Modoc chief Kintpuash photographed by T.N. Wood in 1864. Kintpuash and his family were among the Modoc removed from California by the United States in 1864; his leadership of Modoc and attempts to return and resist led to his capture and execution by the US Army in 1873. (Photo: Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles; Public Domain)[Editors’ note: In his introduction, the author states “Where sources create uncertainty as to tribal identity, I follow the twenty-first-century California Indian practice of using the term Indian or California Indians.” Truthout’s policy is to use the terms Indigenous or Native for articles by non-Native authors and we have made that change in this interview.]
The genocide of California’s Indigenous nations was the foundation upon which settler colonialism built the “Golden State.” In this interview, historian and author Benjamin Madley argues that understanding the 19th century genocide in California will assist scholars in “re-examining the larger, hemispheric Indigenous population catastrophe.”
Mark Karlin: Can you define what constitutes “genocide” and the origin of the term?
Benjamin Madley: In 1943, the legal scholar Raphaël Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide,” or killing, to describe genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, national, religious or political group. In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the…