University of Oklahoma Press (Nov. 2020)
“Terri Castaneda’s Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist helps shed light on Potts’s important story, while effectively tracing her formation into an activist and national figure in Native American politics and cultural preservation…For those wanting to learn more about the roots of the Red Power movement or to gain greater insight into the national politics of Native American activism in the earlier part of the twentieth century, this book is an essential resource."
—Martin Rizzo-Martinez, California History
“It is impossible to share all of her meaning and importance here, but Terri Castaneda has provided us with a detailed view of Marie Potts’s life, her challenges, and her greatest successes as an advocate for California Indian people…Castaneda has given us all something to treasure.”
—Michelle LaPena, News from Native California
“Marie Mason Potts is a long-awaited, textured recognition of the life of an energetic and fearless Mountain Maidu woman that contributes to an emerging canon foregrounding the labor and leadership of Indigenous California women.”
—Beth Rose Middleton Manning, Resources for American Literary Study
“Driven by the careful pen of Castaneda, Marie Mason Potts adds depth and texture to what we know within many critical areas of California Indian history and Native American history more broadly…[This] is an exceptional book, and it offers renewed promise for the possibilities of biographical study as a lens into Indigenous experiences of the early twentieth century.”
—Kevin Whalen, NAIS—Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.
“Castaneda’s work highlights her strong commitment and record of community-based scholarship, making lasting connections with Potts’s descendants and Mountain Maidu peoples. Using the rich record left behind by Potts’s own writings in newspapers, letters, and oral interviews, Castaneda foregrounds Potts’s own voice…Castaneda is an expert storyteller and her work is an important addition to the growing scholarship on twentieth-century California Indian history.”
—Kathleen C. Whitelely, Western Historical Quarterly
. . . more about Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist
"Marie Potts was a celebrated Mountain Maidu political activist, culture bearer, writer, and Native newspaper editor. Born in 1895 at Big Meadow, in the northern Sierra, she was taken to Greenville Indian Industrial School at four years old, where the school superintendent assigned her the Mason surname, as he had done years prior with her elder half-siblings. In fall of 1912, she matriculated at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School, graduating three years later in the Class of 1915, the second descendant of her grandfather Hukespem—Big Meadow Bill—to graduate from Carlisle (see chapter 2). Returning home to Big Meadow, now flooded by Lake Almanor hydroelectric reservoir, she married, raised a family, and worked as a domestic laborer in white homes and lakeshore resorts.
In 1942, she joined her adult daughters in Sacramento. Here, her career as a journalist and political activist was launched as Publicity Chair for the Federated Indians of California land claims organization (1947-1978), and as editor and publisher of The Smoke Signal newspaper (1948-1978). Statewide activism led to national platforms from which she could represent California Native people: as the American Indian Chicago Conference CA/NV regional organizer and national AICC Planning Committee member and delegate; as guest editor of the NCAI Bulletin during a 1961 summer sojourn in Washington, D.C. working with Helen L. Peterson; and as co-founder of the American Indian Press Association (1969-1976).
Political activism fostered opportunities to engage in cultural causes close to her heart, including her award winning work inaugurating (1950) and annually curating the "All California Indian" State Fair exhibit. Here, Potts interpreted material culture, demonstrated basketweaving and acorn processing, and embodied California Indian modernity to a fair-going public schooled to believe Native people were either savages or extinct, or both. This instance of mid-20th century California Indian cultural self-representation can be traced to her Carlisle years and a visit to the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where she was disappointed to learn that her own people were not represented. This absence and a sense of carrying on her grandfather's work informed the dizzying slate of commitments she maintained for some 30 years. Yet somehow, she also found time to guest lecture to thousands of elementary school children, rounding out a long life rich in political, cultural and educational engagement."
— Terri A. Castaneda, April 2023