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

Abstract

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 248 citations exist upstream.