An American Genocide Read online

  Yet, the California Indian population cataclysm of 1846–1873 continued a preexisting trajectory. During California’s seventy-seven-year-long Russo-Hispanic Period (1769–1846) its Indians had already suffered a devastating demographic decline. During the era when Spaniards, Russians, and Mexicans colonized the coastal region between San Diego and Fort Ross, California’s Indian population fell from perhaps 310,000 to 150,000. Some 62,600 of these deaths occurred at or near California’s coastal region missions, and, in 1946, journalist Carey McWilliams initiated a long debate over the nature of these institutions when he compared the Franciscan missionaries, who had held large numbers of California Indians there, to “Nazis operating concentration camps.” Today, a wide spectrum of scholarly opinion exists, with the extreme poles represented by mission defenders Father Francis Guest and Father Maynard Geiger, on the one hand, and mission critics Rupert and Jeannette Costo—who called the missions genocidal—on the other. However one judges the missions, Russo-Hispanic colonization caused the deaths of tens of thousands of California Indian people.2

  Nineteenth-century California

  Under US rule, California Indians died at an even more astonishing rate. Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Native American population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. By 1880, census takers recorded just 16,277 California Indians. Diseases, dislocation, and starvation were important causes of these many deaths. However, abduction, de jure and de facto unfree labor, mass death in forced confinement on reservations, homicides, battles, and massacres also took thousands of lives and hindered reproduction. According to historical demographer Sherburne Cook, an often-quoted authority on California Indian demographic decline, a “complete lack of any legal control” helped create the context in which these phenomena were possible. Was the California Indian catastrophe just another western US tragedy in which unscrupulous individuals exploited the opportunities provided in a lawless frontier?3

  The organized destruction of California’s Indian peoples under US rule was not a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers frequently addressed, and often encouraged, what we would now call genocide, as did some state and federal employees. Historians began using these and other sources to address the topic as early as 1890. That year, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft summed up the California Indian catastrophe under US rule: “The savages were in the way; the miners and settlers were arrogant and impatient; there were no missionaries or others present with even the poor pretense of soul-saving or civilizing. It was one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.” In 1935, US Indian Affairs commissioner John Collier added, “The world’s annals contain few comparable instances of swift depopulation—practically, of racial massacre—at the hands of a conquering race.” In 1940, historian John Walton Caughey titled a chapter of his California history “Liquidating the Indians: ‘Wars’ and Massacres.” Three years later, Cook wrote the first major study on the topic. He quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indians between 1847 and 1865, concluding that, “since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.”4

  In the same year that Cook published his groundbreaking article, Nazi mass murder in Europe catalyzed the development of a new theoretical and legal framework for discussing such events. In 1943, legal scholar Raphaël Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide,” or killing, to describe genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, national, religious, or political group. The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (see Appendix 8) more narrowly defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” including:

  (a) Killing members of the group;

  (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  The Genocide Convention thus provides an internationally recognized and rather restrictive rubric for evaluating possible instances of genocide. First, perpetrators must evince “intent to destroy” a group “as such.” Second, perpetrators must commit at least one of the five genocidal acts against “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The Genocide Convention criminalizes the five directly genocidal acts defined above and also other acts connected to genocide. The Convention stipulates that “the following acts shall be punishable,” including:

  (a) Genocide;

  (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

  (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

  (d) Attempt to commit genocide;

  (e) Complicity in genocide.

  Finally, the Convention specifies that “persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated . . . shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”5

  In US criminal law, intent is present if an act is intentional, not accidental. The international crime of genocide involves more, comprising “acts committed with intent to destroy” a group “as such.” International criminal lawyers call this specific intent, meaning destruction must be consciously desired, or purposeful. Yet, specific intent does not require a specific motive, a term absent from the Genocide Convention. Under the Convention’s definition, genocide can be committed even without a motive like racial hatred. The motive behind genocidal acts does not need to be an explicit desire to destroy a group; it may be, but the motive can also be territorial, economic, ideological, political, or military. Moreover, the Convention declares that “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law.” If the action is deliberate, and the group’s partial or total destruction a desired outcome, the motive behind that intent is irrelevant. Yet, how does a twentieth-century international treaty apply to nineteenth-century events?6

  The Genocide Convention does not allow for the retroactive prosecution of crimes committed before 1948, but it does provide a powerful analytical tool: a frame for evaluating the past and comparing similar events across time. Lemkin himself asserted that, “genocide has always existed in history,” and he wrote two manuscripts addressing instances of genocide in periods ranging from “Antiquity” to “Modern Times.” Genocide is a twentieth-century word, but it describes an ancient phenomenon and can therefore be used to analyze the past, in much the way that historians routinely use other new terms to understand historical events. Indeed, Lemkin planned chapters titled “Genocide against the American Indians” and “The Indians in North America (in part),” but he died before he could complete either project.7

  Many scholars have employed genocide as a concept with which to evaluate the past, including events that took place in the nineteenth century, but some scholars have rejected the UN Genocide Convention definition. Some propose expanding, contracting, or modifying the list of protected groups. Others want to enlarge, reduce, or alter the scope of genocidal acts. Still others call for different definitions of intent.8

  Genocide, however, is more than an academic concept. It is a crime defined by an international legal treaty and subsequent case law. On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the UN Genocide Convention and its genocide definition “unanimously and without abstentions.” It remains the only authoritative international legal definition. Moreover, unlike at least twenty-two alternative definitions proffered since 1959, it has teeth. Now in its seventh decade, the Genocide Convention has been signed or acceded to by 147 nations and is supported and further defined as a legal instrument by a growing body of international case law. Since 1993, the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have tried genocide cases using the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court at The Hague, established in 2002, and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which began its first trial in 2009, are also empowered to try suspects using the Genocide Convention. The UN Genocide Convention definition is part of an international legal regime of growing importance and is both the most widely accepted definition and the most judicially effective one. The Genocide Convention provides a powerful, though possibly imperfect, definition for investigating the question of genocide in California. Still, it took decades for scholars to begin using the term in connection with California under US rule. Caughey and Cook, for instance, used terms like liquidating, military casualties, and social homicide, which fail to capture the full meaning of genocidal events.9

  Most Americans knew little about the concept of genocide or the Holocaust until the late 1950s. A turning point came in 1961. That year, the media glare illuminating the trial of SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann—in combination with the release of the Academy Award–winning legal thriller Judgment at Nuremberg and the publication of political scientist Raul Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of the European Jews—introduced the scope and horrors of the Holocaust to many in the United States. Holocaust-related art, literature, media, and scholarship proliferated during the late 1960s and 1970s. Those turbulent decades also saw continuing civil rights activism, New Left historians’ assault on triumphal US history narratives, rising American Indian political activism, emerging Native American studies departments, and a new American Indian history that emphasized the role of violence against indigenous peo
ple.10

  Twenty-five years after the formulation of the new international legal treaty, scholars began reexamining the nineteenth-century conquest and colonization of California under US rule. In 1968, author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Robert F. Heizer wrote a brief but pathbreaking description of “the genocide of Californians.” In 1977, William Coffer mentioned “Genocide among the California Indians,” and two years later, ethnic studies scholar Jack Norton argued that, according to the Genocide Convention, certain northwestern California Indians suffered genocide under US rule. In 1982, scholar Van H. Garner added that “Federal Indian policy in California . . . was genocidal in practice.” Historian James Rawls next made a crucial intervention. He argued that some California whites openly “advocated and carried out a program of genocide that was popularly called ‘extermination.’ ” Following Rawls’s important equation of the nineteenth-century word extermination with the twentieth-century term genocide, anthropologist Russell Thornton went further. In his landmark book addressing genocide in the continental United States as a whole, Thornton argued that “the largest, most blatant, deliberate killings of North American Indians by non-Indians surely occurred in California.” Historian Albert Hurtado later described an “atmosphere of impending genocide” in gold rush California, while historian William T. Hagen asserted, “Genocide is a term of awful significance, but one which has application to the story of California’s Native Americans.”11

  Meanwhile, the field of genocide studies began taking shape. The Holocaust remains “for many, the paradigm case of genocide,” but the field’s founding publications were emphatically diverse, and some touched on questions of genocide in North America. In 1986, scholars founded the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and in the first issue included an article addressing the question of genocide and Native Americans. Historian Frank Chalk and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn included essays on Native Americans in colonial New England and in the nineteenth-century United States in their edited 1990 book addressing The History and Sociology of Genocide. They argued that American Indians had suffered genocide, primarily through famine, massacres, and “criminal neglect,” and mentioned California’s Yuki Indian genocide. That same year, sociologist Helen Fein also touched on the issue of “genocide in North America.”12

  Genocide studies now cross-pollinated with new works on the question of genocide in the Americas, such as American studies scholar David Stannard’s American Holocaust, and controversial ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide—both of which mentioned genocide in California. During the 1990s, a growing chorus of voices also mentioned genocide in California. By the year 2000, historians Robert Hine and John Faragher had concluded that California was the site of “the clearest case of genocide in the history of the American frontier.” Other twenty-first-century scholars agreed that California Indians had indeed suffered genocide.13

  Still, even though more than twenty scholars have touched on the genocide of California Indians under US rule, little has been written on the topic compared to what has been written on some other genocides. Four scholars—anthropologists Robert Heizer and Allan Almquist, and historians Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer—have assembled important edited primary-source volumes highlighting nineteenth-century racism and anti–California Indian violence, some of it genocidal. Others have described the genocides endured by particular California tribes. Only a handful of works, however, analyze the multiple genocides of various California Indian peoples under US rule, and most of these refer to the genocides briefly and incompletely. Only two twenty-first-century monographs have addressed the topic more broadly. Author William Secrest’s When the Great Spirit Died provided a general description of anti-Indian racism and violence between 1850 and 1860, but it did not address genocide or the entire 1846 to 1873 period. Historian Brendan Lindsay’s Murder State then focused on “California’s Native American Genocide” as a phenomenon motivated by preexisting racism, facilitated by democracy, and advertised by the press.14

  Building on previous scholarship, An American Genocide is the first year-by-year recounting of genocide in California under US rule between 1846 and 1873. Although newcomers imposed California’s political and administrative boundaries on indigenous peoples, these borders form a cohesive unit of analysis with real meaning and repercussions for scholars, California Indians, and non-Indians both past and present. Within and sometimes slightly beyond these boundaries, An American Genocide carefully describes the broad societal, judicial, and political support for the genocide as well as how it unfolded. It addresses the causes of the genocide, state and federal government decision-makers’ roles, the organization and funding of the killing, and the vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, and US soldiers who did the killing and how they did it. Further, it details public support for the genocide, the number of California Indians killed, the nature of indigenous resistance, the changes in genocidal patterns over time, and the end of the genocide. These topics call for meticulous analysis and consistent use of an internationally recognized definition such as that of the 1948 Genocide Convention, because the stakes are high for scholars, California Indians, and all US citizens.

  If US citizens colonized some regions of California, if not the state as a whole, in conjunction with deliberate attempts to annihilate California Indians, scholars will need to reevaluate current interpretive axioms and address new questions. Scholars could, for example, reexamine the assumption that indirect effects of colonization, like the unwitting spread of diseases, were the only leading causes of death in most or all encounters between whites and California Indians—rather than mass murder or other deliberate acts like forced incarceration under lethal conditions. Exceptionalist interpretations of US history—which suggest that the United States is fundamentally unlike other countries—lose validity when researchers compare the California experience to other genocides and place it within global frameworks. A careful study of genocide in California will also assist scholars in reexamining the larger, hemispheric indigenous population catastrophe and the question of genocide in other regions. Where scholars document a genocide, it will be necessary to evaluate what roles colonial, federal, state, or territorial governments (or private individuals or groups) played, as well as whether or not the event was part of a recurring regional or national pattern. Larger questions follow. What tended to catalyze genocide? Who ordered and carried out the killing? Why do we not know more about these events? Did democracy drive mass murder, and, ultimately, did genocide play a role in making modern Canada, Mexico, the United States, or other Western Hemisphere countries?15

  Given the political, economic, psychological, and health ramifications of the genocide question, it is urgent for California’s approximately 150,000 citizens of California Indian ancestry. Should they press for official government apologies, reparations, and control of land where genocidal events took place? Should tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should California Indian communities commemorate victims of mass murder while also emphasizing successful accommodation, resistance, survival, and cultural renewal? The psychological issues related to genocide are also fraught. What happens if a tribal member learns that she or he is a descendant of both perpetrators and victims? How might California Indian people reconcile increased knowledge of genocide—sometimes at the hands of the United States—with their often intense patriotism? Finally, what role might acknowledgment of genocide have on the “intergenerational/historical trauma” prevalent in many California Indian communities and that trauma’s connection to present-day physical illnesses, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide?16

  The question of genocide in California under US rule also poses explosive political, economic, educational, and psychological questions for all US citizens. Acknowledgment and reparations are central issues. Should elected government officials tender public apologies, as presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans—many of them Californians—during World War II? Reparations constitute an important subordinate issue. Should federal officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease their cut of California Indians’ $7 billion in annual gaming revenues (2013) as a way of paying reparations for the state government’s past involvement in genocide? Might Californians reevaluate their relationship with California Indian gaming in light of increased awareness of the California genocide? A better understanding of the genocide that took place in California might also affect the federal government’s dealings with the scores of California Indian communities currently seeking formal federal recognition. The question of commemoration is closely linked. Will non-Indian citizens support or tolerate the public commemoration of mass murders committed by some of the state’s forefathers with the same kinds of monuments, museums, and state-legislated days of remembrance that today commemorate the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust? Will genocides against California Indians be included in public school curricula and public discourse along with these other systematic mass murders? All of these questions have important ramifications, but can be addressed only in limited ways without a comprehensive understanding of relations between California Indians and newcomers during the California Indian catastrophe of 1846 to 1873.17