<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container content-width3" style="--font-size:20px;">
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://truthout.org/articles/californias-indigenous-history-is-a-story-of-genocide-and-resistance/">https://truthout.org/articles/californias-indigenous-history-is-a-story-of-genocide-and-resistance/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">California's Indigenous History Is a
Story of Genocide and Resistance</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Chris Steele - January 12,
2020<br>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<p>Every inch of North and South America is Indigenous
land. With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror, its <a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/thanksgiving-is-dedicated-to-erasing-the-ruthlessness-of-english-settlers/">mythological
history</a> still needs to be debunked, and a true
discussion of the violence of settler colonialism and
empire needs to happen. Award-winning historian Benjamin
Madley is author of <a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/does-the-mass-murder-of-indigenous-americans-in-california-qualify-as-genocide/"><em>An
American Genocide: The United States and the
California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873</em></a>.
In this interview, Madley discusses the genocide of
Indigenous people in California, as well as stories of
resistance, trauma and commemoration.</p>
<p><strong>Chris Steele:</strong> <strong>The main thesis
of your book is that you name settler colonialism in
the U.S. for what it was, which was full-on genocide,
where calls for extermination were made and committed.
Your research is meticulous; can you speak about the
implications of your research that shows that genocide
was not only committed by vigilantes, but by the state
government and the federal government? Can you give a
summary of how all those topics interconnected in
California?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Benjamin Madley: </strong>When I was a
graduate student at Oxford, I came across reports of
massacres in California, and this connected for me with
the stories I’d heard as a boy growing up in a little
town called Happy Camp on the Klamath River in far
northern California, where Karuk and Shasta people had
told me about the killings that took place there. I’d
always wondered if those were localized massacres or if
they happened elsewhere in the state. What I found in
the research is that in general, California’s Indigenous
population plunged perhaps from 150,000 people to just
30,000 survivors between 1846 and 1870 and certainly,
diseases, dislocation and starvation caused many of
these deaths, but what I found was this was not the
near-annihilation of a people simply based upon the
unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into
contact. It was, in fact, genocide, sanctioned and
facilitated by California officials.</p>
<p>I’m referring very specifically to the definition that
is put forth in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. In
order for a prosecutor to successfully convict a
defendant of the crime of genocide, they have to prove
two things beyond a reasonable doubt. The first thing
that they have to prove is that the defendant evinced
intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnic,
racial or religious group as such; and second, they have
to prove that the defendant committed at least one of
the five genocidal acts specified in the convention.
These include killing members of the group, causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,
deliberately inflicting harm on the group, conditions of
life calculated to bring about physical destruction in
whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent
birth within the group, and forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group.</p>
<p>When people speak about genocide, they’re usually
speaking about a state-sponsored policy, and when
California’s first legislature convened in 1850, one of
the very first things that it did was to ban all Native
Americans from voting, and then they banned Indigenous
people with one-half of Native blood or more from giving
evidence for or against whites in most civil and
criminal cases, and they denied Indigenous people the
right to serve as jurors. Then they banned Native
Americans from serving as attorneys and justices, so
when you think about what that means, in combination,
these laws largely shut Indigenous people out of
participation in (and protection by) the state legal
system, so this amounted to a virtual grant of impunity
to would-be Native-killers. That’s kind of the first
stage, and that’s similar to some other genocides — that
targeted victim groups are denied protection or
participation in the legal system and are stripped of
any political rights as well.</p>
<p>Then in that same year, 1850, the government legalized
unfree Indigenous labor; this led to a truly genocidal
slave system. It had multiple genocidal impacts. First
of all, when slave raiders would arrive at a village,
they would typically kill anyone who resisted, anyone
who tried to run away, and many of the older men and
women, and then people would be marched away to be sold,
and anybody who tried to escape or resisted during that
process also was usually killed. Once people got to the
place where they were going to be sold, they were
scattered, so it would be very difficult for the
community to reproduce itself either biologically or
socially, and finally, when people reached the places
where they would work as unfree laborers they were often
treated as disposable and worked to death.</p>
<p>Between 1850 and 1870, Los Angeles’s Indigenous
population fell from 3,693 to just 219 survivors.
Slavery played a huge part in this genocide, but there
was also a state-sponsored killing machine, and it was
built by state legislators, so what they did was to
authorize no fewer than two dozen separate state militia
expeditions against California Native people between
1850 and 1861 which killed at least 1,340. They paid for
this by passing three different bills in the 1850s that
raised over one-and-a-half million dollars — a huge
amount of money at this time in history, both for past
and future militia operations. It was important because
this policy transcended the number of people that it
killed directly, by demonstrating that the state
government would not punish killers but instead actually
reward them.</p>
<p>These militia expeditions and the policies that
supported them helped inspire huge numbers of vigilantes
to go out on their own killing sprees, and they took the
lives of an absolute minimum 6,460 Indigenous people in
California between 1846 and 1873. The U.S. Army and its
auxiliaries also killed at least 1,680 Native Americans
in California during these years, and that institution
was of course directly funded by Congress, but Congress
also reimbursed the state of California for most of the
money that it spent on hunting Indigenous people through
its militias.</p>
<p><strong>I wanted to take a step back and look at the
Indigenous culture that you speak about as well. To
quote you, “California stands out as one of the most
linguistically diverse places on Earth.” Can you speak
more about the significance of this?</strong></p>
<p>To me, California on the eve of contact with Europeans
is this amazingly exuberant clamor of many different
Native American economies, languages, tribal nations and
individuals, and we know that Indigenous people had
worshipped and loved and traded and fought in California
for at least 12,000 to 15,000 years. It’s a very diverse
series of economies. For example, if you look at the
region west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, one of the
keystone foods would be the acorn, but if you go east of
the Sierra Nevadas and east of the Cascade Range, it’s
likely to be the piñon nut or pine nut.</p>
<p>Political organizations, likewise, extraordinarily
varied. With some tribal nations having systems of
inherited chiefdoms, some of them have one leader or
multiple leaders, and it’s also very decentralized — so
very different from what we think of as an
Anglo-American system of government — and it’s also a
very densely populated place. Scholars estimate very
conservatively that at the time the Spaniards first
arrived in California in 1769 to begin colonizing the
land, there were at least 310,000 Indigenous people
living here, and they were organized into as many as 500
or more different individual political units, individual
groupings.</p>
<p>It was a very complicated kaleidoscope to look into it
as a researcher, and even today it’s extraordinarily
complex. There are 109 federally recognized California
tribes, but also scores of other tribes that are not
recognized by Washington, D.C., but which are recognized
by the state of California. Then there are many other
tribes which are recognized neither by the federal
government nor by the state government, but which are
currently seeking recognition by both. In California,
Congress would summarily terminate tribal nations as
tribal nations, and many of those tribes that were
terminated are still struggling to be reinstated by the
federal government.</p>
<p><strong>In your book, you’re very meticulous about
showing every life that was lost that you could
document. </strong></p>
<p>Anyone who has ever lost a loved one has grief, and
when you think about that grief and you multiply it by
hundreds and by thousands and by tens of thousands, then
you begin to understand why it’s so important to
document the loss of each and every life.</p>
<p>When I was a graduate student first working on this
back at Yale, I was walking through the rotunda — the
famous space all in white marble with plinths that
record the names of every Yale graduate, women and men
who have fallen in all the wars that the United States
has been involved in, and its British colonial
antecedents since Yale began in 1701, and I stood there
for a long time one morning thinking, <em>Will there
ever be a monument like this to all of the California
Indigenous people killed between 1846 and 1873?</em> I
hope that one day there will, but I thought to myself
that morning, <em>I can do something like that by
honoring the fallen, at least on paper.</em></p>
<p>In the hardback edition of my book, there are nearly
200 pages of appendices, which document every killing of
a California Native American by a non-Indigenous person
and vice versa. This is my small contribution to
creating a memorial. Not as spectacular of course as
Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., but it
was my attempt to try to commemorate the fallen, and
perhaps on a more practical (less philosophical) level,
I hope that it is a useful research tool for educators,
for students and for tribal citizens who wish to know
more about this history, because I list where possible
the names of the fallen, the date on which their lives
were taken from them, where the event took place, and
the sources where I found the information. There’s a
great deal of data there for someone who is interested
in learning more about what happened.</p>
<p><strong>As far as Indigenous resistance in the book,
regarding 1829, you write, “By repeatedly burning
buildings, killing Spaniards, Mexicans and their
allies and escaping in large numbers, California
[Indigenous people] established a tradition of
resistance to colonialism and helped to pave the way
for their own emancipation.” Is that what your next
book is about as well?</strong> </p>
<p>The next book is a bit different, it’s about the gold
rush, but it is more about survival and about agency. We
don’t know a great deal about [Indigenous resistance]
because people often lost their lives while resisting.
There are many stories in this book of Native American
men and women who fought back to buy time for children
and elders and loved ones to escape, and many of them
made the ultimate sacrifice in order to facilitate those
escapes. When we think about the resistance, it was
courageous and incredible. You have to remember that
relatively small numbers of Indigenous people in
California were being pursued by relatively large
numbers of state militiamen, regular United States Army
soldiers and sometimes paid scout bounty hunters, and
they found incredible ways to resist.</p>
<p>The dark cloud of genocide hangs over California
history, and yet, if there is a silver lining, it’s that
triumph of survival against really impossible odds. It’s
the preservation of languages and cultural traditions
despite not only the genocide of 1846 to 1873, but the
educational assault that followed hard on its heels,
whereby children were taken from their homes to be
educated in boarding schools up and down the state; but
there, too, Indigenous people resisted. They resisted by
withholding their children from enrolling; children who
were enrolled resisted by running away and escaping back
home. Indigenous students set fire to the boarding
schools in which they were held, so that resistance
continued, and that resistance also was part of the
impetus for closing some of those schools.</p>
<p><strong>As of right now, we’re seeing a rise in
right-wing leaders across the world that spout racial
epithets, and these things can quickly slip into
violence and genocide. As a historian, how do you see
this current moment and what’s going on?</strong></p>
<p>One thing that I believe quite strongly is that there
is no safe level of racism. As you yourself just said,
it is a slippery and surprisingly quick ride from
“casual” racism to institutionalized racism, to race
laws, to state-sponsored violence against certain
groups, and then to genocide, and that’s one thing that
I feel quite certain about after my decades of studying
in this field. I do think that at least for now, we
still live in a democracy. One of the important ways
that an educator can combat these problems is by telling
the truth about the past. When people begin to
understand how this kind of awful history has unfolded
again and again around the world (many times in our own
lifespan), people, I think, will become more cautious,
and they may develop more empathy and a sense that it is
a quick link between rhetoric and actual violence.</p>
<p><strong>What are California Indigenous tribes proposing
to commemorate these genocides and even the topic of
what reparations should be brought?</strong><strong> I
know this should be spoken about by Indigenous
communities, but based on your research and your
conversations, what are your thoughts on this and
memorials for Indigenous populations?</strong></p>
<p>I think there are multiple tracks to commemoration. One
is state-sponsored commemoration, and of course, here in
California our own governor, Gavin Newsom, has recently
publicly apologized for this genocide and he has also
called for this genocide to be included in our state
public school curricula. That’s one track for education.
There have been no major public calls that I’m aware of
on a state level for commemoration, but Newsom did
recently change on a statewide level “Columbus Day” to
“Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”</p>
<p>Commemoration in terms of plaques and monuments tends
to happen on a more local level, but there are very few
plaques and memorials commemorating massacres in
California, and where they are in place, they are often
quite controversial, and sometimes an old plaque stands
commemorating something as a battle next to a new plaque
which commemorates it as a massacre. That said, you
raised a very important point, which is that Native
communities in California are themselves commemorating
these things, both publicly and outside of the public
eye. There are, for example, candlelight vigils in
places like Duluwat Island in Humboldt Bay off the coast
of the city of Eureka. Eureka recently gave that island
back in its entirety to the Wiyot people. There is a
candlelight vigil that happens every year to commemorate
a huge massacre that took place up in Del Norte county.</p>
<p>There are also walks and runs; for example, there is a
walk that happens each year to commemorate the Konkow
Maidu Trail of Tears from the area around Chico moving
west toward Round Valley Reservation in southern
Mendocino County. There are a number of different things
going on, but of course there’s much more that needs to
be done.</p>
<p>Pomo folks and Wappo folks up in Lake County,
California, have tried to use [petitions to garner]
ballot measures to get the name of Kelseyville changed
(which is named after slave owner Andrew Kelsey), as
it’s quite a painful name for a lot of people. That has
not yet been successful, but <a
href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-newsom-native-american-apology-20190620-story.html">towns
named after some of the more obviously genocidal
governors</a> from this period have been changed. It’s
an ongoing process but it’s something that happens, that
all of us can be involved in, because at least for now,
we’re still a democracy, so people can be involved in
changing their local education system and they can also
be involved in political movements to change place
names.</p>
<p><em>This interview </em><a
href="https://timetalks.libsyn.com/benjamin-madley-on-the-herero-and-nama-california-indians-genocide-resistance-trauma-and-survival"><em>first
appeared</em></a><em> in audio form as a segment on
the author’s podcast, “Time Talks.” It has been
lightly edited here for clarity and length. </em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a></div>
</body>
</html>