• Title: An American Genocide
• Author: Benjamin Madley
• Genre/Subject: American history
• Publisher: Yale
• Publication Date: 2016
• Start date: 5/14/24
• Finish date: 5/17/24

Review:

Picked this book up for under 5 dollars and it was superb. Let me qualify that. It was superbly researched, constructed, and written but the subject matter was very difficult to deal with at a personal and emotional level.

The author spent years researching and consulting primary sources to come up with a damning account of the U.S government in perpetrating a catastrophe on the indigenous peoples of California. Now, and then of course you’ll be unlikely to read about it because anything that doesn’t support the white christian nationalist vision of American history is woke, and therefore banned and hidden and shoved aside to make room for suburbs and megachurches. The more things change… etc.

Most people have heard of the Trail of Tears, but this California business was news to me. Starting with the Spanish, then the Mexicans, the indigenous people of California were starved, abused, tortured, forcibly removed from their ancestral homes, sold as slaves, and if all that failed there was good old solid murder too.

I like to have a snack sometimes while I read, but that proved to be impossible with this volume. Literally made me feel queasy.

One of the main objectives within the book was to establish exactly what genocide means, and to prove that under that definition the Californian Indian catastrophe qualifies as genocide. While that may sound pedantic it is actual of critical importance. You see this in cases like Rwanda and Armenia, where governments and those in power avoid that word as it has powerful international legal weight. Consider the example of a single shooter scenario. If a man shoots a group of people the first thing that anyone wants to know is, did he act alone or was he backed by an organization? If that organization is found to be a terrorist group that’s bad, but if it is found to be a foreign state behind it, that can mean war.

But if it’s your own historical government found to have committed these atrocities, then what do you do? If you’re like Ron de Santis you deny it, ban teaching of it, burn the books, hold a rally in support of more rights for golfers and then move along. If you’re like me you read books like these and then publish a review on your website. Because people NEED TO KNOW about this, just like they need to know about Stalin’s purges happened, or the Armenian genocide. Because if people don’t have access to the information that leaves the door open to denialism and the dirtbags like Alex Jones that profit off it.

Nearly 100 pages of notes and bibliography, so this is proper full-blooded research. As opposed to watching a 6 minute youtube video with a spooky electronic soundtrack, what most people consider well researched, truthful evidence.

This type of history makes people uncomfortable, it makes me uncomfortable. But you can’t put this under the porch and forget about it, you need to read it, understand what happened, and then decide how to repair the damage or at the very least stop it from happening again.

An excellent read, somewhat digressional in parts and difficult to follow in others, but certainly an excellent book that everyone should at least have access to.