An exhibit at the Cooper Molera Adobe museum in Monterey, California. Photo: The Russian Reader
Cooper Molera Adobe is now pursuing the interpretation of Ohlone/Esselen/Costonoan Native Indian slaves at our historic site. This includes evaluating our history, beyond gaining simple historical information and respectfully work with descendants to then forge a richer, more diverse narrative and legacy.
Three pillars of multi-disciplinary research, relationship building, and interpretation as major benchmarks will guide our methodology as we move forward with this project. Cooper Molera Adobe has partnered with Woodlawn Pope Leighey and Shadows on the Teche as a working group in a large network of sites the National Trust has to move toward this collective goal.
Failing to tell the truth about race and slavery results in widely-held fears of engaging with people who look, speak, act or think differently than oneself. It is lived out in anger and despair in feeling marginalized, erased, and invisible due to demographics or identity.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website to see more of our updates in the future for this project.
On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.
Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.
The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.
Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.
As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indians encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.
Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.
The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861–2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.
In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.
By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.
Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.
The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.
The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”
The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.
Source: Stacey L. Smith, “Freedom for California’s Indians,” New York Times, 29 April 2013
The gardens at the Cooper Molera Adobe in Monterey, California. Photo: The Russian Reader
[…]
Confusion about how sex trafficking works and who qualifies as a victim has compounded the problem. The government’s 2019 indictment charged Epstein with trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005, the period covered by his earlier Florida plea deal. The adult women Epstein entrapped after his 2008 conviction weren’t included in the indictment.
In 2019, prosecutors brought charges using the minimum number of victims needed to apprehend Epstein in order to keep the case secret and avoid him fleeing, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors continued interviewing victims after his July 2019 arrest and had planned to expand the indictment, including potentially to adult women, had Epstein not died the following month, according to these people and a 2019 Justice Department memo released in the files.
For sex-trafficking cases involving adults, prosecutors must prove the victim was compelled into sexual exploitation through force, fraud or coercion. Fraud typically involves false promises of employment or a better life; coercion can be psychological and take the form of threats of deportation, blackmail or debt bondage, lawyers said.
Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted cases of adult sex trafficking. In 2019, the Nxivm group founder Keith Raniere was convicted for his exploitation of adult women and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Most recently, the Alexander brothers were convicted in a case in which adult women testified that they had been lured to exclusive parties and trips, then drugged and assaulted. Lawyers for the Alexander brothers said they planned to appeal.
Pyramid scheme
After his 2008 plea deal, Epstein shifted his focus to adult women who looked like teenagers—many of them fashion models from Europe and Russia. He dangled fake jobs linked to his famous connections, promising work at places like Victoria’s Secret. He rarely delivered.
Once inside his orbit, the women said they were coerced into performing massages that escalated into sexual demands. Several have said he required at least one such encounter a day, and when no other women were available, he turned to his “assistants.”
Epstein took control of their finances, health bills, immigration and housing. Money he gave to some women and their families came in the form of loans, leaving them unable to disconnect from him.
Sex-trafficking operations often function like pyramid schemes, with traffickers using victims to recruit other victims. Raniere built a secret inner group, DOS, in which each “master” was required to recruit “slaves,” who in turn recruited more women, with victims coerced by handing over compromising photos as collateral.
Epstein’s operation worked similarly. He pressured victims to recruit additional victims, a pattern prosecutors noted in his 2019 indictment. Some victims have said they would offer up other women to Epstein in order to avoid being asked to participate in sex acts themselves.
Pozhidaeva identified herself as the redacted person in this photo with Norwegian diplomat Terje Rod-Larsen, billionaire Bill Gates, and Epstein. Rod-Larsen and Gates have said they regretted associating with Epstein and weren’t aware of his crimes. Justice Department
Both Epstein and Raniere created a power-imbalance with adult victims and used “continuous drips of promises” alongside “implicit threats” to coerce women to participate in sex acts and trafficking, said Moira Penza, the lead prosecutor on the Raniere case who is now a partner at Wilkinson Stekloff.
Penza said the argument that “they could have just left” misunderstands how consent works in these types of cases. She said once a predator creates an environment of dependency, “consent just becomes irrelevant. There really is no way to consent.”
Brad Edwards, a lawyer who has represented dozens of Epstein accusers including Pozhidaeva, said that documents and victim testimony show that after his 2008 conviction Epstein deliberately shifted to women over 18 to use their age as cover to continue running his sex-trafficking operation—and that the strategy largely worked.
[…]
Trapped and ashamed
[Svetlana] Pozhidaeva, who walked on runways for well-known European fashion brands, said she was introduced in 2008 to Epstein by Daniel Siad, a modeling scout who told her Epstein could arrange a Victoria’s Secret audition. Siad’s lawyer had no immediate comment. Siad recently said that he worked professionally to connect models with Epstein and was unaware of any wrongdoing.
In the U.S., Epstein secured her visa through MC2 Model Management and housed her at 301 E. 66th Street alongside other victims. He later used contacts, including former Russian minister Sergei Belyakov, to write U.S. immigration letters on her behalf, copies of which she showed the Journal in 2023.
Belyakov told the Journal that he “did not remember this letter” and declined to comment further. The former deputy minister of economic development corresponded with Epstein for several years, the files show.
Epstein closely monitored her, took compromising photos and expected regular updates on her interactions with other men, Pozhidaeva said. Money he gave to her and her family was structured as loans and tracked meticulously.
Other victims have told the Journal that Epstein sent them spending reports detailing what they owed him, a tactic that made leaving feel financially impossible. Pozhidaeva said Epstein also appeared to have powerful connections in Russia such as Belyakov, which made her fear for her family if she ever fell out of his favor.
When the promised jobs never materialized, Epstein blamed her for not being good enough. He asked her to take photos with prominent figures he met, and later conjured up roles at his nonprofit entities for her. It wasn’t until after his death that Pozhidaeva said she came to understand there had never been real positions and that he had been making the same false promises to other women.
The recently released Epstein files have dredged up painful memories for Pozhidaeva. A January 2016 message showed Epstein interrogating her over photos she had posted of herself and other assistants on Facebook, which he blamed for drawing attention from the Daily Mail. Another email from October 2016 showed her asking Epstein to deliver on a promise to help her brother in Russia get a job. He never did.
Some emails showed Pozhidaeva suggesting other women to Epstein and forwarding photos and modeling profiles, something she said he repeatedly pressured her and other victims into doing. Dozens of emails show Epstein making such requests of other women.
Epstein also asked Pozhidaeva and other victims to vet prospective women, including flagging their ages to ostensibly confirm they were of legal age and wouldn’t cause trouble, and to meet women and relay his instructions to them.
“I feel ashamed and think about those other women all the time,” Pozhidaeva said. “That’s the hardest part of all of this—I was too consumed by my own abuse to see beyond it. I had to appear happy, to keep smiling, while privately I was battling eating disorders, depression, and insomnia.”
Bridgette Carr, a law professor at the University of Michigan who founded the school’s human-trafficking clinic in 2009, said she draws the line between perpetrator and victim like this: Someone who aids a trafficker after fully escaping their situation is a perpetrator, while someone who does so while still entrapped remains a victim.
“If a woman is still in that situation,” she said, “there’s no magic that happens on her birthday when she becomes a year older.”
Pozhidaeva was among dozens of victims who pursued claims against Epstein’s estate after his death. She was also deemed eligible to receive compensation from other victim suits. Each woman had to present evidence to a settlement administrator.
“I was bullied and controlled for more than 10 years by Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “I have to learn to stand up for myself now. I am done being bullied by anyone.”
Russian ties
Since the Epstein files release, Pozhidaeva has been contending with social-media posts and blogs insinuating she is a Russian spy. Several other Russian women in Epstein’s orbit told the Journal they have faced similar accusations.
For Pozhidaeva, the suspicion traces back to her father, who told the Journal he worked for Russia’s armed forces until 1996, retiring during the Boris Yeltsin era. He later worked as a sales representative at coffee and wine companies, and then took jobs at state-run energy and railroad companies.
Her father denied that he or his daughter are Russian agents. “Unfortunately, in the current political climate, there is a tendency to label almost any Russian national with a background in government or a high-level education as a ‘spy’,” he wrote in an email.
His early employment history, compounded by Pozhidaeva’s college degree from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, has been enough to fuel accusations. “I’m willing to take a polygraph test to make this stop,” she said. “Whatever is needed, I will do it, so I can move on.”
Several media outlets have grabbed emails before the Justice Department removed them and published articles using her name. Pozhidaeva has since been contacting journalists asking to have her name removed from their articles. She said most reputable publications have agreed to withhold the names of sex-trafficking victims, but some haven’t responded.
Penza, the former Nxivm prosecutor, said sex-crime victims expect their confidentiality will be protected by law enforcement and when that expectation isn’t met, it “can feel re-traumatizing.” She said that exposing sex-crime victims “can also have a chilling effect on other people being willing to come forward.”
The redaction failures have given ammunition to bloggers and online commentators who have portrayed women trapped in Epstein’s orbit as willing participants. Some have gone further, citing emails in which women expressed gratitude or warmth toward Epstein as evidence of complicity or consent.
“People see a few emails and think they understand what happened,” Pozhidaeva said. “The Justice Department made mistakes, and even when they fix them, we’re left to live with the consequences.”
For years, the agricultural sector has faced a tight labor market as farmworkers age and fewer new immigrants and younger Americans are willing to toil in the fields. Top Trump administration officials vowed that mass deportations would help, leading to “higher wages with better benefits” and a “100 percent American work force.”
But the administration has quietly acknowledged in recent months that its immigration raids and crackdown on the border have aggravated the issue. So it has instead turned to an alternative source, making it cheaper for farmers to hire immigrant farmworkers on temporary visas.
Many farmers have celebrated those changes, made to an increasingly popular visa program known as H-2A, noting the difficulty in hiring American workers and tough economic conditions for the industry. But immigration hawks and labor unions alike are opposed, arguing the move will only increase the share of foreign workers and hurt native workers and suppress their wages.
The simmering debate underscores how some of the administration’s top goals of reducing immigration, keeping food prices low and helping American workers may inevitably conflict. The competing interests at play also show the spillover effects of Mr. Trump’s hard-line approach to legal and illegal immigration.
Brooke L. Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement that the administration was enacting “real reforms to ease regulatory burdens and lower labor costs.”
“The farm economy is in a difficult situation, and President Trump is utilizing all the tools available to ensure farmers have what they need to be successful,” she said.
Only 0.4 percent of farmers in California reported losing workers directly to farm raids, according to a new survey by the California Farm Bureau and Michigan State University. But more than 14 percent said the raids and general anxiety surrounding enhanced immigration enforcement caused worker shortages. Among labor-intensive crops like fruit and vegetables, that number was nearly 20 percent.
The Labor Department, in a regulatory filing revamping the H-2A program in October, acknowledged the challenges of finding workers. “The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal work force,” it said, “results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
Those difficulties, the agency warned, would only increase in light of Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, raising the possibility of deterring about 225,000 workers. “This threat will grow as the tools Congress provided in H.R. 1, One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to enhance enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws are deployed,” the agency continued.
Under the new changes, the agency adjusted how wages paid to H-2A farmworkers are calculated, effectively lowering hourly rates by between $1 and $7 depending on the state, according to some estimates. Farm owners can also now include housing as part of the compensation package they provide to guest farmworkers.
The reduction in wages has prompted a lawsuit from the United Farm Workers of America, which represents thousands of field workers. It argues that the rule will adversely harm American farmworkers by lowering their wages as well or pushing them out of the labor pool entirely.
“These actions are going to displace domestic farmworkers who have been working in the fields and putting food on dinner tables for decades, and bring a work force that is even more vulnerable to abuse,” Teresa Romero, the president of the union, said in an interview, noting that H-2A workers are often exploited and trafficked.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration and increased enforcement, agreed. The changes are likely to encourage more foreign migration and discourage automation in agriculture, he wrote in an opinion essay in November, “two consequences that are contrary to the administration’s stated objectives.”
But for Bruce Talbott, who operates a peach orchard and vineyard in Colorado, the move will reduce his wage bill and allow him to hire more workers, making the economics of farming a little more viable. Mr. Talbott has tapped into the H-2A program for more than a decade, as the pool of locally available labor slowed to a trickle.
Because Colorado’s fruit and vegetable industry is seasonal, he said he could not offer year-round employment like farms in California, which makes the already grueling work of pruning trees and picking fruit less attractive to local workers. One year, when unable to hire enough local workers and while waiting for H-2A visas to be approved, the orchard lost 40,000 pounds of fruit.
Mr. Talbott’s farm employs four dozen to five dozen guest farmworkers annually, the vast majority of whom are returning workers and from Mexico, and just half a dozen local workers.
“Are there hard-working Americans? Of course there are,” he said, “and they’re in construction and they’re in oil and gas and they’re in career jobs. They’re not in seasonal farming.”
Mr. Talbott’s point about the lack of domestic workers is reflected in the data. Under the H-2A program, employers must also demonstrate an inability to hire U.S.-based workers. In 2025, only 182 of more than 415,000 advertised positions received a domestic applicant.
In the past two decades, the number of certified H-2A visa positions has risen sharply, to nearly 400,000 in the 2025 fiscal year from about 50,000 in 2005. These temporary workers now make up 15 percent of all crop workers. (About 40 percent of crop workers are unauthorized migrants and about a third are American citizens, according to the latest government estimates.)
Maria, a farmworker of nearly three decades in Idaho who declined to share her last name because she is not authorized to work in the United States, said in an interview that she had witnessed the program’s growth firsthand. Over the past four years, she has spent fewer and fewer weeks planting and harvesting onions, beans, alfalfa and wheat as more and more H-2A workers arrive.
To make up for the lost hours, Maria has resorted to selling tamales while other local workers have taken on second jobs. And her American-born 17-year-old son was unable to find a job in the fields and was told that teenagers were no longer wanted, given the availability of H-2A workers.
This year, as a result of wage cuts to H-2A workers, Maria may also see her hourly earnings drop to $11 from $17 — a reduction that has her considering leaving Idaho to look for work elsewhere.
“I don’t think it’s fair that our pay will be lowered so much,” Maria said, noting that although she was nearing retirement age, she could not afford to stop working.
The predicament Maria and her son face underline a point made by economists: Lowering wages for H-2A workers will not lead to more American workers in agriculture or increased pay for native workers.
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that the methodological changes would result in a $2 billion cut to the annual wages of guest farmworkers — and a $3 billion cut for U.S.-based farmworkers.
Philip Martin, a farm labor economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, said he was skeptical of the administration’s claims of an impending mass shortage in agricultural labor. Whatever the justification, he noted the moves would not increase the number of American workers in agriculture.
“It’s a basic economic point,” he said, adding, “If you have a shortage of something like energy — gas and oil — you raise the price to give people an incentive to go out and find more, right?”
Reducing wages, he said, will instead mean that American farmers will rely increasingly on mechanization, guest farmworkers and food imports.
Congress, too, is considering more sweeping changes to the program. A bipartisan bill introduced last year would streamline the application process, reduce costs and expand it to yearlong employers that currently do not qualify, like dairy farmers. (The bill would also establish a pathway to legal status for unauthorized farmworkers already in the United States.)
Mr. Talbott, the orchard operator in Colorado, praised the administration’s changes to the H-2A program and said he hoped Congress could make it more transparent and easier to use. Still, he worried that the moves were “too little, too late,” noting that several produce growers in his area were already closing shop this year.
“Labor is a big component of why people are saying this enterprise is not viable, I’m not doing this anymore,” he said.
That is why for Mr. Talbott, the H-2A program is essential. “We can’t farm without going back” to guest workers, he said.
