American Settler Colonialism: A History by Walter L. Hixson

Author:Walter L. Hixson [Hixson, Walter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), 19th Century, Social History
ISBN: 9781137374240
Google: UVHVngEACAAJ
Amazon: B00HP4KEW8
Barnesnoble: B00HP4KEW8
Goodreads: 18360206
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Killing Fields of California

Preceding the dispossession of the Plains tribes was a genocidal campaign against of the California Indians. In a recent study, Benjamin Madley found “evidence of hundreds of massacres and mass killings perpetrated against California Indians” constituting an “American genocide.” Colonial ambivalence thus found little traction with the American settlers of California. Free of government oversight, they carried out orchestrated campaigns of mass murder.39

As a result of the gold rush, settlers poured into California too fast for the federal government and its treaty-making prerogative to gain traction. Thus Americans dealt with California much like the settlers in Australia, treating the territory as terra nullius (empty or uninhabited land) thus obviating the need for treaties. By the time federal agents arrived, surveyed the situation, and drew up treaties to dispossess the bands in a civilized legal fashion, it was already too late. In 1851–1852, Californians rejected the federal treaties, which they claimed would hand over “the finest farming and mineral lands” to tribes “wholly incapable, by habit or taste, of appreciating its value.”40

Treating California as empty land was brutally ironic insofar as the territory at one time probably had the highest density of indigenous people on the continent. The Indian population, estimated at about 300,000 in 1769 when the Spanish built their first missions on the Pacific coast, had been halved by the time of the 1849 gold rush. Over the next decade, it plummeted another 80 percent, to around 30,000 Indians, as a result of murder, disease, famine, and declining birth rates. By 1900 only about 15,000 Indians remained in California.41

Separated by almost a century, both Hispanic colonialism and American settler colonialism had a shattering impact on indigenous Californians. As the Spanish Franciscan missionaries sought to force labor and conversion on them, the coastal Indians suffered the “brutal effects of mission policies.” Many adapted but most resisted and stayed away from the missions and presidios. In 1680, the massive Pueblo revolt drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe. In 1775, hundreds of Indians assaulted and burned to the ground the San Diego Mission. Such revolts prompted the Spanish to “put down resistance with shocking brutality, killing, maiming, or enslaving Indians who defied them.”42

Holding their own in an ambivalent colonial setting for some 80 years, Indians in the California interior interacted with Spanish missionaries, mission refugees, Mexicans, and American settlers. Relegated primarily to the coast, neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans successfully colonized the interior tribes of California— only the American settler colonials ultimately would cleanse them from the land. Following the revolt from Spain, Mexican rancheros broke up the mission system and took control of coastal California. The dominant rancheros during the period in which Mexico laid claim to California (1821–1846), men such as Mariano Guadalupe Villejo, “emerged both wealthy and popular after he and his followers attacked and murdered over 200 Wappos in 1834.” Indigenous people on the coast, both men and women, worked for the rancheros while Indians from the interior plagued the Mexicans with raids in which they stole stock, especially horses.

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