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

Preface

This book was inspired in part by my experiences in academia over the past seven years, including time as a university lecturer and graduate student. As I studied and taught about the history of California and the United States, I encountered many students, colleagues, and faculty unwilling to accept the argument that genocide had been committed upon Native Americans in California and the United States during the nineteenth century. Some suggested that the tremendous loss of lives was instead an unintended consequence or even a necessary evil of the advance of Western civilization or national progress. A common sentiment was that the democracy of the United States in the nineteenth century bore little resemblance to the Holocaust of the twentieth century. The urge to compare, I believe, is not uncommon ; many people cannot conceive of any study of genocide without making such a comparison. I am sympathetic to the reasons why one might find it an inescapable comparison to attempt.The Holocaust is so monstrous, so recent, and so well documented (by the perpetrators, in particular) that it often overshadows all else in genocide studies. But my reason for pursuing this study does not rest upon a desire to make a comparison of genocides or measure atrocity against atrocity. Rather the motive for this book rests upon a very practical foundation. Native Americans in California today are making inroads in matters of health, cultural renewal, sovereignty, and the reclaiming of lost lands and other rights. California voters, teachers, courts, and lawmakers thus continue to face choices that affect Native American people in the state. If my personal experience serves as any indicator of the perceptions of many of these decision makers, it is vital that people should Preface be made fully aware that the present is a product of the past as regards Native American peoples in California, their history, present numbers, and state of affairs. A key to understanding the relationship between Native Americans and non-Natives in California is to recognize that our shared past contains a genocide of monstrous character and proportions , perpetrated by democratic, freedom-loving U.S. citizens in the name of democracy, but really to secure great wealth in the form of land against Indians cast as savage, uncivilized, alien enemies.This seems the key point to be made about how California came to exist in its present form, especially as the land we occupy today is the very same ground on which these terrible crimes took place. We Californians are the beneficiaries of genocide. I suspect few Californians today contextualize their homes as sitting upon stolen land or land gained by bloody force or artful deceits, nor do they likely consider the social and political questions of present-day Native American affairs in this light. Californians have to make informed choices in voting, educating children, and judging the remarks and policies of our political leadership where Native American affairs are concerned. I hope this study can provide such background information for making informed, intelligent decisions today. Moreover it would not hurt for most of us to be reminded that the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, and democracy has been put to terrible use in the past, and can be so again. In nineteenth-century California many settlers needed only hubris and self-interest to make a start on genocide. For them, centralized government and its accoutrements cost too much money and took too much time to deliver on their demands; average white citizens in California could dispose of Native American people on their own and simply send the bill to the government for reimbursement. Self-described hard-working, self-sufficient, entrepreneurial citizens claimed they were doing their pragmatic best to bring peace, law, and order in the name of democracy, progress, and the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny by killing or relocating uncivilized savages in California. Indeed democracy as a political system served as a genocidal mechanism. The will of the white majority, enshrined as x Preface the sacred will of the people, drove the democratic process of creating a multifaceted campaign of genocide in California, in which Native people were starved to death, worked to death, shot to death, or so badly broken by poverty, exposure, and malnutrition as to waste away from diseases at an alarming rate. Representatives were elected, laws enacted, meetings held, and companies of volunteers empowered, all in the name of legally removing or exterminating Native peoples in...