“Indian Girls Prefer Park to Housework”: Native Labor, Runaways, and Carcerality in the Twentieth-Century San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract: In Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, behind the façade of well-appointed homes, lie traces of a once thriving labor program. From 1918 to roughly 1942, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from US Indian boarding schools to work as live-in housemaids in homes across the Bay. In exchange for room, board and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned and lived in the private homes of their employers. This article examines the understudied facets of gendered Indian labor and carcerality in the context of Western outing by exploring early twentieth-century outing runaways and Native women’s experiences in California’s juvenile justice system. To this end, the author considers the powerful and painful stories of women and girls who expressed their dissatisfaction, ran away, stayed out past curfew and found themselves in Bay Area “detention homes.” Caitlin Keliiaa’s use of the term “runaway” considers a spectrum—women who had public departures and those who quietly absconded in the night—also considers those who left without permission. Ultimately, the article argues that outing functioned as a carceral force that sanctioned criminalization and incarceration of Native women. In turn, outing women resisted containment, constant control, sexual surveillance, and labor exploitation.