An American Genocide

American author and historian Benjamin Madley’s non-fiction book An American Genocide:The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (2016) chronicles the decimation of the American Indians in California in the mid-19th century. During this period, the population of California's Indians plunged from 150,000 to 30,000. In a review for The Nation magazine, Richard White writes, "In a commanding new book, Benjamin Madley calls California's 19th-century elected officials 'the primary architects of annihilation' against Native Americans in the state. Reading it is like watching bodies being piled on a pyre."

While "genocide" is a 20th-century term that isn't always applied to pre-1900 North American atrocities, Madley believes it is essential as a historian to name the state-led slaughter of American Indians as such. To makes this distinction, he relies on the criteria established by the United Nations Genocide Council in the wake of mass killings in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The UNGC's definition says that acts qualify as genocide if "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." The term used by 19th-century Californians to describe the large-scale death of American Indians was "extermination," which Madley considers synonymous with genocide.

The era of genocide against California's native tribes began with the Gold Rush, which started in January 1848 with the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. Upwards of 300,000 prospectors from inside and outside the United States descended on California, resulting in a dramatic rise in population that in turn led to California becoming a state in 1850. As prospectors increasingly laid claim to the California countryside, American Indians who stood in their way were dispossessed of their land and slaughtered by means of what the author refers to as a "killing machine." Funded and enabled by the new state government as well as the federal government, the killing machine consisted of US Army soldiers, California militiamen, and paid mercenaries known as Indian hunters. "It took sustained political will—at both the state and federal levels—to create the laws, policies, and well-funded killing machine that carried [this genocide] out and ensured its continuation over several decades." While the actual killings were carried out by soldiers and mercenaries, Madley identifies several state and federal officials as the true architects of the genocide. Among these is John C. Fremont, a veteran of the Mexican American War who became one of the first two senators elected to Congress on behalf of the new state of California.

Madley divides the Indian genocide into three categories. The first comprises attempts at the physical extermination of Indians. As the Daily Alta California newspaper pointed out in 1850, California gold miners were united in "the work of extermination" of Indian tribes. The second was enslavement. Enslavement commonly involved murdering the parents of Indian families and forcing their children into indentured servitude. Kidnapping children not only caused extreme trauma for the specific individuals involved, but it also threatened Indian communities' ability to flourish and remain viable. The third arm of genocide was the starvation and disease that resulted from repeated assaults on Indian families and communities by US troops, militiamen, and mercenaries.

Part of what made American genocide efforts so successful was that many of California's Indians—particularly the Miwok and Yokut tribes—had already been segregated into missions while the territory was under Mexican rule. Anyone who escaped the missions was hunted down, beaten, and returned. Forced to work and live in overcrowded conditions, the tribes already suffered from malnutrition and disease before the Americans arrived. Indians were also segregated by gender in the missions, resulting in plummeting birthrates.

Madley explores several horrifying atrocities suffered by the Indians at the hands of Americans over the quarter-century following the start of the Gold Rush. In one particularly appalling scene, Sally Bell, a Sinkyone woman, watched as her entire family was slaughtered. One soldier even cut out the heart of Sally's sister and threw it into the brush where Sally hid. Horrified, Sally clutched her sister's heart to her chest for the duration of the slaughter.

While Madley notes that Indians did fight back, he is careful to characterize the events he depicts as genocide rather than war because one hundred Indians died—men, women, and children alike—for every American who died. He points out that this sense of asymmetry in terms of white deaths versus Indian deaths was even more markedly steep in California than in other conflicts with Indians, particularly in the American Northwest.

In tracing the motives behind the killings, Madley says the slaughter was driven by something more than greed or racism. The soldiers and mercenaries viewed themselves as agents of history, a conclusion supported by an 1850 editorial in the Daily Alta California, "Such is the destiny of that miserable race, and we are but fulfilling our own by the enactment of scenes on the Pacific similar to those which have stained with blood our Indian history from the first dawnings of civilization."

An American Genocide is an illuminating and frequently stomach-churning look at one of America's darkest and most shameful chapters of history.