This is the history of the Shasta Nation as told by the Shasta people to Betty Lou Hall, who has spent her life recording and verifying Shasta oral history with documents, photographs, and interviews. Now she presents this story of her people. Thousands of years before there was a California, the native Shasta Upper-Klamath people had a successful society in an area stretching from Crater Lake near Medford, Oregon, to just north of Redding, California. These people are far fewer today, but they are still there. Many early American settlers tried to eliminate, enslave, or forget them, and later anthropologists cut them into linguistic jigsaw-puzzle maps of origin. Meanwhile, the descendants of approximately 35 surviving families overcame both hatred and scientific scrutiny.
Authors Betty Lou Hall, official historian and keeper of records for the Shasta Nation, and Monica Jae Hall, who also co-authored Arcadia's Western Siskiyou, Gold and Dreams in the Making of America series, are partners in Shasta Upper-Klamath Research.