An American Genocide

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 is a 2017 non-fiction book about the California genocide by history professor Benjamin Madley.

Background and publication

An American Genocide was the first book to fully document the U.S. government-sanctioned California Genocide.^[1] The book was published by Yale University Press^[2] and is used by Yale University.^[1]

The 692 page book^[2] was published on 27 June 2017.^[1] It was written by Benjamin Madley, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.^[2]

Synopsis

The chronologically arranged^[3] book documents the United States-government's role in the 19th-century California genocide. The book details killing of Native Americans by the Americans who violently colonised California. It gives the pre-1846 history in which Spanish colonisers used Native Americans as a source of low-cost labour, and how Native Americans suffered from both disease and land theft. When the Americans arrived, they started a program of genocidal extermination, killing 80% of the Native American population, who lacked access to firearms.^[2] The book reports on the slavery that Americans subjected Native American women and the abuse of children:

“[Some] white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. . . . Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid.”^[2]

The book's author names the actions as genocidal^[4][2] and devotes 200 pages of the book^[2] to documenting almost every killing that took place during the time period that the book covers.^[5]

Critical reception

The book won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 2016 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.^[1]

In 2018, Pacific Historical Review described the book as "monumental."^[5] The Journal of the Early Republic described it as "impressive" and praised the author for the quality of his research.^[3]

References