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 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]
