Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
In August 2017, protesters, counter-protesters and white supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Virginia.
What started as a rally against the removal of a Confederate statue quickly devolved into a melee.
The violence added fuel to a national reckoning already underway — a debate over how we as a nation remember infamous men, now on the wrong side of history.
In California, the timbre of that conversation sounds a little different, but there are some common threads: There are 109 federally recognized American Indian nations here. Several suffered at the hands of the state's earliest settlers.
Despite this, the names of those responsible for their annihilation live on, according to Benjamin Madley. Madley is an associate professor of history at UCLA, and author of the book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe.
"California's legislature convened for the first time in 1850, and one of its very first orders of business was banning all Indian people from voting, barring those with one-half of American Indian blood or more from giving evidence for or against whites in criminal cases," Madley said.
The legislation effectively stripped the state's natives of their ability to participate in the legal system.
"This amounted to a virtual grant of impunity to those that attacked them," Madley said.
The state's early leaders didn't stop there, however. Madley said they soon legalized "white custody" of American Indians, leading many to become "unfree" laborers and indentured servants.
"Right here in Los Angeles, one lawyer recalled that: 'Los Angeles had its slave mart and thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way,' " Madley said.
He adds that, between 1850 and 1870, L.A.'s American Indian population fell from 3,693 to just 219. That drop, he said, is due in large part to California's American Indian labor policies.
Benjamin Madley said the names of the men responsible for the systemic oppression and killings of California's native people continue to be "hidden in plain sight."
"In 1878, Serranus Hastings donated $100,000 to found the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco," Madley said. "So California's oldest law school is named after a man who helped to lead the assembly, the financing and the state sponsorship drive for the genocidal Eel River Ranger state militia expedition of 1859, which killed perhaps 500 or more California Indians," Madley said.
And there are more. Madley said names like Stanford (University), Fremont (City), Carson (Carson Pass), Kelsey (Kelseyville), each played a pivotal role in the eradication of California American Indians.
"Addressing the complex legacies of the genocide in California is an ongoing process," Madley said.
Governor Jerry Brown acknowledged Madley's book in 2017, saying, "Madley corrects the record with his gripping story of what really happened: the actual genocide of a vibrant civilization thousands of years in the making.”
Madley said acknowledging the past, as Brown has, can set a standard for other states reviewing their histories through modern eyes. But he said that's only part of the struggle — determining the next steps will require collaboration.
"That's something that needs to happen with the joint participation of state officials, government officials at the federal level, California Indian people and other California citizens."