"California's earliest European colonists - Russian merchants and Spanish missionaries - depended heavily on Native Americans for labor to build and maintain their colonies, but they did so in very different ways. This book brings together disparate skeins of the past - including little-known oral histories, native texts, ethnohistory, and archaeological excavations - to present a new view of how native cultures fared under these two colonial systems. Kent Lightfoot's work, which incorporates the holistic methods of historical anthropology, explores the surprising ramifications of these long-ago encounters for the present-day political status of native people in California."--BOOK JACKET.