An American Genocide: The US and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 - Benjamin Madley

foreign so I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote today Dr Benjamin medley he's an associate professor of history at the University of California and a historian of Native American of Native America the United States and colonialism in world history born in Reading California Dr medley spent much of his childhood in carwick County uh near the Oregon border where he became interested in relations between colonizers and Indigenous peoples he has authored or co-authored 20 Journal articles and book chapters his articles have appeared in journals ranging from the American historical review California history European history quarterly and the Journal of British studies Journal of genocide research Pacific historical review and the Western Historical quarterly Yale University press published his first book an American genocide the United States and the California Indian catastrophe 1846 to 1873 this was published in 2016. this book received the Los Angeles Times book prize for history the Rapha the lemkin book award from the institute for the study of genocide the Charles red Center Phi Alpha Theta award from for the best book on the American West the California book award gold medal and for Californian the Heyday book award history and the Norman Nuremberg award for the Historical Society of Southern California that was a lot it was also named a New York Times book review editor's choice and and an Indian country today host book so and also an Indian country today hot list book um a choice magazine outstanding academic title and a Caroline Bancroft history prize honor book true West magazine named medley the best excuse me the best new Western author of 2016. medley recent recently co-edited the Cambridge world history of genocide Vol 2 genocide in the Indigenous early modern and Imperial worlds 1535-1914 its forthcoming 2003 so stay tuned with historian Ned Blackhawk Ben Kiernan and Reb Taylor in 2018 he received the California Commendation Medal for the Military Department of the State of California according to California Governor Jerry Brown medley corrects the record with his gripping story of what really happened the actual genocide of a vibrant civilization thousands years in the making so please help me welcome Dr medley [Applause] first of all I think some thank yous are due I got to see the organization of this conference at a distance over the last several years and I think we should just give a quick Round of Applause to the four organizers they did a tremendous amount of work so thank you I also want to acknowledge that we're an Indian country and that's maybe the most important thing if you if you leave with one recollection of the time that we've spent together this morning it's remember that wherever you go in this Basin or in this state or in this hemisphere from the shores of the Arctic to the tip of Patagonia you will be on someone's ancient and ancestral Homeland almost all of it legally unseated and that's really crucial to the project I think of All of Us coming together is to think about land and sovereignty I don't think we ought to lose sight of those issues as We Gather here together over the next several days I also want to Echo uh what Lorena said earlier this is going to be some rugged material that we're going to Traverse together over the coming days and this paper that I'm about to deliver to you is no exception to that if you need to take a moment to go outside and to listen to the water and get some fresh air to say a prayer or if you've just had enough I invite you to do so that's completely up to you the ceremony continued until just before Dawn illuminated by a central fire the celebrants moved together to ancient rhythms the women's clamshell necklaces clicking softly against their beaded seashell dresses male dancers meanwhile regaled as deer birds or Hunters supported the women in their heavy regalia meanwhile singers raised their voices toward the stars with songs of nidash the feather dance between songs they offered prayers of thanks not only for the original creation of this Marvelous World in which we are privileged to live but also for its renewal in each and every moment finally the celebrant stopped and they walked away arm and arm under a full moon nearby they passed through round doorways into snug Redwood houses outside Lake Earl lacked gently at the shore inside the talawadini people and their native guests from Northern California and Southern Oregon slept next to kith and kin celebrants were unaware that less than seven miles away men in Crescent City had gathered and established a new branch of California's ever expanding killing machine Crescent City's Coast Rangers and Klamath mounted Rangers had been well armed by California Governor John Bigler he had sent them crates containing 20 muskets 95 rifles dozens swords and Sabers bayonets and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition these men prepared to do one thing and one thing only kill indigenous people in the pre-dawn hours of the final day of 1853 as many as 116 militiamen accompanied by an unknown number of volunteer auxiliaries quietly surrounded The Village they took up positions concealed in the brush in the shadows of beholders or behind the Brows of high sand dunes at Daybreak Elders women children and Men emerged from those houses to begin their day as they did so according to one eyewitness they were shot down as quickly as we could reload possessing only three guns the talawadini and their guests were unable to effectively defend themselves against this pre-dawn attack a few plunged into the nearby Waters of Lake Earl but there too they became targets as they swam across the lake they were shot down by Sharpshooters who were concealed on the other side of that body of water when the shooting sobbed perhaps hundreds of people lay dead and dying not more than five seemed to have survived this onslaught the attackers by their own account suffered one casualty a wounded man and the state of California based in Sacramento paid all of these 116 militiamen for their so-called work as you can see in this chilling graph between 1846 and 1870 California's Native American population plummeted from perhaps 150 000 individuals to not more than thirty thousand survivors disease dislocation and starvation caused many of these deaths however abduction unfree labor Mass death on federal Indian reservations homicides and massacres took thousands of lives while simultaneously hindering biological reproduction this was as I will argue today nothing less than a case of genocide so what do I mean when I use this politically charged and explosive word that we are all going to be talking about at Great length over the coming days I don't want for the discussion of the definition to suck all of the oxygen out of the room but I do want you to know exactly what I mean when I use this term in my work for a prosecutor to successfully convict a defendant of the crime of genocide they must prove two things Beyond any reasonable shadow of it out first they must prove what is known to International litigators as special intent and that is acts committed with intent to destroy and whole or in part a national ethnical racial or religious group as such it is the highest threshold of intent that exists in international law and crucially this is crucial it does not involve motive there is no motive that comes into play in these cases but the second thing that the prosecutor must do in order to successfully secure a conviction is to prove that the defendant has committed one of these five specified acts there are other ancillary acts like inciting genocide but these are the primary acts of genocide now following the formulation of this new international legal treaty in 1948 which goes into effect in 1951 and which by the way is signed by almost every nation state in the world now Scholars began to reinvestigate The Invasion and colonization of the State of California and by the year 2000 more than 20 Scholars mostly historians but some anthropologists and sociologists and Scholars from other disciplines had concluded that what took place in California during these years that I'm going to talk about today between 1846 and 1873 did in fact constitute genocide what I've tried to do in this project which in its hardback version is almost 700 pages long is to create the first comprehensive history of this catastrophe I spent 10 years writing this book why all the detail when people like Russell Thornton had already written books about this topic because I believe this topic calls for meticulous attention because the stakes are so high not only for Scholars like us but also for indigenous people in the state of California and in fact for everyone residing or even visiting in the United States so if U.S citizens or some groups of them some regions of this state where we're in California upon deliberate attempts to physically annihilate the indigenous people of the land Scholars like myself have to re-evaluate some of the foundational axioms by which we understand the making of what is now the most populous and prosperous state in the richest and most powerful country on Earth Scholars will need to reevaluate for example our understanding that it was accidental acts like the spread of epidemic diseases that caused this population rather than deliberate actions like mass murder that were the leading cause of death in this massive population catastrophe likewise exceptionalist interpretations of United States history lose validity as we begin to compare the genocide that took place in California with other genocides around the world at other times and places in The Human Experience I hope that the careful study of genocide in California will also lead to a re-evaluation of The Wider indigenous population catastrophe that took place not only throughout the Americas but in many parts of the Earth where Scholars documented genocide it becomes necessary to reevaluate not only the roles that private individuals played but also government employees at the municipal County state and federal level and whether or not major decision makers orchestrated paid for or planned such mass killings larger questions then tended to follow and I think these are some of the questions we'll be grappling with together in our days ahead what tends to catalyze genocide who ordered the killing who carried it out very importantly why don't we know more about these events what has happened in the interceding years decades and centuries and very important and painful to contemplate did Democracy Drive mass murder and ultimately what role did genocide play in the making bless you of modern Canada Mexico the United States and the other nation-states of the Earth the genocide question as I have found in my many visits to Native California peoples is particularly urgent my last count they're approximately 150 000 California Indian people and as I've met with tribal councils culture committees and other groups of people there are some big questions that come up and I'd like to share what some of those questions are should they press for government apologies reparations and control of lands where genocidal events took place can they effectively Marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition how should they commemorate the victims of mass murder while simultaneously emphasizing successful and effective accommodation resistance survival and ongoing cultural and political renewal now the psychological issues surrounding genocide for California Indian people are often fraud what happens for example if a tribal member learns that she is The Descendant both of genocide perpetrators and genocide survivors how might tribal governments and individuals reconcile increased knowledge of the genocide that took place in California often at the hands of U.S officials with their often intense patriotism many tribal council chambers or the rooms leading to them are decorated with the portraits of citizens who have served in the U.S armed forces finally and this is perhaps one of the most important questions what role might acknowledgment of genocide have and apology relative to genocide have on the intergenerational and historical trauma prevalent in many California Indian communities today and that trauma's connection to present day physical illnesses substance abuse domestic violence and the highest rate of Youth suicide of any group of people in the state of California I argue though that this question of genocide is a question not only for indigenous people it is a question for everyone in the United States should government officials tender public apologies as have presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1980s for the relocation internment of some 120 000 Japanese Americans during the second world war many of them California citizens and interned here in California there's been a step toward that as you heard in in the introduction the previous governor of the state of California has acknowledged that this was a genocide and the current governor of the state of California has issued a public apology but will that really matter will federal officials follow suit another question is whether or not federal officials will offer compensation along the lines of the more than 1.6 billion dollars that Congress has paid out to the 82 210 Japanese Americans were interned during the second world war and to their descendants there are also state issues a really big one that I hear people asking me about all the time is might California officials decrease or completely erase their cut of California Indian gaming revenues which as of 2014 exceeded 7.3 billion dollars by the way for those of you who are visitors this cut of California Indian gaming revenues which is a direct violation of their sovereignty is a major funding stream for the State of California so there is there's a lot of money involved in these questions a better understanding of the genocide that took place in California might also address or change the federal government's dealings with the scores of California Indian tribal communities currently seeking Federal recognition we have 109 tribes in this state who are federally recognized we have an additional 78 tribes who are recognized by Sacramento but not by Washington D.C and we have several dozen others who recognize neither by Sacramento nor by Washington D.C and one of the things that I've found in my work after this book was published is that lawyers are constantly calling wanting to ask about pieces of evidence having to do with their representation of unrecognized tribes the question of commemoration is also very closely linked will non-native people support or even tolerate the same kinds of public monuments or public days of remembrance that we currently celebrate here in California for other genocides for example the Holocaust will genocide against California Indian peoples join these other mass murders as part of our public school curricula or part of our public discourse it's very unusual that all of us are gathered with some knowledge about this when I speak about this topic most people are completely blindsided they have zero knowledge of this and these questions are all extremely important but they can't really be addressed without understanding the actual history of what happened here in California between 1846 and 1873. now sporadic mass killings of California Indian people punctuated the initial years following the U.S invasion of this state but it was James Marshall's 1848 gold strike that precipitated a new wave of much more intense violence and it was Oregon men coming south to participate in the Gold Rush who precipitated a dramatic increase in the number of attacks and The lethality of those attacks in 1849 Oregonian assaults on California Indian individuals communities and whole Nations increased further in their lethality and frequency particularly in the central mines which you can see mapped here where the mines are now booming this is a Cartesian representation I apologize 149 are explained in a journal account that I found and I quote Oregon people had been used to shooting Indians and in California they did shoot them freely that April Theodore Johnson entered the epicenter of this local genocide kulama at Sutter's Mill where Marshall had first found gold in a central mines Johnson and other eyewitnesses recounted multiple massacres scalpings and the slaying of surrendered California Indian civilians due to primary spotty Source coverage there were no newspapers yet in this portion of California we will never know the precise number of California Indian people who perished in the mines in 1849 and early 1850. but by my estimation hundreds if not thousands of people may have suffered violent deaths there during these years what was absolutely clear to observers at the time though was the exterminatory nature of these killings both in their intent and in their actual impact in December of 1849 Pomo and wapo Indian people held as slaves on the shores of Clear Lake at this place Kelseyville which you can see on the map here rose up and killed their two white American captors now in response to this double homicide the United States Army vigil aunties and regular U.S soldiers killed as many as one thousand California Indian people or more just between Christmas 1849 and May 15th of 1850 in the area depicted on this map Vigilantes first murdered and massacred large numbers of Napa and Sonoma Valley Indian people then after authorities arrested eight of these Vigilantes California's Supreme Court tried them in its very first case and what did they do they released all eight men on bail and they never went through the former trial you if you're not from California you may not know this but the legislature just voted to rename our oldest law school which is named after this Supreme Court chief justice who made this initial ruling so Hastings law school is going to be renamed That's The Power of History by the way meanwhile the U.S army ought to also sought to avenge the deaths of these two white slaveholders in a San Francisco newspaper article titled horrible Slaughter of Indians a journalist described a massacre committed by the United States Army on an island in Clear Lake using information provided to him directly by a regular U.S army captain and I quote little or no resistance was encountered and the work of Butchery was of but short duration neither age nor sex was spared it was the order of extermination fearfully obeyed end quote as many as 800 wapo and Pomo people the majority women children and Elders were murdered that day other killings followed and this is very important none of the officers involved received censure none of them were sent to prison none of them received a demotion or a pay cut in fact every one of them received a promotion in latter years three of them became full U.S army generals one of them became governor of the state of California so a new Factor was at work large-scale extended vigilante and regular U.S army operations tolerated by both state and federal officials as the California Gold Rush continued newcomers continued to Surge into the state like a human tidal wave before the Gold Rush the wraps 13 or 14 000 non-native people in the entire State of California as you can see from this chart by 1860 there were more than 360 000. so this was the single largest mass migration of the 19th century in the United States these newcomers came primarily in search of wealth they came to get rich quick and then go home but in seeking to access gold eat dress acquire labor and satisfy their rapacious sexual desires immigrants placed immense pressures on indigenous communities these demands triggered an explosion of industrial scale ranching hunting Mining and slave raiding these activities generated shock waves that literally tore communities apart and California's new leaders magnified that impact under martial law U.S military officers explicitly made California Indian people into second-class citizens with very few rights California's 1849 Constitution created and signed here at Colton hall a building State Park that you can still visit today in Monterey they made it all but impossible for any Indian person to vote and a few months later in the very first meeting of California's brand new legislature legislators banned all Indian people from voting borrowed Indians with one half of Indian blood or more from providing testimony for or against whites in criminal cases and then banned Indian people from serving as jurors in courts of law the following year they banned all Indian people from serving as attorneys so in combination these laws largely shut California Indian people out of participation in and protection by the new State's legal system abduction played a major role in the California Indian population decline in 1850 legislators passed the infamous act for the government and protection of Indians many of you are probably familiar with this act it legalized the white custody of Indian miners while also facilitating prisoner Leasing and allowing courts to summarily reject Indian testimony in both criminal and civil cases native people could thus be forced into unpaid work for extended terms on trumped-up charges Ten Years Later in 1860 California legislators extended that act to allow for the indenture of any Indian or Indians these laws triggered a boom in slave rating what would happen if we were a community assaulted by slave Raiders in the 1850s and 1860s they would come into this room and they would first kill all of the older men wolf me every everybody else who's old um anybody who resisted the assault would be killed anybody who tried to run across that courtyard and get away would be killed people would then be dressed up like animals and thrown into wagons or have their hands tied together and led away behind horses to slave Marts often the slave Raiders already had contracts and they knew who they were going to sell human beings to this scattering of the community would then make it very difficult for us to biologically reproduce ourselves or to maintain crucial social connections and to maintain connection to the land because almost always people were taken far away from their place of origin so that distance served as the barbed wire distance served as the walls that kept people in servitude I just want to tell you what happened here in California as a result of this every Monday morning there was a slave Mark right down in the plaza you can go to where it is people would be sold they were sold typically for a one week term and one lawyer recalled I just want to quote this Los Angeles had its weekly slave Mart and thousands of honest very useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way we can see the effects by reading the census in 1850 there were 3 693 Indian people enumerated in the town of Los Angeles the Pueblo of Los Angeles Ten Years Later there were 219. Escape was one way that people defied these systems of servitude but Vigilantes frequently responded with overwhelming liesla Force thalassic and wylacki woman Lucy young who we see here in portrait toward the end of her life she escaped servitude multiple times in one case she was chained to a cast iron wood stove and she used the ax that was sitting there to chop her way through the chain and liberate herself here's her recollection young woman been stole by white people come back shot through lights and liver front skin hang down like apron she tie up with cotton dress never die neither others were less fortunate after one California woman fled her quote Lord and Master with his Indian boy in 1858 end quote white Vigilantes massacred some 15 people her and her entire family two years later a Rancher on the Van Duzen River in Northwestern California became so incensed when his seven-year-old California Indian servant visited his family half a mile away that he quote slaughtered the entire family six persons boy and all end quote despite such reports which appear with alarming frequency in 19th century California newspapers state and federal law enforcement officials turned a blind eye and almost never intervened the United States Congress meanwhile made California Indian people particularly vulnerable to immigration's blast in 1851 and 1852 federal agents signed 18 treaties with 119 California Indian leaders allocating them 7 million 488 000 Acres so we can see the treaty areas are the dark gray zones surrounded by white those were the lands set aside by those treaters but when the treaties arrived at the United States Senate Senators met in secret session and repudiated all 18 of them instead Congress authorized just five military reservations not to exceed 25 000 Acres each and conferred no legal Land Titles or recognition so we're going from roughly seven and a half million acres to a maximum of 125 000 Acres the results were four-fold first No Reservations were legally patented and jurisdiction over these temporary reservations in California was left uncertain second this is very important because jurisdiction had not been defined confusion and conflict between and among state county and federal authorities would be the prevailing condition on reservations for decades to come third California Indian people did not become the explicit Federal Awards of the United States government finally Major General John wools 1857 interpretation of the reservation's legal status denied them the protection of the United States Army I'm going to read you this order because it's so important until these reservations are perfected the United States troops have no right to exclude the whites from entering and occupying the reserves or even to prevent them from kidnapping women and children end quote so Federal officials made California Indian people particularly vulnerable not only to kidnapping but also to enslavement and to outright mass murder the establishment of California's new militia system now marked the rise of a state-sponsored killing machine between the years 1850 and 1861 3414 men voluntarily enrolled in two dozen militia operations against California Indian people killing at least 1 342 of them we can talk a lot more about the numbers in the Q a if you like but that's an absolute Baseline number the absolute minimum but their actions the actions of these Volunteer State militia operations were much more important than just the numbers why because they served as a widely publicized very public advertisement of federal and state policy toward California Indian people not only were participants not punished they were in fact richly rewarded and that led to a boom in vigilante killings during the years that I'm talking about Vigilantes killed an absolute minimum of 6401 California Indian people in January of 1851 California governor Peter Burnett declared and I quote that a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct this is not some hidden away comment that he made on the on the down low in the dark this is in his annual message to the assembly and the Senate of California so this is as public a pronouncement as he could make the following month state legislators then voted to borrow half a million dollars a huge amount of money at this time and by far the single largest line item in the state's budget for that year for past and future anti-indian Volunteer State militia operations meanwhile the state began building up an extensive arsenal of cutlasses Sabers rifles muskets ammunition Saddles all donated to them by the United States Army then in 1852 United Standard Senator John Weller who became California's governor in 1858 told his fellow United States senators on the senate floor in Washington D.C the California Indians and I quote will be exterminated he insisted the interest of the white men demands their extermination that same year having now spent the first half million dollars that they raised state legislators voted to enact a six hundred thousand dollar Bond measure to pay for additional operations what we're looking at here is one of the bonds that came in many different denominations 50 100 250 and 500 indicating 2ss Scholars that they were meant for a variety of different types of buyers of small denomination Bond might be bought by private citizen uh 500 bonds are probably only purchased by the very wealthy or by financial institutions I'm now working on a project to write the history of these bonds what banks transacted them where do they go and it's a national thing I could just foreground that for you these are not only traded as Financial Commodities on the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco but they also appear as far away as Boston and New York and I suspect there going to appear in European financial markets as well so people are actually financing and profiting from investing in genocide the sink your own woman Sally Bell pictured here provided us with a rare eyewitness California Indian recollection of a massacre that took place in the 1850s she remembered and I quote about 10 o'clock in the morning some white men came they killed my grandfather and my mother and my father I saw them do it then they killed my baby sister and they cut her heart out and they threw it into the brush where I had run to hide my sister was just a little baby just crawling around I did not know what to do I was so scared I guess I just hid there for a long long time with my little sister's heart in my hands it was a terrifying time to be an indigenous person in California the United States Congress endorsed such killing even as state and federal officials work to perfect their killing machine in the year 1854 the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to allocate more than 924 thousand dollars to be paid into the California State Treasury to reimburse the state for its past volunteer militia operations the following year this man's State quartermaster and adjutant General William C Kibby who ran California's militia system from 1853 through the end of 1863 underscored this state's genocidal militia purpose there are but two Alternatives before us he said either to wage a war of extermination or to abandon a large and productive territory land was Central to the California genocide to help perfect his killing machine Kibby wrote a tactical manual had it published and then distributed it to all of his State militia officers meanwhile then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis would go on to be the leader of the rebelling Confederate States sent kibi U.S Army tactical manuals to distribute to his militiamen as Christmas gifts then in 1857 having already spent 1.1 million dollars on Hunting Indian people state legislators appropriated an additional four hundred and ten thousand dollars for additional militia operations with predictable results finally in 1861 Congress appropriated another four hundred thousand dollars to reimburse California for all of those expenses civilians also carried out large forced removal operations to concentrate California Indian people on federal Indian reservations and those operations were often extremely violent in one case in Mendocino County when a group of people resisted 50 of them were shot dead the lake yakut's woman yoi mut from California's Central San Joaquin Valley recollected that during the forced removal of her relatives to the Fresno reservation soldiers first shot 12 people and then killed a dozen who could not keep up during the march likewise the known Lackey men Andrew Freeman explained when they took the Indians to the Round Valley reservation they drove them like stock and they would shoot the little children who could not make the trip and were getting tired once at reservations California Indian people often faced institutionalized malnutrition and outright starvation the konkow leader tamayanem recollected that after volunteers had forcibly removed his people to the Mendocino reservation we were very hungry and the Kong cows began to die very fast the reservations proved little better in 1860 he removed his people South to the Round Valley reservation hoping to find food there but he recollected there was even less to eat indeed in 1860 officials there typically provided just 480 to 910 calories per day to working Round Valley reservation inmates by 1862 after the federal government cut funding for reservations in California rations there fell to just 160 to 310 calories per working person per day some reservation colonists also treated reservation Indians as unpaid laborers with lethal results according to one man testifying under oath and I quote about 300 died on the Round Valley reservation during the winter of 1857 to 1858 from the effects of packing them through the mountains in the snow or mud they were worked naked and carried 50 pounds each if able so at California reservations willful neglect took an Untold number of Indian lives but the federal government soon took over the killing during the U.S Civil War Federal officers and their men killed thousands of California Indian people they transformed the killing machine it became a purely Federal project the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part definition set forth in the U.N genocide convention first perpetrators demonstrated both in word and indeed their intent to destroy and they committed not one but all of these five genocidal acts enumerated here killing took place in more than 370 known massacres and scores and scores of homicides sources indicate that between 1846 and 1873 Vigilantes militiamen and regular U.S soldiers killed at least 9492 to 16 094 California Indian people and probably many many many more by way of contrast they killed fewer than 1 300 non-indian people during these years but other acts of genocide proliferated too many rapes and beatings occurred and these meet the convention's definition of causing serious bodily harmed victims on the basis of their group identity and with the intent to destroy the group The sustained military and civilian policy of demolishing Villages and chasing survivors into inhospitable desert and mountain regions also amounted to deliberately infecting on the group conditions of Life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part some office of Indian Affairs employees likewise administering Federal reservations were guilty of the same crime further and this is often lost in genocide studies but because malnutrition and exposure predictably lowered fecundity and increased stillbirths and miscarriages some state and federal decision makers also appear to have been victim guilty of imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group finally the state professional slave Raiders and federal officials were all very much involved in forcibly transferring Children of the group to another group three thousand to four thousand California Indian children suffered such forced transferred during these years by breaking up families and shattering entire communities forced removals also constituted imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group sufficient evidence thus exists to designate the California Indian catastrophe a case of genocide according to international law thank you [Applause] do you want to come up to take questions also how will we do that though well I think people have questions for you I'll go quickly I was interested in what you said about the bond and I'm wondering if you could just comment about today's stock exchange and how much uh corporations and companies are contributing to ongoing genocide through removals and polluting of uh indigenous lands well I'm a historian so we're very bad at talking about the present but but I will say that we can see a deep and enduring pattern that goes back hundreds of years before the events I was speaking about that goes back to the very arrival of Columbus in the islands that immediately there there is you know financing other people's land was stolen to finance that expedition a Jewish land and then right away it's a corporate Venture you know I was just reading through his this is why it's front of my mind it was just reading through his journal of the first voyage he mentions gold 137 times I started counting and then in his letters back to Isabella and Ferdinand he mentions gold another seven times and in one of the letters he says gold can do everything it can even send souls to heaven so the colonial project the catastrophes of colonialism are very much rooted in greed and in corporate structures that begin in the late 15th century so what I was speaking about I think is is nothing new it's all part of a long trajectory that goes back to the beginning so one of the things that I didn't get to is the fact that making land into property it was essential so in 1850 or when you were talking Ben about the 1850-51 period That's when land was being transitioned to the public Claims Commission into title so that that title could behold and there is all kinds of other part of the killing was because of wanting to create that land into title under U.S What I Call domesticating Land right which I thought everybody knew what that was but I got asked that question the other day what does that mean but that domestication comes because of the way title and property are also hetero patriarchal in that way right that that property law is passed to land ownership which is foundational to the U.S in the from the very first census it was white property owning men so this gets carried into the case in California in that 1850-51 era now what happens also there is that there are numerous people in Los Angeles that also were involved in Canada in the killings in Canada with the Luis Rebel real rebellion and that Land Title that they made into a financial and then came here that's how Arthur lets establishes West Los Angeles where UCLA is at which eventually becomes the Playboy Mansion so there becomes a whole way that title gets passed and broken down in relation to that which is part of that same moment that been so thoroughly you know connecting to what mishana is saying when on the very day that California becomes a state Fremont who's one of the first two senators representing California he comes with a whole raft of 13 bills that he wants to bring before the Senate that are all about land and one of the crucial ones is he wants to extinguish in the entitle so you can see how embedded it is in the very foundational moment the very Day California becomes a state what do the states what are the federal senators from California do they want to extinguish Indian title they want to grab a bunch of land to create the UC system that's the beginning of the land theft that you know they pay us so we're we're paid partly from that and they they also want to make sure that they get rid of any claims that the existing Mexican land holders have too so you you can't really talk about this without making land a central point of discussion and the land is all about profit you know for for the Invaders and just to bring it up to the present and then Stanley has a question I think that in in the present what manifested after that were oil well refineries and these sorts of things where La becomes a center also of that kind of environmental destruction um uh the the industries of ceramic Industries for the airline which then eventually will bring those from the Pacific after post-world War II into these territories uh oil wells and you get like a large that's why we have also there becomes a Max Exodus they're in the dust bowl and further development of that and there there are some wonderful maps that kind of document where the oil War refineries are still working today and they're largely in those communities of color um in in Los Angeles where that is happening and there's a woman up at Occidental or one of the Claremont colleges that is mapped out all the pollution air areas that relate to those oral refineries as those titles pass so that answers that kind of environmental question but the environmental destruction is is part of the process of what Ben is talking about but I think Stanley had questions boy I just don't even know where to start but um I'll just start with the doctrine of Discovery and how those documents I mean lay the framework for the genocide to take place in the Americas not just in the Americas but in Asia Africa all over the world and we've seen in Australia today and we see it all over but back to California and when we talk about you know we as native people in California we've endured three waves of encroachment Spanish Mexican and American the American wave when they came in you know taking a look at the history why did they do it it's because Texas wanted to you know join the union they were a slave state that would have created an imbalance of the United States needed to take California so they would have a balance between slave and free states allegedly that's that's one of the reasons why they took it and you're right the popular the native population in California was the majority uh non-natives were a small minority but then when encroachment came in all the people you know all these people coming in to the cold fields that started a another wave of I mean a wave of genocide and you know and and not to you know talk about you know just what happened with the Jewish people or the aroma people but I mean whole Nations up north were just eradicated all their people are gone so as they continue doing this you know you were talking about the 18 treaties these 18 treaties that were made I'll just say for our people the Kumbia people the Treaty of San Isabel which was created in January 7th 1852 a premises of reservation from the Mexican border all the way to uh up to Riverside County these were the 18 treaties that were never ratified and this was due in part because this was on the eve of the Civil War a lot of people were rushing in uh non-native people seeing that as good land and they you know basically petitioned the government that they would side with the Confederacy if those treaties were ratified and again all this land was taken taken away and in the doctrine of Discovery it states that natives are not allowed to own land they can reside on land and and you know that document is still used as one of the founding documents that the Supreme Court uses in its cases today to this day so all these things that were you know that would take in place with our native people and even when the reservations were created and here in California there are no State uh identified tribal groups only Federal federally recognized no state recognized I I thought there were state and I found out later that there are none no state recognized groups they have no uh no protection at all but even with the federally recognized groups it was all created by executive order and what does that mean when we talk about an executive order no treaties were created that land can be taken back at any time so these are some of the problems that we've had in California and last thing I want to say before I shut my snoot is California has more language and cultural diversity than any other part of the world aside from Papua New Guinea and for these you know acts to take place you know it was like libraries of knowledge and culture that have been burnt to the ground to never be able to to reclaim again and that is a tragedy so I just want to share that thank you so we have a limited amount of time remaining for questions if it's okay with the presenters we'll take a few collect them and then hopefully you can address them briefly so hello thank you Ben for your lecture I wanted to ask you about the figures the numbers that you brought up and the registers that you use because we find a lot of similarities in the Argentinian case but we don't have that amount of numbers yeah okay so uh if if you if you really want to see all the numbers there are a couple of ways to access this data one is to get a hold of the hardback copy of the book dependencies are about 200 pages long and they list all of the financial information all of the killings divided up into different scales and there's a whole section on disputed Massacre death tolls for some of the big massacres but I thought this was pretty important to get out into the public so I did a project with California state parks that started under the previous governor and it's called the California Native American Digital Atlas so what's quite useful for Scholars about this is you can look things up by region by tribal identity if we know it and then you can actually see the sources that I used we got a big Grant have graduate students at UC Berkeley scan everything and so you can actually click on these hyperlinks so if you're looking at say the bloody Island massacre in 1850 of Pomo and Guapo people in what is now Lake County you can actually click on all of the accounts and you'll be able to read them for yourself so um this seemed like best practice I was I learned a lot of this from Linda Ryan when she began her mapping of the massacres in Australia to try to think through making it as public and as accessible as possible so maybe to get to the core of what you're asking because I know you're asking about the sources but you could look at this a lot of it is very public a lot of it is newspaper accounts but it's also from private journals and letters it's from the official records of the state militias themselves it's from the official records of the United States Army but the biggest source by far is newspapers and so you would have multiple different accounts published in the newspapers then they would then be circulated and republished so that account that I read you about a horrible Slaughter of Indians this didn't just appear in the daily out to California which was California's most widely circulated newspaper it was then republished in dozens of other newspapers so we didn't catalog all of that but I think you know this wasn't this wasn't a secret dirty war this was a very public operation and a lot of people were making a lot of money and all of those bills to gather more funding or to recognize a group of Vigilantes as militiamen or all public so there's there's records of all of that and there had to be votes and so there had to be an accretion of political support for those things to happen and while there were people who stood up against the genocide by and large most non-native people voted for this money to be spent voted for these weapons to be given away at both the state and the federal level okay we have time for one more question and hopefully during the break that's going to follow we can continue this conversation good morning Ben and Roshana thank you so much for your talks it's really good to see you I'm right here hi hi Shawna um I wanted I was noticing of course your evidence Ben especially we're both historians and you know historians like to push our evidence to the fore um but I saw the sort of Silent or whispered critique of Edward Curtis in your evidence and I was hoping that we could sort of yell our critique of Curtis um but also I mean because he's still being used right the the Palm Springs Art Museum did an exhibit maybe two or three years ago you know with all these amazing California Indian artists like Gerald Clark but then there's Edward Curtis you know right there so it's not like it's not like we've our critique has been loud enough of Curtis so so let us do it again um and then second you know you're you're talking about the 19th century and then you've got these amazing images you know of of these people from tribes who are the survivors and they're the ones that are telling us about who did not survive so maybe we could do both of those things things with with our Edward Curtis moment yeah yeah so what what quite length Link mini essay underneath it about it and coming out of grad school I was very anti-curtis I'd heard lots of critiques but then when I went back home to California and was visiting with people and doing my interviews and my mode was to gather a lot of research write a presentation and then go to a tribal uh community meeting place and show it and then get lots of feedback and it was usually a phased process first just with Council than with the culture Council and then sometimes with everybody and one of the things I learned going into people's houses is certainly in Northern California and in a lot of Southern California they're Curtis photos in people's living rooms and in their kitchens and they're also in public tribal spaces so that's what I tried to write about but I also heard from people about what happened when that that photo of their great great auntie was taken and he would say okay take your watch off okay take your diamond wedding ring off let's get the car out of the background um but but I want to speak to the broader question of because this is you know what you do too I do a little bit the representation of people representation of humans I think we always should be telling our readers that it's through the lens of whoever made that image and so we could say this about Curtis we could say this about Caitlyn you know any of the people who have done the large collections of depictions of humans who are not their group they've modified it and and they've they've Twisted it okay to the second part you know I had to make a decision at a certain point was I going to try to use all these interviews that I had gathered and was I going to do a two-volume book and I decided that one 700 page book was enough and I had to cut hundreds of pages to get down to that size 700 pages is the largest that Yale University press can bind you can't go more than 700 pages so that became the defining feature that was the rule that kept me at that at that limit but what I would say to everyone and maybe there are people who want to write this book we need a companion to the book that I wrote that is purely based on interviews with people today because there's a whole different story that would be centered in indigenous knowledge California Indian perspectives and it would probably be revelatory because it would change the way we see this so so we need that yeah I I would say just on that last Point there's a lot of California Indian Scholars now they've have a Consortium and I fully want to just say that here because there are people that are examining these issues like Mark Mint out of UCR a lot of my grad students ex-grad students were not graduate they're not ex they're just graduated uh Katie keala is doing a lot of really important work I'm reading Stephanie lumsden's dissertation continually lately who's working on incarceration and this moment in Hoopa Valley area so there are several California Indian Scholars that are starting to take on this work and and doing that and they need full support and awareness and they need the institutions in California to hire them and to support them and to do that work that's part of the accountability that needs to take place at USC private public and all the universities as well and we have a job search if any California Indians are listening at UCLA right now and we have an emphasis on trying to hire we're finally going to be a department after many years so that we can hire that person because this is interdisciplinary work um and I'll get to that to answer the other part of the question and go back is how anthropology played a role in all of this as well with JP Harrington and other anthropologists who would take photos and such it's not just Edward Curtis we put a lot of emphasis on Edward Curtis but I think about Gene Lamar's artwork and contemporary artwork and what she looks at the way these photos circulated of young women who were you know we all know what happened you didn't talk about sexual violence as much you it's it was in your talk but we all know that's why young women sold for higher rates at La Plaza and in other places and so um that was part of that but these circulations of photos I love Jean Lamar's work for what contemporary native artists do she took um one of the the soldiers the photography showed soldiers um Soul uh how this had this circulation of this young woman that we see a lot actually represented as California but she reclosed her in the lavender and cares and puts her in it back in traditional dress and repatriates her through that art and that's the care that native artists are doing California Indian artists are doing but also all over in our communities are doing with those kind of archives like Curtis I had similar experiences as you with Curtis whenever I teach it in my classroom people well this is at Dartmouth and Stanford people be oh that's my great grandmother so people have a vexed feeling with that right we all want that kind of you know that the pictures to see our ancestors and that's fine but we also have to address the kind of violence there you know he was supported by JP Morgan so again it gets back to the how corporations circulated in that particular way but I think you know I highly suggest if you want to understand also how will Wilson plays a role um uh I'm sorry how Curtis plays a role look at Will Wilson who's a Navajo photographer a contemporary Navajo photographer who examines the process that he used because I think it also helps us understand like I look totally different by using that same plate method so he has this thing called the photographic exchange because he's looking at the different ways that Community can exchange with the Curtis photos and so he kind of does that well he went around in a tent and used the same plate method and it totally changed the way I teach Curtis because I see like you have to sit so still and you can't move we weren't stoic people we laughed we had joy we still laugh and have joy most of the time um but you know you have to sit so still in those frames right so how did that also create understandings of who we are through those photographs so I think theirs also becomes part of thinking through that process but will Wilson Jean Lamar think about that archive think about what contemporary native artists are doing [Applause] I just want to uh thank Dr medley for and congratulate you for um The Fabulous research that you've done um you know I I can't even imagine how many hours and months and years well you said 10 years right of your life um so important and I'm very grateful that you are here to come in and share that history I'm sure a lot of us have a number of things that we we would like to do now with that history you mentioned recording elders and other people that have been impacted by that history and I see a lot of interdisciplinary work that could be done in supporting that so again thank you very much and we will now take a brief 10 minute break to grab some tea or coffee go get some sunshine or fresh air if you need to and we'll see you back here soon

Channel: USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

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Id: YcIY6sKFGiA

Length: 69min 6sec (4146 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022