Claiming Cultural Authority, Asserting Mountain Maidu Identity: Marie Potts and the Mixed Legacy of the Indian Boarding School Experience
(CSU, Sacramento)
Born in Big Meadows (now Lake Almanor), California, in 1895, Marie Potts (Mountain Maidu) was the product of two boarding schools—the Greenville Indian School in Plumas County, California, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. By all accounts, she was a model student who excelled in the curriculum designed to erode her Maidu sense of self. Removed from her ancestral homelands, the boarding school experience cultivated in her an American Indian identity where otherwise, a Maiduan sense of cultural distinction would have developed. In the mid‐20th century, as land claims cases fostered political mobilization and cultural revitalization among California Indian peoples, Potts was able to utilize the tools of her boarding school education to promote California Indian causes. This paper examines Potts’s own writings and related archival records as autoethnographic narratives that grow increasingly focused in her later years, upon the authoritative recounting of a traditional Maidu childhood. Rooting her cultural authority in the pre‐boarding school period of her life, and in a moment of rupture that marks her entry into the wider‐world, Potts deploys familiar ethnographic conventions that bolster her claim to Maidu cultural authority.