From the time the Europeans arrived on American shores, the U.S. government authorized more than 1,500 wars and attacks on Indigenous people and at the conclusion of the “Indian wars” in the late 19th century, of the estimated 10 million to 15 million native peoples, fewer than 238,000 remained. In the past I’ve written about these efforts in the Great Plains and upper Midwest. I’m now spending some time in Santa Barbara, California which has prompted my looking into that state’s role in the great American genocide. The Santa Barbara region was inhabited by Chumash people for at least 11,000 years and before the European invaders arrived the population was some 18,000. By 1900 it had declined to less than 500 and today it’s leveled off at about 5000.
Benjamin Madley’s book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
A new California law, which takes effect on January 1, 2025, requires that public schools begin teaching about the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. The State Department of Education must consult with tribes when updating the social studies curriculum and several tribes are advocating the inclusion of material contained in UCLA professor Benjamin Madley’s book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This is the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned murder of California’s Native People. Madley documents how state and federal governments employed their legitimizing authority for the genocide and Congress financially underwrote California’s extinction campaign.
The new legislation was set in motion five years ago when California Gov. Gavin Newsome publicly apologized for the “war of extermination” pronounced by Peter Burnett, the state’s first governor in 1851. Newsome said that at time, state law required that Indigenous peoples be removed from their land, children separated from their families, native people stripped of their language and culture and a system of indentured servitude was begun. Under Gov. Burnett, California’s Indigenous population was reduced by 80 percent.
In 1846, U.S. troops took control of California from Mexico and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico. Mexico ceded California and its other northern territories for 15 million dollars. On January 6, 1851, the new governor of California said the following about the “Indians” in his inaugural address: “That war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian is extinct. While we cannot anticipate this result with painful regret, the inevitable destruction of a race is beyond the power of wisdom of man to avert.” California Senator John B. Weller declared of the Indigene, “Humanity may forbid, but the interests of the white man demands their extinction.” This “myth of inevitable extinction” fueled the ideology that Indigenes were destined to vanish, that it was simply their fate and unstoppable.
And in case there remains any doubt that this was not official policy, we know that the men who “killed thousands of Indians from the 1840s to the 1870s were paid by the state of California and the federal government… they filed expenses and were reimbursed.” (Tom Fuller, “Hastings Law Grapples with the Founder’s Involvement with Native Massacres,” NYT, (pay wall, updated November 4, 2021). It should be noted that with the outbreak of the Civil War, California sent 15,725 volunteers to serve in the Union Army. However there so many volunteers that enough remained at home to serve as the primary agent of the killing machine. Furtherduring the Civil War the Union government’s treasury was running perilously low but Congress still allotted major funding to the California Volunteers for their Indigene-hunting operation. Madley calculates that at the end of the Civil War, only 34,000 Indians remained from from 150,000 in 1845. Limited attacks continued until 1871 when it was beginning to find any more Inidigenes left to kill. The decline was caused by killings, disease, starvation and massacres. Madley estimates that the “state spent 1.7 million—a staggering sum in its day—to murder some 16,000 people.”
My hope (perhaps a fantasy) is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous public school kids in California will be deprogrammed and learn that genocide, like slavery, was part of the inherent capitalist logic of dispossesion. Will they be exposed to the truth that there exists a glaring contemporay parallel to this history in Israel’s “plausible genocide” (ICJ) in Gaza and the future ethnic cleansing of the West Bank? Young Indigenous peoples understand that they are the descendants of genocide as the banner flown by the Oglala Lakota’s Youth Council in South Dakota reads, “From Pine Ridge to Palestine.” Will school chidren learn, as Middle East Eye‘s Jonathan Cook points out, that Israel is now finishing the job it began in 1948? At least as important, will they be encouraged to understand that, as in the 1840-1871 period in California, the U.S. government is not only backing this modern day war of extermination but its actions are wholly consonant with the objective of U.S. imperialism in its efforts to maintain America’s global empire? Will they learn that both Israel and the United States were settler-colonial state projects and not as the official narratives proclaim, “nations of immigrants.”