 | ||
The California Genocide is a term used to describe the decrease in the indigenous population of California due to violence, relocation and starvation as a result of the U.S occupation of California. The indigenous population of California under Spanish rule dropped from 300,000 prior to 1769, to 250,000 in 1834. After Mexico won its independence from Spain, and after the secularization of the coastal missions by the Mexican government in 1834, the indigenous population suffered a much more drastic decrease in population. The period immediately following the U.S. conquest of California has been characterized by numerous sources as a genocide. Under US sovereignty, after 1848, the Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 in 1870 and reached its nadir of 16,000 in 1900.
Contents
Background
Prior to Spanish arrival, California was home to an indigenous population estimated at 300,000, with the largest group being the Chumash people with a population around 20,000. The diversity of the region was evident in the numerous distinct languages spoken. Even with the great diversity in the area, archeological findings show little evidence of intertribal conflicts.
The various groups appear to have adapted to its particular area. California supported an abundance of wildlife, including rabbits, deer, varieties of fish, and acorns. This resulted in a high level of food independence and allowed the natives to engage in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, moving around their area as food was available.
California was one of the last regions in the Americas to be colonized. Spanish missionaries led by Franciscan administrator Junipero Serra and military forces under the command of Gaspar de Portola arrived in 1769. The goal of this mission was to spread the Christian faith among the region's indigenous peoples. They built the first of 21 missions, San Diego de Alcalá, in present-day San Diego. Military outposts were constructed alongside the missions to house the soldiers sent to protect the missionaries.
California statehood and genocide
Mexican rule didn't last long either as after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to end the Mexican-American War, the U.S. took control of California, and in the latter half of the 19th century both State and Federal authorities, incited aided and financed miners, settlers, ranchers and people`s militias to enslave, kidnap, murder and exterminate a major proportion of displaced Native American Indians, sometimes contemptuously referred to as "Diggers", using many of the same policies of violence against the indigenous population that it did throughout its territory.
Simultaneous to the ongoing extermination, reports of its effects were being made known to the outside world.
A notable early eyewitness testimony and account: "The Indians of California" 1864, is from John Ross Browne, Custom's official and Inspector of Indian Affairs on the Pacific Coast systematically categorizing the fraud, corruption, land theft, slavery, rape and massacre perpetrated on a substantial portion of the aboriginal population.
By one estimate, at least 4,500 California Indians were killed between 1849 and 1870. Historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873 and estimated that during this period at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians, mostly occurring in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise"). Professor Ed Castillo, of Sonoma State University, provides a higher estimate: "The handiwork of these well armed death squads combined with the widespread random killing of Indians by individual miners resulted in the death of 100,000 Indians in the first two years of the gold rush."
Call for tribunals
United States federal law contains no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity (genocide). Native American scholar Gerald Vizenor believes that university tribunals should be assembled:
Genocide tribunals would provide venues of judicial reason and equity that reveal continental ethnic cleansing, mass murder, torture, and religious persecution, past and present, and would justly expose, in the context of legal competition for evidence, the inciters, falsifiers, and deniers of genocide and state crimes against Native American Indians. Genocide tribunals would surely enhance the moot court programs in law schools and provide more serious consideration of human rights and international criminal cases by substantive testimony, motivated historical depositions, documentary evidence, contentious narratives, and ethical accountability.
Vizenor, in accordance with international law, believes that the Universities of South Dakota, Minnesota and California Berkley ought to initiate and establish tribunals to hear evidence and adjudicate in crimes against humanity alleged to have taken place in their own state and domain. [5]