Peter Burnett, California’s first governor, expressed the prevailing colonialist point of view of his time thusly: “A war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
His dire proclamation sums up the essence of Benjamin Madley’s scholarly text, “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe.” Madley has meticulously researched the written and oral records that reflect a concerted effort on the part of the foreign invaders…