Introductory Essay

The history of California was already thousands of years old by the time Europeans came to stay in 1769. Long after the first Indigenous people made California their home, their descendants numbered in the hundreds of thousands and lived in hundreds of densely settled independent nations. Colonizing newcomers of European descent found Native Californians thriving in a world of abundance and relative peace, but the colonizers did not mean to leave California as they found it. In a relatively short period of time—just an instant in the long sweep of human history in America—they violently undid the work of generations of Native Californians.

In California, a series of colonizing societies posed threats to Indians. The Spanish forced coastal Native people to give up their land and to labor for the people who took it. Instead of working to sustain their own communities’ independence and prosperity, Native Californians worked at new industries like cattle ranching and European-style farming to support the colony. When California was part of Mexico, ranchers raided independent villages for laborers and took control of more Indian land. Colonists made it harder for Indians to make a living from the gathering, fishing, and hunting they had historically relied upon. This made the Indians poorer and less secure. Colonists had already inflicted violence, poverty, and hardship on thousands of people by the time gold was discovered in 1848. After that, when Americans arrived in large numbers and claimed California as a state, more California Indians faced even greater danger.

Americans took control of California by law and by violence. American citizens were confident that they had the right to use physical force to secure their own rights and to take Indians’ land because of their race. They knew their government would support them. In the United States in the mid-1800s, “race” was the idea that human diversity could be explained by perceived or imagined differences in peoples’ physical features and that these differences should determine one’s place in society. It was a way of determining who had power. Those whom the law treated as “white” stood to gain the full benefits of property ownership, citizenship, and political freedom (if they were male), as well as the ability to act with authority when it came to “nonwhite” people. White citizens in California saw Indians not as members of distinct and independent nations, but as a lower race of people within American society. As such, state laws empowered whites to act forcefully against Native and other nonwhite people. One of California’s first laws denied Indians equal protection under the law. That law also set up a system that allowed citizens to keep Indians as laborers without paying them, have them arrested and then put to work if they were not already employed by a white citizen, and use corporal punishment on them. By law in California, white citizens could not be convicted based on Indians’ trial testimony, which assured white citizens that their mistreatment of Indians would not be prosecuted as a crime.

Citizens also used violence to terrorize entire communities of California Indians. Groups of white citizens attacked Indian villagers to “punish” suspected thieves, to keep Indians away from citizens’ property, and to capture Indian children. The state and federal governments often paid the attackers and so encouraged more attacks. Almost from the moment they began, white citizens understood and even cheered these attacks as attempts to destroy or “exterminate” California Indians. Americans displaced California Indians from their lands and homes, denied them access to traditional life-sustaining resources, carried out mass murder against them, enacted a system of forced labor that led to the kidnapping and enslavement of Indian children, and generally subjected them to a sustained climate of terror.

Historians have written that American violence against California Indians was similar to other historical examples of organized and government-supported violence against specific groups of people. Even before the word “genocide” was defined during World War II, surviving California Indians knew that they had endured world-shattering violence at the hands of Americans. In the 1930s, the Pomo man William Benson published the first historical article by a California Indian on what scholars would later call the California Indian genocide. For his evidence, he talked to survivors of two 1850 American attacks on Pomo villages in Northern California. Benson ended his account not with the violence itself but with a survivor’s grief. After the attack, when one man realized that he was “not to see my mother and sister but to see their blood scattered over the ground like water,” he was overwhelmed and “sat down under a tree and cryed all day.”

In the years that followed, that man and other grieving survivors set to work on the difficult task of remaking the kinds of Indian communities in which Benson was later born, grew up, and lived his entire life. By the time Benson published his article, eighty years after the gold rush, California had more tribes than any other state in the country, but for every Indian person living in the state, there were nearly three hundred non-Indians. California Indians owned almost nothing of what would become the wealthiest state in the country. Survivors and their communities dealt with these legacies of nearly unimaginable destruction as they continued new chapters in the long history of California’s Indian people.