From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations

Introductory Overview

Indigenous peoples represent the most complex social analytical issues in the world today, including invasion by foreign groups, outright genocide, culturicide and multiple forms of coercive assimilation, and ranging over half a millennium of modern colonization histories covering the Americas and globally. Perhaps the most critically contentious of these issues would be genocide, especially in North America and the United States, in terms of how scholars employ this relatively new term over social histories obfuscated by dominant group histories.

Recent developments in describing and interpreting indigenous peoples, including how genocide affected so many nations, have allowed us to evaluate how survival from genocide, resistance to dominant assimilation, and revitalization of some indigenous social systems (such as American Indians over the 20th century) appear to be alternative epistemological constructions of social organization and worldview. Certainly, Indigenous histories are alternative to dominant hegemonic stories. As the world engages in struggles over socioeconomic hegemony, political representation, environment and climate change, and relationships of human communities from the local to the global, the story of continued survival of the Indigenous must be addressed by the academy with a firm understanding of the past and how that past affects the present and serves as prologue.

This issue of American Behavioral Science considers many perplexing issues and important questions from macro-historical to micro-event analysis. One particularly vexing issue is genocide: (a) What is genocide? (b) What qualifies as genocide, and what is the short-term and long-term harvest of violent acts against indigenous peoples and the attempted and forced cultural domination of groups and governments? (c) How and when did genocide occur? (d) How have mainstream scholars and the academy dealt with genocide? (e) How have states and nations functioned to silence genocide, particularly against Native peoples of the United States? (f) What are the effects of survival and resistance among indigenous people on historical and contemporary analysis that keeps changing? We approach these questions through understanding what happened in California, as instructive of how Western societies, even those claiming to be democratic, have engaged in systematic genocide and its ideological cover-up and denial. While primarily historical, these discussions hold great import for Indian peoples in North and South America and, although beyond the purview of this American Behavioral Science collection, for indigenous peoples globally.

We examine the larger questions by considering the expansion of European nations over the Americas encompassing 500 years of increasingly powerful and centralized social forces. These begin with the Columbian voyages at the end of the 15th century, the expansion of colonization from the Caribbean throughout North and South America, the colonization and institutionalization of dominant European forms in the Americas, and the rise of new states from the ashes of indigenous peoples, to become holistically hegemonic, including within the annals of the academy, accompanied by a dominant historical worldview. The 21st century has brought an intriguing and incisive set of issues to the study of indigenous peoples. Premier among these are global climate change, the nature of world capitalism (or now neoliberalism) as dominant economic relations, increasing conflicts over political representations inclusive of opposing differing worldviews, and nature of community where human survival is most evident. In fact, we are literally at a crossroads or watershed, where these global issues will affect every community on earth, likely in highly destructive ways, unless we find new ways, as nations, cultures, societies, civilizations, and people, to engage the human condition on and in a world of diverse peoples and physical locations.

The rest of this article addresses these questions and issues from four perspectives: (a) Who are indigenous peoples? (b) How has genocide been practiced in California and globally? (c) Do these articles and issues interrelate? (d) What lessons may emerge for indigenous peoples? Can we learn from these analyses, these open discussions, and bring to light world genocides and their consequences in today’s society? It is only through identifying the particular sociohistorical locations of individual indigenous peoples, Indian nations if preferred, and how they relate to larger social systems that come to dominate them, that we can see the larger picture. First we must unsilence the genocide perpetrated by peoples around the world, including the United States. We also need to identify the systems of invasion and domination, and how their ideologies contribute to distortion of indigenous peoples and the study of first nations globally. Can we learn from these studies to understand the complex world in which we live?

As the United States has come to represent this continued Westernization of the Americas and the world, what happened in California is even more poignant as we deconstruct the full meaning of the California Gold Rush and the genocide conducted by small groups of democratically constituted groups of pioneers eager to rid themselves of indigenous peoples who owned the land in their own manner and controlled vast acres of farmland, ranch lands, lumber, water, furs, fish, and minerals, particularly the gold greatly desired by the newcomers. To wrest the Indian tribes and peoples of their wealth, frontiersmen and women conducted a physical, mental, and cultural genocide against Native Americans in California and other places in Indian country and around the world where indigenous people controlled land and wealth desired by newcomers from foreign lands. The process renewed itself again and again in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, where the invaders refused to acknowledge the part in the destruction of Native peoples, denying and silencing genocide while controlling the mechanisms by which scholars may examine and interpret genocide.

Indigenous Peoples—Creating the American Indian

The American Indian, as indigenous people, represents 500 years of racial formation and many centuries of invasion, colonization, and institutional domination for hundreds of separate Native nations or Indian tribes by newcomers from Western Europe. Essentially, Native peoples undergoing invasions, initial penetration, and intense colonization by soldiers, governments, and entrepreneurs were quickly followed by what is now termed settler colonialism (Veracini, 2010). This process began with Christopher Columbus’s second transatlantic voyage in 1493, instructive to our discussion as he came with the cross and sword, intending to use his military forces and the “settlers” to occupy and exploit the islands of the Caribbean. Through the European principles of Right of Discovery and Right of Conquest, and with full support of the pope, titular head of the Christian Church (Newcomb, 2008), Columbus and the settlers overran the islands and exploited resources and people, killing, capturing, raping, and burning indigenous peoples throughout the region and setting the precedent by which Spain and other European nations would act in relationship to indigenous peoples.

Under the newly developed racial rubric of “Indios” or generically Indians, this pattern quickly took American Indian nations over the entire Caribbean island complex, capped by Hernan Cortez between 1519 and 1522, toppling the great Aztec military, with the help of smallpox, and taking their capital of Tenochtitlan, one of the largest and greatest cities in the world. Spurred on by the riches found among indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Mexico, in 1532-1533, Francisco Pizarro joined in a Native civil war and brought down the Incan Empire with similar techniques. Hernando De Soto blazed a path of vast destruction across what became the southeastern part of North America, while Francisco Vasquez de Coronado cut another swath across the American Southwest from Arizona and New Mexico to Kansas, invading and killing Indians while claiming the vast Native region for Spain. In like fashion and pattern, the Portuguese killed and enslaved countless thousands of Native peoples, laying Native nations and great forests to waste, replacing the decimated indigenous population with combinations of European settlers and newly enslaved peoples taken from African nations that the Portuguese and Spanish labeled Blacks. Thus, racial formation during this period was over “Indians” to destroy their nation, enslave them, and take their land, to build their new colonies, often committing genocide, wiping out the indigenous population base and minimally eliminating their societies and original sovereignty. Racial formation also was to capture and exploit peoples from African nations and ship them to the Americas, where they simply became “Negro” or Black, enslaved for life as their racial status would remain in perpetuity, families becoming slaves for generations.

The formation of the dominant group was not entirely racial yet, with Christian and European nations gradually supplanted with Whites denoting the original “civilized versus savage” dualism passing into racial groups. The French and English were quick to follow up on these systems of colonization for land and labor exploitation with racial constructs that further institutionalized the stratification by race. The key feature for our analysis is that this racial formation required the destruction of autonomous nations of indigenous peoples, along with dehumanization of African-descent Blacks as slaves. Europeans destroyed Native Americas so newcomers could create or re-create the world they had known, establishing European controlled colonies, and ultimately Euro-American states. They created new nations with racial and cultural domination of the “Indian” to justify the theft of land with property rights for Europeans, not Native Americans or incoming Blacks from Africa and the Caribbean. Europeans exploited the labor of Native Americans and Blacks, profiting and building their colonies on indigenous lands and the exploitation of African labor. Land and labor were key elements in the colonization and exploitation of Native America, as Europeans transitioned from the invasion to colonization, including control of a new capitalistic system built on what the newcomers had known in Europe. This became their system of control of peoples, places, and resources that had once been the sole domain of competing Native groups subordinated under the new system.

We note that European newcomers created two large systems during the invasion and colonization of the Americas that resonated with developments in Europe. The Spanish, Portuguese, and, to a lesser extent, French used the Catholic ideologies to create a religious political colony and state as evidenced in the Treaty of Tordasillas and Papal Bulls, creating racially subordinated peoples because of their non-Christian status. Although the Spanish required ship captains and soldiers to read the Requerimiento to unsuspecting Native peoples, the indigenous people did not know that the newcomers were offering them “salvation” and the opportunity to surrender before soldiers leveled villages and killed, maimed, raped, and enslaved indigenous people in the name of the Christian God. Since 1492, the Catholic Church has been an essential political part of the social hierarchy in many colonies, usually with more fluid boundaries, as seen in creation of the mestizo. ¹ The English, Dutch, and Germans also used Christianity to support their invasion and destruction of indigenous people. Protestant settlers and new governments violently rejected Catholic controls, identifying Northern European countries as counterrevolutionaries to the Church, but Protestants invaded, destroyed, and exploited in the name of Christ while excluding indigenous people, Blacks, Catholics, and Jews from their planned control of American colonies. The English developed dual strategies of wresting the land from indigenous peoples through genocidal wars, slave labor, legal statutes, and social policies designed to destroy Native control of land and rights to indigenous resources. Protestants institutionalized African slavery, establishing a series of laws and social policies that deterred any crossing of racial boundaries, creating subordinate categories of Indians and Blacks dominated politically, socially, and economically by Whites in America. From the colonial era forward, White Americans, generally Protestants, sought to dominate Asians, Pacific Islanders, and others globally, thereby continuing the systems created during the 17th and 18th centuries.

The invasion and dominance of indigenous peoples by the English in the Americas is important for at least two reasons. One is that many, if not most, English colonies committed genocide against Native peoples in the Americas, thereby depopulation of indigenous peoples to take their lands and resources. The English tried to exploit Native labor but soon found that African labor proved more effective to exploit and control. The process originating out of the 17th century created a deeply racialized system dominated by White Euro-Americans bent to subordinating indigenous and African peoples. The newcomers denied the existence of Native American systems of politics, economy, and social life. They denied the existence of Native American sovereignty, establishing a system of treaties and agreements whereby the newcomers claimed control over indigenous lands and resources. Europeans refused to recognize fully an equality of sovereignty between the groups, limiting indigenous sovereign and subordinated Native sovereignty to that of their own. Thus the foreigners subsumed indigenous forms of sovereignty and through written documents—not oral forms acknowledged through wampum belts—and reconstructed definitions of Native sovereignty to benefit newcomers, not Native Americans (Deloria & Wilkins, 1999). Euro-Americans perfected their techniques of nonrecognition of Native sovereignty, changing the process and meanings of sovereignty among indigenous peoples over time. Thus notions of uncivilized “tribes” were separated from civilized nations from Europe. Sociopolitical and religious-racial domination were co-intertwined. Newcomers refused to recognized indigenous rights and sovereignty, and Euro-Americans denied indigenous peoples real sovereignty as a result of differences in culture, race, and gender.

The English, French, and Spanish constructed their colonies and social systems to the advantage of newcomer settlers, not indigenous peoples. In California, the Southwest, and the Southeast, forms of Spanish Catholicism contributed significantly to the invasion and destruction of Native Americans through militarized missions, taking a perfect form along the California coast where violent missions invaded Indian country with the aid of soldiers under the pretense of bringing Christ to Native Americans but controlling vast acres of land and exploiting Native labor within the missions. The mission system rationalized that it was out to “save souls” and indigenous lands by force, controlling neophytes through jails, food deprivation, whippings, and other forms of corporal punishment. The Church attempted to silence the many indigenous voices while it attempted to bring sainthood to Father Junipero Serra, the president of California missions.

When control of California moved from Spain to Mexico, the Mexican state secularized the missions, turning them over to Californios, not the indigenous holders of their Native lands. After 1846, when the United States invaded California, White Americans continued the colonial process in California and refused to acknowledge the citizenship of Native Americans (as found in the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848) and used genocidal policies and practices to extinguish Indian title to lands and resources. Miners rapidly overran the lands of California Indians, intentionally destroying the autonomy and sovereignty of Native nations. Far worse, the newcomers murdered indigenous men, women, and children. They raped women and children, and they enslaved Native Californians, selling them into servitude and prostitution as state and federal officials looked on and allowed atrocities to occur. In California, no so-called middle ground existed. Small groups of pioneers met in democratic meetings to discuss Indian policies and decided to murder men, women, and children. They used rumors and theft of livestock as their overt justification for killing Indians, but they also harbored deep-seeded racism and fear of indigenous, non-Christian peoples the newcomers considered uncivilized savages.

Europeans intentionally planned an invasion and destruction of Native nations, societies, and humans, which ultimately became the case throughout North and South America. They extended their genocide through murders and near complete cultural destruction. In the English colonies, the so-called democratic and White Protestant systems of North America instituted more invasive and more genocide-like policy practices than the highly destructive mission system, generated by the Spanish Catholic colonizers. Pioneers in what became the United States and Canada replicated the patterns of destruction, and they supported these forms of invasion through adaptive forms around the world. We identify these settler-colonial systems in this special edition of the American Behavioral Science and specifically hone in on their genocidal patterns in California as exemplary of this invasion–domination. But California provides only one example, as others exist in the Americas and beyond. Haiti is perfectly instructive of all these processes on a hemispheric scale, as well as connections to current issues of environmental degradation and climate change. On his first voyage, Columbus spent the most time on the large island named Española (Hispaniola) after one of his ships foundered off Cape Haitienne. He left some crew of that ship near the cape in Hispaniola to begin the invasion and settlement, and he captured and took a number of the Taino-Arawak people back to Spain, where he presented the “Indios” to the courts of Spain and then sold them in local slave markets.

After great debate and issuance of various papal bulls giving Spain and Portugal the right to conquest and plunder in the name of the Christian faith, Columbus was dubbed “admiral of the ocean seas” and supported to return with a small armada to take Native American lands for “God and country.” The crew Columbus had left behind looted local Native villages and violated women, and indigenous leaders attacked the Spanish soldiers. In retaliation with a planned invasion, Columbus unleashed the engines of war, including attack dogs, overtaking the inland agricultural region. Spanish soldiers and sailors began to “settle” indigenous land in early “plantations.” More significant, Spanish newcomers began feverish searches for gold and silver, at times killing and enslaving whole families and communities in their quest for gold. This combined with diseases known only to Europeans, and the Taino population was quickly decimated. Some Taino revolted, but were too late to prevent their doom. Columbus and his commanders extended genocide to other lands where Spanish governors and settlers assumed their superiority and dictated policies detrimental to indigenous populations.

The story of Spain in America is well known by scholars and the general public, but many refuse to acknowledge the genocide committed against indigenous peoples of the Americas. Spanish newcomers enslaved Native Americans and after Spain outlawed indigenous slavery, Spanish overlords began importing Africans, rationalizing that they had had many opportunities to become Christian (they did not), and as West African believers in “Satan” could be enslaved and transported to the Caribbean to work as slaves. Popes and kings sanctioned the enslavement of thousands of Africans, and the Spanish instituted the first Black slavery in the Americas. Of course, the French, Dutch, English, and others followed suit, creating and expanding the African slave trade, which encouraged economic growth in the Americas on land formerly owned by indigenous peoples of the islands and mainland of North and South America. In time, the Spanish instituted the system of encomienda, wherein Spanish soldiers and others received royal permission to use indigenous labor on huge land grants, thereby putting racially defined “Indians” in subjugation and forcing them to work like slaves for the encomendero. While encomienda and land grants spread throughout Latin America, Hispaniola intensified its slave systems, cut down many mahogany forests, and drained mineral wealth from the island.

The French eventually acquired the western half of Hispaniola, calling it San Domingue (Santo Domingo), both as a wealthy colony and to control the windward passage to Louisiana and the southern coast of North America. The Catholic Church never fully embraced the race-based slavery and genocides conducted during the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, having justified their actions by proclaiming that Spain was bringing heathens to Christ. The debate still exists about the degree of brutality and causation of destructive actions by the Spanish, as evidenced in the great debate between Bortolome de Las Casas (a protector of los Indios, whom he argues were humans) and Juan Ginés de Supelveda (who argued that Native Americans were subhuman) in 1550. De las Casas, a Dominican priest, had long argued for indigenous rights and condemned the Spanish genocide against Native peoples, which resulted in A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552/1974). De las Casas and other reformers argued for new laws to turn back genocide, and their efforts resulted in reforms in 1542. However, the key features of two centuries of invasion, domination, and settler-colonial states remained the racial construction of the subjugated Indian and the denial of the perpetrator to avoid responsibility to genocide and its long-term effects on indigenous communities of the Americas. Native Americans, Native nations, and indigenous societies have long interpreted the invasion of America as genocide, and contemporary indigenous peoples agree with the convention of the United Nations (see categories below) and not interpretations offered by many scholars who deny genocide of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples of the world historically and in contemporary society.

This was the first, and perhaps most important, racial construction in the history of the world, and would be applied to all subsequent colonization by European powers, first within the Americas, and later around the world, calling the indigenous peoples Natives or aborigines, without recognizing their social constructions, instead referring to them as undifferentiated “tribes” within the broader race construct associated with being “uncivilized” and less developed or evolved. When great civil change and social unrest swept Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, leading to the French Revolution, the French colonized islands joined the new ideologies of freedom and citizenship, throwing off oppressive legal, political, and economic chains, although by this time most of the local Taino and other indigenous peoples had already been destroyed or marginalized as societies. (Remarkably, many Taino survive to the 21st century, even from Hispaniola, and challenge dominant interpretations of their elimination.)

During the era of the French Revolution and rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the English had long been in open conflict and competition with the French over North America. The Counterrevolution under Napoleon restored elements of the old systems of empire, including genocidal conquest and race-based slavery, but the Haitians rose up in rebellion and defeated French colonial forces sent to recolonize it. France could no longer reinforce their Caribbean territories, including Louisiana, entering into a treaty agreement with the United States to sell the so-called the Louisiana Purchase, lands belonging not to the French but to the hundreds of Native nations of the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley. However, the Louisiana Purchase serves as an example of Euro-American arrogance, selling and buying lands and resources owned by several diverse indigenous nations without their consent (Fenelon & Defender, 2004). The Louisiana Purchase and subsequent journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark appear noncontroversial in American history texts. But the benign trek of the Corps of Discovery opened the door to tremendous immigration of non-Native foreigners and representatives of the federal government eager to liquidate Indian title to the land and resources, re-creating their old pattern of “discovery” and destruction of Native American cultures, religions, languages, and economies. Particular to the Louisiana Purchase, and possibly the largest land takings in the history of the modern world, is the status of Native nations, few of whom knew about the agreement and none of whom would have honored the European American sale of Native American lands. Also included in the land deal was the technical transfer of sovereignty from the French to the United States, without the knowledge or consent of any one Native nation. By executing this agreement, both countries committed genocide as described by the United Nations, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” Moreover, no representatives of France or the United States had even traversed, mapped the territory, or consulted with the owners of these vast lands owned by Native peoples, not European nations. Instead, France really conveyed their rights to these expansive lands to the United States by the foreign, non-Native Doctrine of Discovery and Prince’s Rights to Conquest from the Westphalia Treaties, which the originators never meant to be applied to Native peoples.

Among the peoples whose autonomy and lands were “transferred” without their knowledge or consent were the Tetonwan Sioux, or Lakota. When the Lewis and Clark expedition, titled the Voyage of Discovery by President Thomas Jefferson to invoke the above doctrines, collided with Lakota leaders and peoples along the Missouri River, it was a harbinger of decades of conflict to come. ² Lakota leaders rejected the Lewis declaration of “sovereignty” through the Great White Father (meaning President Thomas Jefferson), causing him and Clark to call defiant Lakota “the most savage, miscreant race” in the world. ³ Still, the Lakota allowed Lewis and Clark to continue their journey up the Missouri River without a serious incident, but in the years to come, the Lakota became the archetypical defenders of sovereign Indian rights and fought as patriots for their people, lands, and culture. The Lakota engaged the newcomers in constant conflicts, often leading to armed battles and sometimes outright warfare. The Lakota successfully fought to prevent trade and traffic through “Sioux Country” until after the American Civil War, when the United States turned to invasion and legal tactics to control the Lakota, resulting in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The Lakota tried to negotiate with Americans, but the Army and miners violated the Treaty of 1868 by invading the Black Hills and establishing forts on the Bozeman Trail between 1868 and 1874. The United States pushed the Lakota into war by abrogating the Treaty of 1868 and opening Lakota lands to mining development and White settlement. The conflict between the two nations reached its peak in 1876, when the Seventh Cavalry, championed by Colonel George Custer, was destroyed by the Lakota in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The same unit was brought in by U.S. Army brass to finish the surrendered and surrounded Lakota families on Pine Ridge in 1890, finishing off the people associated with the Ghost Dance who had fled with Bigfoot from Cheyenne River and Standing Rock in December 1890, in what has become the massacre of Wound Knee. The killings at Wounded Knee ended overt resistance but not the sovereignty of the Lakota people, who have continued the fight for Native sovereignty and rights.

Euro-Americans constructed the American Indian legally, socially, and racially to the benefit of Euro-American colonizers, and the United States invoked rationalizations and ideologies of invasion and destruction intentionally to steal Native American lands and control for the first nations of the Americas. Agents of the federal government sought to destroy Indian agency and the autonomy of the many Native nations, making sovereignty a legal concept under federal law rather than a spiritual concept born of ancient stories and songs of creation. Thus sovereignty is indigenous to the Americas and not a gift of the United States, which limited Native sovereignty legally without consent based on the Right of Conquest. Furthermore, the federal government employed religious domination as a central rationale in declaring the indigenous as “savage” from 1492 to 1892, and therefore outside the realm of legal and moral responsibility. Over this period, key differences between the Catholic conquest for supposed conversion, albeit at a terrible human cost, and the Protestant racial purification led to elimination of the indigenous, albeit often calling it absorption and later assimilation. These concepts emerged early in the colonial era but became the Manifest Destiny of the United States as the new nation justified the killing, theft, and rape of indigenous people. This interpretation is neither original nor innovative, but challenges scholars to rethink the genocidal attacks of the United States against indigenous Americans, and their underlying rationalizations in language such as the Louisiana “Purchase” and the building of early “democracy” in California.

Through our essay, we have identified the racial construction of the American Indian and attendant dominating ideologies of colonizing European and American powers and then by independent new states reproducing the same systems over indigenous peoples. Euro-Americans used broad transitions from feudal and colonizing countries to modern and independent states, which took place during a 500-year development of the modern world system. Industrialism and capitalism, systems very destructive to indigenous societies, were also developed and became hegemonic in Europe and the Americas. Following the colonizing patterns of Europeans, newcomers to indigenous nations provided global imprints that maximized private property and the accumulation of wealth above all other social systems. In so doing, Euro-Americans destroyed Native American economies and those of other indigenous peoples around the world to gain wealth at the expense of first peoples. Furthermore, transitions from centralized Catholic ideologies to diverse Protestant rationalizations as well as democratically constructed local governments were instrumental in achieving domination, such as the perverse democratic systems employed in California.

Indigenous Peoples—Genocide in California and the Americas

The development of the modern world begins with and is maintained by European and Euro-American invasions and dominations of the Native nations and peoples indigenous to the Americas. In California and other sites within the American West (and around the world) genocide played a central role in the historical processes. Brendan Lindsay has become a leading historian of the genocide theory as it is applied to California’s indigenous populations, relating genocide to the democratic traditions of Americans. In local frontier areas of California (and other sites of the United States), small groups of people met to formulate Indian policies, using democratic meetings to launch genocidal attacks against men, women, and children. During the 1850s and 1860s, pioneers provided their voices as evidence of vast genocidal actions, but the state of California as well as educators, writers, textbook, editors and historians of the period deny the genocide and refuse to reevaluate the historical record based on the evidence. Thus, the dominant society denies and distorts genocide in the name of “progress” and “civilization.” California provides a perfect example of both genocide in practice and policy, and concomitant denial by using Western ideological constructs. In addition, the federal and state governments wish to block reparations due indigenous people by denying the theft of lands and resources, the “killing of members of the group,” the causation of “serious bodily or mental harm,” the destruction of indigenous “conditions of life,” the prevention of “births within the group,” and the enslavement, prostitution, and “transferring children of the group to another group.” (Lindsay, 2012, p. 15; United Nations, 1948).

Although genocide is an ancient practice throughout the world, the term emerged during World War II in response to the Nazi genocide. In 1944, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin wrote Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which coined the term and applied it to state-sponsored genocide or the systematic and intended extermination of ethnic groups or entire human groups. In 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations offered a convention to define genocide as (a) the killing of members of a group, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) deliberately infliction of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Under every category provided by the United Nations, the historical record is clear. Euro-American people and governments have committed genocide worldwide against indigenous peoples, including genocide against Native Americans of California during the era of the Gold Rush, a fact denied by the California Department of Education. The articles in the following section in this volume provide selected examinations of genocide and its long-term effects within indigenous communities. They are offered to continue discourse about genocide with a focus on indigenous communities and peoples.

This section of the article discusses these processes as indicative of what many indigenous peoples have experienced and considers the problems arising for historical and scholarly analysis of genocide against Native Americans. Like other colonizers, the United States sought total domination of Native Americans, and federal and state officials allowed pioneers to murder, rape, kidnap, steal, and destroy Native Americans, creating systems for superordinating settlers, militia soldiers, and government officials to subordinate Indians, thereby developing caste-like social systems fully alienating Indigenes, usually on their own lands. These rationalizations provided the basis for the denial, dismissal, and distortion of genocide in America, most specifically in California, because of six major reasons: (a) the difficult analysis of genocide in California because of the lack of precedent; (b) general denial among scholars, historians, and sociopolitical forces; (c) an inability to establish intentionality (critical to proving genocide); (d) inapplicability of contemporary models; (e) lack of temporal sequencing between systems (e.g., missions to U.S. Indian policy); and (f) failure to take responsibility by descendants and beneficiaries of genocidal policies (similar to throughout the United States generally).

We examine each of these issues, with evidence from California Native nations. For instance, the Chumash were a complex society before the Europeans came, as see in a painting by Michael Wood, Gathering at Shisholop, showing a beachside festival with sports, feasting, and considerable social order. Yet Spanish and later Americans depicted the Chumash and their neighbors as small-scale hunter-gatherers, called “Diggers,” an intentionally charged, racist, and pejorative term with origins in “Niggers.” During the mission period, Indian life was very hard. While many Indian families came willingly at first to the missions, later they resisted mission life and the regimented work. Soldiers forced Indian villagers into missions, traveling great distances into the Mojave Desert, Santa Rosa Mountains, and Colorado Desert to kidnap women and children to force into the mission systems at the San Fernando and San Gabriel missions. Spanish priests oppressed girls and boys, forcing everyone to work for the mission or face corporal punishments. Many died, as evidenced by the pit burials at Mission San Diego and others. Only favored neophytes lived longer, while most people led very short lives. Priests segregated young girls, taking them out of their homes and placing them in monjerios, Spanish dormitories where filth and disease killed many and sickened others. While Priests claimed this to be an attempt to guard girls from sexual activities by locking them in the dormitories where many died, it also made them vulnerable to other males at the mission, including soldiers. When neophytes fled the missions, the priests hunted them down and punished them with jails, stocks, whips, and other severe means. Over the years, California Indians fled the missions, seeking sovereignty and freedom from Spanish overlords. Not long after the Spanish creation of missions, indigenous peoples rose in violent revolt against the priests and soldiers. The Spanish treated first peoples as inferiors, attempting to “convert them to Christ” and force them into forms of Spanish civilization while denigrating Indian culture and religions.

In 1824, 2,000 Chumash struck Missions Santa Barbara, La Purisma, and Santa Ines, the largest of the Indian revolts. The Quechan struck the priests near present-day Yuma, Arizona, and the Kumeyaay burned Mission San Diego. When Indians living in the missions told their own stories, they shared many Native truths: “The Indians complain bitterly that they receive nothing for their toil. . . . This discontent . . . likely resulted in the revolt of the Indians at Santa Barbara and Purisma.” However, there is virtually nothing about this maltreatment in the required fourth grade school curriculum in the state of California. One author’s son, James Dean Fenelon, interviewed Tongva-Gabrieleno teacher Julia Bogany (April 1, 2010) about her origins from Mission San Gabriel and learned of many transgressions within the missions, including the killing of children younger than 10 so families would work harder. He also learned about systematic separation and sexual violation of pubescent girls in many missions, documented as “girls quarters for domestic education” at Mission La Purisma. The teacher of this 10-year-old criticized him for presenting his findings based on oral and Native sources to his classmates in a required fourth grade discussion of the missions and California Indians.

The silencing of historical realities and Native voices permeates the entire educational complex, from grade school to university curricula, with many scholars dismissing the voices of contemporary indigenous people, claiming they have nothing to offer the historical record, including any understanding of their own cultures or tribal relationship with the Spanish in the mission systems. American textbook companies and programs deny Indians a voice, dismiss Indian evidence, and distort historical accounts to pass examinations by non-Native teachers and a few scholars. Genocide is not mentioned in historical texts when addressing the indigenous peoples of America, including Native Americans of California. Helen Fein states, “Only by focusing on the identity of the victim and that of the perpetrator, can we strip the mask of ideology and the accounting mechanisms used by perpetrators to disguise their responsibility” (Fein, 1979, p. 30).

With a continued focus on identity and ideology in our genocide examples, we also need to establish variation in practices and systems. Using systems analysis for genocidal models (Fenelon, 1998), we can identify a range of movement from the most destructive systems of genocide, to still lethal systems of cultural genocide, to the targeting of destruction of culture in order to subordinate by culturicide, to general cultural suppression, to the more benign dominant preferred system of Assimilation, coercive yet less destructive. However, dominant societies can move in either direction, ranging from genocidal practices to assimilation policies. In fact, this has been one of the beguiling factors of identifying genocide in California. The extremely destructive mission system put into place by the Spanish during the 18th and 19th centuries was clearly culturicide and often became cultural genocide in one direction and sometimes cultural suppression in the other. When the United States took over the then secularized missions, the government launched clear-cut genocide in Northern California and event genocide or cultural genocide in Southern California, intensifying the destruction. By the 20th century both California and the United States had moved into cultural suppression and coercive assimilation policies as their primary modalities.

In 1979, Fein contributed further to the analysis of genocide, pointing out that “victims of 20th-century premeditated genocide—the Jews, Gypsies, the Armenians—were murdered in order to fulfill the state’s design for a new order.” Nations created a formula that showed “the right of the master race, the unique destiny of a chosen people” as being the critical justification to wage war “to transform the nation” by eliminating groups conceived as alien, enemies by definition. Thus, perpetrators labeled victims as “adversaries.” The so-called Indian Wars and the above-noted revolts provided rationalization for creating uncivilized “savages” as adversaries to justify their complete destruction (Fein, 1979, pp. 29-30). Rupert and Jeannette Costo (1987) also contributed to the analysis of genocide from a Native American perspective in their book The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide. They argued that Spain’s “new order” was a California without recognizing claims by indigenous peoples, but through reconstructing them as mission Indians with no rights and targeted for elimination. Robert Heizer and Alan Almquist (1977) argued the process accelerated with the discovery of gold and American control of California, in The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920. Americans decided Native Californians were in the way of progress and wealth, and they were threats to miners. So American miners and pioneers determined to “exterminate them” to the extent that they would be eliminated—culturally, physically, politically, and even historically (Heizer & Almquist, 1977).

Newspapers of California and written documents speak to the intentionality of genocide perpetrated by citizens of California and the United States. On a national level, usually operating under Manifest Destiny ideologies, we can show that intentionality to commit genocide against indigenous peoples was strong. “U.S. policymakers, and military commanders, were stating their objective was no less than the ‘complete extermination’ of any native people” resisting the cultural-genocidal policies, according to Stiffarm and Lane (1992, p. 34). Stannard (1992) also describes Native peoples of the Northeast who “regularly suffered depopulation rates of 90 to 95 percent and more.” Even General George Washington declared that the United States must “lay waste all of the [Indian] settlements” until there was “total ruin.” And President Thomas Jefferson stated goals of “to pursue [Indians] to extermination” or “to drive them to new seats beyond our reach” (Takaki, 1979/1993).

The democratic legacy of the United States made it difficult to recognize and acknowledge genocide. Instead the national government and its leaders have offered a systemic denial of genocide, the occurrence of which would be contrary to the principles of a democratic and just society. “Denial of massive death counts is common among those whose forefathers were the perpetrators of the genocide” (Stannard, 1992, p. 152) with motives of protecting “the moral reputations of those people and that country responsible,” including some scholars. It took 50 years of scholarly debate for the academy to recognize well-documented genocides of the Indian removals in the 1830s, including the Cherokee Trail of Tears, as with other nations of the “Five Civilized” southeastern tribes. Yet elementary texts are silent and do not use the term genocide when dealing with Indian removal to the trans-Mississippi West. To do so would put at risk millions of dollars in sales for publishing companies established to make money, not to tell the truth or various interpretations of historical events. Thus, textbooks explain the Indian removals and sometimes share statistics about the thousands of people killed while “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” but no text identifies genocide or develops the theme. Genocide is preserved for the Jewish Holocaust and a few other events in world history.

In considering the analysis and demonstration of how genocide works and what factors or sequences are involved, Fein finds the dominant society’s ruling elite operationalizes a “sequence of preconditions, or intervening factors” (Fein, 1979) that precedes genocide. These factors are the following. First, the victims have been defined outside the universe of obligation of the dominant group. Second, the rank of the state has been reduced in war or strife (this “predisposing condition” is linked to “political or cultural crisis of national identity,” which, for Native peoples, may be attributed to the “end of the frontier” or a new state). Third, an elite political formula is produced to justify the nation’s domination and/or expansion, idealizing singular rights of the dominant group. And then finally this calculus of costs of exterminating the victim changes as perpetrators join a coalition against antagonists who might protest the persecution. Fein (1979) further sees that the “third and fourth conditions taken together constitute necessary and sufficient conditions or causes of premeditated genocide” (pp. 9-10).

Mission system development was certainly premeditated, but actual extermination is not as clear. However, the United States was already pursuing “genocide-at-law” (Strickland, 1992) strategies during this period, as found in the Nonintercourse Act of 1790 by “alienating” Natives from their own lands, in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and in the Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) Supreme Court decisions. Skirting ahead past the California laws, policies and practices, we can also identify the Treaties Statute of 1871 and the General Allotment (or Dawes) Act of 1887 as cementing the alienation and transfer of lands by the United States from and over Indian nations. Similarly, we see genocide by law and practice or deed in California, documented in “Exterminate Them!” Written Accounts of Murder, Rape, and Enslavement of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush, by Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer (1999), and in Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama, 1888-1964, by Trafzer and Robert McCoy.

Finally, linking these policies and practices found with intentionality in law and policy, Irving Horowitz (1982, p. 57) finds that “a central tendency in all genocidal societies is to initially create juridical-legal separations between citizens and aliens, elites and masses, dominant and backward races, and so forth.” So, in this analysis, we ask the question, do we find these in the California case? The answer is an unquestionably and resounding yes. The state of California and federal government contributed to genocide by encouraging militia groups to attack and kill Indians and by paying them for resources they used in destroying Native American communities. In fact, in 1850 the state of California passed Chapter 133, An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, legalizing the taking of Indian children as state wards and the incarceration of vagrant Indians who could not pay their fines and were auctioned off as laborers for eager ranchers. The laws facilitated removing California Indians from their traditional lands, separating at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures (1850 to 1865) and provided for “apprenticing” or indenturing Indian children and adults to Whites, and also punished “vagrant” Indians by “hiring” them out to the highest bidder at a public auction if the Indian could not provide sufficient bond or bail. In 1850 and 1851, the California Legislature enacted laws concerning crimes and punishments that prohibited Indians, or Black or mulatto persons, from giving “evidence in favor of, or against, any white person” in a court of law. And the 1850 statute defined an Indian as having one-half Indian blood, while the 1851 statute defined an Indian as “having one fourth or more of Indian blood.” These are clear juridical-legal separations between citizens and aliens. Legislators in California intended to control Indians at local and state levels by justices of the peace, not federal Indian agents. And when American agents negotiated 18 treaties, creating 18 reservations, the California delegation made sure that Senate of the United States met in a secret session and voted against ratifying any of the negotiated treaties. Thus, California Indians had no “legal” ownership to traditional lands, giving the newcomers time to steal as much Indian lands as possible before federal officials recognized Indian reservations and Indian nations could claim a small portion of their vast former holdings taken by newcomers through “legal” means established by non-Indians in the state of California.

Between the 1850s and 1860s, the state supported militia forces created to kill, rape, and enslave Indians. During the era, the governors of California called out the militia for “expeditions against the Indians” on a number of occasions and at considerable expense (with large numbers mobilized and armed); “Accounts are daily coming in . . . of sickening atrocities and wholesale slaughters of great numbers of defenseless Indians. . . . Within the last four months, more Indians have been killed by our people than during the century of Spanish and Mexican domination” (Mendocino County official register); “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert” (Governor Peter H. Burnett, January 7, 1851). In this, the policies of the state and official records are laid bare. But the costs of these genocides remain incalculable as California Indians continue to cope with the atrocities committed against members of their families. In open sessions of the Native American Heritage Commission of the state of California and the sessions sponsored by the California State Parks to create the California Indian Heritage Center, descendants of California’s first people openly lamented the murder, rape, kidnapping, and enslavement of friends and relatives, remembered in detail through their oral traditions.

Newcomers to California racially defined indigenous peoples and their nations. Between 1851 and 1852, Indian commissioners of the United States negotiated 18 treaties with California Indian tribes, thereby extinguishing Indian title to more than 92% of indigenous lands, with all their resources. In return, the first peoples of California secured a mere 11,700 square miles, or 7.5% of California land. California citizens (which did not include Native peoples) opposed the treaties and did not want to recognize any lands for the first inhabitants of California. In March 1852, the California Assembly voted 35 to 6 to oppose the Indian treaties, and the Senate of the United States, meeting in secret session, voted 19 to 4 against ratification of treaties. The United States rejected the treaties in 1852 but did not inform the indigenous people of these actions until 1904.

In conclusion, pioneers and miners in California committed genocide against the indigenous people of California and initially crowed about the killings, rapes, kidnappings, and enslavements during the 19th century, only to have scholars, authors, and textbook companies silence the genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries. The state of California and federal government participated in the genocide or turned a blind eye to democratically constituted militia groups bent on genocide. The missions of California had a history of Culturicide, one of the stages toward genocide. Newcomers to California—Spanish, Mexican, Russians, and Americans—considered indigenous people to be “alien,” and certainly most were non-Christian. Spain, Mexico, and the United States, and California enacted laws detrimental to the life and liberty of California’s first people, codifying the theft of land and exploitation of indigenous people. In the wake of attempted extermination, the United States enacted laws to destroy the Indian estate, especially the General Allotment Act, Burke Act, and Termination—all subjects beyond the scope of this study. Today the federal and state governments deny the historical record of genocide and do not view the killings as a “real” genocide. Academics, teachers, scholars, authors, educators, politicians, textbook publishers, and the general public do not accept the fact of genocide, even with the evidence provided by Jack Norton, James V. Fenelon, Robert Heizer, Alan Almquist, Clifford Trafzer, Joel Hyer, and especially Brendan Lindsay. More important are the voices of contemporary indigenous people of California who offer oral testimony to the genocide that took the lives of thousands of their families members but not the heart and spirit of California’s first nations people.

We end this section with interview quotes from Emanuel Olague, descendant of Payuchi people of San Bernardino region, whom scholars and governments do not recognize even existed:

The Aqueduct near the San Bernardino courthouse is significant to the Payuchi people because this water belonged to Native Americans, this was their ground, where they would spend their winters because the water came out so hot (180 degrees). All the way down to the Orange Show there was a lake. These are the stories my uncle would tell me. Because there were so many Indians there, when they would make their pot of beans they could see the smoke, and thus it became known as the “Valley of Smoke”—this is where the Payuchi people start at. . . .

I was told that story about 2 ranches, up in Devore of the Cajon Pass, 1 owned by a white guy other by Mexicans. Mexican ranch they had guns and would protect you from the other [American ranch] when great uncle came to this area, they had to get to the Mexican ranch. [pointing] There is the house that the cowboys lived in. Can see where all the people are coming through from the house. Uncle would tell me that when Indians came across the Cajon pass, the cowboys would see them and chase them down, or just shoot at them.

This is 1850 to 55 time period, 1870 tops. Uncle was born in Mexico. Stories of Genocide is not just a myth, we came out to explore uncle’s story and it’s not just a story, it did happen. . . . There was another big massacre happened in Las Flores ranch, literally cut natives heads off and stuck them in the front poles. Las Flores ranch by Silverwood Lake. . . . My dad told me that they could never could say that they were native American from Redlands, because what would happen was that Native Americans were taken into San Timoteo Canyon and were put in horse corrals, like planks where they would train the horses, no one could see in or out. Stuck them in corrals and gave them blankets with diseases and they all died. Tried to figure out where the plague was at, and was told that it was at an old school house and it happened behind in San Timoteo canyon. Refused to let them pray or see the place, sign of what happened to Native Americans. . . .

People went to Deep Creek, Chemehuevi are a branch of Southern Payuchi, and all of them were one huge nation, Paiutes nation. Payuchi meaning is “little Paiute.”. . . When I went to Mojave Lake, an elder saw me and said he was a relative, it was a really nice spirit. But they didn’t know about Chimney Rock. Believe that at Chimney Rock it should say Paiutes, not Chemehuevi, there was a mixture of both and it was written wrong. It was a 32-day battle. Some of the Militia died here, but not many, they were well armed. They had weapons while the Natives were only armed with bows. The Native people chose this spot. . . . My uncle told me to look for springs and if you go into the rock, there is water and they chose this place for the battle because they knew there was water and a lot of rattlesnakes. Militia, name was Holcombe, at that family had a lot of land, by Big Bear and there were mercenaries chasing them, they got money for killing Indians, they got money for taking down Indians, paid by scalp. That was the proof that you killed an Indian; was by the scalp. . . . These markers don’t tell you about that. Many of my relatives died here, it was like the end, yet our stories still survive. (personal communication, June 2, 2012)

Indigenous Peoples—Struggles in Resistance and Revitalization in the Americas

We have attempted to describe the evolving essence of who indigenous peoples were and are through tracing the racial construction of the Indian in the early conquest of the Americas, how colonialism shaped relations between Native nations and colonizing European powers, and how that contributed to the creation of highly racialized new states in the Americas. Of course, over these hundreds of years many indigenous peoples and nations were lost forever, while others survived but in an often violent subordination to dominant Euro-American powers that initially refused citizenship and participation, and thereafter would not recognize the autonomy and potential for sovereignty of American Indians who survived the onslaught of civilization.

American Indians in North America, composing a mere 1% to 2% of the total population north of Mexico, have come to be iconic in representation of resistance to, and ultimately revitalization over, colonizing dominant societies. Differences between the Catholic Spanish and later Protestant English produced different colonizing patterns, racially, politically, and demographically, with these patterns especially evident in the transitions in California from the mission systems to U.S. occupation. With development of industrial, capitalist states with neoimperial objectives of global control, many indigenous peoples are still on the front of resistance to long-term forces of empire, referred to as neoliberalism, that assaults community, environment or land, the political-economy, and the very basic leadership of indigenous peoples. This special issue has a series of articles designed to help describe these processes.

In “Transcending the Coloniality of Development: Moving Beyond Human/Nature Hierarchies,” Tanya Casas, professor of sociology at Delaware Valley College and of indigenous descent from Ecuador, shows us how deep, paradigmatic thinking and “epistemological cracks” between dominant, hegemonic versions of the world and those of surviving indigenous peoples illustrate how Quijano’s notion of coloniality has imbued how we view lands, civilizations, histories, and the essence of hierarchies that the modern world system accepts as “natural” and that the indigenous world often sees as forced and narrow in its scope of an earth interacting on local to global levels. Casas reminds us how Columbus and the conquistador mind-set set off conquista without thought of community, land, or philosophy, some of that evidenced in the debates at Vallodolid and then in conflict with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Law of Mother Earth (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) passed by the Bolivian plurinational state and citizens toward “Mother Earth.” Professor Casas shows us how these relationships are evidenced in the Kichwa indigenous concept of sumak kawsay, or “living well,” for all natural systems, and how these integrate (and unite) peoples and communities with Pachamama (Mother Earth) imagery and philosophy. Although firmly rooted in this historical context, this further transformation of coloniality and its future connotations for the global environment and crisis of capitalism is a perfect starting article.

Manuel Barajas, professor at California State University, Sacramento and of indigenous descent through Mexico, discusses another important topic, or step in analysis, for our general understandings in “Colonial Dislocations and Incorporation of Indigenous Migrants From Mexico to the United States.” Indigenous identity and sense of origin get transmuted through the colonial lens of migration, seen only through the sovereignty of modern states, and furthermore indigenous migrants’ incorporation is within a global context of social inequalities that further obfuscates to cover over indigeneity. Barajas sees emergent “collective nepantla cultural form” as an “in-between position” of two unequal worlds, fully belonging to neither. This not only violates human rights but also is comprehensively destructive to indigenous peoples.

California Genocide Articles

Much of what is known by the general public about the history of California and the American West stems from social studies texts written by well-known scholars and published by the school division of major publishers in the United States. In third grade, most states focus on the history of local areas, but in fourth grade school curricula generally examine state history, including the history of Native Americans of the state’s past. In fifth and eighth grades, students learn about American history, which includes the relationship of English settlers with the Pamunkey and other tribes in Virginia as well as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Massachusetts Indians of New England. Most texts for elementary children deal with “Praying Indians,” warriors of the French and Indian War, Tecumseh, Indian Removal from the South, and the Indian wars of the middle and late 19th century. Nearly all of the texts in American history deal with the California Gold Rush, a central event in American and California history, but they rarely examine the genocide perpetrated by pioneers against California’s first people.

In their work, “Silencing California Indian Genocide in Social Studies Textbooks,” Clifford Trafzer and Michelle Lorimer of the University of California, Riverside examine the silencing of genocide in the historical record provided to children in California and the United States. Trafzer’s earlier volume, “Exterminate Them!”, did little to enlighten teachers, school superintendents, politicians, and administrators of education in California. The present work by Trafzer and Lorimer points out more clearly that although social studies texts examine the California Gold Rush, the curriculum focuses primarily on benign aspects of the Gold Rush: the gold discovery at Sutter’s Mill on the American River, the rush of the forty-niners, routes taken by gold seekers, the high price of food and Levi’s jeans, and the transition from mining with pans and rockers to high-powered hydraulic hoses.

Some texts mention the place of California Indians in the Gold Rush, but only a few mention that miners and soldiers killed thousands of Indian men, women, and children. Not one textbook refers to the killings and displacement of Native Americans as a genocide, even though the treatment of Indians during the era fits every category of genocide defined by the United Nations: killing members of the group, causing bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction (theft of natural resources, including food and water), imposing measures intended to prevent births (kidnapping of children, slavery, and prostitution), and forcibly transferring children (kidnapping children, separating families, and forcing children into federal schools). The state of California contributed to genocide by aiding and funding settlers and volunteer troops, and the United States provided money and regular soldiers to kill Indians and destroy their homes. The state of California and federal officials ignored the atrocities, in part because Indians were a vanishing race and because their extermination suited the aims of every level of government. Since the 1850s and 1860s, Californian officials have denied genocide, and the California Department of Education continues to deny genocide and silence textbooks from providing children truths about the genocide of Native Americans by pioneers during the era of the Gold Rush.

Trafzer, Lorimer, and other authors in this special issue owe a great debt to the cutting-edge scholarship of Jack Norton. They all draw on the groundbreaking research of Hupa-Cherokee author Norton. In 1979, Norton became the first scholar to use the definition of genocide provided by the United States when addressing genocide in his book, Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried. The professor emeritus of American Indian studies at Humboldt State University adds to his past research on genocide in his essay, “If the Truth Be Told: Revising California History as a Moral Objective.” The enrolled member of the Yurok Nation was the first California Indian historian to be appointed to the Rupert Costo Chair of American Indian History at the University of California, Riverside. His work in this volume documents the genocidal aggression committed by the majority of White citizens against the Native peoples of California.

Despite the moral objectives of settlers and their purported ideals of Christianity, democracy, and protection of loved ones granted to all of humankind, they perpetrated horrible acts of inhumanity against California’s Indian people. Through their own writings, White pioneers and their leaders justified murders, rapes, kidnappings, and thefts by projecting their racial superiority over “savage heathens.” The dichotomy between their stated virtues and overt behavior has allowed them and past leaders to offer distortions, misinformation, and continued psychological confusion and conflict within the American psyche and California’s Indian history. The essay found here offers us the opportunity as scholars, historians, and concerned citizens to review and revise the historical record based on sound archival research and to aid future learning while, perhaps, healing human relations. Hence, our shared moral objective for accountability, for justice, and for truth may teach us all about the ethical responsibility we have to one another and to all life forms.

Brendan C. Lindsay is an assistant professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, and the author of the recent much-acclaimed volume, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873. Lindsay adds to his past work with an original essay, “Humor and Dissonance in California’s Native American Genocide,” which focuses on a disturbing feature of California’s Native American genocide—the use of humor as a salve by its perpetrators, the Euro-Americans who flooded California seeking wealth and opportunity beginning with the Gold Rush. These emigrants launched a peripherally organized, democratically driven popular campaign of genocide against California’s Native American population that nearly wiped them out by 1900. It is difficult to imagine a history more humorless. But as one examines Euro-American attitudes toward and actions against Native peoples in California, a compelling vein of evidence emerges that illustrates the significant role played by humor in aiding and abetting atrocity.

White settlers to California used humor to help relieve cognitive dissonance between the perpetrators of and bystanders to the genocide. By making Native American humanity a joke and their demise something to be laughed away, genocide could proceed with fewer misgivings associated with brutalizing and killing human beings, including women and children. Humor taught and reinforced in White audiences what other sources within Euro-American culture had already laid the groundwork for, even before heading west to California: Indians were savage animals or at best laughable caricatures of humans rather than humans, not to be lamented but laughed at in their extinction. White pioneers and newspaper editors deployed their wit in a variety of ways: in published articles and humor sections; in cartoons and illustrations; in practical jokes played on Native Americans; and, later, recounted in written pioneer memoirs. By examining anti-Indian jokes, cartoons, and humor in the latter half of the 19th century, one can understand in new and complex ways the nature and character of Euro-American attitudes toward indigenous peoples and their extermination.

In addition to the killing, rape, enslavement, and other nonhumorous methods, non-Indians extended their genocide with an assault on American Indian cultures, religions, and languages by placing children in federal Indian schools where administrators, teachers, and disciplinarians could reprogram children. In his book, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, David Wallace Adams (1995, x-xi) stated that the federal government established off-reservation American Indian boarding schools “for the sole purpose of severing the child’s cultural and psychological connection to his native heritage.” And in his book, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, Ward Churchill (2004, xlv) states that given the definition of genocide provided by the United Nations, the forceful removal of Native children and intended destruction of American Indian cultures in boarding schools constitutes genocide: “The profundity of their destructive effects upon native people, both individually and collectively . . . [is] incalculable.” Federal officials established the Indian schools to destroy American Indian cultures and replace Native “savage” cultures with American “civilization” through limited academics, vocational education, work, and Christianity.

Kevin Whalen of the University of California, Riverside, scholar of student labor at the Sherman Institute, provides an examination of cultural genocide at the flagship off-reservation American Indian boarding school, the Sherman Institute of Riverside, California. In his essay, “Finding the Balance: Student Voices and Cultural Loss at Sherman Institute,” Whalen argues that most people view Indian boarding schools as imagined places, defined by homesickness, disease, and cultural loss. While school officials set out to destroy every aspect of Indian cultures, religions, and languages, recent studies have added nuance to older interpretations of the boarding school experience. During the early 20th century, many students used the schools to benefit themselves and their families. Documents from the Sherman Institute provide case studies regarding this trend. During the Great Depression, Native people from across the American Southwest found work in Southern California through the “outing system,” an Indian boarding school program intended to “uplift” Indians by sending them to work within White households and businesses. Others came to Sherman seeking a specific skill that might allow them to gain employment in Los Angeles. Urban Indians in Los Angeles used Sherman as an escape route from poverty in the city to gainful employment.

While more recent studies of federal Indian boarding schools highlight how students “turned the power” and used the schools to their own benefit, contemporary Native voices often remember the schools as places of violence and suffering. How, then, can scholars illuminate student approaches to federal Indian education systems without downplaying the pain and suffering caused by ethnocentric curricula and dangerous conditions within the schools? The acknowledgment of cultural genocide within boarding schools is a good place to start. As scholars continue to focus on student voices and choices within the boarding school experience, the acknowledgment of cultural genocide within the schools will call to mind the damage inflicted on individuals and communities by federal Indian education. Moreover, the study of cultural genocide will remind us of the remarkable challenges that Native students faced and many overcame as they navigated their boarding school “seasons” and used the schools to access jobs and gain new skills and perspectives. But as James Fenelon has pointed out, federal Indian boarding schools serve as a clear example of “culturicide” or cultural genocide that remains a part of the nation’s past and that of many Native American people today.

Indigenous Struggles to the 21st Century

We have documented how the mission system in California was cultural genocide, leading to the death of many Native peoples and the destruction of their cultures. Furthermore, creation of the boarding schools is clear culturicide—an intentional destruction of lifeways, such as language, kinship systems, and national origin ties. In “Visualizing Humanitarian Colonialism: Photographs From the Thomas Indian School,” Jeffrey Montez de Oca and José Prado discuss eras that boarding schools went through, using the Thomas Indian School where the relatives of Montez de Oca attended and he was privy to firsthand accounts. Early culturicidal or coercive assimilation forms of the 1890s and early 20th century changed during what they observe as Progressive era of the 1930s emerging after the Indian New Deal, yet they see continued racial ideologies dominating the schools, albeit without putting “Indianness” in opposition to civilizing projects seen as progress. Through the extensive use of photographs, Montez de Oca and Prado show us how the school both “inflicted tremendous harm on students and exasperated traumas” yet also gave them opportunities and education they otherwise may not have had, even if in the lower rungs of the working world and often in servile positions. Utilizing Philip Deloria’s concept of “playing Indian,” Montez de Oca and Prado also show us how the “real Indians” used in commodity racism were actually the least knowledgeable and least connected of the schools’ student body. Boarding schools thus are part of the broader racial project of producing stereotypical “Indians” even as they were in the past out to “kill the Indian” meaning the cultural forms of indigenous nations and societies. It was in this milieu that many Native youths made the best of a bad situation and learned or benefited from the boarding schools, although as members of a mainstream society that discriminated against them as members of individual Native nations.

Caleb Bush takes us in another direction, away from the educational bureaucracy used to suppress indigenous cultures and into governmental forms of breaking up Native land holdings for further penetration of corporate exploitation, in “Subsistence Fades, Capitalism Deepens: The ‘Net of Incorporation’ and Diné Livelihoods in the Opening of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, 1880-1970,” which identifies the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) part in this late stage incorporation. Always pernicious, the BIA as a governmental arm identifies this as the Hopi-Navajo dispute, disqualifying the United States and corporate players such as Peabody Mining as major players, somewhat akin to calling the armed conflicts of 200 years ago the Indian Wars. This is clear in the government’s language of seeing it based on “age-old hatred between the Hopis and the Navajos.” A quote from Bush’s essay captures what the editors of this journal find is more indicative of indigenous perspectives, in the words of a relative of Hopi traditionalist Thomas Banyacya:

I have never known up until now, of any wars between the Navajo and Hopi people. The Navajo people around my place, they bring me wood, they bring me mutton, and in turn, I trade them corn and other things. We all need each other. Maybe a long time ago our ancestors fought, or whatever, but as far as I know, there has never been a war between the Navajo and the Hopi. It is this white man, these white people, who want to get hold of our land. They are the ones who are causing this conflict of this so-called war that is being fought like they say we shouldn’t do. (Bush, 2014, 189)

This brings us to the second to last article on a topic of enduring controversy precisely because it speaks to the contrast in worldviews and communities of “indigenous peoples” and Western notions of conservation of the environment, often without seeing the power issues that are involved or the inculcated dysfunction of dominant nation-states over traditional knowledge and how it may be enacted in relation to global environments. Ulia Popova takes on this effort in “Conservation, Traditional Knowledge, and Indigenous Peoples,” where she examines “theorizing sustainability—a model that balances social and economic needs with the requirements for environmental safety—with a need to support threatened by the postindustrial economies subsistence practices of indigenous groups” within the difficult and often convoluted worlds of policy makers and actual results. Evaluating over 100 cases around the world, Popova discusses the complex policy and economic constraints and supports that affect traditional knowledge and practices toward the land, itself a topic of immense philosophical proportions, through community management, the tourism industry, creating protected areas, and alternative approaches in various contexts around the world, all supported by data charts of great precision. The work finds most of the indigenous projects were “secondary” in their results, as it also points out that many conditions and methods were “imposed” on indigenous peoples, with somewhat greater results from those practicing autonomy, or what is called cultural sovereignty. This gets at the heart of issues in this journal issue, in that these efforts are still within global contexts that historically have been more about profiteering and domination, and that are evaluated in terms of a larger, mostly neoliberal paradigm that doesn’t acknowledge resistance and survival of the people as positive outcomes, nor consistency of community and traditional life in such a world.

We are now back to the issues of the first article, where identity conflicts are found in ongoing issues constructed by “blood logics” arising from “settler colonialism” that produced the North American policies of American Indian political identification as part of racialization projects growing out of settler-state formation. Here we look to future Native scholars to take on these deep processes of systemic settler colonial logics that continue to suppress indigenous peoples and finalize the appropriation of their lands and cultural histories. Hoest Mo’e’hane Oxháestoxese (Hoest Heap of Birds) is one of a host of younger scholars examining these relationships as an eliminationist discourse that brings us full circle from Casas’s observations on how coloniality obscures indigenous practices for centuries, in Casas’s cases in South America, even as contemporary settler-colonial logics still determine political orientations and can create divisiveness in ways that maintain hegemonic dominance, cover up a multiplicity of genocidal eliminations of Native Nations and peoples, and reduce the cohesiveness needed for supporting sovereignty struggles.

Indigenous Peoples—Lessons and Future Prospectus

Coloniality and its attendant cultural destruction continues to affect modernity for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, including in their understanding of history, dominant distortions of their cultural sovereignty, and even issues of internal identity. These issues are exacerbated because of immigration issues in contemporary state systems, particularly the United States, and a general lack of recognition of international borders other than those arising from colonial constructs.

Systems of cultural destruction reconstruct ideologies of rationalization and justification, such as with the California missions, that further subordinate American Indians and nations. When even more dominant and destructive systems enter into the social arena, these distortions are amplified, such as with the genocides in California after it was a state, that hegemonic forces take the trouble to deny, distort, and suppress in political systems claiming to be democratic. Recognition and revitalization become increasingly more difficult when these systems refuse indigenous perspectives, history, and knowledge. Some bureaucratic mechanisms of control such as boarding schools operated in a sphere of education culturicide while claiming to be “helping” indigenous peoples. American Indian identity therefore becomes suppressed and confused, furthering dominant group interests.

Other bureaucratic mechanisms such as the BIA ensure ongoing dominant exploitation, as with corporate mining interests. Globally, these systems and their denial of indigenous traditional knowledge are even harder to observe because they are situated in neoliberal systems of capitalist and state control, which are solely evaluated by productive measures that ignore community or collective interest.

Finally, we observe that racial and cultural constructions, emanating from settler colonial ideologies, further distort community and sociohistorical endeavors to make progress within these systems. Of course, these are rooted in the same coloniality from our first observation, amplified by denial of genocide and culturicide, such as what happened in California and is still perpetuated by the schools and curriculum of the state. Thus, the struggles of indigenous peoples require reconstructing histories and identities and revitalizing our societies by melding those into modern social systems that accept and understand traditional knowledge and perspectives, while creating our own new social movements that allow us to collectively step forward.

These struggles are evident in the world around us, as the Idle No More movement from Canada spread throughout North America and now is global. Sustained efforts by Native survivors of the genocidal suppression of the Ixil and many other Mayan highland communities by General Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala have brought the first charges of genocide against their own head of state by any country in history, even as indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Peru challenge multinational oil and mining corporations with lawsuits on environmental destruction. Many successful Native nations are working with and assisting struggling peoples to have their stories heard, and some semblance of justice to be stated in the open. We can only hope this special issue can help with these important efforts by establishing these past and present Indigenous struggles in the Americas. In that sense, we are all related in the world, or as Lakota people say, “mitakuye oyasin” (all my relatives in respect and strength across the earth).