American Genocide Research Articles

The “New” American Genocide: Forced Pregnancy and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

The “New” American Genocide: Forced Pregnancy and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

We Are the Land: A History of Native California

We Are the Land produces a seismic shift in its insistence that the history of California is the Indigenous history of California. Grafting Indigenous history onto previous narratives of California fails in these authors’ eyes. Keeping the two as distinct enterprises also fails. We Are the Land insists on seeing California as a brief moment in the history of Indigenous people, for whom California is but an episode: “People misunderstood the settler invasion of Indigenous California as California history rather than as an unsustainable and disruptive episode in it.” Instead of minimizing the American contribution to that disruption, much of the book takes place after the Gold Rush, serving to highlight America's contribution to genocide.Comprising ten chapters, this delivers an avalanche of facts, details, and nuance. The authors begin with Indigenous history prior to contact with Europeans, centering Indigenous knowledge, origin stories, and a holistic view of this time period in California. Looking at what has been called the “age of exploration,” the authors begin with beaches, riverbanks, and hillsides to see the moments of first encounter as an engagement of trade and movement into others’ tribal territories well before missionization. With the arrival of Spanish missions and missionaries, Indigenous people in California struggled to cope with disease and the domesticated livestock brought by Europeans which changed the Indigenous landscape, both of which presented a number of risks and opportunities for Indigenous people.Considering the Mexican period of 1811–1849, the authors suggest that Indigenous Californians leveraged their power, especially their labor power, during this period with Russian fur traders, American merchants, and Franciscan missionaries. For the American period of 1846–1873, the authors suggest using genocide as the only way to understand American relations with Indigenous people, but they also look closely at how Indigenous people of California used their power to resist and survive American genocide. From California statehood in 1859 through 1904, Indigenous people focused on creative ways of holding onto communal land in response to the definitively Anglo state's interest in acquiring access and title to all lands of California. From 1905–1928, the authors suggest that Native people in southern California fought allotment as a way of maintaining their communal land bases, while many northern California Indigenous communities embraced the policy to further their land claims, all of which constitutes a distinctive Indigenous legal and political activism.Identity acts as the central force in the period from 1928 through 1954, where the authors see a causality at work in legal and political activism leading to a cultivated Indigenous identity as California Indigenous people, coming together to sue the federal government for land theft. The period of 1953–1985 begins with the federal policy of termination and ends with the assertion of tribal self-determination among California Indigenous people. The authors include California tribes in their analysis here as well as the multi-tribal and multi-national protestors at Alcatraz. Both groups fought for land claims, prevention of dams, and the establishment of bingo halls. The book closes with the period of 1985 to the present, the authors document the fight among tribes, the state of California, the federal government, and private business groups to bring tribal gaming to tribal lands in California. Although it took two decades of struggle for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians to secure the right to gaming, many other tribes followed suit, bringing in a huge revenue stream. Access to gaming funds has given tribal citizens the opportunity to reconnect and even relocate to tribal lands, and tribes gained the economic power to engage in land legislation, buy back tribal lands, and reassert tribal land rights.The authors provide vignettes of Indigenous viewpoints on spaces within California but also Europe. In an unusual move, they also provide extensive sources at the end of each chapter rather than a collection at the end of the book. Creating their own maps of California tribal lands and reservations of today and insisting on centering their stories on Indigenous knowledge and activism, We Are the Land makes a massive intervention in the field of Native history. This book is a powerful history of what is known as the state of California, giving scholars what they have needed for decades.

Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung

Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

In this devastating and important account, Jeffrey Ostler brings to light the broad sweep of early US genocidal policies implemented before the more familiar period of the so-called Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. By highlighting the preremoval period and more closely examining postremoval Native America through the Civil War, Ostler challenges us to broaden the spectrum of genocidal policy and military actions, as well as settler practices, to include dispossession and its entangled relationship with disease, demography, interethnic warfare, and cultural disintegration. As he eloquently observes, “For Native people in real historical time . . . this was the challenge before them: to avoid what they perceived as the very real possibility that their communities, their people, their nations would be totally annihilated” (7).This book is part of a larger two-volume project seeking to recalibrate Native American history between the American Revolution and Wounded Knee. Treading into recent debates and new historiographical territory around the historical reality of and accountability for “American genocide” (as Benjamin Madley has aptly phrased it), Ostler takes a nuanced approach by seeking the Indigenous voices who practiced “survivance” in the face of a rapidly expanding settler-colonial machine. While many historians have ably located Indigenous power and agency in early encounters and resistance movements, it is also critical, Ostler argues, to look again at “times and places where the balance of power did not favor Indigenous people . . . where Indians were subject to a raging sea” (8).In addition to its bold conceptual scope, Surviving Genocide is also geographically sweeping, focusing region by region on the Indigenous nations and confederacies of the present-day American South, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes, and Eastern Plains. Before tightly focusing on the period between the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas, he offers a fascinating reassessment of earlier encounters between the Native confederacies of all of these regions, identifying the nexus of disease, starvation, and endemic warfare that proved a deadly disruption of delicate Indigenous alliances. Yet, as he argues, these alliances remained regional in scope until the 1760s. “None spread throughout the entirety of eastern North America . . . [but] the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War set in motion events that would lead to the American Revolution” (29). This is a crucial point overlooked by historians until very recently. The power and might of an Indigenous “backcountry” exercised the enmity of the fledgling colonists while simultaneously enflaming their desire for independence. Ostler, then, directly ties American independence with genocidal dispossession right at the nation’s founding.The remainder of the book takes on the difficult task of placing the more well-known resistance movements of Pontiac, Little Turtle, and Tecumseh, among others, within the larger framework of the Removal Period. These are typically seen as parts of distinct, separated historical periods, but Ostler threads these nations and regions into one story about a clear, consistent, and merciless government policy of genocide implemented in varying degrees but always with the same outcome: Indigenous disappearance from the new Anglo-American landscape.Ostler’s neat prose powerfully conveys the clear implications of this: “By 1860, many nations—impoverished, starving, and afflicted by multiple diseases—were on a trajectory toward complete and total extinction” (244). Despite the relentless war of extermination, though, the descendants of Tecumseh and others survived. This occurred, Ostler concludes, not due to a change of heart by Americans (who continued to pursue Indian elimination into the twentieth century) but simply because of the defiant resilience of Native America.

Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality

Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality

“Conservation, Tradition and Popular Iconoclasm in North America”

ABSTRACT Throughout North America, contentious debates and protests are occurring over the existence of historic monuments that represent racial hatred. As post-colonial countries, the United States and Canada, are only now grappling with managing historic statues, buildings, and landscapes associated with African American racism and cultural genocide among aboriginal people. The “negative heritage” embedded in these monuments was created by acts of tradition. In this context, tradition is a series of acts and rituals intended to embed cultural values on a place or an object. As North Americans acknowledge the injustice that was done to African Americans and aboriginal people, an iconoclastic movement is underway, resulting in the removal of monuments and buildings. This paper proposes that the role of tradition and iconography should be re-examined in conserving and managing North American built patrimony. Tradition, by its nature, is an intangible heritage and new traditions can transform people’s perceptions of historic monuments. Using the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London as a case study, this article will explore how using tradition can redefine a historic monument within the context of contemporary time and place.

Review: Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians, by Clifford E. Trafzer

Book Review| May 07 2020 Review: Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians, by Clifford E. Trafzer Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians. By Clifford E. Trafzer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019, 392 pp. $34.95 cloth). Brendan Lindsay Brendan Lindsay Brendan Lindsay Is An Assistant Professor Of History At California State University, Sacramento. He Holds A Phd From The University Of California, Riverside, And Is The Author Of Murder State: California’S Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Nebraska, 2012). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2020) 102 (2): 197–198. https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2020.102.2.197 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brendan Lindsay; Review: Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians, by Clifford E. Trafzer. Southern California Quarterly 7 May 2020; 102 (2): 197–198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2020.102.2.197 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Historical Society of Southern California. All rights reserved.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Holocaust Humor and Our Aesthetic Sensibility of American Genocide

Holocaust Humor and Our Aesthetic Sensibility of American Genocide

B. Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873

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Saying it Like "Indians": The Wooster Group's Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of "Playing Injun"

For the production: Cry Trojans! (2015, The Wooster Group, USA).

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

Review: <i>An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873</i> by Benjamin Madley

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

Reviewed by: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 by Benjamin Madley Brendan Lindsay (bio) An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. By Benjamin Madley. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 712. Cloth, $38.00.) Benjamin Madley's impressive An American Genocide advances genocide studies and California history significantly. In this chronologically organized, painstakingly researched, impeccably documented monograph, Madley sets goals he achieves admirably. Key among these is making the case that genocide was committed against California Indian peoples by the state of California and the United States government through direct [End Page 195] and indirect policies and laws, financial sponsorship, neglect, and massacres committed by state militia and U.S. Army units. The core of Madley's argument focuses on the intentionality of government-sponsored genocide in California. Madley assembled a massive data set of the violent killings taking place in California using letters, government reports, newspaper articles, and other archival sources, which he then organized chronologically, and set about looking for patterns. This method applied to a mass of evidence clearly produced results. Most important among them is what timing in policy decisions can tell us about genocidal intent. Madley shows a vicious cycle of state and federal action and inaction intended to bring about genocide. California created laws removing legal protections and denying rights to Indians, prevented them from sustaining themselves as cohesive groups, and sanctioned militia and volunteer campaigns to physically exterminate Native peoples or deliver them into conditions producing similarly mortal results. The timing and context of these genocidal policies and actions encouraged non-Native Californians to commit acts of unsanctioned genocide. By the 1860s, non-Native Californians were killing Indian people with impunity, adding to the violent death tolls Madley estimates at 9,000–16,000 murdered between 1846 and 1873. Madley's method reveals another important conclusion: Over time, operations designed to annihilate California Indians became smaller, yet more effective in terms of body counts and expense. The patterns also reveal how vigilante, state militia, and army units destroyed village sites and resources stores, oftentimes as Native communities were about to face the brutal winters of the mountains into which they had been driven. The state then billed the national government. The United States repaid much of the cost incurred, meanwhile adopting federal policies best described as malevolent neglect. Lawmakers cut funding for Indian affairs when needed most, refused to ratify treaties, directed federal agents and army officers not to interfere in stemming violence, ignored public and intragovernmental reports of atrocities and unlivable reservation conditions, ceded Native land bases to the state, and ordered troops to carry out the murder or removal of Indian peoples. The consequence of state and federal action and inaction, Madley argues, was the creation of a "killing machine" (173) clearly intended—in whole or in part—to exterminate California Indians as a group. Madley employs the definitions set forth in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. As with other scholars adopting this standard, much [End Page 196] depends on a reader's acceptance or rejection of this document as defining authority. It is a third-party standard, conceived neither by Native peoples nor the United States government, and serves perhaps as the most neutral arbiter possible in such a debate. Nonetheless, it is an attractive target for naysayers; it is relatively broad in its categorizations, open to interpretation, and seems to favor the rights of victims rather than err on the side of perpetrators. It seems an appropriate choice, given the hesitancy of many Americans to even consider the possibility of an American genocidal past. The work is not without some weaknesses and potential disappointments. Madley well places himself in the historiography of American Indian genocide in the text, but is less successful when it comes to California history. There is a rich literature on atrocities committed against Native people in California—dozens of books and articles have commented on the slaughter of California Indians—yet one must consult the endnotes to really get such a sense. Indeed, Madley's front cover flap claims that he is the "first historian to uncover the full extent...

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

Benjamin Madley. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.

Benjamin Madley. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.

Saying It Like Indians: The Wooster Group’s Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of “Playing Injun”

In The Wooster Group's Cry Trojans!, the Trojan characters are depicted as Red Indians. The theatre company's play with white, American appropriations of Native American culture is the latest in a long line of controversial engagements with race in the company's history, dating back to Route 1 &amp; 9 and The Emperor Jones. It also forms part of their more recent engagement with classical theatre, in particular Shakespeare, as Cry Trojans! has it origins in a much-reviled collaboration between the Wooster Group and The Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. By their own admission, the Group chose to "Play Indian" to be "as American as possible," and also because (to quote Kate Valk, who played Cressida), they felt they "'... should say it like Indians,’ because I was thinking of English as a second language." The choice then comments on the Group's own play with authenticity, another constant enagement throughout its thrity-plus years history. By mimicking and appropriating Native American and First Nations cultural production (Smoke Signals and Atanarjuat in particular), the Group performs its own uneasy engagement with authenticity. However, in contrast to their staging of The Emperor Jones, which employed blackface to unpack Eugene O'Neill's "idea of a Negro," Cry Trojans! reduces native culture and history to a white, elite history of appropriation and genocide without positing alternative histories of resistance and/or re-appropriation. It does so most expicitly in the final scene, where a blanket, a property associated with Euro-American germ warfare and Native American genocide, is applied first to Troilus and then to Pandarus, the bequeather of poxy diseases, to suggest the imminent demise of the Trojan-Injuns. The Wooster Group seems to be aware of part of their appropriative formulations, and put on display both the work (their adoption of an Indian manner) and the work of art (the acts of appropriation that lead to their adoption of Indian manner): but for a Company so invested in the ironies of post-modernity, they do not in this production seem so aware of the depth of their own unironic complicities in the erasure of indigenous cultures and cultural forms. The production's employment of Native American/First Nations cultural production undermines their own claims of native cultural loss.

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

During the twenty-seven years bounded by the Mexican and Modoc wars, invading white Americans ruthlessly conquered the approximately fifty California Indian tribes that had eluded Spanish, Mexican, or Russian domination. Triggered by US annexation and the subsequent gold rush, the final subjugation of Native California resulted in a shocking demographic collapse that slashed the state’s Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to a mere 30,000 by 1870. Although demographer Sherburne Cook carefully calculated that epidemic diseases caused fully 60 percent of this loss and that lethal violence accounted for less than 4 percent, historian Benjamin Madley argues that the “California Indian catastrophe” was no accidental tragedy but rather a clear-cut case of “genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention” (14).To prove his case, Madley has produced a towering book that will long endure as a landmark text in California history. Among its many achievements, this painstakingly researched and thoroughly documented work provides by far the most complete and detailed account ever written about the murderous campaigns waged against Native peoples by the US Army, the California state militia, local volunteer militia units, and irregular bands of self-appointed “Indian fighters.” Grimly, and relentlessly, Madley’s 360-page narrative “focuses on documenting and analyzing deaths due to direct acts of violence” and, in so doing, “reveals many of California’s so-called Indian wars for what they were: genocide campaigns that California Indians violently resisted” (11–12). Determined to let no killing escape the historical record, Madley bolsters his argument with eight appendixes spanning 194 pages. With encyclopedic detail Madley tabulates every murder, battle, and massacre uncovered by his years of research in the primary sources and lists each army, militia, and vigilante expedition as well. According to Madley’s meticulous count, these invariably one-sided encounters claimed the lives of “at least 9,492 to 16,094 California Indians” between 1846 and 1873. As Madley points out, “This more than doubles Cook’s calculation of 4,556 California Indians killed between 1847 and 1865” (12).But did all these terrible killings, spread out across a vast territory and over the course of a quarter century, really add up to a single “American genocide” perpetrated by a “killing machine” built, sanctioned, and funded by politicians and lawmakers in both Sacramento and Washington (13)? Critics will raise at least four objections. First, Madley’s attempt to link so many separate events into a genocidal whole relies on a largely circumstantial and contextual argument that, in turn, depends heavily on the UN Convention’s overly broad and elastic definition of genocide. Consequently, the numerous scholars who reject the UN standard will likely dispute Madley’s overall interpretation.Second, Madley’s analysis does not actually cover all of Native California, since he declines to measure the Spanish or Mexicans by the UN yardstick, and, except for the Cupeño and Wappo, does not examine the post-1846 fate of the numerous tribes that had fallen under earlier colonial rule. Third, the strength of Madley’s evidence for genocide varies considerably from place to place and is far stronger in some cases (such as the army’s slaughter of the Pomo at Clear Lake and Cokadjal in 1850) than it is in others (such as the Modoc War of 1872–73). Similarly, in regard to the respective guilt and complicity of the various alleged perpetrators, the proof offered against the US federal government is not nearly so strong as the damning evidence Madley compiles against the frontier miners, farmers, and ranchers who took so readily to exterminatory “warfare.”Fourth, while Madley’s tally of killings is more than twice that of Cook’s, epidemics, not violence, still remained by far the greater factor in Native mortality, a fact that Madley acknowledges but never squarely confronts, tending instead to submerge the role of disease beneath his thick descriptions of mayhem.Nevertheless, Madley’s case for genocide is overwhelming and compelling in many specific instances. As his evidence makes plain, deliberately exterminatory campaigns devastated at least eighteen California tribes, including the Achumawi, Karuk, Lassik, Nisenan, Nongatl, Owens Valley Paiute, Pomo, Shasta, Sinkyone, Tolowa, Wailaki, Wappo, Whilkut, Wintu, Wiyot, Yana, Yuki, and Yurok.Beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt (and by the standards of any reasonable definition), genocide did in fact play a significant role in the US conquest and subjugation of Native California.

Reembodying Our Occupied Geographies: Boyd Cothran's Remembering the Modoc War, Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide, and the Future of Native American Studies

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.

Review: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley

Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. By Benjamin Madley. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, 712 pp., $38.00 paper). Nicolas G. Rosenthal Nicolas G. Rosenthal Nicolas G. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2016) 98 (4): 494–496. https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2016.98.4.494 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nicolas G. Rosenthal; Review: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley. Southern California Quarterly 1 November 2016; 98 (4): 494–496. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2016.98.4.494 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The Historical Society of Southern California2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 . By Benjamin Madley

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 . Lamar Series in Western History. By Benjamin Madley. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. xi + 692 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00.) Prior to its nineteenth-century Euroamerican conquest, California was the most densely and diversely settled portion of the native North American West, with approximately 150,000 Indians. And yet by the time of the 1870 census, that number had plunged to just 30,000. Scholars have debated the reasons for this precipitous decline, with some citing starvation and disease as well as other forces of social dislocation attendant to the gold rush. But in An American Genocide , Benjamin Madley offers another explanation (one raised–if only obliquely–in decades past, though never pursued so doggedly): genocide. After reading his important and relentlessly grim … agraybill{at}smu.edu