TRUTH DIG
PHOTO / Amazon
Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was exposed to the effects of colonization at an early age. “When I was a boy,” he explains, “my father was working with Karuk people, as a psychologist. … I was getting exposure to the ongoing conflicts between colonists—us—and the indigenous people of California.”
Madley is the guest for this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” podcast. He joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to discuss this too-little-known aspect of California history. The two begin by talking about the label “genocide,” a term used by Madley in his book, “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846-1873.”
“What are the disputes about whether this is genocide?” Scheer asks. “And what is the value of the term?”
Explaining that the term has a wide range of academic definitions, Madley notes that he is using “the 1948 United Nations genocide convention’s definition, because that is the definition that almost all nation-states in the world now subscribe to.” Madley explains that because of this definition, it is possible to prosecute those who have committed genocide.
“Frankly, there’s a lot at stake,” he says. “This is a major issue for the 150,000 people who identify themselves as California Indians. … Many of them see a relationship between the genocide and ongoing issues of historical trauma that are related to high rates of suicide, high rates of domestic violence and other health issues that impact California Indian people today.”
RS: Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is Scheer Intelligence, my podcast in collaboration with KCRW featuring American originals who supply the intelligence. My guest today is Benjamin Madley, who is a history professor at UCLA and author of the recent book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. Benjamin Madley, welcome.
BM: Robert, it’s a pleasure to be here.
RS: So let me ask you, first of all, why this period that your book deals with, the period from 1846 to 1873? Why California, and why did you write, devote so much of your research and life so far to this topic?
BM: My interest in this project goes way back to when I was a boy finding arrowheads on our family’s ranch in northern California. And when we moved back from Siskiyou County to LA, I started to attend high school with a Plains Indian warrior for a mascot. And I knew, being familiar with Karuk people in the area where I’d been a boy, that this kind of regalia was not the regalia, is not the regalia of California Indian people. And at the same time, anthropologists and archaeologists were beginning to come to campus looking at Indian village sites, Tongva village sites right on the spot where I was taking my German classes. And so I began to wonder, where are all the Indian people? Later, as an undergraduate at Yale, I wrote about the destruction of Tasmanian aborigines by British colonists in the early 19th century. And at Oxford as an MA student, I wrote about the destruction of Nama and Herero people in what was then German South-West Africa. So when I returned to graduate school after a number of years away, returning to Yale, I thought that I ought to write about the vanishing or the killing off of California Indian people.
RS: So let me make a point, by the way, that the An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley, published by Yale University Press. And it’s really a substantial commitment on their part. This is a major work and a difficult undertaking. But you had a personal history, I believe, and when you came to my class at USC to speak about this, you mentioned your father was working in this field and that’s why you were up there and—yeah.
BM: Yes. So when I was a boy, living in the log cabin on the family ranch, my father was working with Kuruk people as a psychologist. So I was—
RS: Was he in the government, or he was—
BM: He was working for the tribe, right. So I was getting exposure to the ongoing conflicts between colonists—us—and the indigenous people of California. Conflicts over what should be done with the Klamath Dam, which was leading to ever-increasing fish kills and ever-decreasing salmonid populations on the river. Timbering, which was putting effluents into the river that were making it difficult for fish to survive. The gold mine in our local town, which was polluting while at the same time creating the economic mainstay for the town. So those issues were very obvious and real. They weren’t hidden away in 19th century histories; they were present, they were visible.
RS: So at a point in your youthful experience, when, at least in an earlier culture, most kids would be cowboys killing Indians—in an earlier history, that’s when I grew up—you actually were in a position because of your father’s occupation to understand that we were dealing with humans, and complex humans, with different aspirations. We now have another cartoon image of the Indian. We have the drunken Indian that we see in urban centers, but we have also the idea of the prosperous Indian because of gambling, casinos, and so forth.
BM: Indeed.
Truth Dig for more