Benjamin Madley’s book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 is a recent addition to the wonderful Lamar Series in Western History from Yale University Press. Noting that “relatively little” has been written about the destruction of California’s Native population, Madley contributes to the growing body of historical work that explores “genocide,” a term of twentieth-century origin, to understand events deeper in the past. Some readers might question the usefulness of applying this term to events in the past, but Madley succinctly makes the case for why these events in California can accurately be described as genocide. He writes, “Genocide is a twentieth-century word, but it describes an ancient phenomenon and can therefore be used to analyze the past” (p. 5). He documents how other historians have used the term in their studies and connects it to the use of the older word, “extermination.” Madley sets his book in a larger context by writing that he seeks answers to larger and uncomfortable questions about the role of genocide in the making of modern democracies like the United States. He also connects his work to the present by asking broad questions about how descendants of California Indians should react to this history, wondering about possible forms of reparation and recognition. Finally, he asks how modern non-Native Californians might reevaluate their relationships with Native descendants. The book explicitly does not address the idea of a concerted effort at the cultural destruction of Native peoples. Much has been written about that elsewhere, and Madley is specifically focused on proving how and why these events should be labeled as genocide.
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