‘An American Genocide,’ by Benjamin Madley

Alan Taylor, The New York Times

1 June, 2016

The state of sunshine and pleasure is drenched in the blood of Indians, the victims of mass killings. These peaked between 1846, when Americans conquered California from Mexico, and 1873, when they snuffed out the last group resistance by natives in the state. The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by the grim standards prevailing elsewhere in North America. Before 1846, California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and dispossession. But Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor. The American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.

Lacking firearms, subdivided into many distinct groups, and greatly outnumbered by 1852, the California natives were more vulnerable to attack than Indians elsewhere. As Benjamin Madley writes in “An American Genocide,” by 1873, roaming bands of Indian-killers played a major role in reducing native numbers by more than 80 percent. Often the massacres erupted as indiscriminate retribution after some starving Indians killed and ate a few cattle. Vigilante gangs also profited by seizing native women and children for sale as slaves, principally in San Francisco. A Sinkyone survivor, Sally Bell, recalled the morning when “some white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. . . . Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid.”

Nearly genocidal in their consequences, the mass murders raise the question: Did they constitute genocide by official design? Madley, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks so. He thoroughly documents the extent of the killings and their horrific consequences. In addition to the grim stories in his text, Madley devotes nearly 200 pages to appendixes listing every known episode of violence involving California Indians.

“Genocide,” however, is rhetorically double-edged, provoking controversy as it invites attention. A 20th-century coinage, “genocide” derives from the industrial and bureaucratic scale of slaughter perfected by the Nazis. The term distorts if projected back onto the mid-19th century, when governments were far weaker and less cohesive in their purposes. Shedding more heat than light, the word often distracts the author from telling his important story as he digresses to dwell on the 1948 definition of genocide by a United Nations convention.

Emphasizing “intention and repetition” in the California massacres, Madley plays up the designing role of state and federal officials, in contrast to previous writers who stressed the autonomy and agency of local vigilantes. State officials certainly applauded the massacres and often funded or rewarded the killers. One California senator, John B. Weller, declared of Indians, “Humanity may forbid, but the interest of the white man demands their extinction.” Madley concludes that officials created and managed a “well-funded killing machine.”

Much of the evidence, however, shows elected officials reacting to many and diffuse initiatives by their far-flung constituents, who could and did act on their own well-developed racial hatred to commit mass murder. And federal officials did not all collude in facilitating the atrocities. During the 1850s federal treaty commissioners tried to reduce the bloodshed by isolating natives on reservations farther from the killers. The label “genocide” ultimately obscures the decentralized and populist nature of killings that involved thousands of Americans, high and low in society.