CWC Docs: Sugarcane

Caitlin “Katie” Keliiaa is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. She is an Indigenous feminist historian specializing in twentieth-century Native experiences in the West. Her scholarship engages Indian labor exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance of Native bodies, especially in Native Californian contexts. Her newly released book, Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program, examines how Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged an early twentieth-century San Francisco Bay Area-based Indian labor program. In this work, Dr. Keliiaa centers Native women’s voices uncovered from federal archives. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Hellman Fellows, and the Ford Foundation, among others. She is Yerington Paiute and Washoe, and her tribal communities inform her scholarship.

Alex Lilburn is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a BA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to coming to UCSB, he worked at the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals and volunteered at Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. His research explores the ways in which contemporary Indigenous communities utilize an array of media techniques in order to cultivate cultural practice and redefine their relationship to land and the state. He is a citizen of the Osage Nation.