First Advisor
Patricia Schechter
Date of Award
Spring 6-9-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in History and University Honors
Department
History
Language
English
Subjects
Settler-colonialism, genocide, California, decolonization
Abstract
This thesis critically reads primary documents from the settler-colonial past of "Redding, California," my hometown. In this paper, I sketch out a series of moments of historical trauma which continue to cry out for repair. Through a series of episodes from the mid-nineteenth through the early-twentieth centuries, I examine how original settler thirst for land wrought a contested hegemony in principally genocidal flows of power between the settler-state and its settler inhabitants and the pre-existing local Indigenous nations and peoples. In the first chapter, I argue for an understanding of the dispossession of the northern valley as genocidal. In the second chapter, I argue that genocide and its resultant settler hegemony are incomplete, contested forces in which slippages provide room for the agency of the oppressed. In the third chapter, I argue that the settler-state and settlers are not monolithic in their oppressions, but that their philanthropic, sympathetic gestures often come too late and are not enough. In the fourth chapter, I argue that these conceptions of the region’s history form a new origin story which provides room for genuine repair through truth and reconciliation. For settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure, intricately woven into the landscape over generations of historical development.
Recommended Citation
Hegy, Celeste, "Unsettling Home: Traces of an Unrepaired Settler-Colonial Past in “Redding, California” 1846-1924" (2025). University Honors Theses. Paper 1733.
Included in
Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, United States History Commons