The California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert

This comprehensive comparitive history project proposal was written for Prof. Karl’s Comparing Societies and Histories: The Impact of Time and Place class (AH152) at Minerva University in December of 2022.

My project will compare two instances of genocide of Indigenous peoples in the second half of the 19th century: the California Genocide and Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert. My research is predominantly analytical and paradigmatic, as I investigate the causal mechanisms behind phenomena affecting my current rotation country and where I grew up.

The California Genocide was a period of massive and systematic violence against the Indigenous peoples of California, committed by European settlers and the United States government. It began after the American Conquest of California from Mexico and following the Gold Rush. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives were killed by non-Natives, while hundreds to thousands were additionally worked to death or starved. In 1850, the State of California passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which led to the forced labor of many Native Americans and played a crucial role in sanctioning the genocide. The violence resulted in the loss of much of the cultural heritage of the Indigenous peoples of California, including languages, spiritual practices, and traditional ways of life. The consequences of the California Genocide are still felt today, as Indigenous communities struggle to survive and reclaim their heritage.[1]

The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign waged by the Argentine government between 1878 and 1885 to establish its authority over the Patagonian territories of the Pampas, Gran Chaco, and Patagonia. The campaign was predominantly led by Colonel Julio Argentino Roca, who was appointed the Argentine President in 1880. The campaign began with the aim of exterminating indigenous populations and their culture, and incorporating their lands into the Argentine Republic. This was accomplished with the support of the military, which used modern weapons, including artillery and cavalry, to take control of the region. During the Conquest, Argentine troops killed more than 1,000 Mapuche and displaced over 15,000 more from their lands, enslaving a portion of the remaining natives. The Conquest of the Desert was an important step in the formation of the modern Argentine state, as it established a clear border between Argentina and its neighbors, and provided the Argentine government with vast tracts of land for agricultural and ranching development. Just like the California Genocide, the effects of this campaign continue to be felt today, as the descendants of the Indigenous populations struggle to regain their land and culture.[2]

My units of comparison (the genocides) are on a similar temporal scale, and exhibit many similarities that strengthen the justification for their comparison. Argentina and the United States are both New World states with large immigrant populations, experiencing spikes of European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. As settlers pushed west, tensions mounted with native peoples over culture, land, and resources. The extermination of thousands of Indigenous people in both the United States and Argentina was carried out by state authorities and militias, and those who survived were subjected to forced labor, exploitation, and misery. By putting the two campaigns in conversation, we can gain a better understanding of the long-term effects of settler colonialism and the destruction of Indigenous communities.

In both cases, the killings were (and, to a certain extent, still are) politically justified as civilizing missions. Colonizing powers claimed that Western civilization had a duty to ‘civilize’ ‘primitive’ peoples, even if it meant the destruction of Indigenous families, languages, and cultures. In an 1851 State of the State address, California governor Peter Burnett stated, “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected,” later on saying that the extermination of Native Americans was the “inevitable destiny of the race.”[3] This racialized statement echoes the devaluing of Indian creole lives in Argentina under the hierarchical casta system, leading to Julio Argentino Roca’s belief that “our self-respect as a virile people obliges us to put down… this handful of savages who destroy our wealth.”[4]

Different actors have framed the California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert in different ways to justify or condemn the acts, and I believe comparing these historical and contemporary framings will be fruitful. Their portrayals have far-reaching social, political, and economic implications, impacting scholarship, possible reparations, and public remembrance (especially within Indigenous communities). My thesis is as follows: Framing the California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert as asymmetric wars, assimilations, civilizing missions, or mere instances of ethnic cleansing (rather than genocides) reinforces the traditional hegemonic narrative which justified the campaigns in the first place. It paints the mass murders as natural or inevitable events in the evolutionary history of civilization, and does little to push for contemporary Indigenous justice. Using the term ‘genocide’ allows us to better grasp the systemic violence and destruction that the Indigenous people faced, and it is an important step in pushing for Indigenous justice.

Literature Review

Despite the similarities of the two genocides, to my knowledge, the phenomena have not been explicitly compared. There was an allusion to their parallels in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture: “Much as happened in the western United States in the same years, the [Argentine] native people were either exterminated or herded into reservations, and the land was opened for white settlement,” however, no further comparison was made.[5] Some, such as Maybury-Lewis, have conducted broad transnational studies on genocide against Indigenous peoples. Maybury-Lewis's research, based on interviews and fieldwork with Indigenous people from various parts of the world, provides an important perspective on the issue of genocide against Indigenous peoples.[6] Others, such as Madley, Fenelon & Trafzer, and Barreiro et. al have studied the Conquest of the Desert or the California Genocide independently. Many take a contemporary focus on issues of remembrance and denial of these acts. Fenelon & Trafzer focus on the genocide of Native people in California to examine the construction of racial formation and cultural domination.[7] Through the notion of cognitive polyphasia, Barreiro et. al explore how people remember the Conquest of the Desert, suggesting that the event has a ‘nothingness’, where it is both known and unknown, and is remembered in different ways depending on the perspective of the individual.[8]

Benjamin Madley’s “An American Genocide” is a comprehensive overview of the California Genocide which details the full extent of the slaughter and the involvement of the state. Through an analysis of primary sources, Madley shows that a surplus of weapons were given to the State of California by the U.S. Army for the express purpose of killing Native Americans, and that between 1848-1852, white settlers in California spent $6 million (about $200 million today) on knives and pistols alone.[9] In an interview with Insider News, Madley stated that “California legislators established and then funded a state-sponsored killing machine.”[10] In general, Madley's book provides an in-depth exploration of the various actors in the genocide, including the U.S. government, military, settlers, and missionaries. He also highlights the devastating effects of the genocide on the California Indian population, including the loss of language, culture, and population. Additionally, Madley's book goes beyond the traditional narrative and offers a critical analysis of the motivations and implications of the genocide.[11]

Many sources on the California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert show that the initiatives were state-sanctioned and framed in terms of racial superiority, leading to broad societal, judicial, and political support. A California Research Bureau report investigates the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians and related amendments which led to the forced labor of many Native Americans and played a crucial role in sanctioning the genocide. The report shows that California legislators authorized the organization of ranger militias to exterminate Native Americans, and the total expenditure of these militias was $1.2 million (about $50 million today), which was reimbursed almost in full by the U.S. Congress.[12]

My comparative study fills a gap in scholarship by putting the California genocide and the Conquest of the Desert into direct conversation, following a guide like Sousa, who wrote a comparative study between genocide in California and Tasmania. In the same vein of viewing the Tasmanian phenomenon “in the context of other episodes of genocidal violence that have occurred in the context of settlement under similar circumstances,” I hope to investigate the genocides in United States and Argentina in connection with the same larger historical patterns.[13]

I will use several primary and secondary sources to investigate the framings of the genocides, both at the time of their implementation and in the centuries following. Some scholars posit that the Conquest of the Desert should be considered an (albeit asymmetric) war. They cite evidence that most of the natives killed were done so during combat, while several native tribes fought alongside the Argentinean Army. However, the death toll was overwhelmingly Indigenous. An example is the 1882–1883 Neuquén campaign which led to the deaths of 364 indigenous warriors, at an Argentine loss of only 4 officers and 38 soldiers.[14]

In the collection of essays “The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History,” various scholars weigh in on this controversy. Some, such as Julio Vezub and Mark Healey in Chapter 2, acknowledge the conflict’s complexity. They urge readers to “move beyond flat accounts of a unified conquest by state forces” and “examine more closely the social history of this conflict, composed of multiple overlapping struggles.”[15] Vezub and Healey draw upon indigenous correspondence, military reports, and ethnographic testimonies to argue that the conquest was more of an asymmetric war between Indigenous tribes and the Argentine army. Indigenous leaders, they contend, were far more effective than previous scholars have recognized. Mapuche warriors conducted brutal malóns, raids against Argentinian outposts to steal cattle, slaughter men, and abduct girls and women. The Mapuche also used guerilla tactics to wage defensive war against advancing Argentine forces to limit mortality in their villages: in military reports, there was “palpable disappointment” when they found abandoned tents of escaped indigenous groups.[16]

Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez investigate the various framings of the Conquest of the Desert as either a war, an assimilation/incorporation, or a genocide. They argue that Indigenous peoples were coded as obstacles to building national sovereignty, and military historiography understood the conquest as a war won against “barbarism” and the wild “desert,” in order to legitimize and justify the operation. A central element in this hegemonic narrative is the ‘raiding Indian’ stereotype: the Othering of Indigenous peoples by depicting them as savage, degenerate, and law-breaking.[17] The framing of “assimilation” proposes the conquest as a naturalized and evolutionary history of civilization, similar to the inevitability of Manifest Destiny as understood in the United States.

Finally, Delrio and Pérez talk about the framing of “genocide,” first proposed by Indigenous activists in Argentina. The Conquest of the Desert could be labeled as a genocide under the definition formulated by the 1948 United Nations convention.[18] Some claim that the label victimizes Indigenous nations and denies their agency, but Delrio and Pérez argue that calling the campaign a “crime against humanity” is helpful in helping to explain the far-reaching consequences of the Conquest of the Desert for Argentine society, including the destruction of families, cultures, and languages.[19] The concept of genocide, the authors write, is “key to avoiding reductionism” and “allows us to situate the process in its true proportions.”[20] I agree with scholar John Soluri in thinking that these opposing viewpoints reveal the need for historians to “move beyond demonstrations of Indigenous agency to nuanced considerations of the conceptual language used to frame people’s actions and discourses.”[21]

In my essay, I will extend Delrio and Pérez’s investigation of framings to the California Genocide, whose taxonomy is also controversial. Madley’s ‘Introduction’ will be helpful here, as will Fenelon & Trafzer, since they explicitly discusses definitions of genocide.[22] Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell explain that there is vigorous debate over the scale of Native American losses during the Gold Rush and whether to characterize them as genocide.[23] Critics of left-wing revisionists, like Gary Clayton Anderson, insist that the California Genocide was mere ethnic cleansing: “If we get to the point where the mass murder of 50 Indians in California is considered genocide, then genocide has no more meaning.”[24] I will then connect this discussion with Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, who describe the Eurocentrism behind differentiating ‘ideological’ genocides (narrowly modeled after the Holocaust) and ‘utilitarian’ genocides (including indigenous peoples “crushed beneath the wheels of occidental ‘progress’”).[25]

Detailed Research Plan

Primary sources I will use include firsthand accounts, such as personal letters and diaries (especially Indigenous accounts), as well as government documents, treaties, and other legal materials. An example is the California Research Bureau report, which investigates the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians and related amendments. These sources will provide firsthand evidence of the events, policies, and actions that led to the genocide and conquest. They will also provide insight into the attitudes of those involved in the events, as well as the motivations behind their actions. The limitations of these sources are that they may be biased, incomplete, or even fabricated. Additionally, these sources may not provide a full picture of the events due to the passage of time and the destruction of records.

Secondary sources I will use include scholarly journal articles, books, and other published works discussing the California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert. These sources will provide valuable context for understanding the events and their impact on the Indigenous populations involved. Not only will I examine secondary sources focused on the events of the time (historicity 1), I will use sources engaged in historiographical debate (historicity 2). The limitations of secondary sources are that many rely on older scholarship and existing interpretations of the events, which can be biased or incomplete. Furthermore, there is limited focus on the stories and perspectives of the Indigenous people who experienced the California Genocide and the Conquest of the Desert.

There are many archives I can visit or consult for this project. The Online Archive of California contains digital collections from over 300 California institutions and provides access to primary source materials related to the history and culture of California.[26] The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley is one of the most heavily utilized libraries for manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials. This library provides access to digital collections related to the history and culture of California, including primary source documents related to the California Genocide.[27]

The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera (DALACE) is an online archive that includes primary source materials related to the Conquest of the Desert, such as laws, decrees, maps, and photographs.[28] The National Library of Argentina holds a variety of materials related to the Conquest of the Desert, including books, pamphlets, and periodicals.[29] It is possible that I will need to produce new sources for this project through ethnographical research, such as interviewing Indigenous activists or descendants of those impacted by the genocide and conquest. These can offer a unique perspective on how the phenomena affected their communities and families.

---

[1] Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), http://archive.org/details/americangenocide0000madl.

[2] Carolyne R. Larson, ed., The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, Diálogos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020).

[3] Peter Burnett, “State of the State Address,” January 6, 1851, The Governors’ Gallery: California State Library, https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html.

[4] David Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide against Indigenous Peoples,” in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (University of California Press, 2002), 45.

[5] Barbara A. Tenenbaum and Georgette M. Dorn, Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1996), 150, http://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofla01tene.

[6] Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide against Indigenous Peoples.”

[7] James V. Fenelon and Clifford E. Trafzer, “From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations: Special Issue on Indigenous Struggles in the Americas,” American Behavioral Scientist 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 3–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213495045.

[8] Alicia Barreiro, José Antonio Castorina, and Floor van Alphen, “Conflicting Narratives about the Argentinean ‘Conquest of the Desert’: Social Representations, Cognitive Polyphasia, and Nothingness,” in Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, ed. Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017), 373–89, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52908-4_20.

[9] Madley, An American Genocide, 78–81.

[10] Why The Gold Rush Is One Of The Darkest Moments In US History | Whitewashed, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2bpBAXvJew.

[11] Madley, An American Genocide.

[12] Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, “Early California Laws and Policies Relating to California Indians” (California Research Bureau, California State Library, September 1, 2002), 7, 23, California Water Library, https://cawaterlibrary.net/document/early-california-laws-and-policies-relating-to-california-indians/.

[13] Ashley Riley Sousa, “‘They Will Be Hunted down like Wild Beasts and Destroyed!’: A Comparative Study of Genocide in California and Tasmania,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 194, https://doi.org/10.1080/1462352042000225949.

[14] Julio Vezub and Mark Healey, “‘Occupy Every Road and Prepare for Combat’: Mapuche and Tehuelche Leaders Face the War in Patagonia,” in The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, ed. Carolyne R. Larson, Diálogos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 51.

[15] Vezub and Healey, 44.

[16] Vezub and Healey, 50.

[17] Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez, “Beyond the ‘Desert’: Indigenous Genocide as a Structuring Event in Northern Patagonia,” in The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, ed. Carolyne R. Larson, Diálogos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 125.

[18] “Genocide Definition,” United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, December 9, 1948, https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml.

[19] Delrio and Pérez, “Beyond the ‘Desert,’” 129–40.

[20] Delrio and Pérez, 142.

[21] John Soluri, “Book Review: The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Diálogos, 101, no. 4 (2021): 720, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-9366844.

[22] Madley, An American Genocide, 4–8.

[23] Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell, A Global History of Gold Rushes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 58, https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=lidtDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

[24] Alexander Nazaryan, “California Slaughter: The State-Sanctioned Genocide of Native Americans,” Newsweek, August 17, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/26/california-native-americans-genocide-490824.html.

[25] Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2010), 4, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=381031&site=ehost-live.

[26] California Digital Library, “Home,” OAC: Online Archive of California, 2022, https://oac.cdlib.org/.

[27] The Regents of the University of California, “Bancroft Library,” UC Berkeley Library, 2022, https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/bancroft.

[28] Princeton University Library, “Home,” Latin American Ephemera Digital Archive, 2022, https://lae.princeton.edu/.

[29] Ministerio de Cultura Argentina, “Inicio,” Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, 2022, https://www.bn.gov.ar.

---

Bibliography

Primary sources and archives

National Archives. “American Indian Treaties,” August 15, 2016. https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/treaties.

Argentina.gob.ar. “Archivo General de La Nación,” May 23, 2019. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/interior/archivo-general-de-la-nacion.

Burnett, Peter. “State of the State Address,” January 6, 1851. The Governors’ Gallery: California State Library. https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html.

California Digital Library. “Home.” OAC: Online Archive of California, 2022. https://oac.cdlib.org/.

Johnston-Dodds, Kimberly. “Early California Laws and Policies Relating to California Indians.” California Research Bureau, California State Library, September 1, 2002. California Water Library. https://cawaterlibrary.net/document/early-california-laws-and-policies-relating-to-california-indians/.

Ministerio de Cultura Argentina. “Inicio.” Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, 2022. https://www.bn.gov.ar.

Prado, Manuel. “La ocupación del Río Negro ; expedición realizada por el ministro de la guerra, general Julio A. Roca, 25 de mayo de 1879.” Pamphlet. Buenos Aires, 1900. 990063505580203941. Latin American pamphlet digital project at Harvard University. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/latin-american-pamphlet-digital-collection/catalog/43-990063505580203941.

Princeton University Library. “Home.” Latin American Ephemera Digital Archive, 2022. https://lae.princeton.edu/.

State of California. An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850). https://web.archive.org/web/20110411070352/http://indiancanyon.org/ACTof1850.html.

The Regents of the University of California. “Bancroft Library.” UC Berkeley Library, 2022. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/bancroft.

Secondary sources

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Barreiro, Alicia, José Antonio Castorina, and Floor van Alphen. “Conflicting Narratives about the Argentinean ‘Conquest of the Desert’: Social Representations, Cognitive Polyphasia, and Nothingness.” In Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, edited by Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever, 373–89. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52908-4_20.

Bloxham, Donald, and A. Dirk Moses. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2010. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=381031&site=ehost-live.

Browning, Christopher R. “One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder.” In Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945. Routledge, 1994.

DeLaney, Jeane. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina: Defending the True Nation. University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19m64mc.

Delrio, Walter, and Pilar Pérez. “Beyond the ‘Desert’: Indigenous Genocide as a Structuring Event in Northern Patagonia.” In The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, edited by Carolyne R. Larson, 122–45. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020.

Fenelon, James V., and Clifford E. Trafzer. “From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations: Special Issue on Indigenous Struggles in the Americas.” American Behavioral Scientist 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213495045.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. http://archive.org/details/nationsnationali0000gell_j9y6.

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. “Genocide Definition,” December 9, 1948. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml.

Hasbrouck, Alfred. “The Conquest of the Desert.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 15, no. 2 (1935): 195–228. https://doi.org/10.2307/2506294.

Larson, Carolyne R., ed. The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020.

Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. http://archive.org/details/americangenocide0000madl.

Maybury-Lewis, David. “Genocide against Indigenous Peoples.” In Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, 2–52. University of California Press, 2002.

Mountford, Benjamin, and Stephen Tuffnell. A Global History of Gold Rushes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=lidtDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

Nazaryan, Alexander. “California Slaughter: The State-Sanctioned Genocide of Native Americans.” Newsweek, August 17, 2016. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/26/california-native-americans-genocide-490824.html.

Overy, Richard. “‘Ordinary Men,’ Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Social Issues 70, no. 3 (2014): 515--530. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12075.

Soluri, John. “Book Review: The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History.” Hispanic American Historical Review, Diálogos, 101, no. 4 (2021): 719–21. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-9366844.

Sousa, Ashley Riley. “‘They Will Be Hunted down like Wild Beasts and Destroyed!’: A Comparative Study of Genocide in California and Tasmania.” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462352042000225949.

Tenenbaum, Barbara A., and Georgette M. Dorn. Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1996. http://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofla01tene.

Vezub, Julio, and Mark Healey. “‘Occupy Every Road and Prepare for Combat’: Mapuche and Tehuelche Leaders Face the War in Patagonia.” In The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, edited by Carolyne R. Larson, 43–70. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020.

Why The Gold Rush Is One Of The Darkest Moments In US History | Whitewashed, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2bpBAXvJew.