Growing up on the Round Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California, Bauer says he noticed certain omissions. “Very often native people were ignored in these parks,” Bauer recalls. “They rarely made reference to the native people who were indigenous to these areas. So I wanted to devote my time and energy to looking at the role that native people, and native workers, had in helping to create what we know about the American West.”
Bauer says his work differs from other research that has been done on the Round Valley community and other reservations. “Much of [the research] that [has] been done tends to look at what non-native people did to native people; what my work emphasizes is what Native Americans themselves have done and are doing.” He relies heavily on oral history records and on his own oral interviews.
