Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

Notes

introduction The epigraph is from Record 363, Military Department, Office of the Adjutant General, Indian War Papers, 1850–1880, California State Archives, Sacramento (hereafter cited as Indian War Papers). Throughout this work I have corrected spelling errors in source quotations. Spelling in the nineteenth century, even for the formally educated, was often a creative enterprise, with writers frequently spelling the same word differently within the space of a few sentences. Rather than repetitively inserting [sic], I have used the modern spelling. I have preserved grammatical structure as originally written. 1.Throughout this work I have avoided employing the flawed term “Indian ” to describe the Native American population of California, except when expressing and analyzing the views of the historical actors using the term. I have also avoided the term “American” as potentially misleading, instead employing the term “Euro-American” so as to not suggest that the white U.S. citizens the term typically refers to are somehow the only “true” Americans. For excellent discussions of the problematic nature of the terms “American” and “Indian” that have shaped my view, see the work of Forbes: The Indian in America’s Past, 1–5; Native Americans of California and Nevada, 122–44; and especially “The Name Is Half the Game: The Theft of ‘America’ and Indigenous Claims of Sovereignty,” in M. Moore, Eating Fire, 32–51. 2. Here one must note that while scholars prior to 1945 researched California ’s Indigenous population and their history—A. L. Kroeber and Stephen Powers notable among them—that work was typically ethnographic or anthropological in its focus, and the histories collected were often incidental to the process of attempting to recover or preserve cultural elements and artifacts. Important work has been done on genocide or elements of genocide in the era preceding the U.S. conquest of California, during the Mexican and Notes 362 Notes to pages 3–8 Spanish periods of California history, by scholars such as Edward D. Castillo, Albert Hurtado, Rupert Costo, George Harwood Phillips, and others.These studies have been important in understanding the larger history of genocide in California. 3. Cook’s early work has been collected or reprinted in The Conflict and The Population. 4. For an appraisal of Cook’s work and the challenges of Native American demography in California, see Hurtado, “California Indian Demography,” 323–43. Some scholars have disputed Cook’s findings at length. For an example of such refutation, see Guest, “An Examination,” 1–77. For Cook and California placed in the context of Native North American demography, see Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr., “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in Jaimes, The State of Native America, 23–53. 5. Forbes, Native Americans of California and Nevada, 53. 6. See also Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians. 7. Phillips’s later works are The Enduring Struggle; Indians and Intruders; Indians and Indian Agents; “Bringing Them under Subjection.” 8. Coffer, “Genocide,” 11. 9.The most recent example is Benjamin Madley in his 2009 PhD dissertation at Yale University, “American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.” As of this writing, the dissertation is not available on dai or via interlibrary loan, but according to his abstract, he too utilizes the Convention. 10. For a compendium of Jack Norton’s thoughts in the thirty years following the publication of his seminal work, see Norton, Centering in Two Worlds. 11. One must note that despite the title, Beard and Carranco do not discuss the forms and structures of genocide. 12. Baumgardner, Killing for Land, 11. Baumgardner seems to suggest that what happened in Round Valley was not genocide. But it is important to note that his work is not a refutation of the claim of genocide; indeed, to be fair, his comments are quite brief on the matter and perhaps do not express his ideas fully, one way or the other. 13. Other important contributions by Hurtado are “Controlling California’s Indian Labor Force,” 217–38; “‘Hardly a Farm House,’” 245–70. 14. W. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 15. Hauptman, Tribes and Tribulations. Notes to pages 8–19 363 16. Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide; Chirot and McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All?; Wilshire, Get ’Em All! 17. Other scholars have seen this year as the key juncture; for example, see Rawls, Indians of California, 205–6. 18. Faragher, Women and Men...