Wage work was supposed to "kill the Indian and save the man" — that was the theory behind a century of federal Indian policy, from boarding school outing programs to postwar urban relocation. This week we talk with historian Colleen O'Neill about her new book, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century, which argues that Native workers turned that same tool of dispossession into one of the central vocabularies for asserting sovereignty itself. We trace this story from Carlisle's outing system through the New Deal, postwar Relocation and Termination, the rise of the Tribal Employment Rights Ordinance movement in the 1970s, and the transformation of tribes into employers in the era of Indian gaming.

Colleen O'Neill is a professor of history at Utah State University and a former coeditor of the Western Historical Quarterly. She is also the author of Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century.

Links:

• Colleen O'Neill, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2026)

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Yosemite didn't just get discovered — it got made, over and over, by every visitor who ever showed up to see it. This week we talk with historian Michael W. Childers about his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, which argues that the anonymous millions of tourists — not just Muir, Mather, and Adams — are the real protagonists of the park's history. We trace Yosemite from the Mariposa Battalion's 1851 invasion of the valley through the 1864 land grant, the U.S. Cavalry's improvised early administration, the rise of automobile tourism and Mission 66, the long fight over Indian Field Days and Native belonging in the valley, and the overcrowding crisis that's still playing out today.

Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, where he specializes in the modern American West, environmental history, and tourism. He is also the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association's 2013 Ullr Award.

Links:

• Michael W. Childers, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park (University of Nebraska Press, 2026)

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This week we are joined by María E. Montoya to discuss her new book, A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor’s Battle Over Industrial Democracy, just published by Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-workplace-of-their-own-9780197551691?cc=us&lang=en&

The book opens with a question: who owned the American workplace in early 20th-century? This question was particularly urgent in the period of the Colorado labor wars. Those conflicts featured a series of strikes punctuated by the deadly violence of Ludlow in 1914 and in Columbine in 1927. These two notorious episodes of industrial violence frame the story and demonstrate what was at stake in the Mountainous West. Many different groups-- including laborers, unions, governments, and capitalists – had ideas about how to deal with the dramatic problems raised by industrial labor and who should be making those decisions. Montoya focuses on the strategies of two industrial capitalists – John D. Rockefeller Jr and Josephine Roche – easterners who each controlled mining companies in Colorado. They both attempted to solve the divide between labor and capital and shape industrial democracy but through very different ideas about company towns, arbitration, maternalism, and engagement with unions. In Colorado their ideas confronted the regional specificities of the industry in that place.

Dr. Montoya mentioned Robyn Muncy's biography of Josephine Roche, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton UP, 2016) https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173528/relentless-reformer

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