An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 by Benjamin Madley (review)

GENOCIDE IS A MODERN WORD that describes a process deeply rooted in history. First coined in 1943 by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, "genocide" combines the Greek word genos (tribe or race) and the Latin cide (killing), to encapsulate "any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, national, religious, or political group" (4). Five years after Lemkin put the word "genocide" to paper, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide constructed a narrower definition of the term. Although the United Nations cannot retroactively prosecute genocidal crimes that occurred before 1948, the historian Benjamin Madley maintains that its definition of genocide provides "a powerful analytical tool: a frame for evaluating the past and comparing similar events across time" (5). Beginning in 1968, scholars began using the term to describe the nineteenth-century U.S. conquest of California. More recently, some historians, such as Gary Clayton Anderson, have questioned whether the collapse of California's Native American population was an act of genocide or, alternatively, a process of ethnic cleansing. In An American Genocide, Madley not only proves that genocide did, indeed, occur in nineteenth-century California, he also carefully explains how the process developed over time.

Although Madley recognizes that disease, starvation, and exposure helped decimate California's Native American population between 1846 and 1873, his documentation of Anglo-American violence toward Native Americans demonstrates that shootings, stabbings, hangings, and beheadings significantly contributed to the destruction of California Native Americans. Taking a comprehensive, year-by-year approach, Madley fills each chapter of An American Genocide with genocidal acts. These atrocities include the Sacramento River Massacre, the Bloody Island Massacre, and other genocidal killings that contemporaries falsely publicized as "wars." Anglo-Americans committed these genocidal acts against Native Americans, such as the Hupa, Yuki, and Modoc, for a variety of reasons. In some instances, genocidal violence was a harsh response to smaller offenses, such as isolated murders and theft. In other cases, Anglo-Americans practiced what Madley calls "pedagogic killing" (217). That is to say, some Anglos murdered Native Americans to demonstrate their power and place in Californian society. Still other Anglos attempted to exterminate Native Americans to seize their land and remove them from their competitors' labor supply.

Even though Madley is not the first historian to describe the destruction of California Native Americans as genocide, his work is nonetheless distinctive. An American Genocide moves the historiography forward by identifying how genocide in California unfolded and developed as a process, or a trajectory. When Anglo-Americans arrived in California, they initially attempted to maintain the social hierarchy and system that the Spaniards and Mexicans created in California. This consisted of enslaving and dehumanizing Native Americans. Shortly before the gold rush, this system gave way to vigilante killings. Later, state legislators passed laws that kept Native Americans excluded from the political process and left them vulnerable to Anglo violence. Finally, the federal government perfected "the killing machine" when it reimbursed the State of California nearly $1 million for the costs associated with killing Native Americans (230). By the time of the Civil War, genocide was "primarily a federal project" fueled by federal dollars and manned by the U.S. Army (300).

While violence does appear to have escalated over time, Madley struggles to demonstrate how Anglo-American rule differed from the Mexican experience. For example, Madley explains that Anglo-Americans "sought to maintain" the Spanish and Mexican social and economic systems that dehumanized, enslaved, abused, and killed California Native Americans (145, emphasis mine). However, Madley later insists that Anglo-Americans "began a protracted process" when they "stripped California Indians of legal power and rights, excluded them from colonial society, deprived them of their land, denied them protection, legalized their exploitation as both de jure and de factor unfree laborers, and ultimately all but erased legal and cultural barriers to their abuse and murder" (146, emphasis mine). In short, Madley does...