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

Since the 1940s, scholars of California history have researched, documented, and exposed the widespread kidnapping, rape, enslavement, and murder of the state's indigenous peoples. Benjamin Madley's new book contributes to scholarship on the Gold Rush-era genocide perpetrated by settler militias, vigilantes, and the United States Army. Madley's volume documents a genocide long unacknowledged except by a few specialists in California history. Neither the general public nor the California Department of Education recognizes the killings as genocide.

During the 1940s, physiology professor Sherburne F. Cook published on the population decline of California Indians during the Gold Rush era and made note of U.S. Army, local militia, and vigilante killings of Indian men, women, and children. Cook worked during the World War IIera when Polish-Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin first coined the term "genocide" to describe the Nazi mass murder of Europe's Jews. Cook pioneered population studies of California Indians, providing the first in-depth examination of the causes of their population decline. Robert F. Heizer and Jack D. Forbes—both anthropologists—furthered the study of indigenous population decline resulting from settler colonialism. In Native Americans of California and Nevada (1968), Forbes boldly blamed White settlers, the California and federal governments, and slave traders for the genocide. Heizer documented militia attacks against Indians in California in The Destruction of California Indians (1974), "They Were Only Diggers" (1974), and The Other Californians (1971), publishing primary sources written by the perpetrators, often bragging about killing and kidnapping people.

In 1977, William Coffer argued that White settlers purposely exterminated California Indians with "physical genocide as the goal"—the first scholar to use the term genocide in this context. Two years later, Jack Norton, a scholar of Hupa and Cherokee descent enrolled with the Yurok Nation of California, published Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (1979) with the Indian Historian Press. Norton was the first to define the genocide in California using the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). As earlier authors, Norton used extensive newspaper articles and other written sources left by settlers, soldiers, politicians, and editors graphically describing the genocide. Norton, like Forbes, believed democracy was at work when White settlers democratically voted for genocidal actions against Indians and for leaders to direct their actions. In 1981, Estle Beard and Lynwood Carranco followed Norton's study with Genocide and Vendetta, about the Indians of Round Valley. Frank H. Baumgardner, III expanded their story in Killing for Land in Early California, and Ward Churchill offered a broader interpretation of similar cases throughout the Western Hemisphere. The works of James J. Rawls, Albert Hurtado, Clifford E. Trafzer, and Joel R. Hyer expanded research on the bloody conflicts between settlers and Indians in California, although these historians did not use the UN definition of genocide to frame their work.

In 2012, Brendan Lindsay argued in Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 that California settlers, state politicians, militia forces, and the United States Army had committed genocide. Lindsay used the UN definition and significantly expanded the theme of democracy influencing genocidal acts. He introduced original topics, including the way published emigrant guides urged settlers to fear Indians and prepare for violence, arguing that stories and rumors conditioned settlers to fear Indians on the overland trails and the California frontier. Settlers brought a mixture of fear, racism, and violence to California and viewed Indians as dangerous savages and heathens. Settlers coveted, demanded, and stole Indian lands and resources through war. They enslaved Indians as laborers and denied them human rights.

In his book, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (2014), historian Gary Clayton Anderson labeled the chaos in California during the Gold Rush-era ethnic cleansing, not genocide. Madley counters by offering an amazing array of documentation to make his...