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View submission: Friday Free-for-All | January 24, 2025
Cross-posting this.
I’ve posted about the historian Jeffrey Ostler before - I recommend everyone check out his book *Surviving Genocide*, which is a great read. His follow-up volume[1] *Genocide and the American West* is forthcoming. Aside from his books, he is also known for writing extremely thorough critiques of bad genocide denial arguments. See here[2], for example, for a devastating critique - published open-access in the *American Indian Culture and Research Journal* - of a book by the historian Gary Glayton Anderson, who adamantly denies that genocide against Native Americans took place anywhere in the United States, even in California.
1: https://bsky.app/profile/jostler.bsky.social/post/3lbiri4makk2j
2: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33p0786x
Ostler starts out by noting that there is a wide consensus that genocide took place in California:
That California committed genocide against Indigenous peoples rests on a substantial body of scholarship. Since the late 1960s, a long line of scholars—Theodora Kroeber, Robert F. Heizer, Jack Norton, Russell Thornton, Benjamin Madley, Ashley Riley Sousa, Brendan Lindsay, and many others—have applied the term genocide to the Gold Rush era.4 Leading historians of California and the American West, including Stephen Aron, Robert V. Hine, John Mack Faragher, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Michael Magliari, and Richard White, have endorsed this view.5
There are dissenters however, chief among them Anderson. One of his main arguments is a demographic one: Anderson claims that, contrary to previous demographic estimates that place the Indigenous population of California at around 150,000 in 1845, 100,000 in 1850, and 35,000 in 1860 - roughly corresponding to the California Gold Rush period - instead, the Indigenous population had actually declined to 35,000 by 1851, which occurred almost entire due to disease. These estimates, in his words:
"fundamentally discount the argument that thousands of Indians were killed in fits of mass murder by miners after 1849."
Now, this is a weird argument for a number of reasons, but it is also based on extremely faulty estimates. Jeffrey Ostler digs into his sources and looks at the estimates for the Indigenous population of California in 1851 region by region, finding them to be far too low. Pages 84 - 87 of the article contain a detailed analysis, showing that Anderson's estimates are lower than what the sources say, often by more than half.
The other thing Anderson does is *severely* downplay the extent of the violence against Native peoples in California, again based on a dubious reading of the sources. Ostler writes:
Likewise far too low is Anderson’s overall estimate that “approximately two thousand Indians were murdered in California during and after the gold rush,” noted earlier. One would expect Anderson to provide a source for this figure, but rather than explain how it was calculated, he simply asserts it. In contrast, using extensive documentation to provide a comprehensive and highly detailed accounting of American settlers’ killings of California’s Indigenous people during the Gold Rush era, Madley concludes that “non-Indians killed at least 9,492 to 16,094 California Indians, and probably more, between 1846 and 1873.”52 Anderson’s unsubstantiated estimate is at least five times too low.
These are just a few of the critiques made. Other topics covered include definitions of genocide used, and the impact of disease. The whole review is definitely worth reading.
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