswig, and marketing lead is Samara still Special. Thanks to Cecily Messa Martinez, I'm your host, shoot Test Scott. For a full list of the sources used in this episode, please check the show notes.

Make sure to follow, rate and review The Last Resort on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. Wrote what we Do when we Want, I wrote the Wars. Yeah,