Everybody Must Be Good, and Everybody Must Be Happy

Bibliographic Data

ID19218062
AuthorsKhal Schneider (corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume2026
Issue154
Pages38-56
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueRadical History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01636545-12085621
OpenAlexW7159800832
LanguageEN
References cited18

This essay interprets the economic and political strategies of the Pomo-speaking people in late nineteenth-century Northern California through a lens of moral economy. The Pomo moral economy developed out of ancient cultural practices, but it took shape in a specific moment of crisis following their dispossession of land, and it developed in the succeeding decades as Pomo people entered the local agricultural economy as wage laborers. An early 1870s religious revival known as the Bole Maru, or “dreamer,” instructed participants to forsake personal wealth and to direct their productive energy back to the well-being of a larger community while enjoying one another’s company. Thereafter, although they were required to work for pay, Pomos’ non-waged activities, such as feasting, gambling, and dancing—which employers and state officials interpreted as leisure time activities or evasions of labor—distributed resources, cemented valuable social bonds, and sustained Pomo communities

Agriculture · Moral economy · Politics · Wage · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Latin American and Latino Studies

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