Journal of American History · 2017 · 248 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesConflict StudiesHistoryArmed ConflictGenocide StudiesPolitical ViolenceCrimes Against HumanityGenocide PreventionInsurgent Violence Against CiviliansMexican American Civil Rights MovementsMexican American HistoryNative American Political MovementsCalifornia Mexican American HistoryColonial CatastropheExtermination CampaignsExtermination PoliciesMass ExterminationMass Killing PoliciesMexican-american WarState-sponsored Genocide
Scholars have applied the term genocide to describe the systematic extermination of California Indians from 1846 to 1873, a period marked by state‑sanctioned campaigns and widespread militia violence. Madley frames his analysis using the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide to indict local, state, and federal officials, meticulously documenting every Indian death and exposing perpetrators who were prominent in California society. The book delivers a terrifying, comprehensive portrayal of the California Indian catastrophe and serves as a model for examining colonial genocide in the United States.
In the 1970s scholars began to use the term genocide loosely to describe the murderous extermination campaigns and state policies directed at California's Indian peoples from the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846 through the conclusion of the Modoc War in 1873. Notably, thirty years later Brendan C. Lindsay's Murder State left little doubt that “if genocide had existed as a term in the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans might have used it as a way to describe their campaign to exterminate Indians” (2012, p. 23) Benjamin Madley's shocking An American Genocide covers the same period as Murder State but to a very different end. Whereas Lindsay used the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to frame his discussion of the killing of Indians, Madley uses the convention to indict local, state, and federal officials for genocide, leaving no stone unturned in his quest to document every Indian killed and expose every genocidal perpetrator, many of whom became pillars of California society. The result is a terrifying portrayal. Well-armed militias roamed the countryside killing Indians for their attacks on cattle or farms or simply because money could be had in killing Native Americans. Comprehensive and unsettling, An American Genocide is a model of how scholars might examine genocide in colonial America and the United States.